HFL book moves in Gladstone Link 4th-8th July

Posted on 1 July 2016 by smiths

Gladstone shelving in UGL_3 Monday 4^th July – Friday 8^th July 2016

Book moves in Gladstone Link:

HFL sequence S-Z moving from Upper Gladstone Link to Lower Gladstone Link.

Respacing of HC-R sequence in Upper Gladstone Link

We need to create more space for our growing collection of History Faculty Library books. We will be moving the S-Z sequence from the Upper Gladstone Link down to the Lower Gladstone Link. This gives us approximately 40 metres of shelf space to use to re-space the very tight HC-R sequence.

Library staff will be working on moving the S-Z section down to the Lower Gladstone Link on Monday 4th July and then will be re-spacing the HC-R section of books in the Upper Gladstone Link for the rest of the week. Although we will endeavour to work quietly, shifting books inevitably creates some noise!

Signage will be put in place but if you can’t find a book please come and ask library staff for help.

Register now: Letters in the Digital Age interdisciplinary conference on 21st June

Posted on 16 June 2016 by smiths

Speaking in Absence: Letters in the Digital Age (Conference, Tuesday 21 June 2016 / 9th week – Weston Library and Wolfson College, Oxford)

A conference hosted by Helen Brown (Hertford College / Oxford University Press), Michaela Crawley (Wolfson College / Oxford Centre for Life-Writing) and Olivia Thompson (Balliol College / Bodleian Libraries):

Registration for our conference is live, and closes at midnight on Monday 20 June (registration for dinner closes Thursday at midnight).

The conference is a one-day, interdisciplinary, student-led conversation on how we engage with handwritten letters in the digital age. We aim to explore the potential for collaboration between academics, librarians, technicians, editors, and publishers for the creation of mutual frameworks within which to use the digital as a means to supplement the analogue. We have chosen correspondence as a vehicle for this exploration because in the age of social media, its nature raises immediate and intriguing questions about the progression from material object to digital resource.

Speaking in Absence final poster 2 Daytime activities at the Weston Library will include:

an opening lecture on editing letters by Christopher Ricks (Boston University),
panel discussion with the leaders of pioneering digital editing projects (Robert McNamee, Electronic Enlightenment; Alison Pearn, Darwin Correspondence Project; Howard Hotson, Cultures of Knowledge)
demonstration of the process of digitizing letters by Miranda Lewis (Digital Editor, Early Modern Letters Online),
visual tour of correspondence in the Bodleian collections led by Special Collections curators,
panel on publishing with representatives from Oxford University Press and Blackwell’s.

From the Weston Library, delegates will then proceed to Wolfson College for a further panel discussion with writers and directors of projects based on the letters of Gertrude Bell, Dorothy Hodgkin and Ada Lovelace, and Letters 1916, a crowdsourced local history project in Ireland; and drinks reception with research posters by postgraduate students.

The conference is organised by students as part of the TORCH-OCLW annual postgraduate conference competition, and is additionally sponsored by the Bodleian Libraries and Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute.

The conference fee (£45 / limited number of subsidised undergraduate places at £20) includes refreshments throughout the day (breakfast, lunch, two coffee breaks, drinks reception). The conference dinner (£30) must be booked separately. For the full programme and instructions on registration options, please click here: http://www.e-pistolary.net/speaking-in-absence/programme

If you have any questions please contact olivia.thompson@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

History books: Sale on donation basis – 20th June

Posted on 16 June 2016 by smiths

Come and take a book (or two) away, in return for a small donation (or a big donation if you like!)

Monday, 20th June, 9.30am – 12.30pm
Trevor Roper Room, History Faculty

The History Faculty are having a book sale by donation. Details as follows from Susanne Heinrich, Assistant Graduate Officer:

We managed to extract about a third of the late Hubert Stadler’s books from his house and would like to make them available to historians. The books are mainly academic, in English, and most of them in connection with medieval history, but not exclusively.

