New – download ebooks from MyiLibrary

ebooks@cambridge has announced that about 280 ebooks can now be downloaded from the MyiLibrary platform onto ebook reading devices. You can use any device able to run Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) such as iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, Sony ereaders, Barnes & Noble Nook, (and laptops, desktops, etc.) but not (currently) Amazon Kindle. You will need to install Adobe Digital Editions—Adobe has a full list of ADE compatible devices.

To download ebooks you need to set up a user account with MyiLibrary. Downloadable ebooks are distinguished by an additional ‘Add to bookshelf »’ option. You add the title to your bookshelf and then download it to your device. A downloaded ebook will stay on your device for 3 days and then automatically disappear. Each downloadable title allows two simultaneous downloads and titles ‘on loan’ can be reserved. Downloadable titles remain accessible online in the normal way in common with all 1,100+ ebooks on the ebooks@cambridge MyiLibrary platform. More titles will be added to the downloadable list in due course.

For more information refer to the MyiLibrary support pages under ‘download support’. Also there are instructions for the iPad and Nook on ebooks@cambridge access instructions page under ‘MyiLibrary’. Ebooks@cambridge is keen to receive your feedback on this new service: please email Jayne Kelly or Rhiannon Taylor at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk.

Note that ebook suppliers Cambridge Books Online and Oxford Scholarship Online already allow users to download chapters from books to e-readers in pdf format (therefore including the Kindle e-reader) but other ebook platforms do not currently allow downloading to e-readers. There is a list of all ebooks@cambridge ebook suppliers.

New e-resources

I don’t know how many of you keep up with e-resource news. The UL has recently subscribed to four new e-resources and announced two e-resource trials. We occasionally mention new e-resources but we recommend that you to keep up with this news yourself by visiting the eResources etc. blog and/or monitoring its rss feed (using, for instance, Google Reader). Also, the UL has a New electronic resources updates news page as well as a Trial resources news page both of which offer rss feeds.

In brief, the four new e-resources are:

The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive (1902-2006) — this replaces the Centenary Archive that previously provided issues of the TLS up to 1990. The full-text search has a much-improved interface.

ICE Virtual Library civil engineering ebooks — 21 civil engineering ebooks with unlimited simultaneous access. Catalogue records will be loaded and searchable through LibrarySearch shortly.

Dictionary of Old English A-G online — complements our existing access to the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus comprising at least one copy of every surviving Old English text.

Welsh Journals Online — a large archive of Welsh and English texts in Welsh language and Welsh-focused publications from 1821 to the present: 400,000 pages of text in both English and Welsh of around 50 titles.

The two e-resource trials are:

Index to Printed Music and the RIPM – Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals. Trial period: Friday 13 January 2012 to Friday 10 February 2012.

Classic Mexican Cinema Online from the Archives of the Filmoteca of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). It covers the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to 1960. Trial period:  17th of January to the 15th of February. No off campus access to this.

Costa Book of the Year Award 2011

Andrew Miller’s sixth novel, Pure, has won the Costa Book of the Year award, announced last night.

Four other titles were in contention for the award: first novel Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson, a biography of poet Edward Thomas Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis, a poetry collection The Bees by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and a children’s novel Blood Red Road by Moira Young (her first book).

We have all five titles in the library on a display table—although a few seem to be on loan already.

Opening of Queen’s Wing 1957

Queen’s Wing was opened by Queen Elizabeth the Queen mother in 1957.

You are now able to view a film made at this time which is available on YouTube.

It shows the young Queen Elizabeth accompanied by the Principal Miss Skillicorn and Senior Student Miss Hazel Wilson. The film starts with the preparation for the visit, the Queenn’s arrival, informal tour of the college including viewing an exhibition of student’s arts and crafts where she is presented with a woven stole made by second year student Mary Holman. Luncheon then takes place in the Great Hall.Guests are then seen gathering in a marquee on the Terrace Lawn and the Queen declares the New Wing open. The inscription commemorating the ceremony is then unveiled by drawing  the college flag  to one side. Finally the Mayor accompanies the Queen’s Mother to the main gate for the farewell.

