Planned interruption: ScienceDirect

ScienceDirect will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance for approximately 9 hours on Sunday, November 1st, from 2.00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.

LibriSourcePlus temporarily unavailable

We are experiencing technical difficulties with the e-resources research portal, LibriSourcePlus. As a result this is not functioning properly at the moment. We are trying to have the problem solved as soon as possible.

Update: there are still problems with the login procedure. At present the guest profile is available only. This means that you can perform search actions, but cannot save any search results to your personal account in My Space.

New in LibriLinks: recommendations

You can find now a new service, called bX, in the LibriLinks-menu.
This service provides references which might be interesting for you, based on logfiles, i.e.  “users interested in this article also looked at …”. As the logfiles will grow, the service will become more visible.

Biomedical books sale: know how per kilo

The Biomedical Library is selling second-hand books: Kennis per Kilo (Know how per kilo).

- Monday, October the fifth, from 1 pm until 5 pm.
- Tuesday, October the sixth , from 9 am until 5 pm.

 We ask 2 euros for every kilo knowledge.

The profit will go to charity.

Everybody is welcome!

Planned interruption: LibriLinks & LibriSourcePlus

Due to technical maintenance planned on Tuesday, September 29th, between 8 and 9 a.m., the LibriLinks buttons will not work for the duration, nor will the research portal LibriSourcePlus be available.

Planned interruption: ScienceDirect

ScienceDirect will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance from Saturday, August 29, 7.30 p.m. until Sunday, August 30, 3 a.m. (duration: 7 hrs 30′).

Planned interruption: CiNii

CiNii services have announced that their research portal will be stopped due to system maintenance on Saturday, August 29th, from 2 until 4 a.m. During that time, consequently, their resources (including GeNii / Nii Scholarly and Academic Information Portal, and Nii REO / Nii Repository of Electronic Journals and Online Publications) will be unavailable.

LibriSourcePlus software upgrade

On Friday, August 21st, early in the morning, a software upgrade will be performed for LibriSourcePlus. From 9 a.m. onwards the research portal should be available again.

Library users satisfied but the library will work even harder

Over 4,300 University Library users – including 3,400 students – took part in a satisfaction survey at the beginning of last academic year. The survey wasconducted through the Association of Research Libraries’ LibQUAL+ program, which is used each year by  libraries all over the world to help them to assess and improve their services. The participants were asked questions concerning three main issues: the university library as a place for study, the quality of information provision and  and quality of the service provision includingthe client-friendliness of the staff. From the results, it appears that K.U.Leuven’s University Library is generally quite successful in all areas. There were no questions for which we received a lower score than the expected minimum, but on the other hand, there were no questions for which we received a higher score than the desired target. The survey also indicated that library users – especially in the humanities and social sciences – would like more ‘learning centres’: places where students can have a variety of learning environments: places for group work, individual work spaces and quiet study areas. The University Library is already planning several of these facilities in the Leuven City Centre, in Heverlee, in Gasthuisberg and in Kortrijk. . Many people would also like the libraries to have longer opening hours and would like better access to electronic sources. Specific actions will be undertaken during the next strategic planning period to address the concerns of users.

K.U.Leuven is the first institution in Belgium to have made use of LibQUAL for benchmarking its services and looks forward to co-operating with universities in Wallonia who have decided also to take part.The benchmarking exercise will be repeated in three years’ time in order to measure the improvements in service quality that we hope to achieve.

Planned interruption: Wiley InterScience

Due to site maintenance, access to the Wiley InterScience platform may be intermittently disrupted on Saturday, March 28th, from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. Users may experience minor disruptions where items such as the search or customer service interfaces will be unavailable for short periods of time.