Libguides

We have been busy over the summer creating Libguides for our main subjects. These pages list essential resources for research and provide guidance on how to find materials including journal articles, ebooks, theses, data, and digital archives.

The new Libguides are here: http://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

Access Refworks as an alumni

Good news. You can now access your Refworks data even if you leave Oxford to study, research, or work elsewhere. All alumni of subscribing academic institutions will have life-long access to RefWorks. Access will continue for as long as Oxford subscribes.

See the Oxford Refworks page for further information.

Nexis UK to lose News International publications?

A Guardian news story has suggested that when News International starts charging for internet access to its newspapers (Times, Sunday Times, The Sun, News of the World) these will also be withdrawn from Nexis UK (formerly Lexis Nexis UK). The article also suggests that Factiva (owned by Murdoch) will retain its content.

Confused about who to vote for?

To help you decide which of the major parties you have most in common with Yahoo have distilled their key policies into a "Party Matcher". Try it here.

Meanwhile the three major parties have taken noticeably different approaches to the electronic publication of their manifestos:

Labour
Lib Dems
Conservatives

Evernote for managing your research data

If your research data includes multimedia such as photographs, web pages (web clips), voice recordings, and text notes then you might want to consider the freely available Evernote.


Evernote is a web-based service but also a free desktop download which syncs and backs up your data to the server. There are even apps for iPhone, Android phones, and Blackberry to allow you to capture data and create notes on the move.

Social Policy Digest - March 2010 update now available

The Social Policy Digest provides up-to-date listings of policy developments, practice changes, research reports and publications in the whole range of social policy areas - complete with links to original documents and related comment/press coverage. The archive of material, dating back to 2002, now contains over 26,000 items. The March 2010 update is now available online.

The Digest is a freely accessible resource. Simply go to: http://journals.cambridge.org/spd/action/home

RSS/Atom newsfeeds are available. Subscribe to: http://journals.cambridge.org/data/rss/feed_SPD_rss_2.0.xml or http://journals.cambridge.org/data/rss/feed_SPD_atom_0.3.xml.

World Bank data

The World Bank has just launched http://data.worldbank.org/ which provides free access to its key data, including World Development Indicators, Global Development Finance, Global Economic Monitor and much more. See the Data Catalog for more details.

Election leaflets

More on the election.

The Straight Choice is a site that encourages people to upload local election leaflets. With 1951 leaflets uploaded so far it is very well supported and a potentially useful resource for researching political communication. You can search the site by postcode.

The people behind the site also run Public Whip (analysis of MP voting) and They Work For You which tracks MP and Parliamentary activity.

UK Election 2010 polling data

Here are the pick of the sites that provide statistical analysis of the latest polls:

The BBC election seat calculator provides one-click predictions based on the latest individual polls. The site also has a visual poll tracker which goes back to 1984

Electoral Calculus is Martin Baxter's comprehensive site presenting his statistical analysis of the latest polling data


UK polling report provides combined tables and graphs for the major polls on voting intention

This site by Richard Kimber (formerly Keele University)has links to many other election 2010 resources.

Oxford Handbooks Online (Politics)

These are now available here and are already proving popular. You can also access the Philosophy and Religion handbooks.

The Handbooks are a separate collection from Oxford Scholarship Online which we also subscribe to.

Refworks can be used offline

Although web-based, the University subscription to Refworks includes an offline option. You need to install Write-and-Cite III for Windows and during the installation select the Allow working offline option.

Guardian Datastore

This is a rapidly growing and potentially useful site from the Guardian newspaper in which they look at data relating to topical issues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store

Data downloads are available from Google spreadsheets. There is even a Flickr page for visualizations: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1115946@N24/

Oxford economists 'back Gordon Brown's economic plans'

Sir David Hendry, Chris Allsopp, Rick van der Ploeg, David Vines, and Simon Wren-Lewis
are amongst more than 50 economists from around the world who have signed a letter 'backing' Gordon Brown’s economic plans. Here is their letter in the Telegraph.