London's health records now publicly available online

London's Pulse, launched earlier this week, is a digitisation project from the Wellcome Library. This online resource contains more than 5000 fully searchable Medical Officer of Health reports from 1848 to 1973, detailing the health of Londoners in detail - borough by borough and often street by street. It is available at: http://wellcomelibrary.org/moh/

Here is part of the press release: 

'The site showcases the often-overlooked work of Medical Officers of Health (MOHs), qualified medical practitioners who became influential agents of social and medical reform in the city. Their yearly reports amount to a health check of the capital over more than a century, recording vital statistics on births, deaths and illness, infant mortality, and infectious disease.

The reports also offer an unparalleled insight into Londoners’ lives, covering a dizzying array of topics. They contain details of London’s lost trades (such as hair-merchants and pigeon-fatteners), provide reports on the conditions of child workers in factories and families in slum housing, and trace changing tastes in fast food from oysters to Chinese takeaways'.

Copac Catalogue - helping researchers locate unique resources

Copac is a free service, available from anywhere at http://copac.ac.uk which brings together the catalogues of over 70 UK and Irish libraries. Using Copac you can discover the holdings of the UK's national libraries, many university and specialist research libraries. The range of libraries include the British Library, Oxford and Cambridge universities, the National Trust, major Russian and East European collections, Middle Temple and Mechanical Engineers library. The Catalogue of the National Archive is also a very recent addition.

Copac covers a vast number of subjects and specialisms and can help researchers quickly and easily discover and locate a huge amount of material. You can search across all libraries or limit to an individual library - select 'Main search' and scroll down to see various options to limit your search

JournalTOCs - Current Awareness Service

JournalTOCs is a current awareness service which enables you to keep up-to-date with the scholarly journals in your areas of research. It is a freely available service for individual users. It provides access to the largest, free collection of scholarly Tables of Contents, over 21,000 journals from over 1,700 publishers. You can choose which journals you would like to follow and you will then be alerted when new issues of your followed journals are published.

Oxford Brookes Library webpages for researchers provide a range of information specifically for researchers including a section, under Managing information, on keeping up-to-date. There are details about online databases and e-journal collections that offer alerting services which help you stay current.

VITAE - realising the potential of researchers

Vitae is a UK organisation which brings together all the stakeholders who work with researchers, such as funders, national organisations, policy makers, to develop policy and practices to support resarchers. There is a wealth of information available on the Vitae website for researchers, supervisors and employers. The section for postgraduate researchers contains information and advice on how to manage your research and yourself, how to develop and motivations for doing postgraduate research. There is advice on raising your profile, presenting your research and developing your career. Within this section there is also a link to 'The Researcher Development Framework' (RDF) which covers all aspects of professional development for researchers.

Managing Research Data

Does your research involve data? How do you store and share it? Did you know that some funders now require a data management plan? Research data managment is currently a very topical area. There are a range of publications and websites which can help you get to grips with all aspects of data managment.

 

Mantra is a freely available online course which has been developed primarily for PhD students and early career researchers. Mantra provides guidelines for good practice in many aspects of research data management. It consists of a number of units including: research data explained, data management plans, organising data, storage and preservation.

 

You can link to Mantra from the Research data management webpages at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/research/resdatamanagement.html

 

 

Library Training for Researchers

The Library is offering the following training sessions this semester for researchers. All sessions take place in the Headington library Training Room 12.00 - 13.00. There is no need to book.

Information at your desktop: finding your way around the Electronic Library
This session provides details of the range of electronic resources available at your desktop, including journals, journal collections, databases and reference resources.
Thursday 21 February and Tuesday 26 February

Keeping up-to-date
Keep abreast of new research and development in your subject area: find out how to keep up-to-date with new publications in journals, books, conferences and more; track your research using the Web of Knowledge citation indexes. 
Tuesday 5 March and Monday 25 March

EndNote reference management service - we are offering two different sessions this semester:
Tuesday 12 March  - An introduction to the key features of EndNote X5.
Tuesday 26 March and Friday 19 April - EndNote drop-in sessions:  to help you with your EndNote (desktop or Web) questions and problems.  Bring along any queries you have and a copy of your EndNote library and associated Word documents - there will be an opportunity to do some practical work.
 
Please contact libraryenquiries@brookes.ac.uk if you have any queries.