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December 14, 2025
Encouraging ‘deposit on acceptance’ by email
Earlier this year we published a report “A year in the life of Open Access support: continuous improvement at University of St Andrews” which described development of our OA support service. In our case study we mentioned email templates that were being used and in our “REF-monitoring” workflows (Appendix 2. p14) and to back up our simple messages about the HEFCE OA Policy for the next REF. We have recently amended the templates, simplifying the message further to avoid any confusion over dates, and because many of our researchers now have a reasonable awareness of the policy. We continue to use them as a way of encouraging early deposit of accepted manuscripts into our Research Information System, Pure – and to thank authors who have already deposited.
The email templates are at: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7506 (with a Creative Commons license)
We have now sent out well over 200 emails, and have been getting a great response. Naturally our inbox is bursting with additional enquiries and some concerns, but in general authors are happy that they are getting guidance on what/how/when to deposit. Our deposit rate for 2015 across the University is now around 69%, with one School (where we have been working closely to develop additional support) reaching 89%. Some Schools are yet to catch on, so we continue to use other forms of communication such as regular newsletters. Our favourite response to these is “Interesting… please do come and speak at our staff council to get us up to speed” – so the advocacy work continues!
Jackie, Mike & Kyle – OA Support Team, University of St Andrews Library
Arthur Holmes: The most famous British geologist you have never heard of
Gillian McCay, co-curator of the School of GeoSciences Cockburn Museum collection, writes about geologist Arthur Holmes, the subject of a micro exhibition in the University Main Library
Exhibition display.
Sunday September 20th marks 50 years since the passing of eminent geologist Arthur Holmes. The CRC is currently marking this anniversary with a micro exhibition celebrating his life and achievements.
Although many people have never heard of Holmes, he was arguably the greatest British geologist of the twentieth century. Geologists today recognise Holmes for making two major contributions to our understanding of Earth Science; he was the first earth scientist to recognise that heat within the earth could create currents that could move the crust of the planet and consequently rearrange the continents, and he also widely applied the newly-developed method of “radiometric dating” to minerals in the first attempt to numerically estimate the age of the Earth.
It was as an undergraduate, at London’s Imperial College, that Arthur first became interested in the phenomenon of radioactivity, which was a new and exciting field in science at the time. Originally studying for a degree in physics, Arthur took a course in geology in his second year which settled his future as a geologist, much to the shock of his tutors! It was during his final year as a student, in 1910, that he pioneered the use of radiometric dating, a technique that can be used to date rocks and minerals. It was this method which allowed scientists to discover the age of specimens which are many millions of years old, and eventually to attempt to discover the age of the earth itself. Initially Holmes was reluctant to comment on the age of the earth, but by 1913 he had published results indicating that some of the oldest rocks identified were 1.6 billion years old. Years of method improvement and retesting followed and in 1946 several different groups of scientists came to agreement – the Earth is in the region of 4.5 billion years old!
Holmes was also able to use his understanding of radioactivity and apply it to other longstanding geological problems, including suggesting that currents caused by radioactive heat were the driving force behind the Theory of Plate Tectonics. The Theory of Continental Drift, which predated Plate Tectonics, was unfashionable among scientists because it lacked a driving force to create movement of the Earth’s crust. Holmes suggested, in 1930, that the circulation of heat within the Earth could push large areas of the crust together, forming mountains such as the Himalayas, or away from each other, producing oceans such as the Atlantic. It was not until 1960 that other scientists were able to find physical evidence for the movement of the continents when sea-floor mapping revealed submarine plateaus and trenches, where tectonic plates were being pulled apart or forced underneath each other.
Thankfully Arthur Holmes was well recognised as an eminent scientist in his life time and he was given the prestigious position of Regius Chair of Geology at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to securing a professorship, Holmes received many awards and medals from international geological surveys and societies including; the Murchison Medal (1940) and Wollaston Medal (1956) awarded by the Geological Society of London; the Penrose Medal (1956) awarded by the Geological Society of America; and the highly prestigious Vetlesen Prize (1964).
Exhibition display.
