Tag: Geography

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Where could maps take you?

Sniffer dog in high vis detecting a gas leak

So when does an Animal Science student need to use EDINA Digimap and GIS software?  The answer is not all do, but you never know where your dissertation project may take you, and what software may help your research or your presentation or visualisation of results.

Grace’s dissertation took her to Sunderland to road test the country’s first gas sniffer dog.  Collaborating with an Earth Science student to help her use the mapping products and with training from the geosciences team in using GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) accurate to 2cm, she plotted the gas leaks and successful finds by her faithful four legged co-worker.  The team demonstrated that a dog’s nose is as good conventional gas detection equipment, and could be very helpful with difficult to trace gas leaks.

Sniffer dog in high vis finds gas leak
Sniffer dog, image used with permission from Dr Catherine Douglas, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences.
Digimap illustrating gas leaks detected
Map created by student using EDINA Digimap https://digimap.edina.ac.uk/ and used with permission by Dr Catherine Douglas, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences.

With many thanks to Dr Catherine Douglas, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, for providing this content.

See what is available to you on the Maps Guide and take up opportunities to collaborate or share good practice with other disciplines. You never know where it might lead!

Please note: EDINA Digimap requires registration before use.

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Government Publications: Questions in the House!

GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS

Surely all MPs are giving us the correct facts?

Take a look at our links to resources for Legislation, Statistics and Official Publications to make sure!

Government publications provide primary information in a variety of subjects. Statistics, White Papers, Parliamentary Bills and a whole range of Official Legislation.

These are a good reliable source of accurate statistics, and can give support to your argument in essay topics across all subjects.

Many government publications are now available online; our Library Guide highlights the useful websites.

Interested in Student Loans or the legal details of part time Employment Contracts?

Details of all UK legal processes can be found at the government website Gov.uk which provides lots of useful information about government services, with an A-Z of departments, agencies and local councils.

Meaningful Vote mean anything to you?

Keep up with the debate and Prime Ministers Questions at this website.

Follow the government shenanigans as it happens!

Democracy Live is the BBC’s new website which offers live and on demand video coverage of the UK’s national political institutions and the European Parliament.

Who stole 40 llbs of butter from Mr Wadsworths wagon in 1778?

You can find out here in The Proceedings of Old Bailey which contains accounts of over 100,000 criminal trial held at London’s criminal court.

So, for more information about finding your way around all aspects of Government Publications please take a look at our helpful video.

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Are you using the best information to make your point?

With the huge volume of information available and the speed with which you can find something on just about any topic with a simple search, it can be difficult to be sure that you are using the best quality information for your task. Your tutors will often give advice such as recommending that you use academic or peer-reviewed journal articles, and it can be tempting to stick to ‘safe’ types of information such as books.

But depending on your assignment topic, you will need to explore a breadth of different information types, including many that will be online. So how do you know which ones to you?

You will need to consider many issues, including authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency and coverage within an information source. This will help you make decisions about the quality of the information, its reliability and what role it could play within your thinking.

You will evaluate information all the time without thinking about it. It doesn’t need to be a conscious or difficult task. Our Six Questions video will help give you some ideas for the types of questions to keep in mind to make your own judgement.

You may also sometimes decide to include a piece of information, even though it may not be from a credible source or its impartiality is questionable, because it illustrates the point you are trying to make. Being aware of your reservations about a reference allows you to be more confident in your judgment.

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EndNote

What is EndNote?

The official blurb on EndNote is that it is “…the industry standard software tool for publishing and managing bibliographies, citations and references.”

Have you drifted off yet? Don’t – read on!

EndNote takes a little getting used to and we recommend you familiarise yourself with it at the start of your research process. But as Library Staff, we wouldn’t spend a significant amount of time demonstrating and training our academic staff and students on what EndNote is, and how to use it, if we didn’t think it was valuable. It will save you a huge amount of time in terms of writing up your assignments.

