The University of Queensland TEDI (Teaching and Educational Development Institute) hosted a one day conference on Thursday 19 June 2008 on the topic of Blended Learning.

The aim of this conference was “To explore how embedding the use of technology alongside more traditional face-to-face teaching can enhance the student experience.” The event was run simultaneously with its “siblings” from Calgary, Canada and Hertfordshire, UK.

If you would like to check the abstracts of the conference papers or if you wish to read more on this topic go to http://www.tedi.uq.edu.au/blendedlearning/.

Or for an easy holiday read check out “Is Google making us stupid?” , an article mentioned by one of yesterday’s presenters!

Enjoy!

The Graduate Economics and Bussiness Library together with the Business School Employment Services unit are pleased to announce the launch of a new display area in the library.

The Employment resources display incorporates an impressive number of commercial and library materials designed to help postgraduate students with their career development.

Library patrons can browse, borrow or in some instances take home these very useful resources.

Good luck job hunting!

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.). These indicators could be used to assess and analyze scientific domains.

This platform takes its name from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, developed by SCImago from the widely known algorithm Google PageRank™. This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996.

SCImago is a research group from the University of Granada, Extremadura, Carlos III (Madrid) and Alcalá de Henares, dedicated to information analysis, representation and retrieval by means of visualisation techniques.

To access SCImago go to http://www.scimagojr.com/index.php

This is an OPEN ACCESS resource and it is best used in conjunction with Scopus, a database UQ library has access to.

The UQ Office of Research has purchased access to the bibliometric database – Essential Science Indicators.

This database can be used to benchmark research impact by measuring published output and citation rates. Both researchers and research administrators will find the Indicators of interest. It allows to benchmark individual papers, subject categories or institutions against “international average” or an institution or a group of institutions. Also, it allows to place one’s performance within percentiles of publications in the same subject category. The information available in the ESI can be used in management reports, grant applications or CVs.

The ESI is updated every two months and is available from your desktop. (http://library.uq.edu.au/record=e1001810)

Subject categories include Business, Economics, Social Sciences and more.

Thomson representatives (the publishers of ESI) will be at UQ on Thursday 15th May at 9.30 am to demonstrate Essential Science Indicators. The demonstration will be held in the Library conference room (Duhig building, level 1).

Please come and join us!

PressDisplay accesses over 600 newspapers in original format, layout and pagination from 68 countries in 38 languages.

Some features at a glance:

Advanced Search is available on all titles. Advanced Search allows readers to customize and broaden their search. Readers may customize their search by:

* Selecting multiple publications
* Selecting publication collections by country
* Selecting publication collections by language
* Selecting a customized date range
* Selecting a specific author
* Selecting results be displayed either from a headline or from an entire article

SmartNavigation is available on most major titles and is marked with the Smart logo on the front page thumbnail and in the title selection menu. SmartNavigation allows advanced digital features such as:

* Article Text View: Easy copy and paste
* Article Jumps / Linking
* Table of Contents
* Article Printing
* Language Translation: Ten major foreign languages available
* Sound Integration
* Article & Bookmark sharing
* Article Rank
* Blogging
* RSS feeds

You can access PressDisplay from http://library.uq.edu.au/record=e1000065

Llibrary Technology Services have just made a new application available to install on staff workstations.

This new plugin will allow staff to view Windows Media Player video content on websites and databases such as Informit TV News using the Firefox browser.

To install the plugin go to:

1. Start Menu -> Settings ->Control Panel
2. Open the Add or Remove Programs control panel
3. Select Add New Programs
4. Hi-light FireFox Windows Media Player Plugin and click on add
5. The installer will start (it may open in the background, just click on the icon in the task bar)
6. Follow the instructions in the wizard until it completes.
7. Test the install by looking at some articles in the Informit TV News database (available from http://library.uq.edu.au/record=e1001735)

If you experience any problems, please contact LTS on 63600 or email ithelp@library.uq.edu.au

Come and enjoy free movies coming from all around the world at the Social Sciences and Humanities Library!

When: between 14 April 2008 and 19 May 2008, at 1.00pm

Where: Social Sciences and Humanities Library, viewing room 3

Check the full list of movies shown at:
http://www.library.uq.edu.au/hotnews/index.phtml?id=515

Informit TVNews indexes the majority of TV news stories, current affairs and documentary series broadcast on Australian television. Individual stories may be downloaded to the desktop in a compressed video format.

Part of the Informit Media Databases, this database is available via the Informit Online platform.

From Saturday, 15 March 2008 you can also set up alerts based on search terms within this database. A list of all available video clips based on your search terms will be e-mailed to your selected e-mail address.

To set up an alert follow these steps:

UQ Library provides access to Factiva , a global news and business information service that combines the content sets of Dow Jones Interactive and Reuters Business Briefing.

Here are the latest news from the Factiva team:

“Dow Jones Factiva introduces another time-saving tool to help you keep up with the news that drives your business. With one click, you can now LISTEN to a news article rather than reading it. Now you can catch up on the news while performing other tasks.

When viewing full articles with fewer than 4,000 words, you will see a ‘Listen to Article’ link at the top. This listen capability is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages and can be found wherever you are reading full articles, including alerts, search results and newsletters.

The listen capability utilizes a Flash player and is a Web-based service provided by ReadSpeaker. It translates text-to-speech on the fly, but it is not available in any article that is viewed offline, nor is it presently available via Factiva Mobile.”

Hello,

My name is Cristina Ghiculescu and I will replace Kelly Dann while she is on maternity leave.

If you need assistance with any library related matters please feel free to contact me on 3346 6553 or e-mail me at c.ghiculescu@library.uq.edu.au

Have fun at UQ in 2008!

Cristina