The Newton Papers: now online in Cambridge Digital Library

As an attention-grabbing introduction to the launch of Cambridge Digital Library, it’s hard to beat the selection of Sir Isaac Newton’s works now available for all to view. The works include Newton’s own annotated first edition copy of his 1,000-page book Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica (1687), usually referred to as the Principia, which would be the basis for the second edition. Also his college notebooks, his notes on optics, and his so-called ‘Waste Book’ (a very large notebook Newton inherited from his stepfather and filled with notes and calculations). The books were photographed, page by page, at high resolution during the summer of 2011 at the rate of about 200 pages per day. Access to these digitized pages for viewing and downloading is free and open to everyone through a web browser. Images made available for download are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0).

This first batch of Newton’s papers comprises over 4,000 pages; the intention is to add more pages until almost all the University Library’s Newton material is available to view online. This new Cambridge project makes use of transcriptions of Newton’s hand-written text produced by the Newton Project run by the University of Sussex. Thus, where the text is hand-written, detailed enlargements of Newton’s original can be examined alongside an easier to read typescript version.

Eventually, the Cambridge Digital Library will become a portal to a large number of digitized collections ‘in the realms of science and faith’ held by the University Library. Wherever possible, and where copyright and licensing permits, access to the material will be free to everyone. Future works to be digitized will include the papers of Charles Darwin and of the Board of Longitude.

ArtStor

We have confirmed that the University has (at last!) subscribed to the excellent ARTstor database after a couple of trials during the last year. No announcement or publicity has appeared yet but, on enquiry, the UL replied as follows:

Thank you for your email. An annoucement will be made by Patricia Killiard [Head of Electronic Services and Systems] regarding the acquisition of ArtStor shortly and details are likely to appear on the eresources blog (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/eresourcesblog/).

ARTstor, as with all eresources, is best accessed via the eresources@cambridge portal. Off campus access is via Raven password. From the ARTstor site: ‘The ARTstor Digital Library is a nonprofit resource that provides more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research.’

Philippa Pearce Memorial Lecture 2011

It is almost five years ago since local author Philippa Pearce died on 21 December 2006. Since 2008 the Faculty of Education, sponsored by Homerton College, has celebrated her contribution to children’s literature with the annual Philippa Pearce Memorial Lecture.

This year’s lecture in September was given by Philip Pullman. There is a video (and a transcript) of his lecture available at www.pearcelecture.com/lectures/2011. Also transcripts of some previous years’ lectures.

Although the lectures were originally planned to run just for five years, they have now been extended for the foreseeable future. The lectures are funded entirely by donations and one annual collection.

Our library holds a large collection of Philippa’s books in the extensive children’s literature collection on the first floor, believed to be one of the country’s largest collections of children’s literature.

Opening of Queen’s Wing

There is a new display near the entrance of the library showing the Queen Mother opening Queen’s Wing in 1956.

The information is from Homerton College Archive.

University Computing Service courses

University Computing Service training courses up until the end of January 2012 are now listed. Places must be booked. Most courses are free to students and staff of the University. New courses include Web Authoring: Dreamweaver Further Use, Office 2007/2010: Moving From Office 2003 to Office 2007/2010, and Excel 2007/2010: Moving From Excel 2003 to Excel 2007/2010. There are many new self-taught and online courses.

Recent news items

University Library: Christmas vacation borrowing for undergraduates started Friday 18 November. Link. (Our own vacation borrowing starts this Friday, 25 November).

The Centre of South Asian Studies: moving to new premises between 14 December and 16 January 2012. Access to their collections will be severely limited during that time. Link

Earn money over the vacation: and help Homerton College Library. We need a team of 8-14 students to re-tag all our books for a new self issue and security system to be introduced next year. For more information please contact the library now.

