Category Archives: Projects

Employ.Ed Hidden Collections Intern – Weeks 5 to 6

Three quarters of the internship now behind me, I have decided to focus on actually finishing off projects that I have been working on – and that means the New Zealand House periodicals collection first and foremost. That is now almost entirely listed, and should hopefully start appearing on the catalogue in the foreseeable future (and a few things are already available under an NZSC Per. Shelfmark). The list currently contains 125 series, some of which are unique in the UK, ranging from art magazines, through government journals and statistics, to environmental agencies’ reports.

On a more serendipitous note, I stumbled across a collection of works of the hitherto unknown to me Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka, and found really good poem about… Robert Bruce. The poem was written in 1893, when Ukraine was within the borders of the Russian Empire, and played its part in the national resurrection and independence movements of the Ukrainian people. For all the differences between the circumstances they are in, with one country considering independence and the other at risk of losing it yet again, the history of both Ukraine and Scotland is currently being written, and in that context this poem sounds very relevant and appropriate.*

*We only have the book in Ukrainian; I am afraid that the full text of Robert Bruce, King of Scotland is not available in English online or at Edinburgh University Library, but here is a link to the UK holdings of her collected works in English translation:

COPAC holdings for Lesya Ukrainka

Nik Slavov, Hidden Collections intern

Request Lesya Ukrainka books and other authors through Inter-Library Loans

Not available at University of Edinburgh? Recommend a book

Find New Zealand House periodicals on the online catalogue

 

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Employ.Ed Hidden Collections Intern – Weeks 2 to 4

Halfway through the internship, so here comes another update from the Annexe.

These few weeks have been a lot more eventful than I would have expected.

Let me try and get things in chronological order. In week two I made a list of (hopefully) everything in our House of Lords collection (or everything in our collection that is to do with the House of Lords to be more precise) for the National Library of Scotland, who are aiming to digitise their collection and wanted to know what we can offer as back-up.

Important lessons were learned from this trailblazing work, for example:

  • Wear a dust mask when you are spending hours surrounded by 160 shelves of really old books.
  • Take regular breaks for fresh air.
  • Do not cough your lungs out due to not following the aforementioned guidelines.

Since then I have mostly been working on the New Zealand periodicals collection, which seems to be going at quite a good pace (I am almost certain I will be able to finish the pre-cataloguing work while I am here, with luck maybe get to cataloguing as well). There were occasional patches of very interesting things, chief among them The Journal of the Polynesian society. While it is unlikely to get a spot in the Main Library, it is available as an on-line resource, and I thoroughly recommend leafing through it to anyone interested in linguistics, anthropology, geography or history. The covers of National Educations with their pictures of Maori (and Pakeha) kids from the 80’s strongly intensified my sentimental state of mind around Wednesday, week 3. Bad puns in old advertisements made me groan (XYZ Pens and Markers – Always write for you!). Oh, and I found pages from a pamphlet or book from the 1906-07 international fair in New Zealand featuring pictures of towns and landscapes, advertisements (Hotel Central with its new Pneumatic Elevator!), and similar. Another thing I ran into was “A Souvenir of the Empire Coronation Contingents at the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth”.

A Souvenir of the Empire Coronation Contingents at the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

Their majesties King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Crowned in Westminster Abbey May 12th 1937

A Souvenir of the Empire Coronation Contingents at the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

A Souvenir of the Empire Coronation Contingents at the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

Of course, there are also patches of extremely chaotic and messy stuff. And then there are the 27 shelves of Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives of New Zealand – a truly electrifying read. No pictures here. You’ll have to come and see that I am not overstating for yourself.

How to do baking. Put the oven on at Regulo 5...

How to do baking (Cherry Fairy Cakes)

Our Thomas Nelson collection however is probably soon to become available, and that contains a number of lovely and interesting books, from the pretty Nelsons Classics books to French textbooks for Swedish students. Also, a lot of bibles. Also, “How to do baking.”

