Home University of Edinburgh Library Essentials
April 5, 2026
World Newspaper Archive collections: on trial
*The Library has now purchased access to African Newspapers, Series 1. See New! African Newspapers, Series 1 1800-1922*
Thanks to a request from the UncoverEd project team, I’m pleased to let you know that the Library currently has trial access to two digital newspaper collections, African Newspapers, Series 1 and South Asian Newspapers, from Readex. Both collections offer unique access to fully searchable collection of historical newspapers from Africa and South Asia.
You can access this digital resource via the E-resources trials page.
Access is available both on and off-campus.
Trial access ends 19th April 2019. Read More
Mathematical Sciences Publishers content via ProjectEuclid
With the renewal of our Mathematical Sciences Publishers e-journal subscription, we now gain access to the following new titles:
- Innovations in incidence Geometry
- Moscow Journal of Combinatorics and Number Theory
- Pure and Applied Analysis
- Tunisian Journal of Mathematics
Access is via DiscoverEd and the e-journals AZ list.
Screenshot from Project Euclid website
Literature Online – problem update
Back on 31st January I communicated to LLC colleagues about the faulty full-text links to LION’s ABELL records in DiscoverEd and a separate issue of the loss of 1,492 Penguin Classics from the LION platform due to publisher rights. Here is the latest update on the status.
- ABELL indexing issue in DiscoverEd
All the ABELL bibliographical records in DiscoverEd have been removed. This has resolved the problem of faulty full-text indexing, but at the same time removed the ABELL records in DiscoverEd altogether. The LION publisher ProQuest will make the correct bibliographical records available again once LION collections are re-organised and reloaded, hopefully by the end of the first quarter according to ProQuest. This indexing problem only affects ABELL. Other collections in LION, such as full-text journals and books, are still indexed and discoverable at the publication title level in DiscoverEd. Examples:
American Poetry Review as journal title, but not at the article level, e.g. Williamson, Alan: “A Marriage Between Writers: Birthday Letters as Memoir and as Poetry”, in American Poetry Review (27:5) Sep/Oct 1998, 11-13.
Dutt, Toru. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan: By Toru Dutt … With an Introductory Memoir by Edmund Gosse. Kegan Paul, Trench &, 1885
In the meantime, the current LION platform in our Database list, Literature Online (LION), is functioning as normal. Please do use LION for ABELL searching. At the top of the current LION platform, you will see the following announcement: “Literature Online is now available on the enhanced ProQuest platform and cross-searchable with ProQuest journals, newspapers, dissertations and other relevant content. The new user experience is now available in parallel with the current version through mid-2019. …” Please try LION on the new ProQuest platform which will replace the current platform very soon anyway.
- Penguin Classics
There is no alternative provision of the e-texts of the lost Penguin Classics. Most titles also have the print copies in our Library collections. Please note: if you have provided links to LION Penguin books in your students’ reading lists including those in the Resource Lists, please do remove them and replace them with the permanent links to the possible alternative copies in DisocverEd. If no alternative copy is in stock, please use the Book Recommendation Form.
Thank you very much for your attention. We will update colleagues when the re-organising and reloading of the LION content by the publisher is completed.
Complete contents of LION can be viewed from here: https://literature-proquest-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/createCompleteContents.do
DwD2018 – Videos now on Media Hopper
Dealing with Data 2018 was once again a great success in November last year with over 100 university staff and Post-Graduate students joining us to hear presentations on topics as diverse as sharing data in clinical trials and embedding sound files in linguistics research papers.
As promised the videos of each presentation have now been made publicly available on Media Hopper (https://media.ed.ac.uk/channel/Dealing%2BWith%2BData%2BConference/82256222), while the PDFs can be found on https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/25859. You can also read Martin Donnelly’s reflections on the day https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/2018/11/28/dealing-with-data-2018-summary-reflections/.
We hope that these will prove both useful and interesting to all of our colleagues who were unable to attend.
We look forward to seeing you at Dealing with Data 2019.
Open Access update
The University of Edinburgh is a strong supporter of open access (OA), and in 2018, researchers at Edinburgh published over 7,000 peer reviewed research outputs, of which over 5,181 (74%) are openly available from the University’s research portal (www.research.ed.ac.uk). As a large and diverse organisation there is naturally a large variation in the way in which we make our research openly available. From our total of 5,181 open access research outputs we find that 2,959 outputs (or 57%) are published as Gold OA – where the publisher makes the version-of-record open sometimes for a fee – and 2,222 (or 43%) are available as Green OA – where the author makes their accepted manuscript open from our Institutional or Subject Repositories for free.