The Vetlesen Prize was established in 1959 by the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation, and was designed to be the Nobel Prize of the Earth Sciences, awarded for “scientific achievement resulting in a clearer understanding of the Earth, its history, or its relations to the universe”. Characteristically both modest and forthright in his acceptance letter, Holmes expressed his surprise at being selected “for what must surely be the highest distinction in the world for geologists. The surprise was all the greater because I have to confess that I had not even known there was such an award”.
Holmes shared the award of $25,000 with his friend the Finnish geologist, Professor Pentti Eskola. Unfortunately Arthur was suffering poor health and was unable to travel to America to receive the prize. The Royal Society London held a luncheon party in his honour where another famous geologist Maurice Ewing presented him with the medal. Ewing, who was the first recipient of the Vetlesen Prize in 1960, praised Homes as a “pioneer in the field of isotope geology, in the use of radioactive elements for determination of the age of rocks and of the Earth… His papers, books and teaching have profoundly influenced the thinking of every modern student of the Earth Sciences”.
The micro exhibition devoted to Arthur Holmes is on display until the end of October at the Centre for Research Collections.
How to find the Centre for Research Collections
Additional images of the medal collections
More information on the Cockburn Museum and the University’s geological collections
Blog post by Gillian McCay, co-curator of the School of GeoSciences Cockburn Museum collection. Edited by Steven Skeldon, Centre for Research Collections. Credit for photographs to Susan Pettigrew, University of Edinburgh Digital Imaging Unit.
Latest enhancements to DiscoverEd
- There is now a “Request from closed stack” link on the Details tab for items which are held in the Main Library basement closed stacks. The link points to the Main Library closed stack request form.
- There is now a “Library Annexe Scan Request” link on the Details tab for items which are held at the Library Annexe. The link points to the ILLiad Logon page.
- A “Course Name or Code” option has been added to the Advanced Search. This allows search for bibliographic records which are attached to items in Reserve for particular courses.
- A “Course Name and Code” field has been added to the Details tab for items which are attached to items in Reserve. This shows the course details for each course to which the item is attached.
Dealing with Data 2015 – Presentations now available
On the 31st August, over one hundred researchers from across the breadth of the University of Edinburgh met together in the Informatics Forum to discuss the challenges of dealing with the research data. Following-on from the 2014 conference of the same title, the event consisted of twenty presentations on this subject.
The event was opened by a keynote given by Prof Jonathan Silvertown, talking about his experiences of using crowd-sourced data from citizen scientists, and how to build mechanisms to ensure the quality of the data.
The rest of the day was filled with presentations addressing a wide range of data challenges, including topics such as data from the Large Hadron Collider, working with large data sets from China, and data derived from social media. At the end of the event, the topics were pulled together in a closing talk by Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre.
If you attended Dealing with Data 2015, and have not already done so, could you please complete our brief survey at DwD2015 Feedback. It should only take 5 minutes and will help us to improve future events.
Programme with presentations
10:00 Welcome. Download PDF
10:05 Opening keynote: The Alchemy of Volunteered Data: turning base metal into gold, Prof Jonathan Silvertown, Institute of Evolutionary Biology. Download PDF
Session 1 – Informatics Forum
10:45 – 11:05: University data, open data and the Smart Data Hack, Ewan Klein, Informatics.
11:05 – 11:25: Edinburgh Data Science and Managing National Data Services at Edinburgh. Mark Parsons, EPCC. Download PDF
11:25 – 11:45: Channel shift – using data analysis to improve service delivery at the City of Edinburgh Council. Michal Wasilewski, Informatics. Download PDF
Session 2 – Informatics Forum
12:00 – 12:20: What are the challenges of collecting and analysing data in primary care? Lessons learned from a feasibility study in six general practices in Lothian, Scotland. Natalia Calanzani, Debbie Cavers, Gaby Vojt, David Weller, Christine Campbell, Population Health Sciences and Informatics. Download PDF
12:20 – 12:40: Facilitating the reuse of brain imaging and clinical data from completed studies across the life course: the Brain Images of Normal Subjects (BRAINS) Imagebank. Samuel Danso, Dominic E. Job, David Alexander Dickie, David Rodriguez, Andrew Robson, Cyril Pernet, Susan D. Shenkin, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Brain Sciences. Download PDF
12:40 – 13:00: Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics and R: Adding value to a public data resource with the ‘tidy data’ paradigm. Jon Minton, AQMeN. Download PDF
Session 3 – Appleton Tower
12:00 – 12:20: Data ecosystems and wicked problems; supporting “students as researchers” in complex data environments. Arno Verhoeven, ECA; James Stewart, SPS; Ewan Klein, Informatics. Download PDF
12:20 – 12:40: Networked learning analytics: Studying the association between learner generated discourse and learning. Srećko Joksimović, Dragan Gašević, Education. Download PDF
12:40 – 13:00: Automated Content Analysis of Discussion Transcripts. Vitomir Kovanovic, Dragan Gašević, Informatics and Education. Download PDF
Session 4 – Informatics Forum
13:45 – 14:05: Exploring Digital Divides in China, Ashley Lloyd, Business School; Mario A. Antonioletti, Terence M. Sloan, EPCC.