Essentially, you can use EndNote to create and organise a personal library of resources relevant to your research. You can import references from Library Search, and a huge range of databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore and Business Source Complete. You can ask EndNote to locate the full-text PDFs of the resources you are going to use in your research, and you can annotate them as you wish too. Did you know you can instruct Google Scholar to import references into EndNote? No? Try it. Finally, if you already have materials stored in your home folder (H:\) then you can attach them to a manually-created reference within EndNote, bringing all your research together in one place.

In addition to organising your references (and this is the clever bit) you can then get EndNote to ‘talk’ to your word processing software, e.g. Microsoft Word, and insert the citations into your work for you in your chosen referencing style, e.g. Harvard at Newcastle, Vancouver, APA or MLA. If you don’t want to do that, then EndNote will also allow you to create an independent bibliography of your references, saving you an awful lot of typing.

Using EndNote

Intrigued? You should be. Take a look at our EndNote Guide. It contains all the introductory information you need, step-by-step workbooks to train yourself on the use of EndNote (the Desktop and Online versions), videos, useful FAQs, and contacts for help, should you need it.

Finally, Newcastle University provides support for EndNote but it is not compulsory to use. You may prefer Mendeley, Zotero, RefWorks or another piece of bibliographic management software. That’s fine, whatever makes your referencing lives easier. Go on, give them a try.

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When is a website not a website?

A common mistake made in referencing is grouping all sources found online under the category and reference type of a website. Your aim should be to reference the information you have in front of you rather than where it was sourced. Simply grouping items found online as a website would be the equivalent of referencing a book by the publisher details rather than the author and title.

For example, a government publication found online would be referenced like this in Chicago.

United Kingdom. Department for Education. Cloud computing: how schools can move services to the cloud. London: The Stationary Office, 2016. Accessed: February 01, 2018. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cloud-computing-how-schools-can-move-services-to-the-cloud. 

An electronic journal article might appear like this in APA.

Gillum, J. (2012). Dyscalculia: Issues for practice in education psychology.  Educational Psychology in Practice, 28(3), 287-297. doi:10.1080/02667363.2012.684344

While a video posted on the Tate website would look something like this in Harvard.

TateShots (2016) Grayson Perry: think like an artist. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/grayson-perry-think-artist-tateshots (Accessed: 27 November 2018). 

Identifying the type of information you are using as well as the source, are essential skills of evaluation and developing a critical approach to information. In many cases, you will be unconsciously using your judgment to assess the value of information for your purpose. So when you are using any source of information, ask yourself what it is you are looking at, what details are recorded about it, and whether it measures up as a quality piece of information.

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New resource in focus: Aerial and Lidar Digimap

Digimap is an online map and data delivery service, comprising various collections, including Ordnance Survey and Historic. We have recently acquired access to two more modules: Aerial and Lidar Digimap.

Aerial Digimap 

This provides access to some of the highest quality aerial photography available for Great Britain, created and licensed by Getmapping plc. You can use a range of interactive tools, allowing interrogation and analysis of the data online and offline. You can also:

  • add annotations (text, point, lines and areas)
  • identify image capture date by clicking on the map
  • generate PDF, PNG or JPG files for printing
  • save maps to go back to or print later

Lidar Digimap

This offers detailed Lidar data from the Environment Agency and presents a model of the earth’s surface.

Uses of Lidar data are highly varied, from use in the creation of visual effects for virtual reality and film projects, to archaeology, forestry management, flood and pollution modelling.

You’ll need to agree to the new licence before using these new modules: please see our separate blogpost for more details. If you need help with Digimap, there are extensive help pages online for each component.

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To google or not to google?…That is the question

Can you remember life before Google? It is such a huge part of our lives that even those of us who can remember a time before it (hmmm, yes I am that old!) can’t imagine life without it now. It is a great place to find the latest cinema listings or who won last night’s football match, but what about finding information for your latest assignment or research?

