Tuesday, November 7, 2017

RCSI Library and Open Access

October 23rd to 29th was Open Access Week. Open Access (OA) and data management are areas growing in priority for research funding agencies and in higher education. International Open Access Week is a global campaign, now in its 10th year,  to raise awareness about these fields and how they can improve research impact and knowledge sharing. So what is Open Access and how does it benefit researchers, institutions and the public? 



RCSI Library got involved with a number of talks and drop in sessions highlighting the importance of OpenAccess for research. On Tuesday Associate Librarian Andrew Simpson gave a talk on Open Access and Research Data. He discussed the expectation of funders in terms of open data and how to create a data management plan.



The perils of bad data management were also highlighted; Andrew played a short video produced by Karen Hanson, Alisa Surkis and Karen Yacobucci. Of NYU Health Sciences Library – it’s well worth a watch!

On Wednesday, GrĂ¡inne McCabe, Scholarly Communications and Research Support Officer, hosted a drop in session at the library Expo Stage where she answered questions from researchers on the RCSI repository –such as how can one use it to enhance your research profile and how to submit publications for Open Access. 

Tip: Remember to keep pre-prints & post-prints of articles as publisher permissions for what version can go Open Access can vary. 



RCSI Library was also  tweeting and Facebooking interesting Open Access tidbits throughout the week; follow us @RCSILibrary on Twitter  and like us @rcsilibrary on Facebook!

Colm O'Connor

Friday, October 20, 2017

Green Week 2017 at RCSI

This week was Green Week and the RCSI EnviroSoc have been busy spreading awareness across the college and beyond!  From a beach clean up to their vegan food fair and raising funds for the Dominica relief fund it's been a really successful week.

EnviroSoc have put together a number of videos which explore topics from Veganism to Climate change.Take a look at the videos below and Go Green!

Student tips on being green


Climate change part 1


Climate change part 2


Veganism


Dominica relief fund


Clean coasts


Effects of global warming on health

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Library Bitesize: Lunchtime Drop-In Skills Sessions

We are in a brand new Library building and know that students have a lot of information to get to grips with at the start of term. 

Our new Library Bitesize drop-in sessions aim to help you get the most out of the Library and support your acade
mic studies. You don’t need to book a session, just drop into the Expo Stage or the Computer Room (different sessions are in different places) and ask questions, get support and hear tips!


Check out our programme below…more sessions coming soon!


Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Calling all Students! Share your Mercer Memories



 To mark the closure of the Mercer Library space before our brand new library opens on 3rd July 2017, we want students to share their memories of their time in the Mercer. Whether you are still onsite doing exams (nearly there!) or anywhere in the world, we have a way for you to get involved...and prizes for the best entries.

If you are still working away in the library and need a distraction, snap a picture of your favourite study spot. You can post it to our Facebook page with a comment as to why you love it! Or if you are not on Facebook you can email your pic and note to library@rcsi.ie


If you are lucky enough to have finished your exams and are not near the library, you can share photos or a memory about your time in the Mercer Library on our digital online Memory Board. If you would like to be included in the pot for prizes you can sign it, but if not, you can mention your year or class e.g. IC2 or 2nd Pharm

Contribute to the #MercerMemories digital Memory Board
All of your pics and memories will be added to the RCSI Archives which hold collections and materials from College, staff and students about their time in RCSI. You never know, you might recognise your #MercerMemory at your 40th Alumni Reunion!  

Don't forget you can get more information or ask any questions at the Library Service Desk!                               

As we prepare to move to 26 York Street we look forward to creating many new memories at the Library's new home...opening Monday 3rd July 2017!

                                      !




Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Resource spotlight: Westlaw.ie



RCSI Library has subscribed to a new database - Westlaw.ie. This legal database will be of particular interest to our Healthcare Ethics and Law students but will also be of use to many other students across a range of disciplines.

(Click for larger image)

Westlaw.ie provides instant access to a large collection of case law dating back to 1971, including over 20,000 full-text case reports from Ireland's leading law reporting services. Westlaw.ie also provides access to legislation in consolidated, annotated and digested form making it easy to keep up to date with legislative changes. Another feature of the database is the ability to search, browse and download Irish court rules. Westlaw.ie allows you to read digests of cases and provides links to full-text versions.


Westlaw.ie also provides full text access to a number of journals, including the  Medico-legal journal of Ireland. The aim and scope of this journal is to inform professionals of current legal and ethical issues related to patient care and also provides an academic and scientific forum for practitioners and academics to debate medico-legal issues of importance to individuals and society as a whole.







