Resource of the week: Knovel

What is it?

Knovel is a key source of technical information for engineers and scientists.

It provides an interactive platform for e-books and databases and gives fully searchable online access to hundreds of handbooks, data books, dictionaries, encyclopedias and technical reference books.

Why use it?

Knovel allows you to search across a very broad range of data, pull out what’s relevant and manipulate that data for your own purposes using its interactive tools.

You can use Knovel to look up a chemical formula, compare properties of substances or research alternative energy sources.

Knovel’s Data Search allows you to search by numeric data and properties from graphs, equations and tables in e-books quickly and easily. You can manipulate data values and export them into other applications, such as Excel.

Visit the Knovel LibGuide and investigate its links to videos and Webinars to show you how to make best use of Knovel.

From 10 September to 1 December 2012, Knovel is running its University Challenge, with a chance to win iPads and other prizes.  There are two new questions each week, which you can answer using Knovel.

TRIAL: Early European Books

We have a trial of Early European Books until 26th May. To access this trial visit the ProQuest Trials site.

See http://eeb.chadwyck.co.uk/info/about.do for details of the scope and coverage of Early European Books. During the trial we have access to all three collections, but collections may be purchased separately.

After trying Early European Books please leave your comments below. Please prioritise the collections if possible. You can choose the anonymous option to comment without needing to have a Blogger account, but it helps if you include your name in your feedback so that we can follow up on comments.

NEW: Brill journals collection

For 2011 we have expanded our subscriptions to Brill journals to include their full collection. We have had access to the Brill archive (Vol. 1 to 1999) since its purchase by JISC Collections in November 2008, and our usage of those archive volumes suggests that a subscription to the full collection (2000 to current) would be cost-effective.

The Brill collection contains humanities and social science titles from the Brill Academic Publishers imprint, international law and human rights titles from the Martinus Nijhoff imprint and science and technology titles from the VSP imprint. The additional titles that we now have full access to include:

Research in Phenomenology
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology
Southeastern Europe
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
Comparative Sociology
Perspectives on Global Development and Technology
Insect Systematics & Evolution
Asia Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law
Crustaceana
Journal of Adhesion Science and Technology
Journal of Chinese Overseas
Middle East Law and Governance

See the full list of titles in the library catalogue.

Major purchase of CUP ebooks

We are delighted to announce that we have purchased all Cambridge University Press e-books published between 2005 and 2010, and prior to 1993 - some 4,732 titles in all. Furthermore, we will purchase their 2011 and 2012 lists too.

The titles include scholarly monographs and contributed volumes for which CUP have electronic rights, but not textbooks. By early 2011 CUP plan to make new e-books available on the platform at the same time that the printed book becomes available.

The Cambridge Books Online site has no restriction on the number of simultaneous users who can access it, and its e-books are presented as simple PDF files that we know readers prefer. Each chapter has been assigned it own DOI (Digital Object Identifier). This allows you to build a stable link to any chapter, which will work off-campus too, by just adding the chapter's DOI to the end of this URL: http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/

Catalogue records will be uploaded shortly but in the meantime you can search Cambridge Books Online or browse by subject:

Humanities
Social Sciences (you'll find Archaeology and History here!)
Science & Engineering
Medicine

Off-campus access is available via EZproxy as usual.

Science Express now available

For 2010 we have upgraded our subscription to Science magazine to include Science Express, their 'publication ahead of print' section. This section can be accessed directly from http://www.sciencemag.org.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/sciencexpress/recent.dtl or just follow our usual link to Science and head for the Science Express tab.

Most other journals include 'publication ahead of print' as part of the standard online subscription. OK, we can't actually think of a single other journal that charges extra for such content...

Over 475 additional Springer journals

For 2009 we have expanded our Springer big deal to include an additional 479 titles for virtually no additional cost. The additional collections include Springer's:

- Chinese Library of Science
- Russian Library of Science
- Versita (previously known as Central European Library of Science)
- titles that have transferred to Springer in recent years
- titles from imprints acquired by Springer in recent years (including the Current Medicine Group and Humana Press)

Some of the more notable titles now available include:

American Journal of Criminal Justice
Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research
Financial Markets and Portfolio Management
Human Nature
Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and JETP Letters
JOM Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A & B
Science in China Series A-G
Stem Cell Reviews and Reports

You can browse the available titles in the library catalogue, and they have all been activated in SFX (find it @ liverpool).

