Six of the best - Emerald

First in a series of six posts on e-resources to help you with your dissertation

What is Emerald?

Full text articles from 150 leading academic and professional management and business journals, plus additional abstracts. A great database for Business students but also for subjects as diverse as Computing, Engineering, Environment and Food.

How do I access Emerald?

• From the Library web page, choose Resources A-Z (under the Find menu), or use the link in your Subject Guide.
• Select on or off campus access as appropriate.
• Log in using your network username & password.

Tips

• To use all the features, you will need to create a personal profile. Click on My Profile and then Register and enter required details.
• For the best full text results, use Advanced Search and choose to search only within My subscribed content.

Bonus features

• Alerts – Receive emails when new articles match your search, or when your favourite journal publishes a new issue.
• Endnote – export citations from Emerald to your Endnote Library. Go to My Profile then create a Marked List. You can then search and add items to your list before downloading them. Follow the guidance in our WebCT Endnote tutorial.
• Journal of the Week – free articles from two Emerald journals weekly, including titles to which Abertay does not subscribe.

National e-books survey - the results

We recently promoted a survey on e-books that many of you took part in. This survey was run at universities across the UK and over 23,000 staff and students participated. This was the second survey run as part of the JISC national e-books observatory project. The surveys were exploring current awareness, perceptions and attitudes towards e-books and looking to see if these changed between 2008 and 2009. Thank you for participating.

Some headline findings:

• Use of e-books for study increased for students from 61.4% in 2008 to 64.4% in 2009 but the highest increase was use by staff, which increased from 58.9% to 64.9%.
• Surprisingly, over 63% of respondents said that they read the content of e-books from a screen with only around 6% printing pages out, however, the average time spent reading was only between 11 and 20 minutes.
• Over 54% of respondents said that they dip in and out of e-book chapters with only around 8% reading a whole chapter.
• Encouragingly, the percentage of teaching staff recommending e-books to students and placing direct links to them via the virtual learning environment or online reading lists increased between 2008 and 2009.
• Most staff and students get access to their e-books via the university library and dependency on this access had increased by 2009.
• Satisfaction with the availability of print textbooks through the library increased from 2008 to 2009 and this may be due to the availability of more e-books taking the pressure off the print copies.

The results of the surveys will be used to develop the e-books market to help make sure that staff and students can get access to the books they need either in print or electronic format.

For further information on the JISC national e-books observatory project please see www.jiscebooksproject.org