There is a time and a place to use Google, but you need to be aware of its limitations. Google, after all, is a business. It earns the majority of its money from advertising, and it will not reveal how it ranks its search results (every wonder how Wikipedia always appears at the top of every search you do?). A search that we do today and repeat tomorrow for a piece of research could give us hugely different results, with no explanation of why. We are also often bombarded with millions of search results and the reality of our searching habits mean that we rarely look beyond the first or second page.  Admittedly, advanced search features on Google and the use of Google Scholar can really help us to become a smarter and effective Google users, but is it enough for our own research? Are we finding everything that is out there?

We need to think about our information needs before we work out where it will be best for us to search. Imagine, for a moment, that we are want to buy a particular local cheese, which we love. Would we go to a general shop or would we go to a specialist deli? We are probably going to need to go to a deli. It is just the same when searching for information. Google may be great for some background information or a starting point of a project, but it may simply not give us the high quality, niche information that we need to give us top marks for an assignment. So what are the other options?

Aimee Cook, a Liaison Librarian here at Newcastle University, explains more.

So next time you think about googling something for an assignment, stop and check out Library Search and your subject guide first for the books, eBooks and specialist databases that are available to you. If you are going to use Google, make use of the advanced search features and get to grips with Google Scholar. Happy searching!

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

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Guest Post: A Review of Box of Broadcasts

BoB Screen GrabLaura-Jayne Beattie, a final year Law School student, takes a look at Box of Broadcasts, and reviews a film she watched using it (a Law Library favourite!).

BoB (Box of Broadcasts), available to all Newcastle University students regardless of degree discipline, is an excellent resource. Best of all, it’s FREE for students studying at Newcastle (just what a student wants to hear)! You just have to select the university from the list of institutions, sign in with your university login details (username and password), and away you go! You’re free to explore the thousands of television programmes, radio broadcasts and films available on the website. It’s incredibly easy-to-use, and reminds me a lot of Netflix, but is less guilt-free as most of these programs and films are education-related in some way. The broadcasts may relate to your degree or another academic interest of yours (e.g. psychology-related films).

You can watch live TV, or search (by name) for a pre-recorded film, radio show or television programme. The system holds over 2 million broadcasts, which have been shown on television or aired on the radio at some point since the 1990s. If you don’t have a specific film or programme in mind which you would like to watch, why not try out the advanced search feature? Click on the ‘Search’ icon, then on ‘Search options’, change as many or as little options as you like, and then hit ‘search’! A list of broadcasts matching your search criteria will be shown. I’m sure there will be at least one that interests you!

SCreen grab of BoBAfter a few minutes of exploring the website, I decided to choose a film from the ‘Law in Literature Newcastle University’ playlist. To find this, I clicked on the ‘Search’ icon (on the tab across the top) and selected ‘Public Playlists’. I then typed the playlist’s name into the search box. I was surprised at how many titles were available within this collection (all related to Law). I chose to watch ‘Legally Blonde’, a personal favourite of mine but one that I haven’t watched for years.

Here’s what I thought…

‘Legally Blonde’, a fun-filled film showcasing a story of love and success, shows Law in a new perspective and is a must-watch for any Law students (Yes, even you boys). It’s a feel-good film, and is motivational in terms of showing that anyone really can succeed if they put their mind to it! It’s particularly perfect for any law student who feels ‘out-of-place’ with the supposed societal ‘ideal’ of who should be studying law.

Defying all pre-conceptions derived from her appearance, Elle Woods gains a place at the prestigious Harvard Law school. While this was initially to follow her ex-boyfriend, who broke her heart just before he proceeded to study Law there, she soon develops a passion for Law and becomes top of the class. She helps to win a case while on work experience using her knowledge of fashion, and later delivers an inspirational speech at graduation saying words like “you must always have faith in yourself”. When making this speech, it’s clear from the smiles in the room that she has won the hearts of students and staff alike and made lifelong friends with her heart-warming personality. Graduating with a job in a high-ranking law firm, she puts her career ahead of everything and even rejects her ex-boyfriend who wanted her back towards the end of the film.