Taylor & Francis collections for 2009

From 2009 we will no longer subscribe to the Taylor & Francis Full Collection, but will instead subscribe to their Social Sciences and Humanities collection, together with the new Informa Healthcare collection.

This change was precipitated by the transfer of the Taylor & Francis medical and healthcare journals to Informa Healthcare, a separate division of Informa plc.

Our analysis showed that it was only the medical content within the Taylor & Francis STM Collection that meant that the overall collection provided acceptable value for money. The 'rump' Science & Technology collection would have provided us with poor value. Furthermore, there were several poor value subscriptions tied into the ST Collection, and by dropping the collection we have been able to cancel the worst of these.

The consequences of this decision are:

We can still access over 700 Social Sciences and Humanties journals on the Informaworld platform. Our access typically extends back to 1997 and we will update our records, as previous years have been digitised since we originally catalogued this collection.

We have lost access to about 300 Science & Technology journals on the Informaworld platform. Where we hold (or held) individual subscriptions to titles in this collection we will still have access (to the subscribed years).

We have temporarily lost access to nearly 160 Medicine and Healthcare journals on the Informaworld platform. Once our subscription to the Informa Healthcare collection is active we will once again be able to access these journals, back to Volume 1.

We will soon have access to all titles on the Informa Pharma Sciences site (where we currently access Current Medical Research and Opinion) back to Volume 1. This will include the Expert Opinion series of titles (and about 20 title which are also hosted on Informaworld).

We will continue to be access the complete backfiles over 120 journals in the following subject areas:

Behavioral Science (i.e. Psychology)
Business, Management and Economics
Geaography, Planning, Urban and Environment

because we (or JISC) have purchased the backfiles in perpetuity.

TheScientificWorldJournal now available

We now have access to the multidiscplinary science e-journal TheScientificWorldJournal. This journal has been made freely available to all HE and FE institutions and Research Councils as part of the Knowledge Exchange initiative, following central funding from JISC Collections.

The journal covers science subjects raging from biomedicine to environmental sciences with selected articles grouped together by subject in domains and clusters.

The agreement provides us with access to all articles published since the journal launched, and runs until 31st December 2011. At the end of 2011, JISC Collections will renew the agreement, continuing to make the 2001 to 2011 content freely available.

12,000 e-books purchased on SpringerLink

We have purchased all of the English-language Springer e-books published between 2005 and 2008 (including books not yet published) - some 12,000 in total. This includes collections in:

Architecture and Design
Behavioral Science
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Business and Economics
Chemistry and Materials Science
Computer Science (including Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Humanities, Social Science and Law
Mathematics and Statistics (including Lecture Notes in Mathematics)
Medicine
Physics and Astronomy (including Lecture Notes in Physics)
Professional and Applied Computing

Springer are the world's largest publisher of STM books and are at the forefront of e-book provision. They publish every title simultaneously in print and online on their SpringerLink platform, and provide e-books in PDF format with each chapter in a separate file. This means that viewing and printing from Springer e-books is the same as from Springer e-journals.

Each e-book will appear in the library catalogue soon, but in the meantime you can see the e-books that we have purchased by going to http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/books/?Language=English&sortorder=asc&cb=2005&ce=2008. (Unfortunately the 'access indicators' in SpringerLink do not appear when accessed via EZproxy. On-campus users can see the books with reassuring green access indicators by going to http://www.springerlink.com/books/?Language=English&sortorder=asc&cb=2005&ce=2008).

1,500 e-books purchased on Oxford Scholarship Online

We have purchased about 1,500 e-books from Oxford University Press in Oxford Scholarship Online. They are all of the available titles in:

Biology
Business and Management
Classical Studies
Economics and Finance
History
Linguistics
Literature
Mathematics
Music
Philosophy
Physics
Political Science

Each e-book will appear in the catalogue soon, but in the meantime you can access them directly from http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/search/advancedquery.

You can print up to a single chapter from each Oxford Scholarship Online title or up to 5% of the pages of any title, whichever is the greater. Content is printed by HTML page unit – each is the equivalent of five print pages. To print any page from the Oxford Scholarship Online site, simply use the Printer Friendly link in the left-hand navigation area. A preview window will appear with the correctly formatted pages, minus the site navigation components.

find it @ liverpool links appear in Oxford Scholarship Online. These allow you to quickly find out if we also have the title in print, and particularly for the OSO titles that we have not purchased, find out whether we have online access to them elsewhere, for example in ebrary Academic Complete.