Win prizes: An Arcadia research project about how students do their academic reading needs input from students – ‘cool prizes’ to be won! Link

New ebooks

Two new collections of ebooks have recently been added to the University’s ebook collection.

All 56 titles from the Cambridge Companions to Music have been made available for the first time as ebooks. They are accessible in Cambridge Collections Online from which we now have access to a total of 467 ebooks from the Cambridge Companions series. These are all included in LibrarySearch.

The other new ebook collection is a selection of 55 titles from The Blackwell Companions Humanities Collection, mainly in the areas of history, geography and sociology. These are available on the CREDO Reference platform which allows users to list all available titles, browse by topic, or use a concept map which is a visual way of exploring information and how it is connected. Catalogue records will be loaded and searchable through LibrarySearch as soon as possible.

Many ebook collections are not searchable through LibrarySearch: around half of the University’s 27 ebook collections need to be accessed directly. Information about this and access to all ebook collections is at ebooks@cambridge. Keep up with ebook and other eresource news at the eResources etc. blog.

Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011

The Sense of an Ending, a 150-page novella by Julian Barnes, has won this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction, considered to be the most prestigious fiction book award in the UK. Barnes has been shortlisted three times before (for Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984, England, England in 1998, Arthur and George in 2005), but never won. The winning title, announced last night, was chosen from an initial list of 138 titles, from which a longlist of 13 titles was announced in July and a shortlist of the following six books was announced in September:

• The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)
• Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate)
• The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (Granta Books)
• Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail)
• Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (Bloomsbury)
• Snowdrops by A D Miller (Atlantic Books)

There was surprise that Alan Hollinghurst’s highly praised new novel The Stranger’s Child was not on the shortlist which the Booker judges claimed favoured ‘readable’ works. The Booker Prize has faced mounting criticism leading to a proposed new book award—The Literature Prize—planned to start next year. The new prize would not be afraid to favour ‘challenging’ reads and would be open to all English writing (notably American writers who are not eligible for the Man Booker) and ‘genre’ fiction (for example science fiction or crime of the required quality) which tends to be ignored and judges as not ‘literature’. Ironically, this year’s winner Julian Barnes himself said of the Booker in 1987 in the London Review of Books: “the only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo.” He may have changed his mond now, and he can console himself with his earlier win of the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

For an alternative take on the Booker, The Guardian has again run its ‘Not the Booker Prize’ which follows identical rules, but books are voted for by members of the public. Its shortlist is a totally different list of six books from the official Booker (but no Hollingsworth, or anything particularly well known). Barnes and Noble, an American book chain, has a summary of every Booker winner in 25 words each.

It seems that Hollingsworth will get another shot at a prize this year: he is shortlisted for the Galaxy National Book Awards UK Author of the Year—a list which resembles what (I imagine) might have been a Booker shortlist to satisfy the critics. However, as The Observer points out: great literature will live on with or without a prize.

With book prizes now covering virtually any type of book you can buy, they are at least useful for buying those Christmas book presents for relatives. For instance, we have recently had the Forward Poetry Prize (winner: John Burnside), the Wellcome Trust Book Prize (books on medicine and health - shortlist), the Crime Writers Association ‘dagger awards (winners), the William Hill Sports Book of the Year (longlist), the Royal Society Winton Prize For Science Books (shortlist), the Roald Dahl Funny Prize (shortlist), the CMI Management Book of the Year (shortlists), the Mind Book of the Year (mental health – shortlist), The Guardian First Book Award (longlists)… And that’s only the more high profile UK book prizes announced this autumn!

The library will, as in past years, acquire the six shortlisted Man Booker titles. Last year’s winner of the Man Booker was The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson.

The Guardian Booker prize 2011: Julian Barnes triumphs at last. Fourth time lucky for Julian Barnes, who wins the Man Booker prize 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending after missing out on three previous occasions.

The Daily Telegraph Julian Barnes wins the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Julian Barnes has won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novella The Sense of an Ending.