And here’s what I am most looking forward to – I have been asked to take a look at some of our special collections. Yay, old books! Papyrus bindings! Weird drawings! A History of Serpents and other liuing creatures! Let us see if will manage to get my hands of some incunabula. More on that story as it unfolds.

The colleagues, as we’ve now established through thought experiments with Scott and Iraklis, are almost certainly all real. This is a good thing to keep in mind, because hearing someone starting to speak on the radio when you’ve forgotten you have one and you know you are working alone in the store can be a terrifying experience.

In addition, Iraklis said that they won’t let me go when my contract expires (possibly under the influence of fudge and baked goods). Let’s see how that works out. In all fairness – I’d be quite happy to stay.

Nik Slavov, Hidden Collections intern.

Nelsons classics

The Thomas Nelson Archive contains, “a number of lovely and interesting books.”

The National Library of Scotland

Edinburgh University Health and Safety Department 

The New Zealand Collection

The Thomas Nelson Archive (from the Annexe blog)

The Journal of the Polynesian Society

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Employ.Ed Hidden Collections Intern – Week 1

The Library Annexe will be joined for the next 8 weeks by Nik Slavov, who is working for the University as part of the Employ.Ed on Campus summer internship programme, in collaboration with the Careers Service.  Nik is our Hidden Collections Intern, who is tasked with understanding and prioritising print books stored in the Library Annexe, that are not on the Library’s online catalogue.  The eventual goal is to make unique material available for the user community.

Here Nik reflects on his first week at the Library Annexe.

Carl Jones, Library Annexe Supervisor

My first week at the Library Annexe now behind me, it would appear it is now time for me to look back and see how that went.

It feels like I haven’t seen anything yet. On the other hand, considering how much I’ve learned about the House of Lords, the native population of Oceania, reclaiming land for ironsand processing, Australasian literature in the 70’s, Antarctica, dairy farming, soil erosion and pollution (it is actually quite scary), New Zealand’s defence program and a number of other topics that I had never thought to occupy my brain with, all of that being just a side effect of organising a few shelves at Annexe 1…

Well, considering all that, I still haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s there. If my math’s any good, I’ve seen less than 0.05 % of what is held in that room only. At this point, Pratchett’s theory of L-space seems very plausible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Space#L-space). The sheer mass of books distorts the space-time continuum, which is why the Library Annexe is way bigger on the inside.

The team is lovely. In all fairness, given the randomness and rareness of my encounters with other human beings within the Annexe, and the alleged hallucinogenic effect of the fungus that develops in old books, I am not entirely certain they actually exist, but in case I didn’t make you guys up – it’s lovely working with you. Or at least, you know, in the same building, or the one next door. Having lunch together. Occasionally. And sometimes overhearing conversations on the radio…

At least it clearly says in the office that this is a Vashta Nerada free workspace, which is a relief. And apparently there have been no Velociraptor-related work accidents in a bit less than a year (is that really good? I should look into that. There ought to be a book with statistics on the topic in the Annexe somewhere. I can’t find one on the catalogue, but I couldn’t find the New Zealand Agriculture and Fisheries Department report from 1968 on the catalogue either, yet I am certain I had it in my hands yesterday.

Unless, you know… fungus.*

Nik Slavov, Hidden Collections intern.

(*For pedantry’s sake, I’d like to point out that there is no active mould in any of the Library Annexe Collections! -ed.)

The Careers Service

On campus internships

Search for Vashta Nerada and other resources using Searcher

The Conservation Studio (fungus experts)

 

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Thesis Scanning Service attracts international attention

Given the global impact of research at the University we probably shouldn’t have been surprised when our little Thesis Scanning Service attracted attention around the world – but we were.

To date roughly half of all orders received have come in from outside the UK. Predictably, English speaking countries such as the United States and Australia account for the majority of requests. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) in Chicago has even become our first repeat customer; ordering four theses scans in as many months. Each thesis scanned for the CRL will eventually be made available to their users via their digital repository. For those unaffiliated with the CRL, however, they will also be available for anyone to download on our own digital repository, ERA.