You can access Westlaw.ie through the databases page of the RCSI Library website at http://www.rcsi.ie/databases


Colm O'Connor

Monday, April 3, 2017

Digital Skills week 2017 at RCSI


Departments across RCSI are coming together to offer a range of activities and events to mark National Digital Skills Week 2017 including HPEC, RCSI Library, IT, Staff Learning & Development as well as many others.


National Digital Skills Week The All Aboard initiative is funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning, which aims to identify skills and knowledge that students & higher education staff, will need to feel confident and creative when learning, working and exploring the digital world. RCSI is an institutional partner with Waterford IT for this project.

It’s a busy week at RCSI, with a range of talks, webinars and classes taking place. Topics covered will include a digital badging webinar, an online webinar looking at digital skills for health professionals and a talk by Professor GrĂ¡inne Conole looking at current innovations in technology enhanced learning.

Today, Monday 3rd April, RCSI Library will be running an Introduction to EndNote class, which will look at getting the most from this reference management software. You can book a place here.

The remaining RCSI events are below:

Thursday 6th April            Pop-Up Digital Skills Hub                                    11.00-13.00         SSG Concourse
                                            Quizzes, prizes, goodies…find out about
                                            Digital Skills training opportunities in RCSI
                                            from the Library, HPEC, Careers & More

Thursday 6th April           Top Tips for Online Searching                               16.00-17.00         Mercer PC Lab
                                             
Advice & Tips from RCSI Library on getting
                                             the most from your time online
                                             Book a place

Friday 7th April                  Digital Skills for Professional Networking &         11.00-12.00  
Mercer PC Lab                  Job Searches 
                                           Advice & skills for building your
                   networks for internships, placements & jobs
                   Book a place


Friday 7th April                 Pop-Up Stand in ERC                                                 14.00-16.00          
ERC Lobby, Beaumont
                                               

You can see the full schedule of RCSI events here and the nationwide event schedule is here


Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Surf Your Library!

You may already be familiar with literature searching, databases and e-journals. But, did you know about e-books, clinical summaries and repositories?

Electronic resources are not just about databases and e-journals anymore. They are also about e-books, Clinical Summaries and the RCSI Institutional Repository which provide more access to academic literature, peer-reviewed summaries for healthcare contexts for both students and professionals. Institutional Repositories host all of the research outputs of RCSI staff and students and Beaumont Hospital.

So put your digital skills to good use and check out these resources:

E-Books of all shapes and sizes
Armed with even a few digital skills, anyone can search the RCSI Library Catalogue for that elusive hard copy of a book, which may always seem to be “not on the shelf”, “on loan” or in “another location”.

Or sometimes you could be at home and you forgot to ask the library staff. Go explore your library online.  Or you could simply ring or email the library service desk and extract/drain the info from the library staff!

Why not check out the e-book collection for that all important book you need?
All it takes to find an e-book is to:

Go to the library catalogue
Change the search filter to  e-book Collection Catalogue (you can also find ebooks without this step, but this method ensures your search results will show e-books only)
Search your title

If you’re not sure how to do this just ASK the library staff.  No doubt they will be happy to show off their digital literary skills (secret exhibitionists! )

Not only can you search within an e-book for a topic, you can also search a collection of e-books. Collections subscribed to by RCSI include  Access Medicine, ClinicalKey and AccessPhysiotherapy

Once you register with ClinicalKey you have licence to use the Multimedia content, you can export and copy slides, images, graphs and video to your projects. This will save you tons of time!


Clinical Summaries


UpToDate is a very popular site.  Many hospital doctors use this for updated reviews on healthcare and it would be very useful for medical students in their clinical years and thereafter. It’s really useful for anyone working in the clinical areas. It’s a really cool way of keeping up to date or just for reminding yourself of a particular topic or condition from any mobile device.  And of course there’s an App for that! (This is an RCSI subscription). DynaMed is also another really useful site, you can search medical and drug topics.






Institutional Repositories

Institutional Repositories are a great resource for free fulltext and open access articles, research papers, posters and more, which are produced by staff, students and researchers at a particular institution. Search RCSI's institutional repository e-publications@RCSI.


RIAN, the Irish word for 'path' is a combined search engine for 16 Irish research producing institutions including universities, government agencies and including the RCSI. You can see a full list of the institutions whose research is searchable via RIAN here and search the resource here.

OpenDOAR is another excellent resource for institutional repositories. It maintains a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories which can save a huge amount of time as you search for credible and verified research materials. You can see their listings of institutional repositories here and search across all of them here.

Good Old Google - Tip!
You can search individual repositories or simply google the title of your document/article and with any luck you may come across the full text free of charge.  Just make sure that when you search to use www.google.com as www.google.ie may not find documents outside of the .ie domain.




                                                                                                                                             C.Doherty