The Independent The sense of a happy ending – Barnes wins the Booker. He’s made the shortlist three times before, but finally the novelist has taken the prize.

UL Research Skills Programme

The timetable for this term’s Research Skills Programme is now live at http://training.cam.ac.uk/cul/event-timetable. Please note that these training sessions are bookable in the same way as the Computing Service courses, using the same interface. This gives participants control of managing their own bookings and allows them to view their training history. The courses are free to students and staff and most courses still have free places.

You will see that the programme has grown quite a lot in the past couple of years. New courses this term include:

• Music: How To Search For Pendlebury Items [!! tomorrow !!]
• Music: How To Find Sheet Music
• Music: Introduction to E-Resources
• Be The Boss of Your Hard Drive – Working With Digital Data

Note that there is a variety of rather useful information skills handouts at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/courses/librarians.html.

Libraries Gateway

The Libraries Gateway collects a lot of information together on one page. For instance, there’s a search box for LibrarySearch or eresources searches, a list of University Library introductory tours, links to the mobile interface and two new (pilot) services: lecture lists and past exam papers online.

For new users (and not so new), recent additions to the Gateway are 15 tips on using libraries in Cambridge and an expanded How do I..? section.

Computing Service courses

This term’s Computing Service course programme is now available. Courses run from Tuesday 27 September until Wednesday 30 November. The courses are free and open to students and staff of the University. Note that places must be booked for all courses. There is also a range of online and self-taught courses.

Amongst new courses offered this term are:

• Office 2007/2010: Moving From Office 2003 to Office 2007/2010
• Mendeley: Introduction to a Reference Management Program (Self-paced)
• Condor and CamGrid: An Introduction

eduroam wi-fi now at Homerton College

Homerton College’s wi-fi service is now part of the international eduroam wi-fi network. eduroam allows users to get network access (via a wide range of devices) at any institution connected to eduroam. Depending on local policies at the visited institutions, eduroam participants may also have additional resources (for example printers) at their disposal. Refer to  our IT Department’s Network Setup portal and also see the University Computing Service eduroam pages.

Plagiarism: University statement revised

The University has recently updated its plagiarism policy, which is now available online at http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/plagiarism/.

This substantial revision includes an amendment to the University-wide statement on plagiarism: that a student may be found guilty of an act of plagiarism irrespective of intent to deceive, and be subject to the deprivation of a degree. There are also revisions to the procedures to be followed by Examiners in handling suspected cases of plagiarism.

In full, the two revised clauses in the University-wide statement (with the additional new text in italics) are:

• Plagiarism is defined as submitting as one’s own work, irrespective of intent to deceive, that which derives in part or in its entirety from the work of others without due acknowledgement. It is both poor scholarship and a breach of academic integrity.
• Failure to conform to the expected standards of scholarship (e.g. by not referencing sources) in examinations may affect the mark given to the candidate’s work. In addition, suspected cases of the use of unfair means (of which plagiarism is one form) will be investigated and may be brought to one of the University’s Courts. The Courts have wide powers to discipline those found guilty of using unfair means in an examination, including depriving such persons of membership of the University, and deprivation of a degree.

The golden rule as far as plagiarism is concerned (quoted in the College Tutorial Handbook (pages 15-16) and on many University web pages), is that examiners must be in no doubt as to which parts of your work are your own original work and which are the rightful property of someone else. When presenting the ideas, arguments and work of others, you must give an indication of your source. Even if your assignment is to review the literature on a given topic, you should be ‘adding value’ through criticism and analysis.

This change to the University-wide statement on plagiarism was documented in the Cambridge University Reporter (no. 6231, dated Wednesday 13 July 2011). The old version of the statement is, at the time of writing, still available in the 2010 Statutes and Ordinances of the University of Cambridge.