The idea behind this venture is to support students, and we will give any proceeds to the Hubert Stadler Scholarship Fund which supports History graduates. So, we welcome any size donation in exchange for a book – and if you are a poor student who puts £1 in the pot then we have supported a History student as well!

Watney book for auction Although most books are quite ordinary, there is one which is bit more special:
Cornbury and the Forest of Wychwood, by Vernon Watney, 1910, leather bound, 32 x 40 x 8 cms, 296 pages. This book is available for sale on Amazon and ABE for around £300, but we have a reserve price on it of £100. We will be holding a silent auction for this book and you can submit your bid either online (this is where you can see more pictures of the book) or in person on Monday, 20th June in the History Faculty, until 12.30pm. Alternatively, you could just email me on susanne.heinrich@history.ox.ac.uk

We will not disclose any of the information about bids to anyone, and will destroy all collected data after the event. The highest bidder will be asked to contribute the promised amount to the Hubert Stadler Scholarship Fund which supports graduate students, before collecting the book.
The book can be viewed during standard office hours in the Graduate Office.

Do come and browse through the books on the 20th and tell anyone who might be interested. Any remainder will go to Oxfam in Turl Street.

New: International Bibliography of Humanism and the Renaissance (IBHR)

Posted on 10 December 2015 by iholowaty

I am pleased to report that Oxford users now have access to the online International Bibliography of Humanism and the Renaissance via SOLO or Databases A-Z.

The IBHR is an international bibliographical resource of academic publications on the Renaissance and the early modern period. It continues the printed Bibliographie internationale de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance.

The core of the Bibliography focuses on European history and culture that spans the 16th and 17th centuries, and encompasses a broad spectrum of subjects, ranging from religious history through to philosophy, science and the arts; and from military and political history through to social and gender studies.

IBHR includes publications on the European interactions with the wider world through exploration, colonisation, slavery and the Christian mission and extends its coverage to the modern period with the inclusion of modern hermeneutics, reception studies and the 21st-century teaching of texts written in the target period. It covers publications written in various languages such as English, French, German, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Romanian, Dutch and Japanese.

The Advanced search screen allows you to select a geographical area and academic discipline as well as limit your search to a particular century. Users of the International Medieval Bibliography and Bibliography of British and Irish History will find the interface very familiar already.

PCAS downtime 24th/25th March

Posted on 11 March 2015 by

Unfortunately, PCAS will not be available on Tuesday 24th and Wednesday 25th March due to migration to new software and servers which will make PCAS more reliable. During the downtime, it won’t be possible to print, copy, scan, access WebPay accounts or make Scan and Deliver Requests. Print jobs sent but not collected before 24^th March may not be printable.

After the upgrade, printing from sunrays will be withdrawn and the login screen on the machines will look slightly different (see below), but otherwise the system will work as before. We apologise for the disruption.

Knowing your EBL from your ebrary: guide to ebooks

Posted on 30 October 2014 by iholowaty

EBL, Ebrary and EBSCOhost e-books logos

Are you struggling to find our ebooks in SOLO? Do you want to learn how best to use ebooks?

Read here about LibGuide on Ebooks, which ebook collections are available and where you can sign up for eBooks courses.

Bodleian Libraries provide access to thousands of online books across many subjects. We have subscriptions to modern monographs as well as early printed books.

> Overview of ebook collections in Oxford.

To help our readers find the ebooks and make best of them, a new LibGuide on eBooks has now been published at http://ox.libguides.com/e-books.

Use the guide to learn more about:

the different ebook providers and how their “loan” policies differ.
which devices are compatible with different formats. This is useful if you are thinking of buying an ebook reader.

Multidisciplinary ebook packages

eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – Currently Oxford Libraries have over 2100 purchased e-books across all subjects (‘Our Collection’) plus more than 3000 free e-books.
Access to each e-book is normally limited to two simultaneous users.

E Book Library (EBL) – a growing collection of e-books from major academic publishers worldwide in humanities, science and medicine and social studies. The collection also provides 5 minutes free browse to over 200,000 “non-owned” books in the collection, with the option to send purchase requests to library staff.