14:05 – 14:25: Gone Fishing: The Creation of the Comparative Agendas Project Master Codebook, Shaun Bevan, SSPS. Download PDF
14:25 – 14:45: Electronic lab notebooks and research data management at Edinburgh Experience to date and challenges and opportunities going forward. Rory Macneil, RSpace. Download PDF
Session 5 – Appleton Tower
13:45 – 14:05: Tweeting Jonson’s “Foot Voyage”: deeply mapped data, Anna Groundwater, HCA. Download PDF
14:05 – 14:25: University of Edinburgh Reid Concerts Database Project, Fiona Donaldson, Music. Download PDF
14:25 – 14:45: Encountering feminism on Twitter, Prof Viviene Cree, and Dr Steve Kirkwood, Social and Political Science, with Dr Daniel Winterstein, Sodash. Download PDF
Session 6 – Informatics Forum
15:00 – 15:20: The VELaSSCo framework: a software platform for end user analytics and visualization of large simulation datasets, G. Filippone, A. Janda, K.J. Hanley, S. Papanicolopulos and J.Y. Ooi, IIE, Engineering.
15:20 – 15:40: From raw data to new fundamental particles: The data management lifecycle at the Large Hadron Collider, Andrew Washbrook, Physics. Download PDF
15:40 – 16:00: Tipping the balance – introducing data management on a centre-wide level, Tomasz Zieliński, Eilidh Troup, Andrew Millar, Biology. Download PDF
16:00 Closing talk: Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre
Kerry Miller
RDM Service Coordinator
Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: June – July 2015
May 2015 saw the end of the current Roadmap period and we are now into a period of consolidating work that has already been done and organising future work for the next phase of the RDM programme. The draft Roadmap 2.0 has been submitted to the steering group for approval and should be published soon.
The RDM services brochure is now almost complete and should be printed and distributed to Schools soon.
A meeting was held between the RDM team and the DCC to decide on the best approach for offering school level customisation of DMPonline. It was decided that customisation would be offered to all schools and undertaken as and when requests were made.
The Infrastructure upgrades have been procured and physically installed for the IGMM storage capacity expansion and the Research Computing Infrastructure DataStore integration servers.
Upgrades for backup/DR infrastructure have been procured and physically installed.
A 2 part workshop sponsored by EU FOSTER programme, “Good practice in data management & data sharing with social research” and “Overcoming obstacles to sharing data about human subjects” was delivered at the Scottish Graduate School of Political and Social Science Summer School.
A new series of awareness raising presentations and training courses for researchers, committees, and support staff in CHSS, CSE, and CMVM are currently being organised for 2015/16.
The RDM website has been successfully migrated to the new content management system, this included reviewing and revising all content, links, and images to fit with the new structure and layout. All schools in CHSS and CSE now have links on their own webpages to the RDM webpages, and CHSS will be placing a link from their new college pages when they go live.
An EAHIL workshop on ‘Managing research data’ was held on the 10th June and the report of the
Met with RDM staff from University of Lisbon who were visiting the University (via James Toon).
Met with Jennifer Warburton, University of Melbourne, as part of Library visit.
Met with French delegation (INIST-CNRS) as part of Library visit.