Over the last 5 years the University has spent in the region of £5 million with publishers to make around 2,800 papers Gold OA. The majority of these papers were published as ‘hybrid OA’ in subscription journals where the publisher charges subscription fees to access the closed content, and also charges an open access fee to make individual papers open access. This practice of charging twice is called ‘double-dipping’ as large research intensive institutions have not seen their subscription costs lowered in proportion to their open access expenditure.
Over the last 5 years we have seen a period of significant consolidation of the open access publishing market with just three companies responsible for publishing 51% of Edinburgh’s journal articles, whilst receiving 57% of the money available for open access. The bulk of the University of Edinburgh’s RCUK block grants have been spent on ‘Hybrid OA’ journals as shown in the diagram below. Only 3 out of the 10 most popular publishers are purely Gold OA and don’t charge subscriptions :
Block chart showing the top 10 publishers who received funds from the RCUK open access block grant during 2013-2018. The number in the top left of each box is the total number of Gold OA papers published, the number in the middle of the box is the total expenditure and the name of the publisher is in the bottom left of the box.
Research funders like UKRI and the Wellcome Trust previously supported this ‘hybrid-OA’ model, but they no longer believe that it supports a transition to full OA which is their aim. To precipitate a change in the publisher’s behaviour and to increase the adoption of open access, a number of important European research funders, co-ordinated by Science Europe, developed Plan S.
Plan S update
Plan S requires that, from 2020, scientific publications that result from research funded by public money must be published in compliant Open Access journals, and specifically states that ‘hybrid OA’ journals won’t be supported. As it currently stands, Plan S will be hugely disruptive as researchers will potentially not be able to publish in their journal of choice.
In order to understand the impact of how Plan S will affect our research staff, departments and the broader academic community, Library & University Collections carried out a wide ranging consultation exercise. The Scholarly Communications Team held a series of eight open meetings, during the period 23rd – 30th January 2019, which were attended by over 260 staff. As far as we are aware this was the largest consultation held by a HE institution.
Based on feedback gathered at these meetings, the University has submitted a balance response to that is supportive of Plan S and the time frames set down, but also reflects the concerns raised about risks to international collaboration – specifically co-publishing work with collaborators in non-Plan S regions of the world. The response, and more general information about Plan S, can be read in full on our web pages:
https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/publish-research/open-access/plan-s
UKRI will decide how to apply the principles of Plan S once it has concluded an ongoing review of its own open-access policies, which is not likely to be completed until next autumn. The current Open Access policy is firmly in place until 31st March 2020 and it would be improbable for UKRI to change terms and conditions of grant awards midway through the year. We can therefore expect UKRI to adopt Plan S from 1 April 2020.
Taiwan Resource Centre for Chinese Studies
On 22 November 2018, Director of L&UC Jeremy Upton and Director-general Tseng Shu-hsien of the National Central Library of Taiwan (NCL) signed an agreement on establishing the Taiwan Resource Centre for Chinese Studies (TRCCS) in our Library. Over 25 academic colleagues from several Schools of CAHSS and several PhD students attended the ceremony.
Photo courtesy of Susan Pettigrew
Both Jeremy and Director-general Tseng delivered warm speeches in a very friendly, collaborative atmosphere. In his remarks, Jeremy highlighted the University’s long term connection with China, our Library commitment to supporting teaching, learning and research in Chinese Studies and China related topics across the University. The University’s Assistant Principal (China) Professor Natascha Gentz spoke in warm support of the project on behalf of the University. Director General Mr Jason Chien-Chen Lien of Taipei Representative Office in the U.K., Edinburgh Office, also attended the launch ceremony and made a speech. After the official signing of the agreement, the guests were shown by Dr Joseph Marshall a display of Special Collections items on China.
The worldwide TRCCS project was first launched in 2012 by the NCL of Taiwan to promote international exchange and library collaboration in Chinese studies. We are the 31st TRCCS partner institution in the world, the 3rd in the UK after SOAS and Oxford, and the 1st in Scotland.
Our TRCCS is located within the East Asian Studies Collection on the 3rd floor of the Main Library. Thanks to the hard work of colleagues in the Metadata Services and the Collections Management teams, the initial NCL donation of 748 titles of Chinese books and DVDs (948 items) on a wide range of subjects in arts, humanities and social science, recently published in Taiwan, have already been catalogued and made available for staff and students. There will be further donations of several hundred books each year from the second year onwards. In addition, the NCL will offer us access to about 8 digital resources from Taiwan. Under the project, the NCL and the University Library (together with the department of Asian Studies) will also co-host annual “Taiwan Lecturers on Chinese Studies”, delivered by internationally well-known scholars in the field.
TRCCS in East Asian Studies Collection, 3rd floor, Main Library. The entire TRCCS collection can be retrieved in DiscoverEd by shelfmark search for “TRCCS”.
