British Standards Online (BSOL)

The University of Cambridge now has on campus access only to the British Standards Online (BSOL) resource at the following URL

http://bsol.bsigroup.com/

Shibboleth access is to be implemented by the British Standards Institute for off campus authentication in the second or third quarter of 2018.  We are working on providing access via EZproxy in the interim.

Access is available via the Cambridge LibGuides Databases A-Z here

http://libguides.cam.ac.uk/az.php?a=b

And records for the standards in BSOL will soon be available in iDiscover and updated weekly.  NB only on campus users will be able to link through to the standards from iDiscover records.

BSOL is an online library of over 90,000 internationally recognized standards with application to a wide range of subjects, from environmental management to IT security, from construction to food safety.

 

Confusing ‘Sign in’ option on Oxford University Press platforms

Databases on the new Oxford University Press platform show a ‘Sign in’ option below the ‘Cambridge University Library’ access label.

The appearance of the ‘Sign in’ option does not indicate that an additional sign in is required it is simply the new position of the sign in option for the database (previously this option would have appeared in the top right hand part of the screen). ‘Sign in’ will appear both on and off campus.

Once you have been directed to the database site from the databases A-Z you should see ‘Cambridge University Library’ on the left hand side of the screen. If you see this then you will be identified as a member of the university and will be able to use the resource. Simply enter a term into the search bar at the upper right hand side of the site and you be able to view complete results.

Look for a green open padlock in the results list as this will indicate that you are correctly logged in and can access the full text.

The databases allow you to save searches and results. To do this you will need to create an individual account for the platform and this will require you to use the additional sign in option.

Databases that have been updated with this feature include:

Oxford Music Online

Oxford Art Online

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Oxford Bibliographies

The New Oxford Shakespeare

If you have any problems accessing these databases then please email us: ejournals@lib.cam.ac.uk

Perma.cc – an online archival and citation resource

The University Information Service (UIS) has made Perma.cc available to members of the University of Cambridge. You can sign up with the UIS to be part of our organisational account to Perma.cc.

Perma.cc is a free to use service where you can create a link to the version of a web page from which you obtained information and ensure URLs listed in your citations do not lead to broken links and missing pages.

“Perma.cc, developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, is a caching solution to be used by authors and journal editors in order to integrate the preservation of cited material with the act of citation. Upon direction from a paper author or editor, Perma will retrieve and save the contents of a webpage, and return a permanent link. When the work is published, the author can include that permanent citation in addition to a citation to the original URL, or just the permanent link, ensuring that even if the original is no longer available because the site goes down or changes, the cache is preserved and available.”

– ‘Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations’ by Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert & Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law Reform Forum, March 17th 2014)

 

 

MGG Online, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart

Access is now enabled to the encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, known in its electronic form as MGG Online.  Access on campus is via this link:

https://mgg-online.com/

Off campus access is only available via the EZproxy server at this link:

http://ezproxy.lib.cam.ac.uk:2048/login?url=https://mgg-online.com/

A user choosing to access MGG Online off campus via Google, say, will not have access as MGG Online has not yet implemented Shibboleth.

A link to the encyclopedia can be found in the Cambridge LibGuides Databases A-Z and a record for it will be created in January 2018 for retrieval via iDiscover.

Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) is a general encyclopedia of music.  MGG is encyclopedic in the true sense of that term: it offers in-depth articles on every aspect of music as well as many related areas such as literature, philosophy, and visual arts.  MGG Online contains the second print edition of MGG, published from 1994 to 2008, as well as current, continuous online updates and additions.

MGG Online traces its origins to the Protestant encyclopedia Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, seeing music not as a “neutral subject but one that compels action from the individual”, like religion, a subject whose “elemental roots in daily life, experience, and practice were axiomatic to its editors”.

Growing from the turbulent post-war years of Germany, the encyclopedia will now, the editors explain, unfold – unlike a print edition – as a “living project which alters, expands, and renews itself continuously” online:

The goal is the reliable, precise, and authoritative production of musical knowledge with clearly designated responsibilities and boundaries: in short, a publication to compete with other publications. Even in the online era, knowledge must not be reduced to a medial monoculture—alas, a most persistent and perilous illusion and one to which digital players are highly susceptible. What is more, the organization of knowledge is not the same thing as the infinite reproduction of everything which can be known. Were that the case, the digital encyclopedia would be simply a rather trivial replica of the wildest dreams of a positivist age. Order and delimitation are, generally speaking, the results of cogent decisions by professionals, often after long and heated deliberations. And these decisions are intended, above all, as guidance for nonspecialists. Such is the objective of an encyclopedia in the digital age, with all the advantages offered by nonlinear access.

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature integration

As the University has subscription access to the RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, users can take advantage of links out from MGG Online to the RILM Abstracts which launch a search on RILM for the subject of the article in MGG.

Google Translate in MGG Online

The globe icon to the top right of any article in MGG links you to the Google Translate feature in the top bar of your MGG window in a browser.

 Photograph by Terry O’Neill / Getty

RALF VON APPEN, Art. Bowie, David, BIOGRAPHIE, in: MGG Online, hrsg. von Laurenz Lütteken, Kassel, Stuttgart, New York: 2016ff., published 2017-10-06, https://www.mgg-online.com/article?id=mgg01929&v=2.0&rs=id-089483f2-c27d-44ef-3959-87fead9f8812