LSE Library Collections

Protecting the Public Purse

noreply@blogger.com (Ellen Wilkinson) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:09:26 PDT

The Audit Commission is a public corporation set up in 1983 to protect the public purse. They audit councils, NHS bodies, police authorities and other local public services in England. They also help public bodies manage the financial challenges they face by providing authoritative, unbiased, evidence-based analysis and advice. Many of the reports they create deal with social policies and eceonomic realities.

The Library collects all reports produced by the Audit Commission and they can be found via the catalogue. They cover a range of subjects from data quality in the NHS to how councils are responding to the credit crunch to strategic housing. They look at the financial impacts of subjects, for example in the case of Building better lives: getting the best from strategic housing, spending a £1 on providing housing support to vulnerable people can save almost £2 in health, crime and residential care..

They cover aspects of social policy, for example, using sport and leisure activities to prevent anti-social behaviour in young people in the report Tired of hanging around. Many of the reports are also forward looking anticipating social and economic changes that will impact on local public services, for example, preparing for an ageing population or building the local government workforce.

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Ethnographic Video Online - new content

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 01:32:20 PST

Ethnographic Video Online provides the largest, most comprehensive resource for the study of human culture and behavior. The collection covers every region of the world and a wide range of subejcts and could be used across the curriculum - from introductory anthropology and sociology courses to advanced interdisciplinary courses in women's studies, economics, and international studies. It has recently been updated adding 33 new titles to the the database. Below are some of the highlights from the new material.

* Material from the Video in the Villages project, including Agenda 31, Our Languages, and Video Cannibalism.
* Additional films from the John Marshall Catalogue: Vermont Kids, Inside Station Nine and Three Domestics.
* Karl Heider's early film, Tikal (Guatemala).
* John Bishop's important film, Rhesus Play.
* More than a dozen new titles from the BBC catalog.
* Karen Kramer's film important film on Haiti, To Serve the Gods.

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noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:00:01 PST

LSE Library has begun purchasing some eBook titles directly from the publisher Wiley. All of the titles we have purchased so far are accessible through the Library Catalogue. The material is free of Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions meaning that you will be able to save, print and store content as you please.

We are aware that publisher imposed usage restrictions on some eBook collections are problematic for people and we hope to grow collections such as this one in the future. Here are some examples that we hope will be useful to many of you:

The Handbook of Internet Studies
Editor(s): Mia Consalvo, Charles Ess

The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications
Editor(s): Janet Wasko, Graham Murdock, Helena Sousa

The Handbook of Global Media and Communication Policy
Editor(s): Robin Mansell, Marc Raboy

Please do leave us any comments, feedback or recommendations of other titles to buy.

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Data Library Service Provider News

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Horsler) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:24:37 PST

Alas, the Data Library blog has long since died and merged into the Collections blog. The Data Library team are therefore making it our aim to bring you an entry detailing news from our service providers, once a month.

Interested in Public Opinion? Does your research require you to examine public opinion? If so then why not check our the Roper Center Public Opinion Archives . The Roper Center is the largest collection of polling data anywhere and includes over 600,000 questions and answers asked in the US since 1935. It also provides access to a range of international resources. If you require public opinion data from outside of the United States then Eurobarometer, Afrobarometer or the World Values Survey might be the answer.

Supplier Webinars Many of our suppliers operate a regular webinar programme for the resources that LSE Library buys from them. These are a good opportunity for users of the software of learn the basics and to ask questions related to their specific research need. e.g. Thomson Reuters Q&A sessions aim to answer all your questions on DataStream and ThomsonOneBanker. http://training.thomsonreuters.com/

Teaching Datasets ESDS produce a number of datasets which can be used for teaching. The latest of these is the English Housing Survey 2008-2009: Household Data Teaching Dataset, which is available at www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=6949. The teaching dataset is a subset which has been subjected to certain simplifications and additions for the purpose of learning and teaching. Datasets can be useful resources for teaching. Use can use them for hands-on exercises and ESDS have a number of datasets for this purpose. If you wish to use one of the teaching datasets or any of the ESDS Government datasets your students as part of a taught course then see the ESDS website for further details

WRDS Downtime WRDS will be unavailable between 7am - 10am EST on Tuesday 28 February. Users will not be able to access WRDS through UNIX or PC SAS Connect whilst the work is in progress.

Are you working with EU-SILC? Are you an academic or research student working with EU-SILC data? You may be interested in learning more about SPSS and STATA routines which transfer the EU-SILC csv-data to SPSS/Stata-Systemfiles. For further details see this post from GESIS

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India Subject Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Ellen Wilkinson) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:15:44 PST

The Library has created a subject guide on India. This area has long been of interest at LSE but even more so now and the guide is designed to help staff and students interested in this area to find relevant resources.

It is designed like the other subject guides with different pages on a range of different types of resource from books to film and journal articles to government statistics. The main page has links to news from Indian sources and recent publication from LSE relating to India. If you are focusing research on India take a look to see what resources are suggested that would be relevant to your study.

