October is usually one of our busiest months, made to seem even more so by the stark difference between the beginning of Term and the quiet of the previous few Vacation months.
This year has been no different; Term proper started on the 14th of October, but before that was the excitement of Freshers’ Week, and the OIL Open Day.
The Open Day was well-attended, but may have suffered somewhat from its placement at the end of a busy week in that not many people stayed on after the initial presentations took place. Members of the Library staff took turns in introducing themselves and giving a brief talk on various aspects of the Library; Dawn Vaux introduced the library itself, Dinah Manisty discussed electronic resources, Emma Mathieson the South Asian collections, Gillian Evison introduced herself as the Bodleian’s Head of the Oriental Section, Minh Chung gave a brief overview of the Window on Korea collection, and Kate Guest told the new readers about the Library’s Social Media presence, while other colleagues endeavoured to get as many new readers’ cards registered as possible.
We also had a special appearance from Tim Kirtley, the Librarian at Wadham College, who talked briefly about that college’s Persian collection, which is open to any Oriental Institute readers who wish to use it upon application. There are forms at the OIL front desk for anyone wishing to apply to use this resource.
After the talks there was some time for new users to get to grips with SOLO, PCAS and other scary library-related acronyms, as well as a presentation on the new Library Assistant resource in the office, and some lovely Middle Eastern sweets courtesy of Dinah. We hope that our new readers found the session useful and informative, and are, as ever, very happy to answer any questions that readers bring to us.
Meanwhile, in other news:
For those of you who may have missed the original posts, there is now a way of paying library fines online via the University’s shopping pages http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=2049. We hope that this will be popular with readers.
On Wednesday 30th October, we had a visit from a Korean television crew who were reporting on the Window on Korea section in the basement, which is sponsored by the National Library of Korea, and is now one of the biggest Korean studies collections in the UK.
Finally, and just because we can, another shameless plug for our Mystery Object Competition, which can be found on our Facebook Page. The object itself is near the office on top of the card index, if anyone wishes to have a look at it in the flesh (well, concrete) as it were. Keep those entries coming in!