Not all orders are coming in from the English-speaking world; requests have come in from countries as far afield as Japan, Israel and South Korea. While the majority of requests have been made by academic researchers, some have been for exhibitions or even family history enthusiasts. Currently, requests have been received from 13 different countries and we hope to see this number increase in future.

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The new Annexe Thesis Scanning Service proves popular

 

picture of a number of black-bound theses piled up in a cupboard over two shelves

The orders for thesis scans are definitely piling up.

After 9 months and 62 orders the pilot stage of the Thesis Scanning Service is over. When the service started I don’t think any of the team anticipated the impact it would have on our workload. We naively expected to be scanning one thesis a week but, with an average eight scan requests coming in each month, it isn’t unheard of for us to deliver five completed scans in one working week. This far exceeded our expectations and we have been pleasantly surprised by the uptake. In fact, now that the service is up and running, each of us devotes up to half of our working day to digitisation.

The project has highlighted the demand for digital copies of theses. Although only a handful have made their way onto ERA thus far those that have are benefiting from increased visibility and usage. Since being made available on ERA, Lance Whitehead’s 1994 thesis on the Clavichords of Hieronymus and Johann Haas has been viewed over 100 times and downloaded almost 40. On average the theses that have been available via ERA for more than 6 months have been downloaded 23 times each.

As more materials are added to the ERA database, their visibility on search engines such as Google Scholar will only increase, allowing our worldwide audience access to Edinburgh’s Research. Despite some of the interesting moments and challenges along the way, we feel the service has been a great success and all of us on Team Annexe are looking forward to seeing how it develops in the future.

Maria O’Hara, Library Annexe Assistant

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Tom Kibble’s Thesis digitised and made available online

Picture of Tom Kibble

Professor Kibble is currently an Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London

During the summer graduations Tom Kibble will receive an Honorary Degree from the School of Physics & Astronomy for this work in Theoretical Physics. An Edinburgh graduate, Kibble contributed to the discovery of both the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs boson.

scanned image of handwritten formulas included in the thesis

All of the formulas in the the thesis were handwritten.

Ahead of the graduation ceremony in July the School requested the digitisation of his 1958 Thesis on Quantum Field Theory. As with all of our thesis scans the digitised copy will shortly be made available on ERA. In the meantime, the School of Physics & Astronomy will be using it for an exhibition on Kibble to coincide with the conferment of his honorary degree.

Maria O’Hara, Library Annexe Assistant

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Edinburgh physician’s thesis digitised for inclusion in Japanese Museum Exhibit

unedited image of a scanned page

The Carbon Pages were so thin a sheet of paper had to be placed behind each page before it was scanned

Earlier this year a digital copy of the 1909 thesis of Scottish born anthropologist and physician Dr Neil Gordon Munro was ordered by a museum in Japan. The digitised work will be included in an exhibition at the Yokohama History Museum in the city where Munro lived and worked as director of the General Hospital for much of his career.

The thesis was challenging to digitise as much of it was typed on thin, see-though carbon paper. Many of the pages had become wrinkled with age and some were handwritten.

As the University of Edinburgh begins exploring distance learning tools and deploying courses via Coursera this thesis, submitted from Japan, demonstrates the Universities rich yet largely invisible history of distance learning.

For a closer look at the completed digital copy on ERA go to: http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/6685

Maria O’Hara, Library Annexe Assistant

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Edinburgh University introduces new Thesis Digitisation Service

Staff member using the Bookscanner at the Library Annexe

Charlie demonstrates our beautiful scanner.

In October 2012 the Library Annexe began operating a new Thesis Scanning Service. The service has proved popular with theses covering topics from historical re-enactment to earthquakes. And if anyone is fluent in Arabic and can tell us what Al-Hajeri’s (2007) 1200 page thesis is about – let us know!

Once scanned, a digital copy of the thesis is made available on the university’s institutional repository ERA where they are already seeing increased usage. The eventual aim is to make the entire thesis collection available online.

For more information on the service visit the Thesis Scanning Service webpage and to find out more about the University’s online repository check out the research already available on ERA.

Maria O’Hara, Library Annexe Assistant

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