Man Booker Prize 2011 longlist

The longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced yesterday. The Man Booker Prize, which has been running for over 40 years, is considered to be the UK’s most prestigious literary award for fiction. In a relatively new tradition for this prize, a longlist is now announced. This consists of a ‘baker’s dozen’ (thirteen) books considered to be the best novels by a UK, Republic of Ireland, or Commonwealth author published in the UK between October 2010 and September 2011. The thirteen titles in this year’s longlist are:

• The sense of an ending by Julian Barnes (Random House/Jonathan Cape)
• On Canaan’s side by Sebastian Barry (Faber)
• Jamrach’s menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate Books)
• The Sisters brothers by Patrick deWitt (Granta)
• Half blood blues by Esi Edugyan (Profile/Serpent’s Tail)
• A cupboard full of coats by Yvvette Edwards (Oneworld)
• The stranger’s child by Alan Hollinghurst (Pan Macmillan/Picador)
• Pigeon english by Stephen Kelman (Bloomsbury)
• The last hundred days by Patrick McGuinness (Seren Books)
• Snowdrops by A D Miller (Atlantic)
• Far to go by Alison Pick (Headline Review)
• The testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone Press)
• Derby day by D J Taylor (Random House/Chatto & Windus)

A total of 138 books were considered for this list, seven of which were ‘called in’ by the judges. Notable omissions from the longlist were The forgotten waltz by Anne Enright, Last man in tower by Aravind Adiga, Wish you were here by Graham Swift, King of the badgers by Philip Hensher, We had it so good by Linda Grant, Other people’s money by Justin Cartwright, There but for the by Ali Smith, The blue book by A L Kennedy, and Pure by Andrew Miller.

The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 6 September and the winning title on Tuesday 18 October. Last year’s winner was The Finkler question by Howard Jacobson.

The Guardian – Man Booker prize 2011 longlist includes quartet of debut novels: Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English leads charge by first-time authors as previous winners fail to make 13-strong longlist

The Daily Telegraph – Man Booker Prize 2011 longlist: Alan Hollinghurst and Julian Barnes are among the 13 authors on the longlist for the 2011 Man Booker prize

The Independent – Booker Prize pits tiny Highlands publisher against literary giants

