Five new E-book trials

The K.U.Leuven University Library has opened access to five new trials for E-books. While surfing on the KULeuvenNet you will have access to five major E-books platforms during the next coming weeks (until December, 19th) .

• PsycBooks
  PsycBOOKS contains full text in Portable Document Format (PDF) of scholarly book titles published by the American Psychological Association (APA).  In 2006, the database offering includes about 900 titles, including 100 out-of-print books from 1950-2002. The books are offered via OvidSP.
• NetLibrary
  This platform offers access to more than 170,000 E-books. For Medicine you will find a nice selection of more than 500 Doody’s Core Titles , a significant collection of reference books.
• MyiLibrary via Missing Link
  On this platform of E-books you will not need no password: just click on the link “miliBib-Portal starten” on the frontpage. In the category Medicine you can choose books out of 2,500 titles.
• Gale Virtual Reference Library 
  To access this website with more than 1,500 electronic reference books you will need to login with the following passwords. A collection of almost 200 medical books and encyclopaedia is also offered. After login, click on Access this database.
• Dawsonera
  On this platform Dawson offers a selection of 50 titles (out of a collection of 75,000 e-books). You need to login with one of the following passwords.

We gladly receive any feedback on these trials. After the trial period the University Library will evaluate the different platforms based on the quality of the content, the price of the product, the usability of the platform, usage statistics (in the trial period) and, of course, your feedback. Please let us know what you think of the different E-books providers by leaving a comment in this weblog or by sending an e-mail to mgas@bib.kuleuven.be.
Thanks a lot.

Library closed on November 10th and 11th

The Biomedical Library and the University will be closed on Monday, November 10th and Tuesday, November 11th on the occasion of Armistice Day.

Foto by Brenda Anderson

Customer satisfaction survey at the University Library

For the first time all K.U.Leuven libraries are asking their users about the quality of their services. By participating in an electronic survey – which is available from October 27th until December 9th – you can help us to achieve a better understanding of your needs and the way in which we should serve them.

All students and academic staff have been invited by e-mail to fill out a questionnaire, which is available in English and Dutch. It takes an average of 10 minutes to complete the form. Take part and have the chance to win an iPod or one of 50 movie tickets. Your responses will be held in confidence.

The University library is using a standardized questionnaire of LibQUAL+ from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Some hundreds of scientific libraries have already used this web-survey to track and understand their users’ needs and opinions of service quality. This survey will be part of an international benchmarking exercise.  The K.U.Leuven University Library is the first Belgian library who is participating in LibQUAL.

For more information you may like to visit our webpage at www.libqual.be (unfortunately only in Dutch).

Library hours for the new Academic Term

From today, at the start of the new academic term, the Campus Library Biomedical Sciences will be open from:

Monday - Thursday: From 9am till 9pm
Friday: From 9am till 6pm

The evening services (after 6pm) will be attended by two job students. Therefore substantial cash transactions or extensive information inquiry will be limited after 6pm.
Anyhow copying, scanning and printing can be done with a copy card which can be bought at our copy card vending machine. There is also a change machine to obtain the necessary coins.

Be aware that from this week there could be some noise in our reading room(s). In the following weeks there will be a great deal of excavation in front and next to the library. This digging will be the start of the construction at the new auditorium of our campus (800 seats, website only in Dutch).

PubMed unleashed

The Library will provide 2 sessions about the use of PubMed:

29th of September PubMed Introduction:

How do I perform a strategic search in PubMed? How do I build up and refine my request ?

6th of October PubMed Advanced:

How to set up an online alerting ? Wich other databases, programs and features can be connected to PubMed results ? Pubcrawler vs. My NCBI.

How do I register? mail: mgas@bib.kuleuven.be or phone: 016/346105

Maintenance library catalogue

On Monday 25th of August, Tuesday 26th and possibly Wednesday 27th there will be an upgrade of the university library system. Therefore our Library catalogue from LIBISNet will only be available in a light version. These means that you only can look up the books and journal titles which are cataloged before april 2008. In this maintenance period it is also not possible to access your library account.

Anyhow, all journal titles from the biomedical field can be consulted by using the Journals Catalogue (print and online) from our Campus library.

Multifunctional copiers

The library has been replacing all the copiers by three new multifunctional machines in the reading room.

These new machines are situated in the copy corner, on the 4th floor, just before the doors of the silent reading room.

With these new photocopiers it is possible:

• to copy books, volumes, journal issues and sheets (with document feeder) (A4 and A3)
• to scan documents in PDF-format on a USB-stick (only black and white)
• to print from a USB-stick (only from PDF-files)

These machines are easy in use but we like to bring you to notice where the USB port (USB poort) and the scroll wheel (scroll-wiel) is situated. See figure below.

Reminder: Wiley-Blackwell interruption

We would like to remind you that all content of Blackwell Synergy and Wiley InterScience will not be available next weekend. From the Blackwell/Wiley Newsletter:

As of Monday, June 30th 2008, all Blackwell journal content—including all full-text HTML and PDF versions of articles from current issues, backfiles, and issues published online before print—will be incorporated into Wiley InterScience.

We plan to close Blackwell Synergy at the end of business (Pacific Standard Time) on Friday June 27th and we anticipate that the migration will be completed by Monday June 30th. Over the weekend of June 28th and 29th, there will be a period when both Blackwell Synergy and Wiley InterScience will be unavailable while we transition and re-index data.

After June 30th, Blackwell Synergy will no longer be available.

All Blackwell links will be automatically redirected to the new platform and the libraries will adapt their links (Library Catalogue, LibriLinks) as soon as possible.
Note: all content of Wiley’s platform includes The Cochrane Library!

Please read all information concerning your accounts on the Transition Information Page.

Library Summer Holiday Opening Hours

From Monday June 30th, the library will run on Holiday opening hours. This means there will be no evening service in June, July and the first Part of September. The library will be open on working days continuous from 9am until 6pm. New this year is that there will be no closing time anymore at noon.

Normal opening hours will resume as from the beginning of the new academic term, September 22nd, 2008.

Impact factors 2007 available

The impact factors and other journal data for 2007 are made available by Thomson Reuters. You will find these figure in the Journal Citation Reports. There are about 251 journals extra that are been listed (now: 6,417 titles).

It could be interesting to compare the impact factors and rankings with SCImago journal indicators (data from Scopus). We wrote a previous entry about SCImago as an alternative.