Before you leave for your holidays, we got to get you interested in Jan 8-9, 2014, 9am-4pm. 

NUS librarians will be showing some nifty stuff at an Open House organized by The Writing Unit at Education Resource Centre (just above Starbucks).

 

The Open House is organised for students to find out about the Ideas and Exposition modules (I&E) so that they can register for the modules they are interested in. Lecturers of these modules will be on hand to answer any questions.

 

What would the librarians be showing you that is going to make a difference? Well, we will show you:

 

• Electronic resources used for assignments of I&E modules — fancy databases such as LLBA, and did you know you could get transcripts of interviews from Factiva?

 

• Services which you can use without leaving UTown — did you know you can renew books online, chat with a librarian, book discussion rooms at Central Library without going there?

 

• FindMore@NUSL – NUS Libraries’ search engine — From one search box, retrieve full-text of e-books, e-journals and a whole lot more.

 

• The loads of information we have in the NUS Libraries portal such as what are the opening hours of all 7 NUS libraries, where can you scan your documents, where is the Singapore/Malaysia collection and more.

 

So make a date with NUS librarians at UTown’s Writing Unit’s Open House cum Walk-in registration for Ideas and Exposition modules (I&E) on 8 and 9 Jan 2014, from 9am-4pm!

For enquiries about the Open House, email CELC at elcbox63@nus.edu.sg

Visit the Ideas & Exposition website at http://www.nus.edu.sg/celc/programmes/iep.php

For enquiries about NUS Libraries, email: kahwei@nus.edu.sg

 

We try our best to improve the facilities & services of NUS Libraries to meet your needs, here are some of the improvements and changes we made since the new semester began on Aug 2013.

 

1. More powerpoints in Central Library

Table in the Bound Journal Section,   Central Library, Level 5

In our library survey done earlier this year, the lack of powerpoints in Central Library for charging of your laptops, tablets & smartphones was a common issue mentioned.

This was a very difficult problem to solve due to the age of the building which made upgrading to support more power difficult , but we finally achieved this with the help of the Office of Estate and Development (OED), and now every seat in Central Library Level 6, and most seats at Level 5 come with a powerpoint each.

 

2. Availability of scanners

Besides power points, the lack of scanning services in the library was also mentioned in our survey. Again, you asked, we listened and responded.

As of Aug 2013, Scanning services are available at the photocopy rooms of

• Central Library
• Hon Sui Sen Memorial Library
• Science Library
• Medical Library
• C J Koh Law Library (near the networked printers)

More details can be found at http://libfaq.nus.edu.sg/a.php?qid=150390 , but do observe the copyright regulations when using the scanners.

 

3. Books dispenser at UTown

Our book dispenser, NUSL Express at University Town 

We have installed a new book dispenser at UTown so you can borrow selected books 24/7! You can not only borrow books but can return books there but it only accepts books borrowed from the book dispenser. To find out what is available for borrowing at the machine, search FindMore and restrict the search under “Library Location” to “NUSL Express”.

How to search for books available at NUSL Express at University Town 

Refer to our FAQ <http://libfaq.nus.edu.sg/a.php?qid=479928> for more details.

 

4. Improvement to library search – FindMore@NUSL

 Since the final launch of FindMore@NUSL, we have not rested on our laurels and continued to try to improve the system. Among many changes, one recent change was making finding online standards in British Standards Online a lot easier.

How to search for British Standards in FindMore@NUSL

You can now enter the full standard code (e.g BS EN 62034:2012) and preferably the title into FindMore and if the item is available in British Standards Online, it will now show up in FindMore@NUSL.  Clicking on the result will bring you directly to the online standard.

To improve the precision of the results, you may need to act quotes around the search and/or refine to “standards” under “Content Type”.

Another bigger piece of news is that we are currently testing a new version of FindMore at http://nus.preview.summon.serialssolutions.com/

The new preview version of FindMore.

