Musings on Newton and the age of AquaBrowser

Yesterday a student came into the library asking where to find a certain book. He showed me the reference on his mobile phone. How many are using their mobiles and other handheld devices, to access library catalogues now? A week ago or so, Tony Hirst over on the University’s Arcadia Project Blog was Doodling Ideas for a Mobile Library App.

Since then, Tony has been musing on further aspects of the University’s libraries, such as how they might be made more accessible and ’user friendly’. For instance, by improving consistency with regard to the loan types and cataloguing rules which, with the many separate college and faculty libraries, have developed so each library has its own different rules. Or how about Rethinking the Front End of the Library Catalogue.

The Arcadia Project Blog is an interesting read, not just for anyone keen to understand the workings of the University libraries but also for those interested in using the excellent free web applications available. For example, on the companion Arcadia Mashups Blog there was an item on Getting Started With Yahoo Pipes: Merging RSS Feeds and recently back on the Project blog an item on free bibliographic tools Mendeley and Zotero plugin for the Firefox browser: Reading list management with Mendeley.

Tony Hirst also has his own blog: OUseful.Info, the blog…

Talking about ‘Rethinking the Front End of the Library Catalogue’ we have, by coincidence, been told (although I cannot find an announcement – is it still a secret??) that the University Library has puchased AquaBrowser to enhance the overall search and discovery of its resources. It will come into service early next year. Click over to University of Edinburgh Library AquaBrowser search to see it in action: the typical AquaBrowser front end with a simple Google-style search box. Do a search and the whole thing opens like a flower with research results, ‘word clouds’ and clustering of results into groups or ‘facets’. None of this is particularly new in itself, but its application, finally, to library catalogues is a step towards improving the traditional library catalogue search experience.

Holiday borrowing from today

Holiday borrowing starts today. The return date for all items is now Monday 18 January 2010.

Note that today, Friday 27 November, is the set return date for all items you already have on loan. These items must be renewed as soon as possible—especially if you want to keep them over the vacation.

Costa Book Awards shortlist

The following books were yesterday shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Book Awards:

Novel

• Penelope Lively - Family Album (Fig Tree)
• Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate)
• Christopher Nicholson - The Elephant Keeper (Fourth Estate)
• Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn (Viking)

First Novel

• Rachel Heath - The Finest Type of English Womanhood (Hutchinson)
• Peter Murphy - John the Revelator (Faber)
• Raphael Selbourne - Beauty (Tindal Street)
• Ali Shaw - The Girl with Glass Feet (Atlantic)

Biography

• Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius (Faber)
• William Fiennes - The Music Room (Picador)
• Simon Gray - Coda (Granta and Faber)
• Caroline Moorehead - Dancing to the Precipice (Chatto)

Poetry

• Clive James - Angels over Elsinore (Picador Poetry)
• Katharine Kilalea - One Eye’d Leigh (Carcanet)
• Ruth Padel - Darwin: A Life in Poems (Chatto)
• Christopher Reid - A Scattering (Arete Books)

Children’s Book

• Siobhan Dowd - Solace of the Road (David Fickling Books)
• Mary Hoffman - Troubadour (Bloomsbury)
• Patrick Ness - The Ask and the Answer Chaos Walking: Book Two (Walker Books)
• Anna Perera - Guantánamo Boy (Puffin)

The 20 books above were chosen from 592 books overall. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which has already won the prestigious Man Booker Prize this year, is included for the Novel Award with relative unknown Christopher Nicholson’s The Elephant Keeper about “an 18th century boy’s love affair with an elephant”.

The children’s shortlist includes Anna Perera’s Guantánamo Boy about a boy who, amongst other children, was held at the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. Both this and Wolf Hall are held by Homerton College Library and, as in previous years, we may acquire others on the shortlist.

To be eligible for this year’s Costa Award books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between November 2008 and October 2009. Short stories and collections of short stories are not eligible. The books are submitted by the publishers. The winner of each category will be announced onm Tuesday, 5 January 2010 and an overall ‘most enjoyable’ book announced Tuesday, 26 January 2010. Last year’s category winners were:

• Novel: Sebastian Barry – The Secret Scripture (overall winner)
• First novel: Sadie Jones – The Outcast
• Biography: Diana Athill – Somewhere Towards the End
• Poetry: Adam Foulds – The Broken Word
• Children’s: Michelle Magorian – Just Henry

The Guardian: Little-known novelist vies with big names for Costa prize

The Times: Guantánamo ‘nightmare’ novel nominated for Costa prize

Homerton College Royal Charter

From Gale Bryan, Bursar and Fellow of Homerton College:

The Privy Council Office have advised the College that on 17 November Her Majesty in Council ordered the Application of the Great Seal to the Royal Charter of Homerton College.

The process of production and proofing will now go ahead before printing on vellum in preparation for the application of the Great Seal, when the Royal Charter will take effect.

It is expected that transfer of governance from the Board of Trustees to the Fellowship will take place in March 2010.

Bibliography of British and Irish History—one month trial

A one month trial to the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) is now available for students and staff of the University. The above link works on campus, there is also an off campus link for which you need your Raven password. Access is through Brepolis who already provide the University with access to the International Medieval Bibliography and other online resources in history.

The trial, which ends on Tuesday 15 December, has been established to evaluate the new service with a view to taking out an institutional subscription. There are notes for users familiar with the Royal History Society Bibliography.

