Category: SAgE

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Resource in Focus: Construction Information Services (CIS)

Screenshot of CIS homepage

Overview

CIS is produced jointly with the National Building Specification (NBS) especially for architects, civil and structural engineers, building control officers, building services engineers and other professionals in the construction industry. CIS provides fundamental industry information and legislation, as well as additional sector material. The extensive range of full-text documents cover all aspects of the building, engineering, design and construction process in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.

The Construction Information Service (CIS) is a comprehensive online collection of over 28,000 construction related standards, regulations, technical advice and articles from 500+ publishers. Content is updated weekly, neatly organised into topic based supplements and delivered through a function rich and easily accessible online portal.

This collection is an invaluable resource if you are studying:

  • Many of our Engineering courses
  • Architecture, Landscape and Planning
  • Geography

Subjects covered include:

  • Building regulations
  • Environmental/land Planning
  • Planning control
  • Urban planning
  • Waste/water management
  • Earthworks/foundations
  • Land drainage
  • Law/legislation
  • Transport facilities/planning
  • Tunnelling and underpinning
  • Engineering
  • Materials
  • Groundwater control
  • Roads
  • loads/stresses
  • …and much, much, much more!

Searching

Within the CIS search box you can enter your keywords or browse by subject in the left-hand menu. There is also an Advanced Search option. There is also plenty of help with how to use CIS under the Help option on the left-hand menu:

Screenshot of left-hand menu on CIS showing where to browse and where to get help with CIS.

Access

CIS is available through our catalogue, Library Search. If you are on campus no password is required. If you are off campus you will need to log in using your University campus ID and password. You can also find it under the Journals and Database tabs in our Subject Guides, and on our Standards Resource Guide.

Copyright

Every document in The Construction Information Service has copyright permission from the publisher. Some publishers do not allow use of their documents or will only give permission for certain titles. Publishers who do give permission can also place an embargo on certain documents, resulting in a delay between publication and inclusion in CIS.

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Digimap: Global and Society

Screen shot of Society Digimap.

Adding to our existing EDINA collection, we now have access to both Global and Society Digimap.

Society includes census and socio-economic data which can be layered across the map software to provide a picture and give an insight of society in a given area. For more information about how to use the Society data, watch this video from EDINA.

Whilst Global provides access to global datasets in cartographic styles and downloadable formats. It allows you to browse, annotate and print global maps and access to downloadable global datasets for use in GIS software.

To access these resources, click on the link to the Digimap collection via Library Search or our Maps Resources guide, log in with your university account and click on the Society or Global tab to access the data.  You will need to accept the license agreement the first time you use it.

Please explore and email us if you have any questions, or post it as a comment on this blog. For other map resources, check out our Maps Resources guide.

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Resource in Focus: Fortune Magazine archive

We have recently subscribed to Fortune Magazine Archive – an extensive cover-to-cover collection of the long-running business magazine dating from its very first issue in February 1930 through December 2000.

Subjects Covered in this magazine:

  • American business
  • International business
  • Economics
  • Industry
  • Technology

Published monthly by Time Inc., Fortune Magazine sought to provide news and analysis of both American and, later, international business, economics, technology, and industry.  Each issue featured vivid color illustrations and photographs, as well as high-quality feature articles, published at a time when most business magazines were merely black and white compendiums of statistics and figures. 

Articles and cover pages are fully indexed and advertisements are individually identified, ensuring researchers and readers can quickly and accurately locate the information they seek. Fortune Magazine Archive is valuable to researchers of 20th-Century current events, politics and culture, as well as those interested in the history of business, advertising, and popular culture.

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Get more out of JSTOR!

JSTOR is one of our most popular academic databases, and you may be one of the many people who uses it regularly. It provides access to thousands of journal titles, books and other resources.

We subscribe to many of its collections, giving us access to thousands of journal backruns, spanning many decades and subject areas, together with 6,500 Open Access books (all catalogued on Library Search), and over 1.3 million images, videos and audio files, via Artstor Public Collections.

STOP PRESS! We now have access to an additional 59,000 JSTOR ebooks. Read all about it!

But are you getting the best out of JSTOR? Read on to find some tips and features you might not know about…..

Advanced search

JSTOR is a very large, multidisciplinary database, so a simple keyword search won’t usually be the most effective way to search it. Click on Advanced Search to get more options which will give you better control over your search: for example, just searching in certain fields (e.g. author or abstract) or limiting your search by date, resource type, language or subject area.

Text analyser

This exciting new feature enables you to drag and drop a document, and JSTOR will then process your document’s text to find the most significant topics and recommend other documents within its database. Try it out!

Workspace

Using Workspace, you can save, organise, and share your sources, including non-JSTOR content. You can also add notes and generate citations in many popular formats. You need to create an account on JSTOR in order to use this feature.

Text mining

Data for Research (DfR) provides datasets of JSTOR content for use in research and teaching. Data available through the service include metadata, n-grams, and word counts for most articles and book chapters, and for all research reports and pamphlets. Datasets are produced at no cost to researchers, and may include data for up to 25,000 documents.

Further help

You can get more help with JSTOR by clicking on Support at any time, or visit their specialised library guides for a more in-depth focus on particular topics. For the very latest JSTOR developments, tips and features, follow @jstor on Twitter.

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A little conversation with Mintel

As a globally recognised market analyst, Mintel produces hundreds of reports into UK-specific consumer markets every year. Each report provides a unique overview of a market’s dynamics and prospects, giving you the knowledge to devise informed and profitable marketing strategy. Mintel is also one of the many Business specialist databases that we subscribe to here at Newcastle University, which you can access via Library Search, or along with many other of our resources via our Business Subject Guide.