links for 2011-07-22

• HathiTrust 2011 Mid-year Review
  24 June 211 – HathiTrust is an international partnership of academic and research institutions dedicated to ensuring the preservation and accessibility of the vast record of human knowledge. The partnership owns and operates a digital repository containing millions of public domain and in copyright volumes digitized from partnering institution libraries. The preserved volumes are made available in accordance with copyright law… HathiTrust announced a new initiative in to identify orphan works in HathiTrust…
  (tags: hathitrust ebooks googlebooks digitization digitisation)
• What is Distant Reading?
  24 June 2011 – The Stanford Literary Lab, which opened last year [...] asks whether computers can recognize literary genres, and [...] uses network theory to re-envision plots.
  As its name suggests, the Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of “digital humanities,” but Moretti’s approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.
  (tags: digitalhumanities dh textanalysis)
• Microsoft Academic Search: a major update and several new features
  3 July 2011 – As we said in March and we will say again today: look out Google Scholar. It will be interesting to see if, when, and how they respond now that “Academic” has begun to mature. Whatever happens, the addition of Microsoft Academic is good news for info pros and researchers.
  Academic Search debuted in 2009 with all new technology and not a number of enhancements to the Microsoft Live Academic product that was around several years ago and did a poor job (and that’s being very nice)…
  (tags: microsoftacademicsearch academicsearch search googlescholar)
• A mini guide to 40 years of Project Gutenberg
  4 July 2011 – As today marks the 40th anniversary of Project Gutenberg we have a special ebook gift for all our volunteers and visitors. Marie Lebert and friends have put together a mini picture guide on the history of Project Gutenberg; from the founding of the project by Michael Hart, to the first native French ebook, the inauguration of the Distributed Proof-readers, to the posting of ebook #30,000.
  This is a PDF ebook and contains 15 pages of images, each accompanied with a short text covering the main milestones throughout PG’s 40 year history.
  (tags: ProjectGutenberg ebooks openaccess free digitization digitisation)
• The June 30, 2011 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access
  30 June 2011 – Celebrates the growth of open access in the area of the medical literature. It was only a little more than a decade ago when the medline index was available only to subscribers. Today, not only is PubMed available to all – so are more than 3.3 million free fulltext documents indexed in PubMed. 1,176 journals voluntarily participate in PubMed; on average, one new title is added per day. More than half of these journals are open access…
  (tags: openaccess green gold DOAJ PubMedCentral OJS)
• What is wrong with Scientific Publishing and can we put it right before it is too late?
  9 July 2011 – I intend this will be the first of several posts. I often blog in forceful style (rant?) but here will try to be as objective as possible. I’d like to start a discussion and engage responsible STM publishers. I’d like to see if we can define what the basis of publishing is. Why? And how?
  But I am going to start with a strong assertion. STM publishing is seriously broken and getting worse…
  (tags: openaccess green gold libre research STEM)
• Microsoft wants to make it easy for academics to analyze ‘big data’
  The enormous amount of data that scholars can generate now can easily overwhelm their desktops and university computing centers [...] a new project called Daytona, unveiled at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit on Monday. Essentially, it’s a tool—a free one—that connects these data to Microsoft’s giant data centers, and lets scholars run ready-made analytic programs on them. It puts the power of cloud computing at every scholar’s fingertips…
  (tags: MicroSoft data analysis Daytona cloudcomputing)
• A brand new look for PubMed Central
  15 July 2011 – PubMEd Central has undergone a facelift or more accurately, an "interface"-lift, to not only enhance its overall look and feel but also provide users with easier access to PMC resources and information.
  (tags: PubMed PubMedCentral PMC)
• Collect you thoughts with Evernote
  17 May 2010 — Evernote often gets dismissed as yet another web-clipping or "notebooking" tool (like the ill-fated Google Notebook)—an application used for collecting interesting tidbits of information you may come across on the web. While most will find Evernote's web-clipping abilities useful, Evernote can collect so much more.
  (tags: Evernote notes notebook web-clipping writing)

Final Library work experience – Blog

Day 10 – post 5

Last Post (not the piece of music) I’m still unsure whether i should be happy or sad about going back to school…for 3.5 days or so. But it has still been a good two weeks – weekends. Everyone has been very helpful and left me with very good impressions of the college and its library which is what they were also trying to do as well as teaching me the most important thing i have learnt whilst being here … librarians live on tea breaks and also that libraries are very different from what people perceive them as = a building with lots of shelves and stacks of books on those shelves.

They are important facilities with resources for teaching and recreation (for those who like reading)  and the people who run them do a lot more than people might think considering all the things the obviously do but we tend to forget or not glance at. Ordering books, ordering other resources such as CD’s and DVD’s, cataloguing, shelving, maintaining the look and function of the library on a day to day basis: checking books, circulating them within the system of issuing and returning, monitoring doors and people-walking-through who-look-like-they-are-up-to-mischief etc etc etc

I can also see that even from being in a library, work is hard or in my case the journey is tiring or the work in my case also can get a little repetitive but for the right people with the right jobs the rewards are great and well worth the effort put in. Reap what you sow and you should be happy. I have left the library with two displays, less work to do and the college with a few less drinks to drink. I have gained an interest in Philip Pullman unexpectedly after watching the golden compass very kindly lent to me over the weekend and a opinion stating i never want to shelf another book again after this.

I think it has been good and my head agrees (thank goodness) and i think the library staff do as well. They have helped me to enjoy this part of compulsory education seeing it less as two weeks of work and more like two weeks off of schools with a change of scenery for 3 extra hours, a long bike ride and a few extra chores to do.

:) I am happy and content and thanks again for reading this blog, i won’t do another…probably not anyway…