As I do every year at this time, I’ve been admiring the autumn leaves on the trees in the John Crank Gardens.

The first @brunellibrary.bsky.social Getting Started with Bloomberg class this year will be running next Monday (6th October 12-1pm). There are currently four spaces left, available to all Brunel students, staff and researchers.

Introduction sessions for new students across the Brunel Business School College. It was lovely to see people, and to hone my ideas for what I will be talking about in information literacy classes over the coming semester (a work in progress!)

And oh so many emails, on sorting out reading lists and book orders and planning and information literacy classes for the next few months. I have a mammoth spreadsheet!

Also multiple items in the to do list that I haven’t got to yet. There’s always Monday!

Meetings with library colleagues, academics and students. Working on finding data, making plans for the coming year, and some dreams.

(Wish I’d taken a photo of my coffee cup from today’s meeting to put here!)

Finalising the new signage for our Bloomberg computers.

I’ve also started scheduling in some upcoming Bloomberg classes. libguides.brunel.ac.uk/data/bloomberg

Introduction sessions for new students across the Brunel Business School College. It was lovely to see people, and to hone my ideas for what I will be talking about in information literacy classes over the coming semester (a work in progress!)

It’s been a busy Welcome Week for this business librarian:
Staffing the @brunellibrary.bsky.social stall at the Welcome Village several times (along with colleagues). We saw hundreds of new students.

Glad to be doing this as a team, and collaborating on setting up and take down.

I often recommend creating an account when using EBSCO databases, such as Business Source Premier. It's useful for saving searches to come back to, eg for Systematic Literature Reviews, or searching in selected journals. We've had issues lately with access to EBSCO accounts - here's a workaround.

A new FAQ, with links to video sections libanswers.brunel.ac.uk/faq/280350

Did you know? In addition to all our wonderful Brunel resources, as a member of the University of London (which we are part of), you also have access to lots of online journals, books and databases via Senate House Library. See the recently created FAQ for more details, including how to sign up

The next Systematic Literature Review workshops, for social sciences researchers, are now open for booking. There are 3 parts, on 24th & 25th February:
1 Structure & Planning
2 Scoping, Searching & Search Results
3 Screening, Following up, Reporting & Later stages
(Links to parts 2 & 3 in part 1)

Business students and researchers can learn about effectively searching for books, journal articles, market research and secondary data in this new video on Business Specific Resources brunel.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Page...

All ready to meet with the new Brunel Business School undergraduate students!

A second video on Business Specific Resources is coming soon! (Have had a few problems with getting access to the recording in order to edit it...)

New business students & researchers can learn about the Library through the newly updated Library Basics & Getting Help video.
Includes:
Finding & borrowing books
Basic searching for journals & articles
Reading Lists
Subject Guides
Getting Help (FAQs, workshops, appointments, training
Referencing

I'm working on slides for an updated library intro for new students - this one a Library basics, another to come later on Business specific resources. I'm aiming to have this recorded and edited and ready for Welcome week, coming up soon!

I'm preparing for the new academic year, and have updated the LibAnswer FAQ on Systematic Literature Reviews. This now has links to the edited recordings of the two classes I ran on this topic in June, 1. SLR Structure and Planning, 2. SLR Searching, Screening & Reporting. Links to sub-sections too!

I've set up some appointments for tomorrow (Tuesday) & Wednesday this week, & a bit for next week (I hope to add more for next week too libcalendar.brunel.ac.uk/appointment/... Available to help with literature searching, systematic reviews, secondary data collection, market research, referencing...

As well as all our academic books & journal articles, we have popular reading-good for inspiration & general interest. I'll post highlighting these every so often. 1st an ebook, access for 3 simultaneous users, Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions, by Pragya Agarwal #PopularReading

For further ways of assessing the authenticity of a journal, I recommend this FAQ from my colleague-written for people submitting articles for publication, but also of use for assessing as a reader. I particularly like to make use of the ThinkCheckSumbit website.
libanswers.brunel.ac.uk/faq/52606

Business researchers often want to focus on high ranking journals. I recommend searching across many journals, assessing with multiple criteria, but it can be useful to do a search within 3 & 4 star journals in your field. This can help avoid missing key articles libanswers.brunel.ac.uk/faq/245924

Did you know... that even when you're a librarian with 20 years experience, you sometimes forget which EBSCO database you're in (or meant to be in). Business Source Premier & Academic Search Complete-they look nearly the same but have very different content!

Access both databases via the LibGuide

The 2nd Systematic Literature Review session is on Searching, Screening and Reporting libcalendar.brunel.ac.uk/event/4210798 Tuesday 25th June, 2-4pm (same day as the first session).