Mintel also produce an excellent podcast, A Little Conversation Podcast, on YouTube which covers ideas and new perspectives on how we eat, drink, shop, groom and think – from the key issues impacting society to trends in food, beauty, tech and retail, they discuss what consumers want and why.

So if you are looking for an alternative resource in market research, have a look at these podcasts. You can subscribe to their podcast via their website or where you normally download your podcasts.

Here’s their latest podcast which is looking consumer behaviour of upcoming holiday shopping:

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Spotlight on World Scientific eBook Collections

selection of book jackets

World Scientific Publishing (WSP) is an academic publisher of scientific, technical, and medical books and journals with headquarters in Singapore. WSP publishes about 500 books annually as well as more than 150 journals in various fields. World Scientific eBooks are electronic versions of World Scientific print titles. 

The titles span across a wide variety of subjects, including:

  • Asian studies
  • Business & Management
  • Chemistry
  • Computer Science
  • Economics & Finance
  • Engineering
  • Life sciences
  • Mathematics
  • Physics & Astronomy
  • Social Sciences

Once connected, you can search for titles within a specific subject:

Screen shot of subject search

Or for titles on a specific topic :

If you’re searching for titles directly through the World Scientific platform, look out for the “Full Access” symbol to make sure we have access to the full text content:

You can also search for individual titles on Library Search:

A user guide is available on the Library Subject Support guides and you can download from the link below:

World Scientific User manual April 2020Download
selection of book jackets
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New dataset – Digimap Pilot

A new dataset is now available within Digimap called the Pilot Collection. This provides temporary access to data that EDINA are trying out and want feedback from users. This means the data will be replaced with other data sets over time as new sets become available.

Digimap Pilot is free for staff and students at current subscribing higher and further education institutions and research councils. All you will need to do is to accept the end user licence agreement which is available when you log into Digimap with your Campus ID and password. As these datasets will change regularly then you’ll need to re-accept each new licence agreement as sets are replaced.

Digimap Pilot comprises two applications, one for creating maps online, the other for downloading data which enables further analysis and investigation in other packages:

  • Use Roam to view, annotate and print maps online.
  • Use Data Download to download data and load it into a GIS or CAD package for further manipulation

As of April 2020, Pilot currently offers access to the following data.

Geomni data which consists of:

  • UKMap a modern, highly detailed, feature-rich mapping database of Greater London. Its unique, innovative design offers users a flexible choice of integrated map features within a single geographic information source.  It comprises addresses, retail names, detailed shopping centre data, building heights, a wide range of points of interest, aerial photography, together with Digital Terrain and Surface Models.
  • This one dataset has different components for Greater London. This includes UKMapLondon which provides aerial imagery with a resolution of 10cm, UKMap Upper Floors which shows more granular information e.g. which shops are on different floors of shopping centres, UKMap Tree Canopy which indicates tree canopies.
  • UKBuildings a unique database created and regularly updated to help you understand the age, structure, characteristics and use, of commercial, public and residential buildings across the UK.
  • UKLand a maintained, national land information database providing a detailed consistent breakdown of the use of land across the UK. There are 30 different land classes available e.g. woodland, water features, transport and commerical.

An EDINA Satellite data collection initially consisting of:

  • Sentinel 2 derived cloud free optical mosaic for Great Britain, 2019.
  • Sentinel 2 derived Near Infrared mosaic for Great Britain, 2019.

These 2 sections are currently available until the 31/07/2020.

Within the Pilot Data Download section you’ll also find some useful product information such as where the data comes from, it’s availability and sizing and Copyright information.

If you’re using mapping data already you might want to use this in conjunction with GIS if you’re manipulating or working with the data. Or doing a comparison to other maps you might have found freely available e.g. Google Maps.

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Resource on trial: Westlaw student textbooks

Westlaw logo.

We are pleased to announce we have trial access to Westlaw’s student textbooks, in addition to the standard Westlaw All Books collection we use on a daily basis.

The Sweet & Maxwell Academic collection gives access to an additional 19 titles to support studying at home during this pandemic. Titles 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, among others.

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

An image of the Westlaw home screen with the Books option highlighted.

If you know the book you are looking for, search by a title keyword, e.g. tort.

An image of the Westlaw Books screen with Search highlighted.

If you want to browse these student-focused books, use the filters on the left-hand side of the screen. Scroll down and select ‘Sweet & Maxwell Academic’.

We hope you find this additional access to Westlaw useful; please leave feedback or contact libraryhelp@ncl.ac.uk you want to get in touch. The temporary access ends on May 27th 2020.

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SciFinder – a one-stop shop for chemical reactions, substances, and scientific literature.

SciFinder is a research discovery application that provides integrated access to the world’s most comprehensive and authoritative source of references, substances and reactions in chemistry and related sciences.

Accessible via Library Search this powerful, chemist-curated database from CAS offers reference, substance and reaction searching with sophisticated analysis tools. Substances can be searched by chemical structure, markush (for Patents), molecular formula, property or substance identifier. All alternative substance names are listed alongside CAS Registry numbers and commercial sources. Popular in industry, this database is vital for students and researchers in chemistry, pharmacy, forensic science, medicinal chemistry and chemical engineering.

To use SciFinder you must register and sign in when prompted. On doing so you can then set personal preferences, explore resources, and save your own searches. You can also browse your search history and set up alerts and notifications.

SciFinder Mobile allows you quick and easy access to references of published scientific research and information on substances of interest (including nomenclature, molecular formula and properties) from your smartphone.

If you’d like to know more or need a little help to get started CAS provide a range of online support and training. There are also a selection of instructional videos available on YouTube.

So get registered, sign in, and explore. You’ll be inputting structures using the drawing editor and conducting substructure searches in no time!