Wiley – Blackwell merger

From 30 June 2008 all content from Blackwell Synergy will move over to Wiley Interscience.

Blackwell Synergy will close at the end of Friday 27 June. During the transition weekend of Saturday 28 June and Sunday 29 June Wiley InterScience will be unavailable for a period. Click here for more information.

All secure Blackwell Synergy links will be redirected to the relevant page on Wiley InterScience from June 30th.

Attention DCU lecturers: when you create links to journal articles on Moodle, you must make sure the links are secure, so students can access the journal articles off campus. If you just copy and paste the URL from your browsers’ address bar, the link will not work. Click here to find out more.

Database Days

The “Database Days” series of workshops is being help this week in the Library. All DCU staff, researchers and post-graduate students are invited to attend the workshops. This year’s programme includes:

Refworks for Beginners and Advanced Users

Effective Market Intelligence

Law Unlimited

Keep your Eye on the Ball

New Web Developments

Free for All

If you haven’t already booked your place, there are places still available for some of the workshops…..

PubMed Faceoff

PubMed Faceoff is an interesting experiment from postgenomic.com representing PubMed search results as human faces, because our minds are tuned to respond more to facial expressions than text or graphs. The photorealistic images are a variation of the Chernoff Faces visualization technique.

This image above is a representation of this DCU paper:

• Luo, X., Killard, A. J., Morrin, A. and Smyth, M. R. 2006. Enhancement of a conducting polymer-based biosensor using carbon nanotube-doped polyaniline. Analytica Chimica Acta [Online]. 575 (1), pp39-44.

The young face shows that the paper is relatively new. The smile means that it has been well cited. The high eyebrows mean that it was published in a high impact journal. The gender and ethnicity are chosen at random.

By, contrast, the face for another paper shows that its old, it hasn’t been well cited and its not from a high impact journal. Is this likely to prove useful and take off? Is it too simplistic?

DCU Library’s Creative Writing Competition 2008

The award ceremony for the annual DCU Library’s Creative Writing Competition was held in DCU Library on Thursday 22nd May. The competition has been running for the past nine years and is open to participants of adult reading and writing schemes throughout North Dublin. Twelve awards were presented this year, one to the winning entry and commendations to eleven others. An additional commendation was made this year in memory of Margo Fitzpatrick who worked in the Library for over 14 years and who sadly passed away in April 2007. Margo was a firm supporter of the competition and was a member of the judging panel for many years. 
This year in addition to receiving certificates and book tokens, all award recipients were invited back to the Library to attend a creative writing workshop presented by Helen Fallon, a former DCU Library staff member, writer and Acting Librarian at NUI Maynooth.

(l-r) Paul Sheehan, Director of Library Services; John Roche, Winner and Anthony Glavin

Paul Sheehan, the Director of Library Services introduced our special guest for the evening the writer and editor Anthony Glavin. Anthony commented on how powerful and moving the evening was as everyone listened intensely to the award recipients who all read their stories and poems. Anthony spoke of reading British/Carribean writer Caryl Phillips, who suggested form is the most important part of writing, however when he contacted Colm Tobin on the subject, he disagreed and said voice was the key element in writing. Anthony told the award recipients that their “voices” were clearly present in their writing and encouraged them to continue to write and share their experiences.

Before reading from his own novel Nighthawk Alley, Anthony presented the competition winner, John Roche with his award and told the audience that his poem “The hanging basket” was a strong and moving piece, well constructed with the use of metaphors which initially shield the reader from its true significance and emotional message.

Front row (l-r): David Worn, Patricia O’Mara, Mary Lalor, Peter Brannigan. Middle row (l-r): Paul Sheehan, Linda Mahady, Mary Davis, Jonathan O’Neill, John Roche, Brian Bryne, Brenda Curtis. Back row (l-r): Yvonne Murray and Anthony Glavin

The evening was a huge success and attended by over 100 members of the local community. Paul Sheehan thanked the tutors and all the guests for their continued support for the competition; the judging panel; Mags Lehane for her excellent co-ordination of the event; Anthony Glavin and our sponsors NorDubCo.

Winner: 
     John Roche         ”The Hanging Basket”
Commodations:
     Peter Brannigan   “If this is paradise, what is heaven like?”
     Deirdre Wallner   ” Raising children in today’s world”
     Linda Mahady     “The day the plants in the garden began to talk”
     Jonathan O’Neill  “A day in the life of a ping pong ball”
     Mary Davis          “An embarrassing situation”
     Brenda Curtis      “The leaving”
     Yvonne Murray    “A strange love affair”
     Patricia O’Mara    “The green eyed monster”
     David Worn         “Looking back”
     Mary Lalor           “Turmoil”
The Margo Fitzpatrick Award:
     Brian Byrne          “The princess and the priceless”

NBER – New Economics Working Papers Database

The Library has subscribed to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Working Papers collection. This comprehensive resource provides the full text of over 700 new papers produced every year by NBER researchers. This is a particularly significant academic resource as many of the papers are subsequently published in scholarly journals.

You can find the the NBER on our Business E-Journals Database list or on our general Library A-Z of Databases.

The NBER is a valuable addition to the research and working papers available through the Working papers page on the Business Subject Portal.