Ebrary Academic Complete – a collection of around 110,000 e-books from over 500 academic publishers. University members may also download books for 14 day loans (loan limit of 10).

University Press Scholarship Online – 16,000+ titles in 28 subject areas, from Oxford and 17 other leading scholarly presses, e.g. British Academy, Chicago UP, Edinburgh UP, Liverpool UP, Stanford UP, Yale UP, University of California UP, etc.

Humanities

ACLS Humanities E-Books – 1,700 scholarly monographs, mostly history of Britain, Europe, America, Africa, Middle East and Asia.
Cambridge Companions Online – Literature, Classics, Philosophy, Religion and Culture.
Cambridge Histories Online – 250+ titles published since 1960 by CUP
Oxford Handbook Online
Oxford Scholarship Online -1,000+ OUP titles in Classics, Economics and Finance, History, Literature, Philosophy, Political Science and Religion.
Past Masters – Humanities Full Text Works – complete works of individual authors.
Shakespeare Collection – Arden editions and more.

Early printed books

Early English Books Online (EEBO) – printed English books from 1473-1700.
Early English Books Online – Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) – a growing corpus of electronic full text editions of the EEBO collection.
Early European Books (EEB) – printed European (esp. Danish, Dutch, Italian, some French) books upto 1700
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) – 150,000 books published during the 18th Century.
Making of the Modern World – 61,000 titles published from 1450 to 1850.

Free online books

Google Books Millions of books digitised by Google. Many only available in Snippet View. Be careful you know what exactly you are looking at. Describing multivolume works or different editions is not Google’s strength.

Internet Archive (archive.org) Giant digital library of 1.8 million texts. Excellent also for digitised European books, esp. of the 19th century.

Project Gutenberg “Download over 30,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone or other device. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free ebooks.”

Need more help? Sign up for the Bodleian iSkills course on ebooks

iSkills: e-Books

Date: 21 Nov (wk 6), 9:15-10:30

An overview of academic e-books looking at what is currently available in e-format, how to find and access e-books and how to make the most of e-book functionality. Who is this session for? All members of Oxford University and other Bodleian Libraries readers. Book now.

Location: IT Services Help Centre, 13 Banbury Road
Presenter: Hilla Wait, Jo Gardner

iSkills: e-Book Readers

Date: 21 Nov (wk 6), 10:45-12:15

How useful are e-book readers in academic work? Can they be used for accessing library materials? What are the features to look out for when considering purchase? These and similar questions will be considered with reference to the i-Pad, the Amazon Kindle and Sony Touch e-readers and smart phones. Who is this session for? All members of Oxford University and other Bodleian Libraries readers. Book now.

Location: IT Services Help Centre, 13 Banbury Road
Presenters: Hilla Wait, Ian Chilvers

New online guide to oral history resources

Posted on 19 July 2013 by iholowaty

Interested in oral history? Visit our new online guide to oral history resources at http://ox.libguides.com/oralhistory

This newly launched LibGuide provides an introduction to the subject and acts as a portal to oral history resources available online.

Browse by topic, location or date

The introductory pages provide links to advice on the use and conduct of oral history. They also highlight some key resources for beginning your research in the field and for staying up-to-date with new developments.

At the centrepiece of the guide is an extensive set of links to over 150 British and Irish oral history resources available online, both through dedicated oral history project websites and digitised archival holdings. The resources are each accompanied by a summary description of their subject and content, and can be browsed by title, decade, location or topic.

The resources featured are extremely wide-ranging, from a collection of interviews with British diplomats (BDOHP), to a record of post-war British theatre, a study of migration in Ulster during the 1970s (VMR), and an exploration of the former jobbing system of the London Stock Exchange.

All the websites featured in the LibGuide have also been added to the Bodleian History Faculty Library’s Delicious page and are fully searchable by keyword.