Kerry Miller
RDM Service Coordinator
Of Pibrochs and Preachers: Music and Folk Culture in the Old Statistical Accounts
Perhaps particularly in a post-Christian society it is stereotypes we live with, rather than the nuanced reality of religion. Listening to the thoughts of ministers by reading the Old Statistical Accounts has challenged one of these for me recently. We are all familiar with the notion of religion’s hostility to folk culture. The story of John MacDonald, born in 1779 and brought up in Reay, on the north coast, demonstrates this perfectly.
He early manifested an intense love for music, and even in his boyhood acquired considerable skill in subduing into melody for Celtic ears the wild sounds of the bagpipe. This was his favourite instrument; and on leaving home for college in 1797 [in Aberdeen] it was carefully packed in his trunk, and doubtless furnished many a pleasant interlude amidst the busy studies of the session.
However the young man, son of a Church of Scotland catechist, was becoming increasingly committed to his faith.
Poltalloch Harp, Courtesy of West Highland Museum
Before the following session higher matters began to occupy his attention, and the pipe was that year left purposely behind. His father, in order to try him, wrote to inquire what would be done with the pipe. “Just what you think right,” was his answer, well knowing what treatment his idol was likely to receive at his father’s hands. The old man no sooner received this license from his son than he went to fetch the pipe from its place, and laying it on the block, he plied with right good-will the axe on its chanters.
The fingers of all musicians will tighten a little on their mouse as they read that. Young John became an influential preacher, down in Ferintosh on the Black Isle, and beloved to many across the Highlands. But he didn’t feel that music and his brand of faith were compatible. It seems that as people became more religious, affected by the Evangelical movement in the late 1700s in Sutherland and Ross-shire, and in the early 1800s on the west coast, that they rejected their music and the telling of the old stories. The poet Derick Thomson likens Calvinism to a scarecrow; a ‘tall, thin black-haired man’ who ‘took the goodness out of the music’ replacing it with ‘a new song’ and ‘fragments of the philosophy of Geneva’. Thomson is ambivalent about this religious legacy, but is sure it was hostile to folk culture.
The ministers writing in the Statistical Accounts were not all John MacDonalds nor did they all usher in scarecrows. Many record local leisure activities neutrally, even positively. The minister of Islay noted that ‘dance and the song, with shinty and putting the stone, are their chief amusements. Numbers of them play well upon the violin and the bagpipe.’ In Coll and Tiree the people composed and sang songs, told Fingalian tales, and held ‘dancing assemblies at different farms in turn.’ The minister in Thurso fancied himself an expert on fiddle and pipe music. He found ‘the Highland reels are played particularly well … in Caithness; but the proper slow bagpipe tunes and marches, are not given in that perfection here, which seems almost peculiar to the West Highland pipers.’
A few used folk culture to lament changing times. On the south shores of the Dornoch Firth, the minister romanticised the people of Kincardine. They were apparently moral, hospitable, agile, inquisitive, ‘fond of information’ (which I suspect means gossipy!) and ‘extremely patient under hunger, cold, and other distresses, from which their southern neighbours would shrink with horror.’ However he felt all was not well and used the decline in ceilidh culture to emphasise this. ‘The tale, the song, and the dance, do not, as in the days of their fathers, gild the horrors of the winter night.’ He blames this on the rise of legal distilling. The minister of Strachur, Argyllshire, went further. He used a romanticised vision of the past and a perceived cultural decline in music and poetry to subtly criticise the landlord for introducing commercial sheepfarming.
David Allan ‘Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl’ featuring the famous fiddler Neil Gow (1780).
This positive clerical view is not the whole story. In Stromness the minister saw the connection between ‘sottish enjoyment of drinking’ and music and dancing. His neighbour in North Ronaldsay worried about fifty of his parishioners who gathered at some prehistoric cairns on New Year’s Day for ‘dancing with moon light, with no other music than their own singing.’ The connection of music, dancing and community get-togethers with drinking and with ancient spiritual beliefs gave many ministers cause for reflection.