‘Legally Blonde’ relates to Law, as Elle overcomes sexual harassment while on work experience (Employment Law). Initially, Elle doesn’t report the man and decides to drop out of law school- possibly as she thought she wouldn’t be believed or that what happened wasn’t actually a crime (a common occurrence amongst victims in reality). Parts of Law lectures are filmed, and Elle overcomes stereotypes that are derived from her appearance (blonde female who evidently loves the colour pink) (Law, Gender and Sexuality). Despite not being a typical Harvard student, she still succeeds without letting these stereotypes stop her.

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Books added to the Library by students in GPS (Semester Two 2017/18)

We have a service called “Books on Time” for students. This allows you to tell us about the books you need for your studies. If we don’t have the books you need, simply complete the web form and we’ll see if we can buy them. For books we already have in stock, if they are out on loan please make a reservation/hold request using Library Search.

Further information about Books on Time

In Semester two, academic year 2017/2018 we bought the following items after requests from students in GPS.

There were 104 requests from 54 students totaling £4760.50 (60% of requests from undergraduates, 12% from Postgraduate taught and 28% from Postgraduate Research)

 

Title Now in stock
A Decade of Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America 1xlong
A Life in Trans Activism 1xlong
A People Stronger: The Collectivisation of MSM and TG Groups in India 1xlong
A People’s Peace in Cyprus: Testing Public Opinion on the Options for a Comprehensive Settlement 1xlong
Affect, Space and Animals (Routledge Human-Animal Studies Series) 1xlong
African religions and philosophy 1xlong
Age Studies A Sociological Examination of How We Age and are Aged Through the Life Course 1xlong
Age, Gender and Sexuality Through the Life Course: The Girl in Time 1xlong
Aged by Culture 1xlong
Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-culture Borderlands 1xlong
Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science and Law) 1xlong
Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Towards Speciesism 1xlong
Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation (Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture) 1xlong
Before birth: understanding prenatal screening 1xlong
Café Society 1xlong
Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations 1xlong
Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice 1xlong
Criminal Love? Queer Theory, Culture and Politics in India 1xlong
Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy 1xlong, 1xebook
Culture and Politics: A Reader 6xlong, 1xstc
Cyprus: A Conflict at the Crossroads 1xlong
Debates in values-based practice: arguments for and against 1xlong
Different Faces of Attachment: Cultural Variations on a Universal Human Need 1xlong
Disrupting homelessness. 1xlong
Domestic Animals, Humans, and Leisure: Rights, Welfare, and Wellbeing (Routledge Research in the Ethics of Tourism Series) 1xlong
Emotions and Social Relations 1xlong
Expatriate identities in postcolonial organizations: working whiteness 1xlong
Exploring Parliament 1xlong
Feminism and Families 1xlong
Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications Since 1984 2xlong
Gendered Bodies: Feminist Perspectives 1xlong
Global Homophobia: States Movements and the Politics of Oppression 1xlong
Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People: And Other Myths About Gun Control 1xlong
Handbook of Environmental Economics 1xlong
Hijras, the Labelled Deviants 1xlong
How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy 1xlong
Human and Other Animals: Critical Perspectives 1xlong
Identity and Social Change 1xlong
Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus 1xlong
Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi 1xlong
Justice for Laughing Boy: Connor Sparrowhawk – A Death by Indifference 1xlong
Laughing Matters: Humor and American Politics in the Media Age 1xlong
Let Africa Lead 1xlong
Local Agency and Peacebuilding: EU and International Engagement in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Cyprus and South Africa 1xlong
Loneliness and its Opposties: Sex, Disability and the Ethics of Engagement 1xlong
Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/National Projects 1xlong
Markets of Dispossession NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo 1xlong
Masculinities in Transition 1xlong, 1xebook
Me Hijra, Me Laxmi 1xlong