We believe that the TRCCS project will enable us to fill in a gap in our Chinese print and e-resource collections by systematically acquiring scholarly publications produced in Taiwan. It will play an active role in our efforts to build our Chinese Collection into a national resource centre for Chinese Studies in Scotland.
New E-Resources for Literature
JSTOR’s Lives of Literature E-Journal Collection
We have added the newly available “Lives of Literature” collection to our Jstor subscription. This collection supports advanced literary studies and interdisciplinary research on writers and texts critical to curricula in literature. With its focus on journals that use an author or text as a starting place, Lives of Literature also fulfills a scholarly resource need for in-depth study and courses on a single author or text. It will contain 120 journals that are all new to JSTOR when completed.
Key thematic topics include:
- Medieval Authors & Texts
- Modernist Authors
- Victorian, Edwardian & Gothic Authors
- Literary Theorists
View the title list at https://www.jstor.org/titlelists/journals/livesoflitext-backfile-collection?filter=head_titles&fileFormat=xls
Further info
Access Jstor via the Databases AZ list, this e-resource is also available to University of Edinburgh alumni.
A user guide to this collection is available from https://guides.jstor.org/livesofliterature
Oxford Bibliographies – Literary and Critical Theory
We have taken out a subscription to Oxford Bibliographies – Literary and Critical Theory which currently contains 70 articles. As these articles are not yet available in DiscoverEd, please search the Oxford Bibliographies website directly – a user guide is available via the video below.
Further info
The following Oxford Bibliographies modules are available to the University of Edinburgh – American Literature, Anthropology, Biblical Studies, British and Irish Literature, Buddhism, Chinese Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, Classics, Criminology, Education, Hinduism, International Law, International Relations, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies, Linguistics, Literary and Critical Theory, Medieval Studies, Music, Philosophy, Psychology, Social Work, Sociology, Victorian Literature. See http://oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/obo/page/subject-list for individual module title lists.
Access is available via the Databases AZ list.
To the city, in the city, for the city: Patrick Geddes in India
Our project archivist, Elaine MacGillivray, travels to India later this week to deliver presentations at the CEPT Archives (Architecture, Planning and Design) in Ahmedabad, and at the ARTISANS’ gallery in Mumbai. In advance of touch-down in India, we take a brief look at Geddes’ experience there.
Patrick Geddes and class of c1919, University of Bombay Department of Sociology and Civics (Ref: Coll-1869/11)
Patrick Geddes first travelled to India in the autumn of 1914. He was 60. Prompted by the success of Geddes’ urban regeneration projects in the Edinburgh Old Town, Lord Pentland, (the then Governor of Madras), had invited Geddes to travel to India to advise on urban planning issues. In that first of many seasons that Geddes was to spend in India he was accompanied by his eldest son Alasdair. Together, they travelled thousands of miles across the vast country, all the time surveying each of the cities they visited. After arriving at Bombay, they headed north to Ahmedabad, Ajmer, Jaipur, Agra and to New Delhi before travelling across India to Lucknow, Cawnpur, Allahabad, Benares, Calcutta and then southward to Madras.
Geddes had planned to show in India, his favoured tool of civic education, the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. He faced an unfortunate setback when the ship transporting his exhibition to India, the Clan Grant, was sunk near Madras by the German ship, the Emden. Aided by friends and colleagues at home, a committee, led by H.V. Lanchester, collected and forwarded a replacement exhibition. The first shipment made it to Madras by December 1914. The exhibition, comprising over 3000 maps, prints and photographs and set out on a quarter-mile of wall and screen, opened at the Senate Hall of Madras University on 17 January 1915. Geddes went on to tour his Cities and Town Planning Exhibition across India. The exhibits make up much of the Patrick Geddes archive collections now held at the universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde.
An example of the plethora of notes made by Patrick Geddes’ on India, its cities, institutions and culture (Ref:T-GED/12/1/191a)
Geddes worked tirelessly to survey and compose reports on Indian cities and towns, 13 alone in Madras. Lewis Mumford, in his introduction to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt’s Patrick Geddes in India (1947), wrote that throughout Geddes’ time in India he worked to promote his ‘broad humanistic outlook on the social aspects of civic improvement’.[1] To quote Geddes himself ‘town-planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful, it must be folk-planning’.[2]
The measure of the success of a city survey depends on its appeal to the individuals that compose the city: upon its power to rouse each from his, often life-long, training of seeing himself as a self-interested economic man and therefore mere dust of the State – to realising himself as an effective citizen valuing…his contribution to his city, in his city and for his city.[3]
Cities and Town Planning Exhibition at University of Bombay (Ref: T-GED/1/7/21a)
After a season of touring the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, surveying and reporting on Indian cities, Geddes returned to Scotland in the summer of 1915 to fulfil his teaching responsibilities as Chair of Botany at the University College Dundee. Thereafter, he continued to travel to India each autumn. In 1917 he was prevented from travelling home to Scotland due to the dangers of being attacked by German U-boats. Geddes, at this point, was accompanied by his wife Anna and together they planned a summer school in Darjeeling. They recruited renowned Bengali polymath, poet, musician and artist, Rabindranath Tagore. The school opened on 21 May 1917, and marks the beginning of Geddes and Tagore’s friendship.