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More Palgrave ebooks

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:21:19 PST

The Library has added some new e-books from Palgrave. The "Economics and Finance" and the "Political and International Studies" Collections are now available on the catalogue. New e-books are up-loaded to the collections every month. Later this year the Social Science Collection will be included.

The e-books cover a very wide range of subjects from Headscarf Politics in Turkey to Chinese communists and Hong Kong capitalists: 1937-1997 to How Hollywood projects foreign policy. The books will be of use to academic researchers and are also well-timed for students starting to research their dissertations.

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National Libraries Day

noreply@blogger.com (Ellen Wilkinson) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:17:29 PST

It's National Libraries Day on 4th February 2012. LSE Staff and Students have access to collections beyond the Library's walls and this doesn't just mean the electronic resources.

University of London Libraries - LSE staff and students can join these libraries using their LSE card. Senate House Library is especially useful as members can borrow books and access electronic resources from anywhere once registered.

SCONUL Access Libraries- LSE Library is a memeber of the SCONUL Access scheme. This allows academic staff, PhD students and part-time students to borrow from other HE libraries across the UK who are members of the scheme. Even if you don’t fall into these categories of student you can often use other Higher Education libraries in the scheme for reference use.

British Library - Being in London means we are close to the British Library. A copy of every book published in the UK is deposited in this Library so it is a fantastic resource right on the doorstep.

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Web of Knowledge access issues

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:03:33 PST

Access to Web of Knowledge is now working as normal through the Library Catalogue. Please contact library.enquiries@lse.ac.uk if you have any other problems.

Competition Commission

noreply@blogger.com (Ellen Wilkinson) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:36:57 PST

With the rise of multi-national conglomerate companies over the last decade the question of competition in the market is a pertinent one. For those interested in this issue the publications of the Competition Commission are an invaluable source of information.

The Competition Commission investigates markets, mergers between companies and the regulated industries like water. LSE Library holds the reports of a large number of inquiries held by the commission dating from 2000. These cover a wide range of companies from Tesco to Ticketmaster and from BAA to British Salt Ltd. The Commission also publishes market investigations on a range of goods and services, espcially financial provisions, for example, payment protection insurance.

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Patent Information in Orbis

noreply@blogger.com (Ellen Wilkinson) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:03:23 PST

In addition to covering nearly 100 million companies, ORBIS will soon be enhanced with patent information for over 6.5 million patents, linked to 585,000 companies.

Patents can be searched for using:

Word(s) in the title
Publication date
Number of patents per company
All companies with patents

Patent information is provided by the European Patent Office from their Patstat database, which covers over 80% of the world's patents.
For further information and basic assistance with using ORBIS, please contact our Data Library team

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Who's been reading my research?

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Dawson) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:26:38 PST

Until recently it was often difficult to find out if anyone had cited your books/ book chapters. This proved frustrating for social scientists with large monograph outputs which could not easily be included in bibliometric/citation analyses. However, the LSE library has just purchased a new enhancement to the ISI Web Of Knowledge service which aims to change this.

The new Book Citation Index will allow you to find out how many times your monographs have been cited and add these to your existing journal citation counts. Alerting services can also be set up to inform you when specific titles are cited. The system is starting to index scholarly titles (textbooks are excluded) published in the last 7 years, with more titles being added continuously. View the full master list for further information.

The service can be accessed via the main ISI Web of knowledge which automatically defaults to search books in addition to journal articles. From the results list simply choose the Create citation report option to get data on and lists of citing works. You can restrict your search to the Books Citation index by choosing to search the Web of Science then expanding the databases list from the main search screen.

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Congressional Hearings

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Horsler) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:38:57 PST

What do Elmo from Seasame Street, Enron, and the Titanic all have in common? The answer is that they have either appeared be, or been the subject of, a United States Congressional Hearing. You can now find out more about these and other hearings between 1824 and 2003 thanks to the US Congressional Hearings Digital Collection Historical Archive 1824-2003, which has recently been purchased by the Library.

This resource substantially improves access to material that had previously been hard to locate in the Library's US Government Collection.

Access to the hearings will allow researchers to gain an insight into US policymaking. Public policy starts and ends with Congressional committee hearings. In these hearings, committees assess, amend, approve or kill legislation, as well as oversee the implementation and effectiveness of previously enacted legislation falling under their jurisdiction.

The published and unpublished hearings contain the full transcripts of the proceedings, including all oral statements, committee questions, and discussion. Published hearings also contain texts of related reports, statistical analyses, correspondence, exhibits, and articles presented by witnesses or inserted into the record by Members of Congress and committee staff.

A full account of the value and history of these hearings is available here

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Times Digital Archive

noreply@blogger.com (Ellen Wilkinson) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:17:30 PST

The Times Digital Archive has now been extended to 2006.

It contains the full-text of over 200 years of the Times (London) newspaper, from 1785 to 2006. It is searchable across articles, editorials and advertisements. Searching is by keyword and may be limited by date or by type of material. Browsing by issue is also available.

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