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April 9, 2026
Europeana Tech Conference, Paris, Feb 2015
The Europeana Tech conference took place in Paris on February 12-13, 2015. A fascinating event, developers and strategists from institutions all over Europe got the chance to exchange ideas about cultural content in a digital world. Keynotes from the likes of Chris Welty (Google Research), Dan Cohen (DPLA), Tim Sharratt (Trove), George Oates (Good, Form and Spectacle) and Seb Chan (Cooper Hewitt) really focused the mind on different approaches to searching, discovery, and dealing with large scale digitisation projects, while more technical sessions on APIs and interoperability gave us food for thought on improving our own processes. Our contribution was a poster on our metadata game “Tag It! Find It!” which you can find over at librarylabs. It got some positive responses, which was heartening, given some of the sophisticated tools challenging for attention!
I cannot possibly do justice to the information overload, but should you wish to find out more, there’s a summary here. If you’re logged into EASE, you should be able to see it, but mail me at scott.renton@ed.ac.uk if you have any difficulty accessing it. Also, there is a more technical post at librarylabs.
Scott Renton- Digital Development
Think a Europeana Tech developer got loose with a marker pen. Liberty!
Clean up your sax
I am a Preventive Conservation Masters student at Northumbria University, and as part of my course, I am fortunate to be able to put theory into practice for six weeks at The University of Edinburgh. Being a musician, and wanting to work with interesting composite objects, I was hankering after a chance to work with musical instruments. Having studied at Edinburgh Uni for the last 5 years, I knew it housed an amazing musical instrument collection and I relished an opportunity to go back! I have spent most of my first two weeks working with Jonathan Santa Maria Bouquet, the musical instruments conservator, and have had the task of cleaning a beautiful silver plated saxophone by Selmer for the upcoming Out of the Blue exhibition in the Main Library.
Having been taught repeatedly the reasons why metals and water should not mix, I was surprised when I was shown that the preliminary cleaning phase was water-based. However, I soon learnt that as long as each small area is dried carefully after the wet treatment, the water poses little threat. The abrasive agent used is calcium carbonate (precipitated chalk), which is mixed into water, and applied as a fine dispersion in the
water – not as a paste – using cotton wool swabs and cotton rags. The idea is that the calcium carbonate is harder than the tarnish yet softer than the metal. It is still possible to scratch the silver so it is important to be gentle, and to use plenty of water, which seems counter-intuitive but really works.
After working over the entire metal surface using this wet method, drying as I went, I used a microfibre cloth to remove any chalky residue and lastly a silver polishing cloth (which is impregnated with a sulphur scavenger which breaks down the tarnish chemically rather than physically) to get the hard-to-reach and stubborn areas clear of tarnish. The reason for such a thorough clean is that the last stage of the cleaning plan is a coat of microcrystalline wax for protection from re-tarnishing, under which you do not want to trap any dirt or tarnish. These treatments should mean that not only will the saxophone look fabulous on display, but that it will not need cleaning again (if kept in the right conditions) for a long time.
The Saxophone mid-way through cleaning
Other tasks so far have included wrapping musical instruments for long term storage, and starting out on an Integrated Pest Management system project with Emma Davey, which has involved visiting the National Trust Scotland offices to hear Preventive Conservator Mel Houston’s approaches to the challenges of monitoring insect pests over their numerous collection sites.
All in all a varied and exciting couple of weeks. Exactly what I came here for! More to come later in my placement, when I’ll be dealing with strings…
Post by Harriet Braine, Preventive Conservator Student Placement
St Cecilia’s Hall in the News!
The St Cecilia’s Hall Project is in the news, thanks to our grant of £100,000 from Edinburgh World Heritage!
See online story here: http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/facelift-for-concert-hall-with-no-equal-in-paris-or-london.119359358
Find out more about fair trade
This year’s Fairtrade Fortnight runs from 23 February to 8 March 2015 and is celebrating the power of everyday choices by telling the other half of a product’s story – the producer’s – to show the difference Fairtrade makes.
For the past twenty years Fairtrade Fortnight has aimed to educate the public on why to choose Fairtrade and increase sales on Fairtrade terms for marginalised producers. And this year they want people to “choose products that change lives”.
