The Main Library is embarking on a programme of works to bring significant improvements for library users by increasing the number of study spaces by 350 and providing additional power and data facilities at study desks.

The period of works is planned to be from 11^th July to 31^st August 2016 and is to be phased over the different floors.

Unfortunately, this will bring about temporary disruption to users in affected areas, involving noise disturbance, restricted access to some print collections and study areas being out of use.

Phase 1: Floor 4. The first phase of works is on the 4^th Floor.  As a result, some of the collections on the 4^th floor of the Main Library (print journals, newspapers, the Centre of African Studies (CAS) Collection and the Serjeant & Watt Collection) will be inaccessible from Monday 11^th July to Friday 22^nd July.

If you need an item from one of these collections during this time, please email us at collections-management@ed.ac.uk. Items will then be retrieved and be available for you at the Ground Floor Help Desk within 24 hours (Mon-Fri) of the request being placed. Requests placed on Friday evenings and over the weekends will be satisfied on Mondays.

When placing a request, please include your own contact details and full details (title, shelfmark, journal volume number etc.) of the item required.

For further information about the subsequent phases of works, dates and areas affected, please see blog [https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/libraryredevelopment/]

As part of the Main Library work over the summer to create additional study spaces for Library users, the existing New Journals and New Books displays on the first floor are being removed. We are currently looking at options for a new collections display on the ground floor where we would aim to vary our displays between new books and thematic displays throughout the year.

The current displays will be cleared by 8^th July 2016, from which time new journal issues and newspapers will be available within their sequences on the 4^th floor and new books will be interfiled directly into the book sequences on the 2^nd and 3^rd floors.

On Wednesday 22 June, Hannah Mateer and I welcomed the KEW attendees to the Library Annexe at South Gyle. Hannah gave a tour of the Annexe space and services while I discussed the different digitisation services offered by the Library, in particular the PhD thesis mass digitisation project, which aims to have the University’s entire thesis collection digitised and online within three years. Here is a summary of some of the project’s key points:

• We will digitise around 15,000 PhD theses over the next two years; the library has a collection of around 25,000 and 10,000 are already online.
• The collection dates form the early 1600s and contains original Edinburgh research which is not available anywhere else in the world.
• Statistics have shown that digital theses are accessed, on average, 30 times per month each. There is, therefore, considerable demand to put the collection online.
• We chose to digitise in house for several reasons. While it may have been slightly cheaper to outsource, we wanted more oversight over fragile collections and workflows and we wanted to develop expertise in the area of mass digitisation.
• This approach will provide us with scanning equipment and software for future digitisation projects.
• The theses collection is made up of unique items, where there is only one copy, and duplicates, where two or more copies exist.
• Duplicate theses have their spines removed using a guillotine and are then fed through a Kodak i4250 document scanner; unique theses are scanned on a Copibook Cobalt scanner and all theses are batch processed using LIMB processing software.
• The digitised, OCR-ed theses are then made available through ERA, the library’s institutional repository.
• There is also a conservation and cataloguing element to the project – a large proportion of the collection has no digital catalogue record and several thousand require conservation treatment.
• By the end of the project we will have one physical copy of every thesis as well as a digital copy in the online repository. All physical and digital theses will have digital catalogue records and conservation treatment will have been performed on those theses which require it.

Following my presentation, we had a very interesting discussion about how different institutions approach digitisation: I was particularly interested to learn that several of the attendees’ organisations had already undertaken similar projects and I am very keen to learn more from their experiences as this project progresses. If you’d like to find out more about what we’re doing with mass digitisation at the University of Edinburgh, please see our blog https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/phddigitisation/ and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Gavin Willshaw, Digital Curator

Gavin.Willshaw@ed.ac.uk

Friday arrived all too soon and before we knew it the first of our Knowledge Exchangers was having to depart for the airport. After a morning of workshops and metadata games in the hands of Claire, Scott and Gavin we had a final feedback and farewell session.

For me the week had been a great success with the group pulling together from the very start and allowing us to have a highly engaging and informative week. And a most enjoyable week too. A huge thank you to everybody for being part of Knowable Engage Week 2016 and for contributing so fully. We hope that there will be ideas and thoughts taken away and that the relationships built in Edinburgh will continue after everybody has returned home. A few seeds have also been sown for possible future collaborations and our doors remain firmly open for any follow up conversations, sharing of ideas and future visits.

A big thank you and a very fond farewell to Ruth, Kate, Bert, Anna, Rebecca, Katrina, Barbara, Siri, Belen, Nadja, Ryan, Özhan, Jürgen, Eleanor and Gordon.

….and to round it all off one final trip of the week took us to the Anatomical Museum for a very informative tour courtesy of Ruth Pollitt. And a final appearance by the infamous William Burke who has been popping up from time to time throughout the week!