Media and the Riots: A Call to Action 1xlong
Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain 1xlong
Muslim Spaces of Hope: Geographies of Possibility in Britain and the West 1xlong
Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia 1xlong
Negotiating Europe: Europeanness Since the 1950s 1xlong
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies 1xlong
On What Matters: Volume 1 1xlong
Placing Animals: An Introduction To The Geography Of Human-Animal Relations (Human Geography In The Twenty-First Century: Issues And Applications) 1xlong
Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK, Volume 2: The Dimensions of Disadvantage 1xlong
Poverty Propaganda 1xlong
Prostitution, Harm and Gender Inequality 1xlong
Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Post-Colonial? 1xlong
Regarding Animals (Animals Culture And Society) 1xlong
Re-Imagining North Korea in International Politics 1xlong
Religion Matters 1xlong
Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi 1xlong
Smart Green Cities: Towards a Carbon Neutral World 1xlong
Snow and Ice-Related Hazards, Risks and Disasters 1xlong
Social Lives With Other Animals: Tales of Sex, Death and Love 1xlong
Social Mobility for the 21st Century: Everyone a Winner? 2xlong
Sport and Postcolonialism 1xlong, 1xebook
Switzerland and the European Union: a close, contradictory and misunderstood relationship 1xlong
The Changing Nature of the Graduate Labour Market: Media, Policy and Political Discourses in the UK 1xlong
The Concept of Race in South Asia 1xlong
The Cyprus Referendum: A Divided Island and the Challenge of the Annan Plan 1xlong
The Disability Studies Reader 2016 1xlong
The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery 1xlong
The European Union and Africa: The Restructuring of North-South Relations 1xlong
The European Union and Africa: The Restructuring of North-South Relations 1xebook
The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World 1xlong
The Intimate Lives of Disabled People 1xlong
The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism 1xlong
The Myrdalsjokull Ice Cap: Glacial Processes, Sediments and Landforms on an Active Volcano 1xebook
The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography 1xebook
The New Social Mobility: How the Politicians Got It Wrong 1xlong
The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It 1xlong
The Public Shaping of Medical Research: Patient Associations 1xlong
The Retreat of Western Liberalism 1xlong
The Routledge Handbook of European Security 1xlong
The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story 1xlong
The Violence of Austerity 1xlong
Tourism and Animal Ethics (Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility) 1xlong
Tourism, Power and Culture: Anthropological Insights 1xlong
Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession: Youth and Inequality in a European Comparative Perspective 1xlong
Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age 1xlong
Trust in International Cooperation: International Security Institutions, Domestic Politics and American Multilateralism 1xlong
United Nations Development Programme and System 1xlong
Violent Borders 1xlong
We Kill Because We Can From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age 1xlong
What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (PostHumanities) 1xlong
Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury 1xlong, 1xebook
Women in African Parliaments 1xlong
Young People in the Labour Market: Past, Present, Future (Youth, Young Adulthood and Society) 1xlong
Young People Re-Generating Politics in Times of Crisis 1xlong
Young People’s Perspectives on Education, Training and Employment: Realising Their Potential 1xlong

 

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Reading Lists

Have you discovered your Reading Lists yet?

Reading Lists are what you need to access and read to get understanding of the subject on the module(s) you are taking. It’s not just the Library saying this – these lists came from your lecturers!

The Reading Lists are a list of essential, recommended and background reading for your module. Each item has a quick link through to Library Search (to find where the book may be on the shelves) or there could be a direct link through to the eBook or online journal article. It’s an efficient way of accessing your reading and can save you loads of time.

Log into Canvas to access your Reading List

If you have any questions about your Reading Lists then ask your lecturer, or if there is a technical issue then email readinglists@ncl.ac.uk for assistance.