Art, Design & the Built Environment

If you are working on your dissertation right now and would like some help with citing and referencing, why not call in to one of our RefWorks classes that are running on the different campuses in the University of Ulster this week? With RefWorks you can create your own personal database of references by importing bibliographic details from online databases, or adding them manually yourself. You can then insert these references into your dissertation as citations, and automatically format the paper and the bibliography in seconds. More information on RefWorks is available here, and to attend one of our classes, have a look at the times and dates here. Alternatively, contact your subject librarians to arrange a training session.

Localaw UK is a database that crosses many of the disciplines in the School of Built Environment. It is a useful resource for Housing, Property, Planning, Transport and Environmental Health courses, as well as having a module on Local Government. Covering legislation, case law and guidance relating to these diverse but interconnected areas, Localaw is about to become much easier to use.

Some of the new features of Localaw will include:

• A breadcrumb trail so you can track your exact position within Localaw UK and how you got there
• The ability to restrict your search results to cases, statutes or statutory instruments
• More intuitive search results which include document titles and snippets that show the result in context

Sometimes you use BCIS to get data to answer a particular problem but sometimes you may simply want BCIS to keep you up to date, and that has just got easier with the BCIS Online RSS Feeds.

Subscribe to one or more of these feeds and you can see at a glance when information has been updated.

RSS Feeds are a way of keeping track of latest changes without having to visit a web site. They are becoming common around the web and most people will have seen them on the BBC web site. You will need an RSS reader (although both Internet Explorer and Firefox have RSS support as do many email clients, including certain versions of Outlook). Links to more information about RSS can be found on the BCIS Public web site at http://www.bcis.co.uk/site/scripts/rss_about.aspx.

There are currently five different feeds available covering BCIS Online information:

* Most recent BCIS Online News Articles
* Daywork Rates
* Wage Agreements
* BCIS Briefing Background
* Index series updated in the last month

In each case, the feed tells you when a page or index has been updated and provides a link through to the information. When you click on a link you will be taken to the direct login feature enabled on your on-campus only account, then a link will go straight to the page.

To make use of the BCIS Online RSS Feeds you can either find individual feeds displayed as an icon on the yellow menu above the relevant section when you are logged in to the service, or go to http://service.bcis.co.uk/rss/ to see the full list. If you create a link from within the service, your LoginID will automatically be included in the link. If you use the separate page then you can enter your LoginID in the box provided and click ‘Refresh’ for the feed to remember your login.

The Focus database for commercial property and planning has recently extended its coverage to Northern Ireland. Focus agents are actively pursuing Northern Ireland deals and making them available via their website. It not only covers office, industrial and retail properties, but also provides in-depth analysis of socioeconomic & demographic statistics for UK towns and areas. The town and area analysis will soon be extended to Northern Ireland too. If you are interested in checking out what’s available in Focus, login to the Portal, go to the Learning Resources Tab and find Focus in Library Databases. The required username and password will be displayed there.

The University of Ulster Library has set up access to the IPD Academic Market website. You can find the username and password required by logging in to the University Portal > Learning Resources Tab > Library Databases > I for IPD.

There is a large amount of information available in the IPD Academic Market.  IPD are the one of the world leaders in real estate performance analysis, producing benchmarks, market indices and detailed research. The database holds records of properties owned by investors, managed by portfolio managers and occupied by businesses and governments.

IPD for Property Investment Industry

IPD provide services to our clients based around analysis and benchmarking of property portfolios. In addition to services aimed at investors and fund managers they also produce the industry standard indices and detailed market data, information which is invaluable to all property professionals and academics.

IPD Indices

IPD Indices promote market transparency and ensure real estate plays its part on the investment stage by: providing overall statements of a country’s investment property return, comparing property returns with other assets and identifying trends in major market sectors - retail, office, industrial or residential.

In addition to the national Indices IPD are also able to release results at a Pan-European and Global level.  These initiatives aim to increase transparency worldwide.  The IPD Pan-European Index and the IPD Global Index can be downloaded for free on the IPD website, both report investor returns in four currencies for retail, office, industrial and residential and at an all property level.

Property Derivatives

The IPD indices are also increasingly used for a wide range of derivatives trades and IPD support the derivatives market, not only by producing the Indices but also by publishing Trade Volume reports for France, Germany and the UK for this sector each quarter.

IPD for Property Occupiers
IPD also provide a number of services for occupiers of property globally and is the leading independent provider of property performance measurement for corporate real estate and facilities management.
IPD Occupier Global Estate Management Standards – or ‘GEMS’ are an industry standard for the measurement of property characteristics, functions, and cost. GEMS are endorsed by leading industry bodies such as RICS, BIFM, BCO, IFMA and CoreNet. Our range of GEMS currently consist of the renowned IPD Occupiers Cost Code, the IPD Space Code  and the IPD Occupiers Environment Code.

The information you have access to is two years out of date.  Please remember that the data must be used for academic purposes only.

The Irish Times digital archive, which contains exact reproductions of all articles published by The Irish Times from 1859 onwards, is available free until December 14 2009.

You can also access past issues from the Irish Times at any time via our database Nexis UK. The archive in Nexis runs from 1 June 1992 to the current issue.

Due to a problem beyond our control, the database Planex is currently unavailable. Engineers are working on trying to solve the problem at the moment, and you will be updated as soon as access is restored.

In the meantime, if you need help looking for journal articles relating to planning, property, local government or housing contact your Subject Librarians for further help.

We have received a message from Planning Online informing us that it is working again.

The Planning Online website is down.

The webhosts Kattare (based in Portland Oregon) suffered storm damage yesterday and the fileserver is temporarily out of action.  Kattare staff have been working to restore it and we expect normal service to be resumed later today.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

The School of Built Environment in the University of Ulster set up a social networking site for all the new students enrolling on courses this year. It was a good opportunity for students to communicate to each other before their course started, to ask questions of their course lecturers and find out information in the confusing early days of their courses. The Subject Librarians were involved too, emphasising the importance of the Learning Resource Centre to new students. A full induction programme was designed so that first years became familiar with how to use all the resources available to them, with traditional books and journals and web-based electronic material being part of the training.

A short video was created to help new students find their way to the Learning Resource Centre in Jordanstown, with some navigation tips around the University of Ulster website to highlight useful subject resources. 

Any feedback you may have about the video would be much appreciated.

Unfortunately, there have been some problems trying to access the Building law Reports Online in recent days.  The good news is that access has now been restored.

Please notice that when logging in, the username and password are the same as before, but instead of entering your own email address, you need to enter the following email address: adbe@library.ulster.ac.uk

Remember too, that we do have paper copies of the Building Law Reports on the shelf at 343.42078 in the Journals collection, and you can photocopy them for your project.

If you need any further help, please contact the Information Point or your Subject Librarians.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused while the Online Reports were unavailable, but the problems were beyond the control of the Library.