This trial comes ahead of a change in how the RHS Bibliography and London’s Past Online are published which takes effect from 1 January 2010:

The Bibliography of British and Irish History Online (BBIH) has grown out of, and will supersede, the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History. Over the last ten years the RHS Bibliography has established itself as an essential tool for researchers at every level and throughout the world working on British and Irish history from the coming of the Romans to the present. Following the cessation of Arts and Humanities Research Council project funding at the end of 2009, a change has been introduced in order to secure the long-term future of the Bibliography. From now on, the BBIH will be published by Brepols Publishers and will change from a free access to a subscribed service, with institutional and individual subscriptions available.

Arrangements for Christmas vacation

All books borrowed on and after Friday 13 November will be due back in the Library on the fixed date of Friday 27 November. This is to enable fair allocation of reservations. Please note that this will result in a very short borrowing period if you take books out during the week ending Friday 27 November.

On Friday 27 November, from about 9.30am and thereafter, books can be borrowed for the Christmas vacation or renewed for the Christmas vacation with a return date of Monday 18 January 2010. Please note that renewals are subject to the item not being reserved by another reader.

Computing Service News

Now available: the October quarterly roundup of Computing Service news.

Items that caught my eye are:

• PWFweb: Personal Web Pages on the PWF – ‘the Computing Service will from now on create, in each new personal filespace, a public_html directory and a default index page along with a simple stylesheet…’
• Computing Service announcements now available on Twitter – ‘Headlines from announcements made by the Computing Service are now available via the micro-blogging site Twitter. Follow UcamCS or see http://twitter.com/UcamCS.’ They recently tweeted: “PWF slowness now cured”…
• Phishing – they want your account details – ‘Over the weekend [this was back in August] a depressingly large number of people, from undergraduates to senior academics, fell for a phishing message and gave away their email details (username, password, full email address, full name).’ Please be very careful.

Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize

The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2009 was announced yesterday evening: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The judges were not unanimous and, according to The Times, Mantel won in a secret ballot by three votes to two. But we are not told what the other book was.

In The Independent Mantel explained that her book was a study of power, told through the biography of Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rises to wield immense power in King Henry VIII’s court and finally becomes the architect of the Reformation. “The exercise of power, the business of obtaining power, how it is won and lost … we are still living in a Machievellian world,” she said.

According to The Guardian, Mantel has started work on the sequel to Wolf Hall, which will be titled The Mirror And The Light. “What I have got at the moment is a huge box of notes,” she added.

The Library is in the process of acqiuring all six Man Booker shortlisted novels, as it has done for previous years.

New Fellows of Homerton College

The Homerton College News web page lists a number of new Fellowships, Honorary Fellowships, and staff awards. Amongst them are the following appointments:

Two Honorary Fellows: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (Master of the Queen’s Music) and Carol Ann Duffy (Poet Laureate)(from January 2010).

Five new Fellows: Prof Maria Nikolajeva (Professorial Fellow, and Professor of Education), Dr Ashwin Moheeput (Fellow and Lecturer in Economics), Dr Axel Bangert (Junior Research Fellow in Film Studies), Dr Anders Hansen (Junior Research Fellow in Mathematics), and Dr Melanie Keene (Junior Research Fellow in History and Philosophy of Science).

Dr Kate Pretty, Principal, was recently awarded the CBE for her services to Higher Education.

The Homertonian (no.13, May 2009, page 2) published an article by Dr John Hopkins (Fellow and Director of Studies in Music) abour Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

The Library holds a number of Carol Ann Duffy’s works including some of her children’s poetry and also her recent collection, Rapture (2008), comprising intimate poems about a love affair. We also have a number of Peter Maxwell Davies’ CDs and musical scores.

Deposit your thesis for online access in DSpace

Graduates, staff, and alumni of the University can now deposit their theses in the University’s ‘institutional repository’, DSpace@Cambridge, where it will be digitally archived and made available online. More information at Deposit of electronic theses.

This may mean very little to you! In brief, most higher educational establishments now have an institutional repository (IR) which can act as an electronic ’showcase’ of their research output as well as being a safe long-term curated storage facility. Also, many research funders (for example, all seven members of Research Councils UK) now require that all final peer reviewed research reports are available ’open access’ (freely available online to anyone). This can most effectively be achieved by ’self-archiving’ a copy in your IR which will ensure the report is exposed to web search engine ‘crawlers’ and that it includes the correct level of metadata. The open access element is additional to, and does not affect, the traditional publication of the research in a peer reviewed journal.

DSpace@Cambridge is the name given to ourIR (‘DSpace’ is actually the name of the software that runs it). It says: “The repository was established in 2003 to facilitate the deposit of digital content of a scholarly or heritage nature, allowing academics and their departments at the University to share and preserve this content in a managed environment”. If you browse the site you can see that there is already some stuff in there. But the main criticism of many IRs is that, so far, compared to the output, comparatively little material has been deposited in them.

Physics students may well be familiar with arXiv.org, a ‘central repository’ not linked to any particular institution (although now run by Cornell University), in which over half a million research papers have been deposited over many years. It was, admittedly, established much longer ago to serve researchers in a fast-moving field where traditional print publication finds it harder to keep up with events. But it is hoped that emerging individual IRs will achieve the same level of patronage in the future.