First and foremost, a fond farewell to the last of our departing finalists – and a last ditch plea to those of you who have outstanding fines to please pay them off before you go. While the University is not able to prevent you from graduating because of outstanding library fines, there is still the possibility of repeat offenders being referred to the Proctors, and nobody really wants that.
June has been busy for us for various reasons; as well as the general library busyness of the last few weeks of Exams, we have been refurbishing the staff areas. Dawn and Dinah’s office was redecorated at the end of May and all the staff offices now have nice new desks and other furniture which makes for a far more efficient office environment than the previous ad-hoc arrangement of long planks and filing cabinets.
The upgrade of the door entry system was also an ongoing situation during June, but it appears that most people’s cards are now working on the front and Library doors. We will continue to add orange card-holders to the system manually, as we used to on the old one, but blue cards should work automatically. Anyone experiencing problems may need to get an updated card if theirs is too old for the proximity technology, but do ask us and we will endeavour to help.
Vacation Loans have been in force since the middle of the month, so anything borrowed by members with a normal (i.e. non-staff) membership will be checked out until 14th October (Tuesday of First Week, Michaelmas Term). This will only not apply in the event that a readers’ card expires before this point, in which case the due date will be the card expiry date.
Summer Announcements
There are various changes afoot in the Oriental Libraries this summer. While OIL remains constant – our opening hours are the same as for Term: 0915-1900 during the week and 10-4pm on Saturdays – a great deal of change is taking place elsewhere. The Chinese Studies Library will be moving out of the Clarendon Institute in Walton Street to new accommodations in the Dickson Poon Building in the grounds of St Hugh’s College of Canterbury Road from July; and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies will be moving into the Clarendon Institute in September, from their current base at Yarnton Manor. The website is here: http://www.ochjs.ac.uk/about/announcement/
The Chinese move in particular does concern OIL, inasmuch as we will be the place for people to return any borrowed CSL books during their period of closure, which begins at the end of Friday 5th July. We do not have a definite opening date for the new Bodleian K B Chen China Centre Library at present due to the logistical complications of the move, but there should be regular updates on the CSL pages of the website: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/csl/chinese-studies-library-move.
Meanwhile staff at OIL will be assisting Weston Library colleagues in preparations for the movement of the Oriental materials from the current SCRR at the RSL to the new reading rooms; we will update when we know more details, but this should not affect the general running of the Library during this time.
Otherwise we anticipate a fairly quiet summer – bar the inevitable moving round of the Library of Congress collection into the space vacated by the reclassified items!