Thursday 26 November 2009

Winter vacation: loans and opening hours

Here is some information about library borrowing and opening hours over the vacation. We hope you have a great holiday!

1. Vacation loans:

All staff and higher degree students:
From Thursday 3rd December 2009(Wk 8, Michaelmas Term 09)
Due back Tuesday 19th January 2010 (Wk 1, Hilary Term 10)

All PGCE students:
From Thursday 3rd December 2009(last week of term)
Due back Thursday 7th January 2010 (first week of term)

The above applies to all normal loan books.

All overnight material will remain overnight until Tuesday 22nd December 2009.
It can then be borrowed until Tuesday 5th January 2010.

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2. Opening hours:

The library will close for Christmas on Wednesday 23rd December at 17.00, and will re-open on Monday 4th January at 08.30.

Vacation hours are from Friday 4th December to Tuesday 23rd December, and are:
Monday to Friday 09.00-17.30 (please note the exception of Tues 23rd, when we
the library will close at 17.00).

Term-time hours will resume when we open on January 5th.
Please note, our new extended term-time hours are:

Monday to Thursday – 08.30-20.30
Friday – 08.45-19.00
Saturday – 13.00-17.00
Sunday 12.00-16.00

Tuesday 17 November 2009

Extended library opening hours: 8.30 am opening in term

We have had requests via the Staff-Student Liaison Committees for both PGCE and MSc/DPhil for extended library opening hours. PGCE students have generally asked for earlier opening during the week, and for longer weekend hours. MSc and DPhil students have asked for later opening hours in the week, and for longer weekend opening hours.

Although we would love to be able to extend our opening hours, there is sadly no funding available to pay for the extra staffing required to do so. We have considered the possibility of shifting our existing hours (to open earlier and close earlier, for example), but this would not solve the problem, given the conflicting requests from different student groups for both earlier and later opening.

Equally, once all PGCE interns are in school throughout the week, later opening may well be of more use than early opening.

In practice, we generally open earlier than our advertised opening time, which is 8.45am Monday to Friday during PGCE term. As soon as a member of staff is in the library, we allow people to come in and start using the computers and collections while we are opening up. However, we appreciate that it is more helpful to have a guaranteed time when the library will be staffed.

We are proposing changing our official term-time opening time to 8.30am, with immediate effect. This means that the library will be open 12 hours a day, 8.30am to 8.30pm Monday to Thursday. Hopefully, this will be of some help to people who travel in early.

For any students who would like later opening hours, it may be helpful to know that some of the much larger Oxford libraries are open until 10pm, Monday to Thursday (Bodleian, Social Science Library, Radcliffe Science Library). If you mainly need to print, photocopy or read quietly, these may be useful options for later in the evening.

We hope that this helps a bit, and are sorry not to be able to do more!

Friday 30 October 2009

Higher Degree book sale, Wednesday 4th November

Just to let you know that Blackwell are holding a book sale for all MSc and PRS courses in the Common Room on Wednesday 4th November from 10.30-14.00.

All material stocked will be core course readings, and has a 10% discount.

Hope you can make it!

Monday 19 October 2009

Requests for a laptop-free zone

We have had some requests for one of the quiet reading areas in the Library to also be designated a laptop-free zone.

We are proposing trialling this in the top Education Reading Room, and will put signs up to let everyone know.

If you have any comments about this, in favour or otherwise, please do let us know. We will make a final decision based on the majority view.

Many thanks,

Kate

Thursday 15 October 2009

* Using wireless in the Library

The Department of Education has recently installed wireless networking throughout its public areas, including the Seminar rooms, the Library, the common room and garden. You will need a remote access account and to install a VPN client. Here are some instructions for setting up and registering, from our IT Helpdesk people (ithelpdesk@education.ox.ac.uk or tel: (6)11021)

How to register for wireless

1. Connect to OWL from your list of available networks. It will tell you it is unsecure but connect anyhow. Open your browser and you will be taken to Visitor network login. Click on the self registration link on the right.

2. Enter your Single Sign On username and password, which are the same ones you use for Nexus Email. From there you can register for a Remote Access account and download the VPN client

How to connect to OWL when registered

1. Connect to OWL from your list of available networks.
2. Run your VPN client
3. Double click on OUCS
4. Sign on with your Single Sign On username and Remote Access password

For more information

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/wireless/services/owl/vpn/

Once you are registered for OWL you will be able to connect to other wireless sites around the university. For a list of these go to

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/wireless/availability/

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Reading lists with links available on WebLearn

Just a reminder that there are Reading lists with links on all WebLearn course sites, and that Foundations of Educational Research also has links to its readings from the Course Outline page. Please do ask any member of library staff if you need help finding these.

Just for information, the links to e-books and e-journals should all work from any Oxford University computer (in the library/department/college etc), but some may not connect when you are outside of the Oxford network. If this occurs, you should search for the journal or book via SOLO:http://solo.ouls.ox.ac.uk You need to log in, using your Single Sign On password, click on the link for "Online Access" and then search/browse the journal for the article you need.

Again, please do let us know if you have any problems, or any questions about accessing material.

Kate

Friday 2 October 2009

Welcome / welcome back!

I just wanted to welcome all new MSc and DPhil students to the Education Library, and to welcome back those of you who have been away over the summer.

The reorganisation of the Library collection has now been completed, so books are in their final places! However, if you struggle to find anything, please do ask. There is an online subject index, which may help.

We look forward to seeing you at our events this term – book sales, key search skills training sessions etc. If you would like some individual help finding information for your research, please do email me: kate.williams@education.ox.ac.uk

Thursday 10 September 2009

Library tours and training on Monday 14th September

To all our regular readers and returning students -

Just to let you know that the library might be a little less quiet than usual on Monday (14th September), as we will be doing tours and introductory sessions for our new PGCE students. The main sessions are 11.45-13.30 and 15.45-17.00.

The quiet reading rooms should still be relatively quiet!

With many apologies for any disruption.

Welcome to our blog

Welcome to the new official blog for the Education Library! We'll be using this to keep you up to date with everything that's going on in the library: events; training sessions; new services; new resources and anything else we think you might want to know about. You can also let us know what you think by commenting on the posts. We hope that it will be a valuable new way of keeping in touch.

We are also now using social sites such as Delicious, for web book marking, and Facebook, and are inviting you to join us!! Take a look at our Delicious site, where we're building a list of useful and relevant free web resources and websites. If you use Delicious, too, add us to your network and save sites for us. Become a fan of our Facebook page: another great way of keeping in touch with what we are doing to help you.

And above all, please let us know what you think!

Kate and all in the library