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Building Works

Trinity Term 2012

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A lot of our regular readers seem to have returned now, and I know lots of you are having Oral Exams today – good luck! Ditto to anyone with Collections today or tomorrow…

All vacation loans are due back on Monday of 1st Week (23rd April), so if you had books out please remember to renew or return them over the next few days to avoid fines.

Our exciting new windows are now fully installed, with handles and everything! Apparently the scaffolding will be removed next week, so we’ll soon be all back to normal.

OI Building Work

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This Easter vacation the Oriental Institute is having many of its windows replaced. This may make the library quite noisy (and sometimes possibly quite cold), but we will be trying to keep up our normal opening hours. The work will happen in 4 main stages:
– The bike chain at the front of the building will be removed this Friday (24th Feb 2012). All bikes should be removed by 3:00pm or they will be left unsecured, no longer locked to anything.
– Then through the last weeks of term scaffolding will be erected, covering the front of the building.
– During the vacation itself the windows will be replaced. The Library is scheduled to be re-windowed from Wednesday 28th to Thursday 29th of March, but this may change.
– Finally at the start of next term the scaffolding will be removed.

Indian Government Publications

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The Indian Institute used to be located at the top of the New Bodleian building, which is now undergoing a major renovation. Because of this, the Indian Institute Government Publications are currently being kept in the Oriental Institute basement, on open shelves where readers can consult them. Whilst they’re here, we’ve been taking the opportunity to make sure they’re all catalogued and on SOLO. Over the past month we’ve had two important developments in the collection:

Some of the Indian Institute Government Publications used to be kept in Nuneham Courtney. These have now joined their fellows in the basement, meaning that all the Government Publications are finally reunited! Also it means that all of the Lok Sabha debates (the details of government debates) are on open shelves – which should be exciting news for scholars of the Indian government.

Also, the cataloguing project has just completed the Geography (shelfmark P) section. This section includes the gazetteers (shelfmark Pa), extensive descriptions of every district in India that are invaluable reference guides. There are now full details of all of these books available on SOLO. The Social Conditions (BB) and Statistics (CC) sections are due to be catalogued next.

Vacation Loans & Opening

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We’re now into vacation borrrowing, so if you take out or renew any books you’ll be getting them until the 2nd May – which is Monday of 1st Week.

We’ll be open as normal through the vacation, from 9:15 am to 7 pm on weekdays and from 10 am to 4 pm on Saturdays.

We’re closed for Easter from Thursday 21st April to Monday 25th April (inclusive).

We’re also closed on the morning of Monday 28th March, opening at 12 noon. This is because all the electricity for us, the Sackler and the Ashmolean will be cut off that morning! There will be works taking place in Pusey Lane all that week, so be warned that it may be noisy in the library.

We will be open as normal on the Royal Wedding and May Day bank holidays.

Basement becomes Open Access

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Most of our readers know that the Bodleian Oriental Institute Library has collections in Arabic Language and Literature on our ground floor, the PJ section. However what’s less widely known is that we also keep an extensive Arabic Literature section that belongs to the Middle East Library in our basement. These books have been on our online catalogue and available to borrow for a while, but to get access to them you’ve previously had to ask at the front desk.

We plan to eventually move the books upstairs, so they’ll be closer to the main Islamic Literature section, but for now we’ve made these books open access- the doors to the basement have been removed, and anyone can feel free to browse. The collection contains critical works as well as items of literature, and there are lots of gems to be found there. Enjoy!

The books can be found on the online catalogue http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk, where they all have shelf marks beginning with P.

Post-Easter: Book Move & New Acquisitions

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The book move before Easter went well- all the Bod Turk and some of the Bod Pers books are now stored in the Central Bodleian. They’re returning on Friday to try and take the rest of the Bod Pers.
There have been a few requests that have taken longer than normal to process as the request has been sent to us whilst the book is in the Bod- sorry about this, hopefully soon it will stop being a problem.

Meanwhile in the stock check we managed to get through all of the Minor (600s & 700s), South Asia (500s) and Islamic Religion (Bs) books. We’ll be searching for missing books soon.

Finally, here’s March’s New Acquisitions list. These books will all be Reference Only for the first couple of months, so feel free to come browse them in the library!

B316.A85 ALO 1995
Alon, Ilai
Socrates Arabus : life and teachings
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1995

B755.S457 SHA 2009
Shatz, David
Jewish thought in dialogue : essays on thinkers, theologies, and moral theories
Academic Studies Press, 2009

BM755.E76.F57 FIS 2008
Fishbane, Simcha
The boldness of an halakhist : an analysis of the writings of Rabbi Yechiel Mechel Halevi Epstein the Arukh Hashulhan : a collection of social-anthropological essays
Academic Studies Press, 2008

BP189.A65 AND 1960
Andrae, Tor, 1885-1947
Islamische Mystiker
W. Kohlhammer, 1960

BP75.16.B84 BUH 1961
Buhl, Frants, 1850-1932
Das Leben Muhammeds
Quelle and Meyer, 1961