We’ve pulled together a list of resources, primarily available at the University Library, to help you read around or find out more about this subject. Online material, such as e-books and e-journal articles and access to Searcher and other databases, are only available to staff and students at University of Edinburgh unless otherwise indicated. Read More
Trial access to The Encyclopedia of Political Thought
The Library has set up trial access to the online version of The Encyclopedia of Political Thought. You can access this via the E-resources trials page at www.ed.ac.uk/is/databases-trials
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought examines the history of political thought, contemporary political theory, and political philosophy. The entries range in size from shorter definitions and biographies to extended treatments of major topics and traditions. Tracing the evolution of political thinking from antiquity to the present, the scope of this resource emphasizes the richness and diversity of the field’s traditions.
Trial access is available until 25th March 2015. We would welcome feedback on these resources as this helps with making the decision on whether the resources should be considered for subscription or not.
Caroline Stirling – Academic Support Librarian for Social and Political Science
Archaeopress Digital Subscription Service
Following a successful trial last year we now subscribe to the Archaeopress Digital Subscription Service.
This is a package of e-books in archaeology. Around 10-15 new books are added each month. Subscribed and open access e-books will be added to the library catalogue/Searcher. The current list of titles can be found here and future updated lists will be available from our A-Z lists on the library website.
Online access requires the use of our library link listed in the EASE protected password page and then the Archaeopress login listed there.
Further info
Further information about our e-books is available from http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/library-museum-gallery/finding-resources/resource-types/ebooks
If a book you require is not held by the library, please visit our Library Resources Plus webpage.
Tag It, Find It!: Pop Up Library on tour
Last week, Pop Up Library packed its bags for a three day tour of the university campus, bringing paintings from the art collection, our metadata tagging game and a 5kg tub of fizzy sweets to the Murray Library at KB, the Main Library on George Square and ECA Library.
The aims of the sessions were to show off items from our art collection, get students and staff to try out the latest version of our metadata game, and to raise awareness of the importance, and ubiquity, of descriptive metadata, particularly for digital objects.
Players of the game were given laptops on which were displayed a series of digital images from the art collection. They were asked to ‘say what they saw’ by tagging these and then voting on the quality of other players’ tags. Points were awarded for the best descriptive tags, and the leaderboard was displayed on TV screens and projected onto the Holopro above the Main Library Helpdesk, thus creating a healthy sense of competition amongst players. If you took part, have a look at the leaderboard below to see how you did!
STUDENTS: TOP 10
STAFF: TOP 10
Alongside the game, we displayed original works of art next to their digital surrogates in order to contextualise the tagging game: the digital images in our collections are representations of physical items and the information and details that can be seen in the digital object is often quite different to that which can be seen in the original. For digital collections, it is important that items are tagged correctly so that they can be found both in search engine results and within the image database itself.
The sessions were well attended, with almost 3,500 tags entered by over 50 staff and students. The tags obtained from theses sessions, once moderated, will be uploaded to our image database and used to improve the discoverability of our digital image collection.Why not play the game for yourself on the new Edinburgh Library Labs blog?
Downtime Alert – E-Journals
At 10pm tonight, our e-journals will become unavailable for about 1 hour via the e-journal A-Z links, Searcher and the catalogue. This maintenance work is expected to resolve recent instability issues affecting e-journal access.
During this time, please access the journals directly on campus or off campus via the VPN or by adding http://ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/login?url= to the front of a url eg for nature journal, the link is http://www.nature.com and then add http://ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/login?url= to make it http://ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/login?url=http://www.nature.com which will then work off campus. There is also the option to log in off campus via UKFederation/Shibboleth if offered by the publisher.
Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: Nov – Dec 2014
Key results from the regular RDM Programme Progress Reports presented to both RDM Steering Committee and Action Group. Full RDM progress Reports can be viewed on the RDM programme Wiki (University of Edinburgh only).
- Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA) for the RDM programme was completed and published on the Estates and Buildings website (see: http://www.docs.csg.ed.ac.uk/EqualityDiversity/EIA/Research_Data_Management_Programme_%28RDM%29_%28IS%29.pdf)
- Stuart Macdonald and co-author Rory Macneil (RSpace) had a paper (Service integraiton to Enhance RDM: Electronic laboratory Notebook Case Study) accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Digital Curation (London, Feb. 2015).
- Work has commenced to update deadlines and deliverables in the RDM Project Plan.
- Successful meeting held with the Software Sustainability Institute to discuss software preservation used/generated in the research process resulting in a number of areas of investigation (see: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/2014/12/
- FOSTER EU proposal funded for a training event based on MANTRA to be given to the Scottish Social Science Graduate Summer School programme.