Related Links

Unlocking Archives Talk on 25 July

Posted on 19 July 2013 by iholowaty

Lunchtime talk: Unlocking Archives
a new series about research in Balliol College’s special collections

Dr Ross McKibbin
Senior Research Fellow,
St John’s College

Thursday 25 July, 1-2 pm
Balliol Historic Collections Centre
St Cross Church, Manor Road
* all welcome *

Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last no more than half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some of the Balliol MSS discussed.

Another in Balliol Special Collections’ Unlocking Archives talk is coming up on Thursday 25 July; beat the ‘heat’ with a refreshing lunch hour in a cool stone building.

Dr McKibbin was Tutor in History at St John’s 1972-2005 and is now a senior research fellow at St John’s. His research interests are in late nineteenth and twentieth century British history. The diaries of Harold Nicolson (1886-1968), of which Balliol owns the surviving volumes for the years pre-1930 and the complete typescript originals for 1930-1963, are among the most frequently and thoroughly consulted of Balliol’s modern personal papers collections – both because they form a fascinating picture of a man and his times, and because the editions of the diaries that have appeared thus far are very heavily edited. There is still much to discover….

The next Unlocking Archives talk will be in October.

Related Links

Bod HFL books are moving

Posted on 17 July 2013 by iholowaty

As part of the programme of building works and improvements in the Radcliffe Camera and Gladstone Links, Bodleian History Faculty Library material has started moving.

Lower Camera book move

Books in the Lower Camera (A-DA175) are being moved to create space for the new entrance to the Radcliffe Camera. The books are still housed within the Lower Camera but are being respaced across the bays.

To prepare for the move of Bodleian material in Upper Gladstone Link into the Lower Gladstone Link, some respacing is also taking place in the Lower Gladstone Link. Bod HFL books in the Lower Gladstone Link are being gathered together into a smaller space, with less gaps at the end of each shelf. Temporary signage is in place to show the more compactly shelved contents of the rolling stacks.

Temporary signage in the Lower Gladstone Link

Using Bod HFL books over the summer

No Bodleian History Faculty Library books are being removed from the Radcliffe Camera or Gladstone Link as part of this move and they should remain accessible throughout these initial changes. If you are unable to locate material, please ask library staff for assistance.

Plan ahead

Further changes and work, some of which will be disruptive, is scheduled to take place this summer. You can sign up for our mailing list (on the right hand side of this page) or RSS feed to receive updates about further work, or check our Summer Works webpage. If you are planning to use the library, do check ahead of your visit and contact us if your have any questions.

Related Links Summer Works webpage | Bodleian Library website | Contact us

Toward a digital toolbox for individual researchers in the Humanities talk 7 May

Posted on 2 May 2013 by iholowaty

Toward a digital toolbox for individual researchers in the Humanities
Presented by Gabor Toth and Peter Watson
Tuesday 7 May 12.30-13.30
IT Services, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford
Book a place

Part of the make: series, this session looks at how humanities researchers can build a digital environment for their own projects. It examines some of the database and programming tools that are available, and most importantly, how a purpose built digital environment can enhance the process of understanding texts.

The session will show how two DPhil projects in History applied various digital tools (text encoding, data visualisation, corpus linguistics, semantic web) to analyse medieval texts.

Case 1: The Florentine merchant
In 1457, a Florentine merchant decided to transmit his experience and knowledge to his sons. He created a manuscript which covers all aspects of human existence. The goal of this project is to analyse the thinking and knowledge of this merchant as it is represented in the text. The manuscript was transcribed and encoded in TEI XML. The transcription was then transformed into a semantically and linguistically annotated corpus. Finally, an ontology is being built to reconstruct and visualise the knowledge of the merchant.

Case 2: English family charters
The project uses eXist for an XML ‘native’ database of an English family’s twelfth and thirteenth century charters and related material. A TEI marked up copy of the text allows publication either on the web or as pdf as well as the normal database query, listing and tabulation functions. Bibliography is fully incorporated using Zotero. The data relating to social and text networks can be extracted and passed to programmes such as NodeXL to enable it to be visualized graphically.

Book online at http://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/TM13E

Bodleian History Faculty Library at Oxford

A Bodleian Libraries blog

Category Archives: Faculty