Interested in learning more about conservation activity at the University? Come along to our Pop-Up Library Session at the Main Library tomorrow, Tuesday 30^th at 10am and take the opportunity to talk to Emma (Conservation Officer) and Ruth (LHSA Manager) about their work at the University and the techniques involved in conserving and caring for our many collections.

Based in our studio within the Centre for Research Collections, our remit is to guide and support conservation and preservation activity across the many and diverse rare and unique collections held by the University. This work can include undertaking practical conservation treatment of paper-based items, as well as the preventive care of the wider collections.

We hope to see you tomorrow. There may even be the chance to have a go at some conservation techniques yourselves….

The end of September is rapidly approaching and things are moving forward quickly with the LOCH Project. All three partners have been thinking about workflows and are starting to make plans about how to handle the Open Access requirements for REF in each institution.

September has been a busy month for all the project partners. On Friday 19th September, Jackie Proven and I attended the a Jisc Monitor workshop in London, aimed at supporting the development of Jisc Monitor into something that will help to support Open Access processes in HEIs across the UK.

On September 22nd and 23rd, Janet Aucock, Jackie Proven and Linda Kerr and I attended the Pure UK User Group which was hosted at the University of Edinburgh. LOCH Project partners have all been influential in the development of a new Open Access specification for Pure, which will enable customers to better manage OA compliance and reporting for the next REF, with the side-effect of improving compliance for RCUK and Wellcome Trust requirements too. The specification is ready to be agreed, pending the disclosure of the final metadata and audit requirements by HEFCE. A final face-to-face meeting is being planned for the second half of October. All being well, the specification will be passed to Elsevier for development by the end of October, and the new functionality will be released in June 2015.

On Friday 26th Janet Aucock and I presented at the joint Jisc/Sconul/RLUK event in London, looking at how best to implement the Open Access policy in the next REF. This was an interesting and productive meeting, and it was great to see the approaches taken by different universities. Key points which came up included

• The need to engage with the policy early on
• The need to ensure adequate staffing is in place
• Advocacy and engagement are key to gaining high levels of compliance
• You could consider writing the policy into researcher annual appraisal documents
• It would be advisable to treat this as a project and write a plan
• You might want to consider a mock exercise next year to test compliance rates

As we move into October, partners are hoping to publish initial baseline reports and to finalise the functional specification for Pure.

Dominic Tate, University of Edinburgh

The Centre for Research Collections (CRC) provides access to the University’s heritage collections. These include rare books, manuscripts, University archives, Lothian Health Service Archive (LHSA), art collection, historic musical instrument collection and many more. With such a large number of collections, how do you go about discovering them. This blog post provides a list of the key resources and catalogues for discovering the different collections.

General Information: www.ed.ac.uk/is/crc

The CRC website provides general information on accessing the material at the CRC, as well as collection descriptions for our rare book collections, and manuscripts and archives.

Catalogues / Databases

Rare Books: catalogue.lib.ed.ac.uk

Archives & Manuscripts: archives.lib.ed.ac.uk

LHSA: www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/collections/index

Museum Collections (including fine art and historic musical instruments): collections.ed.ac.uk

Digital Image Collections: images.is.ed.ac.uk

Exhibitions: exhibitions.ed.ac.uk

Can’t find what you’re looking for? Get in touch!

Some of our collection material is not yet available on the online catalogues. If you are looking for something specific and cannot find it in our online resources, please get in touch as we have a printed catalogue resources at the CRC.

Email: is-crc@ed.ac.uk

Tel: 0131 650 8379

Visit: 6th Floor, Main Library, George Square (please see our website for opening hours)

Fran Baseby, Service Delivery Curator, CRC