Spotlight on reference sources

Oxford Reference Online Premium Collection (ORO) provides a range of fully-indexed, extensively linked, up to date, and cross-searchable dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press, including detailed information across a broad subject range from the Oxford Companions series.

Selected subjects covered include:

• Computing
• Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Economics and Business
• History
• Literature
• Military History
• Physical Sciences and Mathematics
• Politics and Social Sciences
• Science

The Timelines tab allows you to view a timeline of notable events by country or by theme.  The Subjects and Books tab allows you to view across a number of different resources in a particular subject area, there is also a Links tab to external websites for each subject area. For more online Reference resources the Library webpage “Locate online Reference resources”  will give you further advice and guidance on how to locate other titles available online or you can browse through the UNSW Electronic Resources Portal (SIRIUS).

UNSW Online Learning Resource wins award

“Planning your online class”, is from a series of online video and PDF resources entitled  Learning to teach Online. Developed by UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, COFA Online,  it has just been been awarded the 2012 MERLOT Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources.

COFA is  an academic unit responsible for the development and management of a range of online and blended undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University of NSW. The project was developed by COFA and funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, and supports teachers in any discipline who are new to online learning.

Project leaders, COFA’s Simon McIntyre and Karin Watson, will be presenting “Learning to teach Online” at the 5th Annual International Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning in the United States later this year.  Forty-four universities around the world are now using the program in their Masters courses and for staff development.

For local assistance UNSW Canberra Library  Distance Education for Academics guide provides a range of useful links and tips to further reading and resources.

Titanic Sinking

 This week the world remembers the sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. The ship sank on April 15th, 1912, with the loss of 1514 lives.

 The Academy Library holds quite a collection of books about the event, and several videos showing the finding and reclamation of the wreckage. A useful call number for browsing the book collection is G530 .T6, and a number of videos are at VM383 .T5. If you want to see the full holdings, search the Library catalogue using the word “titanic” as a subject.

Also available through the UNSW Electronic Resources Portal are various historical newspaper collections; use the Locate tab under Find databases with a type of ‘newspaper’ from the dropdown list to read the newspaper accounts of the time. The Historical New York Times covers from 1851 to 2007 – the image above is dated 16 Apr 1912. 

National Geographic Channel also has an interesting commemorative website

Post author is Susan Blood.

Scholarly communication

Some interesting reading came my way this morning.

Heather Morrison a fellow Librarian is writing her thesis on transformative change in scholarly communication, she is publishing her thesis as she writes it and is inviting comment along the way. I have just read her chapter on  Scholarly communication in crisis … sometimes open access publishing seems to be taking a very long time to become mainstream.

This week’s visit from Andrew Wells and Deborah Gibson on Copyright for teaching purposes has also led to some discussion of open access & open access resources across campus. The UNSW Governance support website has Guidelines for Copyright ownership encouraging authors to retain some rights to their work and at UNSW there is the option to deposit papers into UNSWorks Faculty Collection which has one of its aims as increasing ‘the exposure of UNSW research by making it available globally, free of charge. …  also to enable researchers to meet recommendations of funding bodies, including ARC and NHMRC, to deposit research publications in an institutional or subject-based repository’.

Earth Hour 2012 – 31st March 8.30pm

Dont forget to turn off your lights on the 31st of March at 8.30pm for Earth Hour.

This event  began in Australia in 2007 through the inspiration of WWF and has now spread world-wide to become a global event.  2011 saw 135 countries take part in Earth Hour.

Earth Hour is a demonstration of how individuals ,corporations and government organisations can show that they want to see change and care about the environment and reducing global warming.

Within the Academy Library we have a great collection on Sustainable Energy and global warming:

‘Handbook of sustainable energy‘ by  W.H. Lee and V.G. Cho, editors.

‘Winds of change : East Asia’s sustainable energy future ‘ by Xiaodong Wang … [et al.].

‘Energy to 2050 scenarios for a sustainable future’  by International Energy Agency. 

‘Climate change and climate modeling’  by J. David Neelin.

‘Climate conflict how global warming threatens security and what to do about it’  by Jeffrey Mazo.

‘The energy glut : climate change and the politics of fatness’  by Ian Roberts ; with Phil Edwards.

‘Climate conflict how global warming threatens security and what to do about it’  by Jeffrey Mazo.