NVivo Training

You might remember that YSJ purchased a license for NVivo software last March, which you can access from the virtual desktop. Leah will be offering some introductions to NVivo over the summer. Click a date to register (via EventBrite).

Monday 30  June 2014, 9:00-10:30, FT112

Monday 7 July 2014, 10:30-12:00, FT112

Tuesday 15 July 2014, 13:00-14:30, FT210

Thursday 07 August 2014, 13:00-14:30, FT214

Monday 18 August 2014, 14:00-15:30, FT114

This will be a brief introduction to a powerful software. 90 minutes will allow you to see what the software offers, how it might be relevant to your research, and whether NVivo’s 2 day official training would be right for you. There will be about 30-45 minutes for you to experiment with your data in NVivo, so please make some data available to yourself on the S drive or bring it on a USB stick. Data can be text, audio, video, pictures and data sets. A complete list of file formats for NVivo can be found here. If you can’t bring data to the workshop, you can access NVivo’s sample data.

If none of these times work for you, please be in touchwith times/days that work better. Feel free to pass this information along to others at YSJ.

If you have 9 minutes, here’s a YouTube introduction to NVivo

Pardon the noise (and dust!)

Summer is a busy time for libraries. If you've come to Fountains in the last week, you may have seen new shelves being built, books and furniture being moved and carpets being refreshed. There have also been some book stock moves, so if you can't find the books where you are accoustomed to seeing them, you're not going crazy, we have indeed moved them. At the end of this month, we'll also begin placing RFID tags in each book and soundproofing the second floor. Not to mention the digital upgrades you can't see!

We know it's also a busy time for you, and apologise for the noise, dust and changes which may be inconvenient for those of you trying to access Fountains throughout the summer. If you are having trouble finding the books you need or a quiet place to work, please come down to Question Point for guidance.

Copyright changes: good news for researchers

You may be aware that new exceptions to copyright legislation came into effect on 1 June 2014.  We won't go into all of them in detail here, but we are happy to report a couple of key improvements for researchers.

Text and data mining

If you already have legal access to a piece of research (e.g. access to a journal article via a YSJ ILS subscription), you now have the right to use the data within for your own, non-commercial research (e.g. for computational analysis), without seeking permission from the rights holder.  This is only if you have legal access to the published research and if it is for non-commercial purposes, but it is a good step forward in data sharing.

Extension of works allowed to be copied

There have previously been restrictions on the types of work that one is allowed to copy for research.  These have been extended, so you can now copy, for example, limited passages from sound recordings or films, for non-commercial research purposes.  As long as this is considered a fair amount to use and the original source is accredited, this means you are able to use a much wider range of resources in your studies.

We will be updating our copyright guidance on the ILS website very soon, to reflect these exceptions.  We have a new librarian starting at YSJ this month and part of her remit is to focus on copyright issues, so we are sure she will have lots of ideas for dialogue with the research community here on these topics.  In the meantime, here is the official guide for researchers from the Intellectual Property Office.  We also recommend the resources specifically about these new exceptions on the Jisc Legal website and the advice from the London School of Economics.

Please remember that ILS can help with copyright and intellectual property advice, but we are not legal experts!  We very much recommend checking out the official guidance from the Intellectual Property Office listed above and getting individual advice if this doesn't answer your specific questions.




Copyright Symbol by David Wees. Used under CC BY 2.0.  Available from https://flic.kr/p/bD6e8F

EndNote License

We just sent you and your supervisors an email to let you know that EndNote have changed their license terms in such a way that Endnote can only be accessed on YSJ’s university PCs and we can no longer provide access to the software via the virtual desktop.

This could have quite an impact on your work if you're an EndNote user and accustomed to using the virtual desktop from home or from De Grey.

If you'd like to take this opportunity to copy your EndNote library into RefWorks, your academic liaison librarian would be happy to give support individually or to do a group workshop on this process. Copying EndNote libraries and importing them into RefWorks has gone smoothly thus far! If you'd like to give it a try on your own, RefWorks have an online guide to transferring your references across.

For those of you who have begun using EndNote for your dissertation and have already written Word documents with EndNote citations embedded, we understand that switching to RefWorks at this point might cause significant challenges. Please let us know who you are so we can reach an individual solution.

If you haven't yet started using software to manage your reference library and create bibliographies, consider doing so over the summer. Here's a bit more information on RefWorks at YSJ, including links to help pages and YouTube tutorials.