Need help with referencing?

For those of you adding the finishing touches to your History of Medicine SSC I thought that a bit of advice on formatting your references might be timely.

This assignment requires the use of Vancouver referencing and you may find the attached resource, provided by the BMA, useful:

http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/LIBReferenceStyles

The Library has designed some further referencing guidance available at

http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/useful/refs.html

and don't forget the online tutorial, written specifically for the UofS Medical School. Here is how to connect:

Step 1 Login to MUSE

Step 2 Connect to MOLE (My Online Learning Environment)



Step 3 Connect to the Library-Information skills tutorials



Step 4 Select subject specific tutorials

Step 5 Select Medicine

Step 6 Connect to the Vancover referencing tutorial





Vic :-)

Library fines … and how not to pay them …

Library fines … and how not to pay them … Exclusive interview with Lynn Greenwood, Head of Lending Services at the Univ of Sheffield Library



One issue which crops up repeatedly on the library blogs is that contentious matter of library fines and book loan periods. Vic went along to meet Lynn Greenwood, the Library's Head of Lending Services, to find out why on earth library books can only be borrowed for a week and why students can accumulate £15.00 worth of fines quicker than they can shout 'give me the directions to Blackwell's.'

Lynn has the unenviable responsibility of ensuring that the library stock circulates effectively and she has the ultimate power to decide on loan periods, library fines and indeed all matters to do with lending services.

Vic: Lynn, thank you for agreeing to contribute to the Library Blogs. With around 25,000 students and over 1.3m items in stock, it must be no mean feat to ensure that the books circulate effectively amongst our students.

Lynn: That's right, the Library issued 1.6m books last year so it is big and busy business, especially in the Information Commons where much of our undergraduate borrowing takes place.

Vic: One of our students has commented that the Library at the University of Leeds has loan periods of 12 weeks. Why are our books issued for just a week at a time?

Lynn: This particular student was undertaking an intercalated research year and as such will have benefited from the longer loan periods afforded to researchers. The University of Sheffield also grants longer loans to our research students. Leeds issue all books on student reading lists for one week only and their loans policy appears to be fairly consistent with our own.

Vic: So why do we issue books to undergraduates for just one week at a time?

Comment Competition to win an 8gb iPod Nano or another fantastic prize

To launch the Librarians' Blog for Dentistry we are running a competition to win an 8gb iPod Nano

iComment Competition to win an 8gb iPod Nano or another fantastic prize.
Open to all staff and students in the Dental School (a similar competition is taking place on the Librarians’ Blog for Medicine).

To enter simply comment here or against any of the blog entries. Comments should either respond to what is being said on the blog or could be about how well you think information literacy is supported in the Dental School or indeed about any aspect of the University of Sheffield Library service. Nothing offensive though ;-)

Endnote Web

Hi Dental Students

Hope the new term is going well.
One of the resources that I am getting many, many queries about at the moment is Endnote Web and so I thought a blog post about this might be timely.

Endnote Web

Have you ever written a report and found that formatting the bibliography has taken almost as long as writing the text? Perhaps you could benefit from using reference management software such as Endnote Web which does all the fiddly formatting for you. Endnote Web is a resource which allows you to manage your references and generate and format a bibliography using different styles, eg Vancouver, Harvard or a style compatible with an academic journal. It allows the import of references from databases such as Medline which can then be used on a cite while you write basis within Word. Endnote Web is available via Web of Knowledge to all members of the University of Sheffield.

Learning to use Endnote Web

More info about Endnote Web is available here
http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/refmant/endnoteweb.html

I am, apparently, the University Library’s Endnote Web Oracle! I’ve no idea how I have got myself such a position but if you would like tuition in its use I’m the person to contact. Interested? Let me know. If there is sufficient demand I will run a course. Remember that if you express an interest here on the blog you automatically enter the competition to win an 8gb iPod Nano. If you prefer you can email me directly at v.grant@sheffield.ac.uk

Vic

Top geeky techie tips required!

Philip Sadler has asked for a blog post to collate top techie tips. So all you techie geeks out there comment away and let's see how many top tips on using Library eResources we can get :-). Or alternatively why not come and demo your Uber Geek dances to the Library Assistants at the Library Counter ;-) To start you off here is a repeat of Phil's tip, on how to add a new tab in MUSE.

Vic

Maybe we could have a blog on these pages for ideas like this?

TIP for “book-marking” databases in MUSE

You only have to log in to MUSE rather than Athens now, but you still have to navigate to your favourite database start page (OVID SP in my case) via the library indexes, so here’s a geeky trick that you might want to try if you want the OVID page to come up when you first open MUSE.

1. Go the page you’d like to access quickly and copy the address from your web browser,
(in my case it was the OVID page http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/cdfiles/biomed.html)
2. Login to MUSE and click the “Customise Layout” link
3. Click the “Add New Tab” button.
4. Add a name for your tab in the “name the tab” box and select the “Framed - URL:” radio button and add the address you copied in step 1 to the box, then click the submit button
5. Now you will see a page that has all your tabs on so click on the link for the name you used in step 4. On the next page and click “Make this the default Active Tab”. Finally click the “back to …” link at the top right to get back to the tab you just created.
6. Cheer at your IT prowess and do the dance of the Uber geek

When you next login to MUSE that tab will be the first thing you see!

You can add several database pages as tabs by only using steps 1-4 without changing your default page

Geekily yours

Phil

Blogging resumes

Thank you to everyone who has been posting comments on the blog over the last couple of weeks and apologies for the delay in responding.

I am busy busy busy at the moment teaching information literacy to the new students so thank you to those of you who have mentioned how useful these skills have been to your academic work and also to your clinical practice.

I'm working through the comments now and will respond either individually or in the form of blog posts.

Vic :-)

Get this blog in your Facebook!

You can see the RSS feed (i.e. the headlines of any new posts) of this blog right in your Facebook account by installing the "Librarians' Blog for Dentistry" application! Keep up-to-date without even leaving Facebook!! Why not install the application now - its easy:

Log in to Facebook. On the right hand side, in Applications box, click on Edit: