Resource in focus: Westlaw Books

Westlaw is one of our much-valued legal databases and can be accessed via our Law Subject Guide and Library Search, logging in with your Newcastle University Campus ID & password. One of the lesser-used aspects of Westlaw is its Books collection and it’s a resource that should not be overlooked.

Westlaw Books gives access to invaluable titles such as the White Book and Archbold, alongside comprehensive and authoritative coverage of common law through titles from the Common Law Library series, including Charlesworth & Percy on Negligence, Chitty on Contracts, and Benjamin’s Sale of Goods. While these are titles you will use more regularly in practice, all Newcastle Law School students are encouraged to become familiar with them during your time at University.

An image of a selection of Westlaw Books from the Common Law Library and practitioner titles.

We also have academically-based books available in the Sweet & Maxwell Academic Collection to support your studies. These include Winfield & Jolowicz on Tort, Treitel on the Law of Contract, Megarry & Wade on the Law of Real Property, and Elliott & Wood’s Cases and Materials on Criminal Law (the latter being written and edited by former academics of Newcastle Law School).

An image of a selection of Westlaw Books available from the S&M Academic Collection.

To access this content, log into Westlaw and click on Westlaw Books in the menu at the top of the page.

An image of the Westlaw home screen with Westlaw Books highlighted in the top menu.

You can browse through the 350+ titles included in the Library’s subscription plan, but if you know the book you are looking for, search by a title keyword, e.g. criminal.

An image of the Westlaw Books search options, with 'Search by Title' highlighted.

If you want to browse those student-focused books, use the filters on the left-hand side of the screen. Scroll down and select ‘Sweet & Maxwell Academic’ in the Publisher/Series filter section.

An image of a filtered result in Westlaw Books.

This short Thomson Reuters video (1:56 mins) gives tips on using Westlaw Books effectively in locating bibliographic information (essential for referencing these titles in your work), searching the materials using keywords, saving your favourite titles for repeated use, and how to email, print, download, save into a Westlaw folder or simply view the material on the screen (in reading-mode too).

If you’re not a fan of videos and want a handy guide to download or print, then this Westlaw Books PDF will help.

An extract from the Thomson Reuters Westlaw Books PDF guide showing how to annotate text.

If you have any comments or questions about Westlaw Books, or any other library resource, please contact libraryhelp@ncl.ac.uk or leave your comments here.

18th February 202127th May 2022

Resource in focus: Loeb Classical Library Online

Containing over 520 volumes of Latin and Greek poetry, drama, oratory, history, philosophy and more, the Loeb Classical Library is a key resource for those studying the ancient Greek and Roman world. The side-by-side layout of the ancient text and English translation makes the literature accessible to readers and can be especially helpful to those new to the study of ancient Greek or Latin.

The online Library presents tools that allow readers to explore the texts at various levels, via browsing, searching, annotating, and sharing content. The online works include the same content, page, and volume numbers as their print counterparts so you can easily switch between the two or share ideas related to certain passages or pages.

Loeb volumes

For each volume in the Library, you’ll find an introductory page containing useful information on the author, some details of the Loeb edition, a bibliographic reference for the text as well as a table of contents that you can use to navigate through the online work. You can access this page at any time by clicking on the LCL number located above the right hand page.

Screenshot showing the left and right hand pages from a Loeb edition of Plato's Phaedo.

In the text itself, the left (verso) page contains the original Greek/Latin language, while the right (recto) presents the English translation. Tools along the bottom of the page allow you to hide either the left or right pages as needed. The tool bar also includes options for searching within the work or printing sections of the text. Further options to bookmark pages, highlight and annotate text, and organise or share your annotations with others, are also available in the toolbar but require you to create a free My Loeb account.

Browsing the Library

The browse option allows you to scan the Loeb Library by author name, Greek or Latin works, and Loeb volume number.

When browsing Greek or Latin works, you’re given further filter options so you can narrow your search by author, form (poetry or prose), time period, and genre/subject. These options can be particularly useful if you are interested in certain themes presented in the ancient world across specific time periods.

Screenshot showing the Loeb 'Browse' page for Greek Works.

Searching the Library

The search box at the top right of the page allows you to do a quick search for titles, authors, keywords or phrases.

Alternatively, advanced search allows you to be more specific, searching for terms within introductions, bibliographies, or indexes. You can also limit your search to verso or recto to focus on the Greek/Latin text or the English translations. All search boxes provide you with a Greek keyboard to simplify searching for keywords in the original language.

As within browse, the search results allow you to filter records further by language, author, period, or genre. If you’ve searched for a specific keyword, clicking on ‘Show results within’ allows you to browse instances of the word appearing within a text from the results page.

Screenshot showing the 'Show results within' option in the results page on Loeb.

Find out more

For more help, visit the Using the Library link at the top right of the Loeb Library page. Here you’ll find further advice on using tools within My Loeb, how to search and how to cite volumes from the Library.

You can find out more about key features and take a quick visual tour of the digital Library via the Loeb Classical Library website.

15th February 202127th May 2022

Resource in focus: Bibliography of British and Irish History

The Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) is a database of over 600,000 records about British and Irish history from 55BC to the present day. It indexes publications from the early 1900s to the present, including journal articles, books, book chapters and theses, making it an indispensable resource for finding secondary literature. It’s updated three times a year, and is curated by historians, so it’s a very high quality, well-organised database.

Searching

You can search it in various ways, including by subject, author, place and date. Choose Advanced search to get the full range of options, including browsing a subject ‘tree’ (or index) to help you select appropriate search terms, and broaden or narrow your search.

Finding the full text

Your records will link to the full text article at Newcastle University Library if we have access to it. Just click to display the details of a record, and the full text links will be at the bottom of the record in an external links section.

If we don’t have access to the full text of an article, there won’t be an external links section. Please note that if the item you want is a book or book chapter, BBIH won’t link to it automatically, so you’ll need to search for the book separately in Library Search.

You can export records in various ways to create your own bibliography: just click on Export at the top of the screen to see the options.

Need more help?

BBIH has recently released a really helpful set of short videos and guides, aimed at first and second year students; students doing a dissertation or thesis, and lecturers.

Get the latest news about BBIH, including content updates and features, via its blog.

30th October 202027th May 2022

Digital Scholar Lab: find out more, and book your training slot

The Library has purchased Gale’s Digital Scholar Lab: a digital humanities platform with potential uses for students, researchers and module leaders, whatever your previous experience. It enables you to:

create and clean customised content sets, using our Gale Primary Sources collections (which include a wide range of historic newspaper, periodical and book archives)
analyse and interrogate the data, using the Lab’s text analysis and visualisation tools
manage and share content sets with others.

For those who regularly use digital techniques or methods, you can use the Lab to dramatically reduce the time needed to compile, curate and clean datasets, either using Gale data or locally held data, which can be uploaded into the Lab.

For those interested in teaching using the Lab, it contains a comprehensive Learning Centre that you can use to introduce students to basic and advanced concepts, with worked examples that can form the basis of a lesson plan.

Finally, for those new to digital humanities, and intimidated by thoughts of coding, the Lab provides a way to produce sophisticated, analytical research that requires no coding skill and allows you to make discoveries in archives that would otherwise be impossible.

To help you find out more about Digital Scholar Lab, representatives from Gale will be running two online training sessions for Newcastle University staff and students via Zoom on:

Monday November 16th, 14.00-15.30 and repeated on
Thursday November 19th, 10.00-11.30

The session will introduce you to Digital Scholar Lab, and its interface and workflows. It will cover text mining in general, search queries, curating and managing datasets, using analysis tools, and reviewing results. There will be plenty of opportunities for questions.

Any Newcastle University staff and students are welcome: you don’t need any previous knowledge of Digital Scholar Lab. However, if you have previously used Digital Scholar Lab, you may also find the session useful as a refresher, and to find out about recent enhancements.

To book your place on one of the sessions, please fill in our booking form.

If you are interested in more bespoke training (for example, for a specific cohort of students, or at a more advanced level), please contact Lucy Keating, and we’ll discuss with Gale representatives.

29th October 202031st May 2022

British Online Archives: new collections now available

The Library has purchased access to several new collections in the British Online Archives series:

BBC Handbooks, Annual Reports and Accounts, 1927-2002

This collection contains handbooks, annual reports and accounts published by the BBC between 1927 and 2002. It also includes a review of each year’s public service broadcasting, with detailed schedules, audience research, performance and objective tables, commentaries, and editorials. A great opportunity to examine the social and cultural forces that shaped Britain in the 20^th century.

British Officers’ Diaries from World War One

These diaries reveal what life was like for the average British soldier in the Battle of the Somme and later battles of Ypres. The battles of Loos, Arras, Vimy Ridge, and Bethune are also covered. The letters home will have been censored by the army: how much was removed depended on the censor. Tactical information and details of military training often remain, as the main concern was morale.

British Union of Fascists: Newspapers and Secret Files 1933-1951

This collection charts the rise and fall of fascism in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s, with a particular focus on Oswald Mosley’s blackshirt movement.

The bulk of the documents are official BUF publications, including Fascist Week¸ The Blackshirt, The East London Pioneer, and Action. In addition, there are hundreds of Government documents relating to Mosley’s internment during the Second World War, including Cabinet Office, Home Office and Prime Ministerial papers.

Paris Peace Conference and Beyond, 1919-1939

This collection contains archival material relating to this tumultuous period in European and world history. The documents cover the treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Trianon, Sèvres, Lausanne, and Locarno, as well as the foundation of the League of Nations. Most of the files are drawn from the UK National Archives, while the British Library provided the personal papers of Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Arthur Balfour.

These new resources add to the Parliamentary Labour Party Papers 1968-1994 collection, which we had previously purchased.

6th October 202031st May 2022

Resource in focus: OUP Law Trove

This Oxford University Press resource contains most of the essential, recommended and background reading titles you would normally find listed in your Newcastle Law School module handbooks and on the Law Library shelves.

If you’re asking if you need to buy your course texts for 2020/21 then we can’t answer that question for you, as the answer depends on you. Ask yourself: can you work with e-books? Do you prefer to have your own copy of a book so you can fold pages, write notes in the margins or use a highlighter to annotate the text (*librarians across the world gasp in horror!*). Can the University Library provide a copy of the book you need to use via the Click+Collect service? We certainly can’t provide a copy of every book to every single student even when we want to. We do advise you to try OUP Law Trove and see how easy it is to access, and how versatile it can be (including annotating the text!). It may just save you spending money on books where you don’t need to.

Read on, or you can take a tour of the resource before diving in. OUP have released a YouTube playlist for you to watch to make the most of OUP Law Trove too.

An image of the OUP Law Trove home screen.

Logging in
You can access OUP Law Trove directly via Library Search (log in with your Campus ID and password), via your Reading Lists in your Canvas modules, and directly too. You can go to OUP Law Trove and use the ‘Sign in via your institution’ option in the left-hand login box on the homepage, and follow the instructions.

An image of the direct sign-in option on OUP Law Trove's homescreen,

Further guidance on logging in is provided by OUP in this video (1:26 mins):

Searching
You can search OUP Law Trove by author, title or keyword. You can narrow your search to those titles available to us alone by selecting Show titles in my subscription (left-hand menu). Select those that are unlocked or free.

You can further narrow your results by refining by subject using the options available in the left-hand menu.

A screenshot showing a composite of different search types in OUP Law Trove.

Further guidance on navigating and searching is provided by OUP in this video (2:55 mins):

Personalisation
You can create a Personal Profile to experience the full functionality of OUP Law Trove, including bookmarking and annotating (without writing on your books!). Click the ‘Sign in’ button on the top menu bar and follow the instructions.

Further information on the benefits of creating and using the Personal Profiles features is provided by OUP in this video (0:58 mins):

Reading Lists and Handouts
You may find your module teaching staff are using the DOI: for a specific book or chapter from your Reading List or module handout. What’s a DOI? A Digital Object Identifier. It’s a ‘permalink’ (permanent link) to the specific materials you need to read and looks like a weblink (which it is, essentially). If it doesn’t directly link to OUP Law Trove then add https://dx.doi.org/ to create the full DOI link. You will still be asked to login using your Campus ID & password to gain access to the materials.

An image showing the DOI for a Law Trove book and book chapter.

Tips
Search OUP Law Trove directly for your resources if you can. Library Search and your Reading Lists are linking to most of the books, and some of the chapters available, but not all. You may find more resources by performing a keyword search; the results could show a useful chapter in another book that you would never have thought to search in.

You have access to some good study skills information in OUP Law Trove too. Whether you are wondering what academic writing actually is, how to write a case note, how to prepare for a moot or dealing with an exam, there are materials in Trove to assist you alongside the Academic Skills Kit made available to you by the University, the University Library and the Writing Development Centre.

Further information on the online resources, including MCQs, is provided by OUP in this video (2:12 mins):

We think you will find this resource very useful in supporting your studies at Newcastle Law School. If you have any feedback or questions, please leave a comment or contact libraryhelp@ncl.ac.uk.

17th August 202031st May 2022

New resource: Westlaw Edge UK

Westlaw Edge UK. Is this a new resource? Possibly not by definition, but it is most certainly a significant enhancement within the existing Westlaw UK service.

https://youtu.be/K2hiP_AsLag

Westlaw Edge UK (not to be confused with the Microsoft Edge browser) is available via the Law Subject Guide and Library Search within Westlaw UK. Once logged in with your Newcastle University Campus ID and password you will find the tools available to help you keep currently aware and able to anticipate change – skills which are incredibly important to develop as a law student to be carried into your legal career.

These tools include:

An image showing the Westlaw Edge UK tools to enable current awareness.

With inclusion of an interactive precedent map within Case Analytics to easily locate relevant cases…

An image of the precedent map associated with Donoghue v Stevenson (snail in a bottle case).

…and the UK-EU Divergence Tracker to assist with analysing the legal implications of Brexit, it’s even easier to carry out effective and efficient legal research.

https://youtu.be/RIo7_d54VDY

You can go beyond search results lists with AI-suggested relevant research and resources tailored to your needs. Skynet hasn’t got a look in. Go on, don’t be slow. Lose yourself in Westlaw Edge UK and get ahead.

A photo of a snail in a glass bottle. Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash.

7th July 202031st May 2022

New resource: Library of Latin Texts

The Library has purchased access to the Library of Latin Texts (series A and B) following a well-received trial.

This database gathers together Latin texts of all genres and from all periods. Series A contains over 4,000 texts by nearly 1,400 authors, from the beginning of Latin literature to the modern era.

The companion Series B gathers Latin texts of all genres and periods, with the aim of more rapidly integrating a huge number of Latin texts into online form.

Together, the two databases form one large linguistic corpus, with sophisticated tools enabling a variety of search and analytical methods, with the stated objective being simply summarised as “who said what, when, where, and how many times?”

The databases are updated regularly, and can also be used to read texts as a whole.

You can read more about the database, or access it directly from Library Search.

17th January 202027th May 2022

GUEST POST – OFF THE SHELF

Hi! I’m Caitlin, a final year law student and law library aide – and by now I’m used to the stress of exams and deadlines.

I tried the ‘poetry-pick me up’ after going into the common room for a revision break.

I stumbled across Sue (@kind_curious) in the Law School Student Common Room, where she asked, ‘do you want a poem?’. Not really knowing what to expect, I had to overcome a bit of social awkwardness! I was surprised by Sue’s passion and love of poetry, which was clear in the way she spoke about how she’d used poetry in the NHS before and it was what she enjoyed most.

I was asked questions about my current stress levels and how I was feeling with exams, and how I dealt with stress. I told her that when I get stressed I talk even more than usual, which for anyone who knows me sounds like I’m going at a million miles an hour, and she suggested something that would relax me.

I laughed as I saw no signs of chocolate or Netflix – my usual go to relaxation strategies.

Instead she said I needed something like a lavender bubble bath – again I saw no sign of a bubble bath in the Law School and I’d yet to find one in the Dungeon.

She picked out two poems that would make me feel like the relaxing in lavender: she suggested ‘Sonnet’ by Elizabeth Bishop and Shennagh Pugh’s ‘What if This Road’.

What if this road reminded me of Robert Frost’s ‘A Road Not Taken’, and was great for me as a an indecisive person. It was matched perfectly to the questions that Sue had asked me, as I read it as a ‘roll with it’ approach to life, which is definitely needed to cope with exams and deadline stress.

The second poem, Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, had great visualisation techniques, almost like a meditative poem – which was spot on to turn off the stress and slow everything down!

The experience was a great switch off from deadline stress, and a great use of the 10 minutes which I’d usually scroll through twitter or Instagram. It was something different, and really quite unique and relaxing, which I would definitely recommend to help have a break from any exam and deadline stress!

20th June 201931st May 2022

Westlaw platform upgrade

The legal database, Westlaw, has had an upgrade. The content remains the same, but you should notice significant improvements to the search and display options, and its overall look and feel.

How can I access it?

You can find links to the new Westlaw platforms on the Law subject guide and Library Search. There are separate links for Westlaw UK and Westlaw International.

What are the main features of the new platform?

You’ll find the main search headings (e.g. cases, legislation, journals, current awareness, books) are still there, but arranged differently.

As before, you can still search or browse across all content types, or limit to a specific content type (e.g. cases or legislation). Specific search options (such as using connectors) are similar to the old system, but you should find everything more clearly set out.

You’ll also find a wider range of personalisation features, including favourites, and options to annotate and share content with others.

Other new features include a Legislation Compare tool, which makes it easier to track recent and future changes to legislation.

You can browse topics to find key documents (including cases and legislation), and track the latest and future developments via an interactive calendar.

Where can I find out more?

You can get more help via handy quick reference guides to the new platform, or videos. As a minimum, we’d recommend watching the short overview video or the getting started guide, which take you through the key features, and give you useful tips. However, there are also helpful videos and guides on specific aspects, such as alerts, annotations, cases and legislation.

What do I need to do?

Please note, the old Westlaw platform will be switched off on 5th August 2019, so we would strongly encourage you to start using the new platform as soon as you can.

Personalisation features such as alerts and folders can’t be migrated to the new Westlaw platform. Therefore, if you have set up any of these on old Westlaw, you will need to set them up again on the new platform. You should find the new platform has much improved personalisation features.