March News and April Announcements

Move of the Japanese Collections

During March, the Japanese Collections at the Oriental Institute Library have been moved to the Bodleian Japanese Library. This includes the Short Loan books, the books under the Library of Congress classification, and the majority of the collection, which was housed downstairs.

The decision was taken by the Committee for Library Provision in Oriental Studies – subcommittee on Japanese Studies to move the books from OIL so that all the Japanese material would be accessible in one place.

Meanwhile, readers who have borrowed Japanese books may return them to OIL and we can transfer them to the BJL, or may just take them straight to the BJL.

Reclassification and reorganising

Kate is currently undertaking one of her epic bookmoves, moving the books in the Library of Congress section into the space most recently vacated by those books reclassified since the last move in September of 2015. She is currently in the DS section on the back wall of the Library and hopes to take no more than another week (bearing in mind she works 3 afternoons with us and is elsewhere in the Bodleian the rest of the time) to finish up to the As.

Please bear with us while this work is taking place. Care is taken to make sure that not too much noise is generated by the occasional toppling book, but some disruption is inevitable so we try to use the vacations when there are fewer readers around to do this kind of moving.

SOLO downtime

A note from the Bodleian Libraries:

SOLO will have limited availability from 5pm on Friday 8th April until 9am on Monday 11 April.

This is due to essential maintenance on associated background systems. Users will still be able to search the catalogue but:

You will not be able to request items
The Find & Request tab will not be visible, so there will be no live item or availability information
It will not be possible for users to view or renew their loans
It will not be possible to place requests

The silver lining is that online access to electronic resources will be unaffected.

Just a short one…

A short post this month, but with fewer readers due to the vacation it has been rather quiet. We hope to update everyone on the skylight news next month!