- All items in Datashare now have DataCite DOIs.
- Data Library have established a new online statistical analysis and visualisation service (SDA) which can provide an add-on service for DataShare.
- 39 RDM Training courses scheduled for Jan-June 2015. Training materials for two new courses is also being prepared.
- All data from College File servers complete with all data expected to have been migrated to Datastore by end of January 2015.
- Positive review and report received on the DataStore Infrastructure by external consultant.
Edinburgh DMP template revised based on Action group Feedback. - Visitors from Germany (Goettingen, November), Switzerland (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, December), and France (Sciences Po, December) met with IS colleagues to learn more about the RDM programme.
- “Research Data MANTRA: A Labour of Love” (by Robin Rice) was published to Journal of eScience Librarianship following invitation and a peer review process: http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol3/iss1/4
- Two submissions to the Jisc Digital Festival event in March (RDM Training with MANTRA & RDM Programme @ Univ. of Edinburgh) have been accepted.
Stuart Macdonald
RDM Service Coordinator
An Exhibition in a Day
As part of the University of Edinburgh’s Innovative Learning Week, the Centre for Research Collections ran a joint event between Conservation, Exhibitions and Archives entitled ‘An Exhibition in a Day’. The aim of this event was to provide the participants with the basic skills required for curating and displaying an exhibition. Despite all our preparation, we entered the day with some sense of trepidation – was it even possible to create an exhibition in a day? We were certainly about to find out…
Using the fascinating and diverse archive collection from the University’s Moray House School of Education as inspiration and source material, the participants received a ‘behind-the-scenes’ experience of what goes in to creating an exhibition. This was as varied as learning how to curate, interpret, design, display and promote their own exhibition (with the aid of the CRC twitter page!), all of which was topped off by an exhibition opening in which we were able to present our day’s work. The day itself was led by Rachel Hosker (Archives Manager), Emma Smith (Exhibitions Officer) and Emma Davey (Conservation Officer), who all shared their own individual expertise and knowledge in this particular field.
The ethos behind the proposed event was to not only to demonstrate the tools and skills required in preparing for an exhibition, but also to provide an interesting and engaging way for participants to interact with the University’s rare and unique collections. The event aimed to engender a greater sense of ownership by students and staff alike of the University collections, and to encourage them to learn more about how these collections can inform or be incorporated into their own work and studies.
The Moray House Archive Collection
Choosing exhibition exhibits
As one of our attendees, Heather McFarlane, writes ” An Exhibition in a Day was a fascinating insight into the collections and a great way to learn how you can make objects and displays engaging. As Education Coordinator in the School of Chemistry I often visits schools, and trainee teachers so it was great to explore the Moray House historical collections and learn about teacher training and nursery care over the last 100 years. As well as exploring the collection, it gave me the chance to think about using exhibitions more. I am always looking for new ways to engage young people and adults in science and so getting experience of putting on exhibition has given me lots of ideas of what can be done using collections and how to make appealing displays. I look at the chemistry museum in a new light now!”
Also participating in the day’s events was our very own conservation Intern, Samantha, who discusses her experience of the day. “Before deciding upon a career in conservation I was working mainly as an artist and curator concerned with the interpretation and exploration of objects with a passion for community engagement. I was thrilled to be able to discover the Moray House School of Education archival collection and help others to appreciate and handle it correctly. The collection has some wonderfully insightful information regarding education in Edinburgh during the early 20th century with so many stories waiting to be discovered. My main role of the day was to assist CRC staff and those taking part, however I became just as absorbed with the collection as our innovative learners! Because we had to sift through such a large number of interesting documents it was very difficult to know what to include within the exhibition, and how to best tell the story of the nursery school. Nevertheless by the end of the day we had all became familiar with our chosen assortment of documents and objects giving us the confidence to forge ahead with how we wanted others to view them. It was great to see so many people engaging with the collection in this way and learning from it too!”
Video Corner!
A display from the exhibition
A display from the exhibition including children’s toys
Overall, the experience was tiring but very rewarding for everyone involved. And, as it turns out, it is possible to create an exhibition in a day…
Post by Emma Davey, Conservation Officer and Samantha Cawson, Conservation Intern
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
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Archival Provenance Research Project: Lishan’s Experience
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