Among some of the new features includes

• A new discipline facet (e.g. Economics, Psychology) to refine your search
• Grouped newspaper article results to help you focus on the types of content you want
• A new advanced search which allows you to do controlled searching by specific fields such as subject term, author, title, publication title, doi and more.

The new preview advanced search of FindMore.

It’s still in the test phase, but you can be the first to try it out at http://nus.preview.summon.serialssolutions.com/ and let us have your comments  at https://esurvey.nus.edu.sg/efm/se.ashx?s=2891D03D0A7B4AB3

 

Conclusion

 We hope you are excited and happy with these improvements. Of course this isn’t the end, and we are still working through and studying the tons of feedback you gave us during the library survey earlier this year and hope to put in place more improvements based on your feedback.

 

Aaron Tay

NUS Libraries

FindMore@NUSL was launched on 12 Dec 2012 and has seen over 340 thousand visits and 1.1 million searches. We have received numerous feedback and are continually improving the system.

Some improvements which we have made include:

• Adding of new materials, including open-access e-journals and e-book packages
• More accurate display of content types, especially for e-books
• Various small tweaks to the interface for usability, such as clarifying of confusing terms
• Setting up of database and “best bets” recommendations

Some users have suggested that the relevancy ranking can be improved, and this is something we are working on. In the meantime, the statistics we have gathered show that the Book/eBook filter at the results page is used very often. Hence, we have added new radio buttons below the search box:

This helps to save time, as you can now pre-filter the results to only Books or Articles if that is the material type which you need. Of course, you can always use the default “Everything” option.

You can further filter the results by author, as shown at the bottom left corner of the screencapture below:

While this tweak helps, it does not resolve all relevancy ranking issues. You may want to try the recommendations that may appear for better results:

We are planning to release the next major update, FindMore@NUSL version 2.0, in July/August 2013. This upgrade will improve the user interface with the grouping and spotlighting of similar materials such as newspapers articles or reference works. Moreover, the automatic query expansion feature will further improve relevancy ranking by automatically searching for synonyms when appropriate. For example when you search for “heart attack” it will also search for the technical term, Myocardial infarction.

Do continue to let us know your thoughts about FindMore@NUSL as we work to improve it further.

Aaron Tay
FindMore Support Team 

Professor E. P. Ellinger is a Professor Emeritus of the National University of Singapore. In April, C J Koh Law Library put up a display of works by Prof. Ellinger to commemorate his many years of teaching at the NUS Faculty of Law.

Peter Ellinger was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family on 25^th April 1933. The family eventually settled in Tel Aviv where he graduated in 1959 with an M. Jur. Degree from Hebrew University (Jerusalem). He started work at the Faculty of Law in Singapore in 1961 and in 1963, he married a Singaporean Chinese lady who was a school teacher.

Prof. Ellinger obtained his doctorate from St. Catherine’s College of Oxford in 1964. His thesis formed the basis of the book Documentary Letter of Credit: A Comparative Study, which was published in 1970 and established Prof. Ellinger’s reputation as a leading scholar in banking law.

He has published a number of books on the subject, including Modern Banking Law (Oxford university Press), The Law and Practice of Documentary Letters of Credit (with Dora Neo) and chapters in Benjamin’s Sales of Goods and Chitty on Contracts, as well as many articles in scholarly periodicals.

In 1967, Prof. Ellinger accepted a chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand where he stayed for 10 years before moving to Melbourne, Australia in 1977. In 1986 he rejoined the Faculty of Law in NUS and has remained a well-respected professor and scholar ever since.

We wish Professor Ellinger many years of good health and happiness in his retirement.

Reference:

Neo, D. S. S. (2007). Biography of Peter Ellinger. In D. S. S. Neo, H. W. Tang & M. Y. M. Hor (Eds.), Lives in the Law: Essays in honor of Peter Ellinger, Koh Kheng Lian, Tan Sook Yee. Singapore: NUS, Faculty of Law: Academy Pub.

Bissy Ithack
C J Koh Law Library