New BOPs and BIFs!

New or updated on COBRA this month

BOP = Business Opportunity Profile
BIF = Business Information Factsheet

BOPs
Gas Fitter and Central Heating Engineer
Fashion Designer
Window Cleaner
Translator
Aromatherapist
Tattoo Artist
Travel Agent
Aquatic Retailer
Computer Shop
Freelance Editorial Services
Book Publisher

BIFs
An Introduction to Understanding Financial Ratios
A Guide to Renting Premises for your Business
An Introduction to Tax, National Insurance and VAT
Choosing and Using an Insurance Broker
A Guide to Completing a VAT Return and Making Payments
A Guide to Costing and Pricing a Product or Service
20 Tips to Help You Choose a Business Idea
A Guide to Business Rates
A Guide to Fire Safety Measures
An Introduction to Value Added Tax (VAT)
A Guide to National Insurance
A Guide to Corporation Tax
A Guide to Tax Self-assessment for the Self-employed
An Introduction to Consumer Legislation
An Introduction to Applying for a Consumer Credit Licence
An Introduction to Business Regulations When Starting Up
A Guide to Flexible Working Regulations
A Guide to Meeting Tax Deadlines in 2008
A Guide to the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006

Market Synopses
Advertising and Promotional Services
Complementary Therapy

Mini BOPs
Kite Retailer
Mystery Shopper
Perfumer
Haggle Website
Lap Dancing Club
Log Cabin Holiday Organiser
Pet Taxi Service
Second-hand Book Website
Wigmaker
Stonemason
Kitchen Designer

Solent Life enquiries

My Solent Life enquiry duty hours are now Thursday morning 9-11. I'm going to try to be at the virtual enquiry desk during those hours. I will be multi-tasking, which I find quite difficult with Second Life, so please make allowances if you ask me a question in there!

New ebooks via Bized Premier

We've had an ebook collection for some time now, but it didn't include much in the way of core texts or books on reading lists. We now have access to some of the more sought after titles - such as Blythe's 'Principles and Practice of Marketing' - via Bized Premier.

Mintel now contains Snapshots

Mintel has acquired Snapshots International, so you can now access Snapshots market research reports through the Mintel interface.

Free books!

Well it's a library, of course we have free books. But this is different. This is a free book you can take away and keep without anyone writing to you asking for it back. Or you can be nice and pass it on for someone else to read. We're taking part in Southampton's Reading Slam. Soon you too could be reading Slam. There's also a chance to meet the author and win a signed copy of the book.

Reflections in Wonderland

The latest issue of Sconul Focus has an article that a colleague and I wrote based on our experiences of Second Life during the project we've been doing over the last year.

New things

Long time no blog entry. Not because I've been on holiday all the summertime, but because the summer is busy in it's own different way from term time and because I'm even more sure than usual that nobody would be reading this!

So what's new in business information? Well, we have a new online information source for marketing - TGI (Target Group Index) providing data from consumer surveys. We have a new library catalogue which will be getting a lot of new features added in the next few months. We hope that by Christmas you will be able to search it for journal articles as well as books, which I think will be a big step forward.

There are also quite a few more new things being planned but not quite ready for general release yet. As with so much of life the theme is 'constant change'.

Courses: project management

I was relieved to hear in this course that planning is not a natural process. It certainly doesn't come naturally to me! I was also relieved to hear that detailed plans can only be applied to stages of three month or so, and for longer projects you need an outline with the detail to be filled in as the project progresses. In fact I think that is more or less what we have done with our project, although without a lot of formal paperwork, so maybe I'm not as disorganised as I someimes feel!

Citation tracking coming to Proquest databases

Proquest databases ABI Inform and European Newsstand will be unavailable on Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 3:00am for twelve (12) hours.

This is to add a feature showing 'cited' references and 'cited by' references which will allow users to track and view documents which have been cited by other researchers.

This feature was previously only available in specialist citation indexes.

Conference: BBSLG

The BBSLG is the British Business Schools' Librarians' Group (although a name change is under consideration and I hope the new one puts less of a strain on my ability to use apostrophes correctly!)

The conference this year was looking at something called 'OurSpace'. It's always interesting in creative writing exercises to see how different people interpret the same theme, and this applies to conference themes too. One speaker saw space as implying boundaries and asked us to think about where our work boundaries are, a couple looked at physical spaces, and another talked about managing our own personal head-space.

Of the keynote speakers the one I most enjoyed was Michael Comyn on stress and resilience. How could I not like a session that referred to entrainment? (As in the Van Morrison song!)

The members sharing sessions - short presentations on current projects and issues - are a regular feature of the BBSLG conference and one of the best bits, giving everyone a chance to find out more about whats happening in other places. This year we presented on Second Life which, it seems, is a space few business schools are as yet exploring.

The best news was that the BBSLG website is getting an upgrade to web 2.0!

The biggest disappointment had to be the very poor internet facilities in the hotel.

On returning home I was happy to find that the herring gull chicks I've been watching for the last few weeks had not fledged while I was away. They've been trying their wings today - lifting them up, catching the wind and hovering, then dropping back onto the roof. They'll be off and away soon.

Courses: Approaches to induction

This course reinforced an idea I have been getting from a variety of sources recently. To get your message across you need to keep it brief and to the point and make it relevant to your audience. Otherwise you risk your message getting lost in the background noise of information overload we all live with these days.

