Resources for HE

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Introduction

The digital age has provided increased opportunity for resource and knowledge sharing in all education sectors, changing the parameters of effective study and research sources. The modern day tutor and learner needs to go beyond the library and physical publications and make effective use of online resources. In this article, we will focus on resources suitable for use in higher education by academic staff and their students.

Open access teaching resources

Many universities have made selected online courses and other materials available on the Web as part of the Open Access movement. These materials are known as Open Educational Resources (OER) and the term refers to materials and resources offered freely and openly to others for re-use. Open Educational Resources include:

Complete courses or modules
Lesson plans and other tutor support material
Specific course content such as videos, podcasts or images.

Sources of OER

Jorum is the UK's repository for the post-16 sector, including higher education. Content is free and depositors can use a variety of licensing models, depending on how they want to the content to be used.
OER commons: open educational resources from around the world http://www.oercommons.org/
Open video the purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitised video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities.
Temoa: OER portal http://www.temoa.info/
MERLOT is a large searchable database providing access to multimedia educational resources for online learning and teaching. Although USA-based, many of the resources are relevant to the UK HE sector.
The World lecture hall is a vast collection resources similar to the Merlot collection. Subjects range from accounting to zoology.
Wikieducator: A wiki-based online community promoting OER and collaboration in education. Join up and get involved.
OCW Consortium: A consortium of HE institutions creating a "broad and deep" collection of open educational content

e-journals

Many institutions purchase e-journals as companions to print copies or online only - check with your institution to find out what's available. Common platforms for viewing institutional subscriptions are Swetswise and EbscoHost.

You may also wish to purchase you own articles on a pay per view basis. Metapress and Ingenta offer searchable aggregations of e-journal content, which you can search and purcahse from (abstracts are usually available free). If a particular journal isn't available in this way, it may deliver its content solely through its own website, so it is worth also doing a general Web search (Elsevier is a publisher that uses this model).

e-books

Many university and college libraries subscribe to e-books and these can usually be accessed from the library catalogue. There are also a wide range of open access and subscription e-books available to HE students and teachers on the Web - you can use the following sites to find them.

MyiLibrary is an aggregation of publications from many different publishers in online format. You can usually view some of the content in full text, but to see a whole copy you will need to buy the e-book, or be able to access the content through your organisation's subscription.
http://www.ebooks.com/ is aimed at the individual consumer market and has around 100,000 books in its database from many publishers, academic and otherwise. Free excerpts are available of new publications, but most of the content has to be paid for; the e-books are available in a wide range of formats, including PDF. The site now includes an "Academic E-books" tab, which can be clicked to restrict searching to this kind of content.
Google Books allows you to search the full text of over 15 million books (October 2010), which have been scanned or converted to text by Google; the fully viewable, free ones are mostly out of print, or out of copyright. In-print books, which are charged for, can be viewed for a charge or you can choose to be diverted to a range of online book sellers for purchase. You can also browse by subject and also create your own "library" with favourites and attached book reviews. The advanced search option allows you to specify fully viewable or sample only content.

Some authors are choosing to publish their work in the public domain, via e-book sites. This page from Leicester University library, summarises these full text sites well.
Techsupportalert have published a regularly updated listing of the 250 best sites on the web for free e-books

Web 2.0 for HE

A number of publishers are creating social networks or blog aggregators for particular subjects, particularly in science and technical. Here are some examples:

Mendeley Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.
Nature Publishing Group run Nature Blogs, a community run blog tracking and indexing site, with carefully chosen blogs from the natural sciences.

Science Blogs offer a similar service, with over 80 selected bloggers writing on scientific and technical subjects.

Biomedexperts is a social network of over 300,000 life science researchers which indexes their research and helps academics establish connections with others having similar interests

UniPHY is a similar network for engineers, physicists and other scientists

HE resource gateways

Gateways are searchable and browsable collections of resources - there are several aimed at HE teachers and learners which you can try.

One of the principle gateways at the moment is Intute. Although it won't be funded beyond 2011, it is still worth using.
Many of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centres have resources gateways which you can browse and search for subject-specific Web resources
The Pinnakes subject launchpad is a list of subject Web gateways
Although US-based, AcademicInfo has useful subject guides
The WWW Virtual Library offers a browsable gateway to useful Web resources

Specialist search engines

Google Scholar is arguably the leading specialist search engine for Academia. Launched in 2004, Scholar offers a subset of the main Google search index with material identified as "scholarly". This material includes journal articles, monographs, theses etc. The search engine is easy to use, but offers limited advanced search capabilities. On the plus side, some of the material is freely available (although a large proportion requires payment or institutional subscription). The Cited-By feature is a bonus and is a good way of finding associated materials on a similar subject; email alerts or RSS feeds can be created to deliver updates on past searches.

Scirus is a specialist search engine from the publisher, Elsevier which limits its index to scientific and medical information sources only. Over 400 million items are indexed and these include journal articles, monographs, patents, institutional repository content and much more. Many scientific journal collections are indexed by the tool too.

Citeseerx is a specialist search engine which focuses on content around computing and information science

Microsoft Academic Search is a specialist search engine which focuses on content around computing. It's not a general academic search engine, despite the name.

Access to HE libraries

The Sconul Access Scheme gives students, researchers and lecturers access (and in some cases borrowing rights) to over 170 higher education libraries in the UK and Ireland.

Access rights vary and you will usually need an ID card, identifying yourself as a member of a participating institution.

You may wish to check the holdings of a library before visiting. To do this you can usually access its library catalogue via the Web. There are also a number of union catalogues, which allow you to search the holdings of many libraries at the same time:

COPAC is JISC funded and includes many of the UK's leading research libraries
WorldCAT currently indexes 1.5 billion items from a wide range of libraries, including HE institutions

INSPIRE is an initiative to promote the sharing of information from library collections across the UK. You can use the findit! search engine to identify libraries who are members of INSPIRE.

Keeping up to date

Useful web sites

HEFCE
JISC
The Higher Education Academy

RSS feeds You will need an RSS reader or Internet browser which can subscribe to RSS feeds to view these

Latest higher education news from the Universities and Colleges Union (RSS feed)
Quality Assurance Agency for HE news feed
Higher Education Academy RSS feeds
Times Higher Education RSS feeds