Library Blog

Trial access is available to the Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text database until 22nd July 2020.

Click to Access: Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text 

This database is hosted by EBSCO and provides access to hundreds top journals and magazines related to criminal justice and criminology. A full title list is available for you to view online.

Content Includes

• More than 320 full-text magazines and journals

• More than 600,000 records

• Coverage of more than 600 journals from around the world

Subjects Include

• Criminology

• Criminal justice

• Corrections and prisons

• Criminal investigations

• Forensic sciences and investigation

• Substance abuse and addiction

• Probation and parole

Please pass any feedback on this database to your Liaison Librarian.  We'd be interested in your thoughts on its relevance to your teaching / research.

Are you a UoE Law Student?  Interested in becoming a TR Legal Representative for the 2020/21 academic year?  Then read on ...

What will you be doing?

• Encouraging more effective use of Thomson Reuters Legal Services such as Westlaw UK, eBooks and Practical Law. Running and promoting training sessions and competitions.
• Working with Thomson Reuters, Law Librarians and other key members of staff to schedule hands-on training sessions online and on-campus at your institution.

To be eligible to apply:

• You must be studying a Law Degree full time during the 2020/21 academic year at the institution that you are applying for.

Fee:

• Student Representatives are paid a Fixed Fee of up to £180 per month during term time to deliver a set number of tasks. We expect these tasks to take an average of 5 hours per week.

To Apply

• Simply follow the below link and complete the form!

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=ZLjMYhpqXUuOHDl97BqCWEcSIevD84hNnc9cd67cYqdUNjFURDNMSTA2ODI5OUpHS0xTUFhZODhEWi4u

Closing Date - Friday 26th June

If you have any questions, please contact student.representatives@tr.com

#FUTURELEGALLEGENDS

 As we plan for the new term and focus on the online delivery of resources to students, digitised reading lists are an increasingly important element of University teaching support.

In recognition of the value of digitised reading lists to the taught course experience of students, on 16th June, the University’s Maintaining Educational Opportunities and Outcomes (MEOO) committee agreed a new reading lists policy, which is now available on the Library’s website.

Reading List Policy

• All modules must have a Library created reading list (this could be one book, or many) which the Library will make available to students via ELE modules.

• All reading lists for Term 1 should be sent to your Reading List Team as soon as possible, but by 1st August at the very latest.

• Due to Covid-19 restrictions, all materials on reading lists need to be available digitally.

• You can read the policy in full.

Many modules already have reading lists in place, so staff will be used to working with the library on this service. If you are involved in teaching in September you should have received a message about module reading lists for 2020/21.  If you have not previously used the service and want more information just get in touch.

As all materials need to be available digitally, some changes to existing reading lists are likely to be required.  When the reading list team check your lists they will flag any inaccessible content so that alternatives can be considered.

This new approach to reading lists will mean that students on all taught modules have easy access to all their required readings through their ELE modules.

If you need help or advice, please contact the Library Reading List Teams at

Exeter                  readinglists@exeter.ac.uk

Cornwall              digital@fxplus.ac.uk

To address the unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, the Internet Archive suspended waitlists on its 1.4 million (and growing) books in their lending library. 

This National Emergency Library was available from 24th March - 16 June 2020.  The waitlist suspension allowed users to immediately borrow digitised books and supported students, researchers and other readers during a very difficult period when physical access to library collections was not possible.

From the 16th June 2020, traditional controlled digital lending was reintroduced, meaning that users would need to wait for access to a digitised book in the borrowable collection, if it was on loan to another user.

You need to set up a free Internet Archive user account for access.

These borrowable books can be accessed alongside other freely accessible 'always available' digitised books via the Internet Archive book collection.

The University has a wide range of online newspaper sources available, providing current and archive content from a wide range of countries.

You can access these news sources to examine coverage of topical events, but also do historical research through the newspaper archives.  These resources can be particularly useful at dissertation time for those studying in the humanities or social sciences, as they can reveal thinking at the time on topical issues of the day.

As well as newspapers, some of the news resources cover other sorts of content.  For example the Nexis UK service provides transcripts of radio and TV news broadcasting which can add an additional dimension to your news based research.

These online news sources are vast databanks of content so you need to plan your online searching carefully so that you are not overwhelmed by lots of irrelevant results.  You also need to be a little creative with your search terms as action grabbing headlines are typically used, especially in the popular press titles, and articles are not crafted in the same way as scholarly information such as academic journal articles.  So, searching for named people or events or organizations can be straightforward, but if you are searching more generally for a topic then you'll need to be prepared for a bit of trial and error and run a range of searches to capture everything you need.

The Search techniques guide is worth a look as that takes you through the various steps of pulling together an effective online search strategy.

Tip tips for online news searching ...

1. Make great use of the date range functionality

You can segment your searching into yearly or monthly segments if you ar finding lots of search results.  For example, my own masters dissertation looked at newspaper coverage of the principle of double jeopardy in law,  as reform was being mooted.  I chose a range of newspapers to examine and there was a huge amount of reporting about this as it was a very popular, emotive and contentious issue.  I searched each title separately and in yearly batches, before bringing all the results together for content analysis of the research.  This segmenting of the searching made the vast results more manageable - so be prepared to spend some time making the databases work for your particular research scenario.

2. Facsimile & Text formats

Some news sources (particular newspaper archive databases) appear in digitised facsimile form, i.e. as they appeared when published.  Early print copies have typically been scanned or photographed to produce the digital archive.  This format is particularly useful if you are interested in graphical aspects such as tables, photographs, and advertisements, etc. or if you want to compare things such as front page content across a range of newspapers on a particular day or range of days.

The current aggregate news services, such as Nexis UK and Factiva present more recent coverage across a range of news titles and sources.  These are not presented in facsimile format.  The text of the articles is available in a plain text format - and things like photographs and tables etc are not included.

3. Cross searching

Some of the news databases are available on platforms that permit cross searching across titles.  Whilst this is not always appropriate for in depth research, it is a great way to start some news searching.  You can quickly search a range of news databases for a topic/person and identify which news titles are likely to be the most fruitful for more in depth research.

4. Online Help / Tutorials

The newspaper database providers typically offer online help and/or tutorials to assist your research.  It is worth checking out these before you start your research so that you can see if there is any specific functionality that could be useful.  For example, some databases allow you to save searches to repeat periodically, and this is useful if you want to trace a topic in the press over an upcoming period.  Some databases will connect you with related databases on a  topic, so that you can move from your news research into an examination of related scholarly content.  Some databases provide a range of filters to assist with searching, e.g. focusing in on specific countries, regions or industries.  These can help you target your search at your specific research interest and save time by excluding irrelevant sources

5. Call on your Liaison Librarian for support with your news research

It can be tricky to develop an online search strategy that works for your research topic.  Your liaison librarian will be happy to assist you and help develop your search strategy and/or demonstrate some of the recommended databases and functionality to you.  Just get in touch if you find you are struggling with your news research and the team will be happy to help.

Quick Links

• Access all the News Resources
• Access the News LibGuide for lots of guidance on online news searching
• Access the Search Techniques Guide for guidance on online searching
• Contact your Liaison Librarian