My study is not meant to suggest that the church, particularly Evangelical Calvinism in the way it was absorbed and put into practice in Scotland, has nothing to repent of in its frequently invidious effect on local culture. But the more I look, the more Jackson Pollock-like becomes the picture. John MacDonald was not the only influential religious leader to throw out the musical baby with its bathwater. Yet ministers were not doctrinal automatons. For as many as saw moral dangers in the old stories and the new tunes, others were neutral, enthusiastic or even sentimental about folk culture.
Of course there may be another reason ministers living in draughty manses supported musicians. In Ronaldsay the music of the piper, it was said, was capable of banishing rats!
Dr Elizabeth Ritchie, Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands
We hope you have enjoyed this post: it is characteristic of the rich historical material available within the ‘Related Resources’ section of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland service. Featuring essays, maps, illustrations, correspondence, biographies of compliers, and information about Sir John Sinclair’s other works, the service provides extensive historical and bibliographical detail to supplement our full-text searchable collection of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Statistical Accounts.
Sources:
John Kennedy, The ‘Apostle of the North’: the Life and Labours of the Rev. Dr. M’Donald, (Toronto: J. Campbell, 1866)
Derick Thomson, ‘The Scarecrow’, quoted in Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978)
Old Statistical Account: parishes of Kilchoman, Tiree and Coll, Thurso, Strachur and Stralachan, Stromness, North Ronaldshay
Welcome to arriving students at New College Library!
A big welcome to all our new students arriving today. New College Library holds over 250,000 volumes, including rich and unique Special Collections, making it one of the leading theological libraries in Britain. Read More
Data Vault Community Engagement Event
Over the next few months we will be hosting a series of workshops, with the aim of engaging with the community to refine the Data Vault platform solution developed so far.
The first workshop is being held in Manchester on 7th October 2015 – for further details and to register see:
Eventbrite Data Vault Community Event, Manchester
The second workshop is being held in Edinburgh on the 5th November 2015 – for further details and to register see:
LOCH Project at ELPUB 2015!
Last week I attended the 19th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB 2015), which took place at the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity in Valetta, Malta. The theme of this year’s conference was “Scale, Openness and Trust: New Avenues for Electronic Publishing in the Age of Infinite Collections and Citizen Science”.
The conference attracted over 70 delegates from all over Europe – most of whom were employed in scholarly communications roles in university libraries. The convenient size of the event, combined with the specialisms of the attendees made this a really useful event for me to attend – I was able to gain quite a lot of insight into publication trends in different countries and in particular, progress with the transition towards Open Access. I think Finland might be one to watch on this front – our Finnish colleagues have ambitious plans to become 100% Open Access in the next few years!
The conference featured a particularly interesting opening keynote from Gowan Dawson of the University of Leicester, who introduced the theme of citizen science by reviewing the history of this area with a particular focus on some interesting 19th century publications such as Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip.
Other notable presentations included Gail Feigenbaum’s keynote on the unintended consequences of electronic publication – (which even included salary disparities between editors working with print and electronic at one publishing house) and a fabulous talk from senior staff of the Times of Malta, who discussed the impact that disruptive technologies can have on media such as newspapers. They also talked about the pressures that the likes of Facebook and Google can exert on a small press such as this, and the limited recourse available to them.
My paper focused on the UK’s REF Open Access policies and how this is proving a real game-changer in the rate of adoption of OA in the UK. The full conference paper and my slides are available to download at https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/10553 .
Dominic Tate – University of Edinburgh
British Newspapers Part III and IV – 1780-1950
We have recently purchased British Newspapers Part 3 and 4 – 1780-1950.
British Newspapers Part III contains the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Leeds Intelligencer, Yorkshire Gazette, Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury.
British Newspapers Part IV contains the Evening Telegraph, Yorkshire Gazette, Nottingham Evening Post, Illustrated Times, Edinburgh Evening News, Chester Chronicle, Cheltenham Chronicle, Cambridge Independent Press, Belfast Morning News, Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, and Aberdeen Journal.
See the factsheet for more details as well as related newspaper packages we have previously purchased.
There is an entry for “British Newspaper Archive” on our main AZ list as well as the subject AZ lists for History and Newspapers. Individual newspapers titles will be added to DiscoverEd soon.
Collections
Hill and Adamson Collection: an insight into Edinburgh’s past
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Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
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Projects
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
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Archival Provenance Research Project: Lishan’s Experience
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