Blackwell journals now in Wiley InterScience

As of July 30th we believe that we have access to all the Blackwell Publishing journals that we should have access to, including subscribed titles that are outside the NESLi2 collections, and to our purchased Blackwell Publishing backfiles.

Wiley-Blackwell report that 1.6 million additional articles from Blackwell journals have been successfully loaded onto Wiley InterScience. After a few additional downtime hours they have now made the Wiley InterScience site live again. There may be intermittent service in the short term while they stabilize the site. They have also now permanently shut down the Synergy site.

They have redirected most links to their nearest equivalent on Wiley InterScience. However, they are still working on the OpenURL links which currently redirect to the Wiley InterScience homepage rather than the journal page, as they should. These links will be back in place in a few days. If you are not familiar with Wiley InterScience then please use the online tutorials or sign up for a free online webinar here: http://www.interscience.wiley.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/tutorials

To view the full list of Wiley-Blackwell journals go to http://www.interscience.wiley.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/. You will see here several new subject areas which they have added to now reflect the full depth and range of the Wiley-Blackwell list. Wiley InterScience now includes 1,400 current journals, and 660 titles with backfiles back to volume 1. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology will continue to be hosted on a separate site: http://www.blackwellreference.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/subscriber/uid=919/beos_subscriber

There is still some missing content from Blackwell which they are working through. This includes some issues, articles, parts of articles (e.g. article loaded in xml but not in PDF) plus some missing metadata and articles which need to be fixed due to special character rendering issues. The full list of missing content which they are working through will be listed on their transition site: http://www.interscience.wiley.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/transition and this will be updated weekly.

Work is well underway on the new Wiley-Blackwell online platform which will include many of the best features of Synergy as well as InterScience and which we will be launching in early 2009. More information about this new service will be provided in due course.

TRIAL: IOPscience

We have an extended trial of IOPscience until 31st December 2008. To access this trial go to http://iopscience.iop.org.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/. Off-campus users will be prompted to login with their MWS username and password.

IOPscience is a new e-journals platform from the Institute of Physics that will run alongside their existing platform. IOPscience includes innovative features to help you locate articles and keep up to date in your chosen area. For example:

- all articles in physics, astronomy and mathematics are classified with PACS or MSC codes
- journal homepages have tag clouds of the most frequently occuring classification codes (mouseover the code for its definition)
- users can tag articles with their onw choice of keywords
- search results can be narrowed using filters (much like Scopus)
- any search can be saved as an RSS feed for updates

For more details of the added features see http://iopscience.iop.org.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/page/aboutiopscience

Note that catalogue links and OpenURL links (SFX / find it @ liverpool) will continue to be directed to the existing IOP journals site.

Access to IOPscience in 2009 would only be available at additional cost, so we are keen to hear whether you think the additional features are worth paying for. So after trying IOPscience please leave a comment.

Blackwell Synergy site ceases June 30th

Following the merger of Blackwell Publishing with John Wiley and Sons, the Blackwell Synergy site will cease to be available after June 30th 2008. All content on the Blackwell Synergy site, including current issues, backfiles, and issues published online before print, will be transferred to the Wiley InterScience site as of 1st July 2008.

A completely new, 'next-generation' Wiley-Blackwell site will be launched in 2009 that we are promised will include the best features of both Blackwell Synergy and Wiley InterScience and which will introduce innovative new functionality and capabilities.

Wiley-Blackwell assure us that:

- all Blackwell journal access rights will be transferred, enabling continuous access to our licensed content
- existing Synergy URLs and links will redirect to the content on Wiley InterScience
- they will work with link resolver vendors (e.g. our SFX / find it @ liverpool service from Ex Libris) to redirect links to Wiley InterScience
- DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) are persistent and so will continue to work after the move to Wiley InterScience
- they have upgraded Wiley InterScience to accommodate the addition of Blackwell books, journals and customers
- the accounts for all registered users on Blackwell Synergy will transfer to Wiley InterScience so that users continue to receive the journal E-TOCs and other alerts that they have signed up for

Note that:

- Wiley Interscience does not include icons to indicate whether you are entitled to full-text access (but the new Wiley-Blackwell site coming in 2009 will)
- the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology will remain on its existing platform for now
- Linguistics Abstracts Online will remain on its existing platform for now