Wizards in the back office!

Half way through my second day of training on the new library system and have been only very slightly boggled some of the time. I have certainly understood enough of it to see that we will have some very nice new front end features to play with once it's up and running. The technical stuff is accessed via something called a back office wizard, but luckily we have our own real live back office wizards to deal with that!

Courses, courses, courses!

One of the things I have found this blog excellent for is keeping track of the various courses, conferences and training sessions that I attend. I can look back and remind myself of what I did when and any key points I might want to act on in future.

I've not been blogging much lately due to the usual excuses of pressure of work/life etc and I would like to get back into the habit. This week seems like a good time to do it as I have training events on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday!

Monday's was a course in supervisory skills. Today and Wednesday I get my first sessions on the rather interesting shiny new system that we're getting to replace our old library catalogue. Then on Thursday I'm off to London to a course on library induction where I will be presenting on our approach and, hopefully, doing a bit of what Tom Peters calls 'creative swiping' - being inspired by other people's ideas.

Word work/word play

Constant change

I did feel sorry for the student in one of my training sessions who, at the end of his second year, had only just worked out how to search for things on the library catalogue, only to be told that we'll have a new one when he comes back for his final year. Hopefully it will be better, not just different. I just wish that constant improvement was as inevitable as constant change!

New features on ABI Inform and European Newsstand

Proquest are going to be doing some work on their databases at the following times

Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 03:00 for two (2) hours
Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 03:00 for twelve (12) hours

What they're doing is adding the option to create RSS feeds for searches and also adding a new Arabic interface to their language options.

WARC - digital

The World Advertising Research Centre database has added a new 'digital' section looking at things like top viral campaigns, digital consumers, how people use the internet, and impact on agencies.

The library -
exercise for body
and mind




I'm on leave next week - moving house, but Mary and Jane will be in ML107, on floor 1, if you need any help.

Pajamas

I've never been to a conference* in my pajamas before. Virtual pajamas and real pajamas in fact. That's the sort of thing that can happen at an international conference held in Second Life.

I think this unusual style of dress for professional networking can be excused seeing as the latter part of the programme ran from 12 midnight to 5am.

I must admit though, I have been looking for an excuse to wear the rather lovely pjs I found and, in SL, there's really not much chance, as avatars don't sleep (although they have been known to nod off briefly if sufficiently bored.)

I did wear more appropriate clothing for the (relatively) serious part of my day when I - along with a brave colleague - did a presentation in both text chat and voice simultaneously. And we were not too put out to find in a later session that there was a technological gizmo that would have made the process much easier!

There's always more to learn.

If I've done it right there should be some pics of the event here.

*Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums

Conference

I'm doing something weird next weekend. I'm going to be presenting a paper on Second Life at a *conference in Second Life. If the technical gremlins will allow, that is.

I say I am going to be presenting it, but am I? Or is it my avatar, Wynne, who will be doing that? Will she claim ownership of the copyright?

*More info here Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums and here is a Video

Evangelised!

I saw a presentation the other evening by Metaverse Evangelist Roo Reynolds from IBM. He certainly lived up to the job title!

Key points that I picked up on were...

• Virtual Worlds (VWs) are about people, they're fundamentally social spaces
• The average age of people in Second Life is around 34
• What Second Life has over some other VWs is user generated content
• Its ok to start small - send in a few explorers
• Things in VWs can be ephemeral - its easy to build and to destroy
• Do we want to replicate the real world? Or be creative with the posssibilities of VWs?
• It's not just Second Life, watch out for new worlds
• Watch out for the real metaverse - joined up VWs!

£200 prize up for grabs!

JISC are doing the first ever national survey on the use of and perceptions of e-books.

There is a £200 prize up for grabs for staff and students that enter the survey before February 15th.

To participate in the survey please visit the JISC User Survey 2008. The survey will take around 10 minutes to complete. There is information for faculty staff and students if you want to know more about it.

Literature searching: theory and practice

I'm being painfully reminded lately about the difference between theory and practice.

In the early stages of trying to get a paper written, with a colleague, to submit to a conference, I have to keep reminding myself to keep track of what I've read and might want to quote from or refer to. But after several months of "scan, flick and `power browse’"- as a recent research paper calls it - that is proving to be very much harder to do than it sounds!

JISC Ebooks

We've recently subscribed to 5 new business and management studies e-books through the JISC national ebooks observatory project.

• The Dynamics of Employee Relations - Paul Blyton 3rd ed
• Marketing Strategy & Competitive Positioning - Graham Hooley 3rd ed
• Organisational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach - Derek Rollinson, 3rd ed
• Integrated Marketing Communication - David Pickton, 2nd ed
• Management Concepts & Practices - Tim Hannagan, 4th ed

These e-books can be found via the library catalogue and are available on the MyiLibrary platform (using your Athens username and password if off campus.)

Staff and students can copy, print, and paste parts of the e-books and can, for educational purposes, incorporate excerpts of these e-books into teaching materials, essays, course work, presentations and MyCourse units.

Facebook

I am hopelessly word addicted. I realised this when I discovered the (for me) killer app on Facebook: you can play Scrabble on there!

I do realise that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the written, or indeed tiled, word, or for books and literature and the whole text based world of ideas, and I know that these things can be taken too far (as shown by this cautionary tale) but I think its probably a good thing if your chosen career involves something you are just a tad obsessive about.