BR60.C5 A33 AGA 1962 Ref.
Agapius, Bp. of Hierapolis, 10th cent.
Agapius Episcopus Mabbugensis : Historia universalis
Secretariat du CorpusSCO, 1962

DP99 FLE 1992
Fletcher, R. A. (Richard A.)
Moorish Spain
Phoenix, 2001

DS134 BOY 2002
Boyarin, Jonathan
Powers of diaspora : two essays on the relevance of Jewish culture
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

DS149.5.E85 EME 2003
Gitelman, Zvi Y.
The emergence of modern Jewish politics : Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003

DS425 IND 2005
Bryant, Edwin F. (Edwin Francis), 1957-
The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history
Routledge, 2005

DS61.85 ORI 2005
Kalmar, Ivan Davidson
Orientalism and the Jews, 1st ed.
Brandeis University Press ; University Press of New England, 2005

DT79 MUL 1969
Muller, Caspar Detlef Gustav
Grundzuge des christlich-islamischen Agypten von der Ptolemaerzeit bis zur Gegenwart
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969

E184.J5 JEW 1997
Boyarin, Jonathan
Jews and other differences : the new Jewish cultural studies
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

HQ1728.5 JEW 2008
Ivriyot ha-hadashot. English
Jewish women in pre-state Israel : life history, politics, and culture, 1st ed.
Brandeis University Press ; Published by University Press of New England, 2008

LA71 ERZ 1976
Johann, Horst-Theodor
Erziehung und Bildung in der heidnischen und christlichen Antike
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, [Abt. Verl.], 1976

PJ4579.S42 SEG 2010
Segal, Miryam
A new sound in Hebrew poetry : poetics, politics, accent
Indiana University Press, 2010

Stock Check & Stock Move

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This has been a busy week!

The library staff have been doing a stock check. Readers have complained about books that say they are in place in SOLO/OLIS but aren’t actually on the shelves. Whilst some of these are probably on people’s desks, a stock check enables us to work out which books really are missing. So if you’ve seen people wandering around the OIL with little beepy machines, that’s why!
We’ve managed to stock check the Minor (600s & 700s), South Asian (500s) and Islamic Religion (B) sections. Hopefully we’ll do the rest of the library in a future holiday.

Meanwhile, the Bodleian Turkish and Persian books have been being moved out of our basement storage area to the Central Bodleian’s storage. This is to clear space for the up-coming closure of the New Bodleian- we’re due to get lots of books from the Reading Room and from the Indian Institute. Our previously locked stacks will then become open access, allowing people to browse our new material. At least, that’s the current plan. Expect more news as and when we get it…

Book Moving

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If you come into the OIL today, you’re in for a big surprise…

Today’s the day we’re moving all our books around. The B-BP Islamic section that’s been on temporary shelves at the front of the library during building works is being moved back into sequence, and meanwhile we’re taking the opportunity to compress all our upstairs books & removing empty space. We’ll also hopefully be moving the South Asian and Japan/Korea reference works downstairs, so they’ll be nearer their main sequences. This should leave us lots of empty shelves for when the New Bodleian books get shipped over, as well as leaving us lots of room for our Library of Congress sequence to expand into.

We’re hoping to have new maps of the library ready to show everyone by early next week, but hopefully the new sequence will be fairly intuitive.

Ret-Conning 2

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The retro-conversion project discussed last month has continued well, working through the South Asian Collection (India, Sanskrit, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and so on). So far James has inspected almost 2300 items- most of these were already on the system, but around 300 books have been added. He thinks he’ll be finished there in two more months, so all of the South Asian Collection should be complete by Christmas.

In other news, the building works in the library are now fully completed and painted- hurrah! Hopefully our library is ready to welcome the new students arriving from next week…

Library of Congress

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Currently at the Oriental Institute we have 5 series of books on open shelves- the Arabic / Turkish / Persian / Islamic collection on the ground floor and downstairs the Japanese / Korean, South Asian, Hebrew / Jewish and Minor (Syriac / Ethiopic / Armenian / Georgian) Collections.

Sometime in the next decade we’ll be moving to the new Radcliffe Observator Quarter along with Humanities and Mathematics. At this new super-library all the books will be catalogued using Library of Congress classification system.

To prepare for this we’ve started classifying all incoming books using the Library of Congress Classification System, and shelving them in a combined sequence. We’ve also started re-classifying a few of our existing books. This is obviously a huge task, as eventually it will involve re-classifying the entire library! For now our new Library of Congress Series is a bit thin on the ground, but hopefully it’ll grow over the up-coming academic year.

An outline of the Library of Congress Classification Scheme can be found here: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/ – our collection is obviously strongest in the B, D and P classes.

Meanwhile, our other projects are all going well. The emergency exit building works are finished except for painting; the South Asian retroconversion project has now checked 1,300 books; and the Minor Collections retroconversion project is working on the Armenian vernacular books.