Welcome to all new Students in Economics from the Marshall Library of Economics

Welcome to Cambridge from the Marshall Library Team. My name is Clare Trowell and I am the Marshall Librarian. We are here to provide all your resources to support you course in Economics. The Marshall Library has a wonderful collection of materials in Economics and Development Studies both in print and online. We also hold the Archives of Alfred Marshall and other key figures from Cambridge Economics.

You can find the Marshall Library on the Sidgwick Site in the Faculty of Economics Austin Robinson Building. You can see what the exterior of the Marshall Library looks like in the picture at the head of this blogpost. Here it is on the University of Cambridge Map: https://map.cam.ac.uk/Austin+Robinson+Building#52.201273,0.108442,18

Due to the current situation with the Covid-19 pandemic unfortunately we are not able to open our beautiful study space safely to readers but during Michaelmas Term we will be running 

Zero Contact Services. 

These services will include:

• Click & Collect for borrowing
  
• Book Return via the Book Drop
• Scanning of key teaching materials, which are made available via Moodle, the virtual learning environment.

Most of our resources such as journals, bibliographic databases, many of the key ebooks and datasets are provided online. You can learn more about the Library and our services on our website:
https://www.marshall.econ.cam.ac.uk/
To find books you want to borrow via Click & Collect you need to understand how to search our catalogue: iDiscover. You will have received a copy of the iDiscover worksheet and a leaflet explaining the Zero Contact services at Induction - please read them carefully.

If a book is available as an ebook you will see that flagged up on the catalogue.
If you cannot find a book you need please contact the Marshall Library either by email: marshlib@hermes.cam.ac.uk or fill out the book request form: https://www.marshall.econ.cam.ac.uk/contactus/book-purchase-suggestion-form

Library Office Hours
The Librarians will also be running a weekly Office hour for students via Teams from October.

Undergraduates on Tuesdays 1-2pm

Diploma students on Tuesdays 12 noon-1pm 

MPhil students on Wednesdays, 10-11am 

You can speak to us about any issues you are having with finding material or other Library services. We can also offer one-to-one support via Teams by appointment. I will email details of how to access this service in due course.

If you have any questions at all please get in contact with us via email: marshlib@hermes.cam.ac.uk
We will also be providing some Information Literacy sessions on Referencing, Finding Datasets, Literature Searching during the year.

Have a great time at Cambridge and we look forward to seeing you soon! 

 

The Long Hard Search for Ebooks in Economics

You may be frustrated, like the Marshall Librarian and team, right now because there are so many textbooks in the shutdown library and we cannot find many of them as ebooks. Rest assured we are working very hard with Ebooks colleagues at the University Library to do what we can.

I thought it might be helpful to explain where we search for available ebooks, so you can see what is available. Please note that some of this access is temporary during the current situation and it may not continue indefinitely.

Here are some tips

Let's start with Cambridge University Press Cambridge Core ebooks
https://www.cambridge.org/core/browse-subjects/economics

There is certainly one of our textbooks available here in full text: Prof. Oliver Linton's Financial Econometrics  https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/financial-econometrics/09CA0F5E949EB8F516EE4BB4E45F393E

It could also be worth looking through the whole Economics and Econometrics sections and just browsing what is available too. Putting the term "Economics" in the search box brings up over 2000 items, some of which are full ebooks and some of which are book chapters. Cambridge Core also provides Elements, which are longer form articles. You may well find something useful here.

Another useful University Press is Oxford Univesity Press. It is worth searching for their content on Oxford Scholarship Online: https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/
Using the search box on the top right hand side also searches several other University Partner Presses, so you can widen your search beyond OUP. Again it is worth searching for "Economics", "Macroeconomics", "Microeconomics" and "Econometrics" here to see what content they do have available.

Other places that are worth looking through are the EBSCO ebook Academic Collection, which contains (192,000 academic titles) and Proquest Academic Complete which has 180,000 plus titles.
EBSCO https://web-a-ebscohost-com.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk (this is a trial)

PROQUEST https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/home.action

Please do remember we are happy to source and purchase what you need if it is available so do continue to contact us at Marshlib@hermes.cam.ac.uk or email me (clt61@cam.ac.uk) or Simon Frost directly if you need help with ebooks.

Both of these sites will prompt you to login to Raven to gain access. You can also search by topic as with Oxford Scholarship Online and Cambridge Core above. Proquest also gives you the option to browse by subject.

Lean Library: Accessing Cambridge E-resources from anywhere!

The Marshall Librarian recommends that you set up the Lean Library browser extension. This is a way of accessing e-resources that are available through Cambridge quickly and efficiently. You don't even need to have your VPN working for this!

Lean Library is a browser extension that delivers an article to you regardless of where you are linking from. It does not matter where you started searching: Google, Google Scholar, Bing, PubMed, JSTOR or iDiscover etc. If you download the browser extension Lean will automatically detect when you are on a website and there is access via a Cambridge University Library subscription. Where Cambridge does not have subscription access Lean Library will automatically redirect you to an Open Access version of the article if it is available.

Download Lean Library from leanlibrary.com/download

Accessing The Economist remotely during the Covid19 Emergency

Since the Library closed I have received a few enquiries from Economists asking about getting into The Economist (full text and graphics version) now we are all off campus. I have tried it myself on my home laptop and I also had problems - now resolved!

Here is my advice:

Follow the link from either the eresources AZ list or the link from the CJBS Information Centre databases page. This is the link you need: https://proxy.jbs.cam.ac.uk/login?url=https://www.economist.com/

Access is authenticated through our proxy server - unless you go through the link the Economist has no way of knowing who you are. This link is the only way for them to pick up Raven credentials from your computer. So clicking here in a new browser window should prompt you to login via Raven and you should no longer see a request to login half way down the page as you scroll through an article. N.B. Even when logged in this way you will always see subscribe and login buttons at the top but if you can click on an article and read it all the way through you are in.

If you are still having problems open a different browser - it works best in Chrome or Firefox. Try clearing cookies and cache and try again. I have a Mac and I understand many people are accessing it with no problem via Safari. However, in the end, what worked for me was downloading Chrome to my MacBook.

Remember you can always access the text only Proquest access to  The Economist. Just go into iDiscover and login. Search for 'The Economist' and it should be one of the first hits - follow the links through. Unfortunately this subscription will not show images, graphs and graphics.