It was in India in 1917 that Geddes was dealt the harshest of blows. In April, he received a telegram to advise that his eldest son Alasdair had been killed in action in France. He bore this news alone for four months, afraid that sharing the news with his dear wife Anna would accelerate her own illness. Devastatingly, his dearly beloved and stalwart companion, Anna, died at Calcutta in the summer of 1917. She was unaware that she had been predeceased by her son.
Bereft, Geddes continued to work tirelessly to survey and report on Indian Cities, advocating and adapting his ideas on ‘diagnosis before treatment’, ‘conservative surgery’, and ‘regional survey for regional service’ to Indian traditions and values. His attempt to study and understand the interaction between humans and their environment utilised a range of disciplines including biology, sociology, geography, geology, and town planning. Sometimes he would only spend one or two swift days surveying a city. In others cases, as for Indore, he would spend months, culminating in a two-volume planning report, published in 1918.
Geddes returned to Scotland for a period in 1919. In the summer of 1919, he was offered the Chair of Sociology and Civics at the University of Bombay, by the then vice-chancellor, Sir Chimanlal Setalvad. Now at the age of 65, Geddes accepted the offer. By 1924, Geddes’ health had deteriorated and his contract with the University of Bombay was to come to an end. The success or otherwise of Geddes’ terms at the University of Bombay are debated. Certainly, there is evidence that the University Senate expressed dissatisfaction at Geddes’ periods of absence (in some part due to his town-planning commitments in Palestine). Geddes left India in 1924 and settled in Montpellier in the south of France.
For more in-depth accounts of Patrick Geddes in India you may find the following publications a useful starting point:
- Boardman, P., The Worlds of Patrick Geddes, (1978)
- Fraser, B., A meeting of two minds: Geddes Tagore letters, (2005)
- Tyrwhitt, J., Patrick Geddes in India, (1947)
- Munshi, I., Patrick Geddes: Sociologist, Environmentalist and Town Planner, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 35, No. 6 (5-11 Feb 2000), pp.485-491
Elaine will be delivering presentations at the CEPT Auditorium, Ahmedabad on 1 March 2019, and at ARTISANS’, Mumbai on 5 March 2019. For further information please contact Elaine elaine.macgillivray@ed.ac.uk
[1] Tyrwhitt, J., Patrick Geddes in India, (1947), p.16.
[2] Ibid., p.22.
[3] Ibid., p.35.
Judaism and Jewish Studies: the work of John ‘Rabbi’ Duncan and Adolph Saphir
New College Library holds collections of and about a number of individuals who gathered material and wrote extensively on Judaism and Jewish Studies, motivated by their interest in the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Two significant figures in this area of interest are John ‘Rabbi’ Duncan and Adolph Saphir.
Duncan was a colourful, intelligent and, at times, tortured soul, one particularly gifted in the study of languages and in missionary work. Born in 1796, he obtained an MA from the University of Aberdeen in 1814. When he began his study of theology, he was still an atheist and did not convert to Christianity until 1826. Even thereafter, he had times of doubt before settling into firm belief.
John ‘Rabbi’ Duncan – portrait by Hill & Adamson
In 1840, having spent some years as an ordained minister, Duncan’s interest in Hebrew and his growing interest in the church’s work concerning the conversion of the Jews to Christianity led to his appointment as the Church of Scotland’s first missionary to the Jews. Stationed in Budapest from 1841-43, Duncan was remarkably successful in his work there converting, among others, the young Adolph Saphir and his family to the Christian faith.
But in 1843, following The Disruption, Duncan’s calling took him back to Edinburgh where he held the chair of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the newly-founded New College, remaining in post there until his death in 1870.
Until recently, Duncan’s collection was not easily accessible but it can now be searched for online. Resources by, about or owned by Duncan can be found in DiscoverEd and also via this resource list compiled by Academic Support Librarian, Christine Love-Rodgers.
In 1843, one of Duncan’s converts, 13-year-old Adolph Saphir, came with him to Edinburgh from Budapest, his father being keen that the young Adolph improve his English and train as a minister of the Free Church. This process took some time and saw Saphir travel to Berlin, Glasgow and Aberdeen, becoming a student of theology at the Free Church College, Edinburgh in 1851. In 1854, Saphir, himself a Jewish convert, was appointed a missionary to the Jews. Saphir’s mission took him first to Hamburg and then, in 1856, to South Shields. Five years later, he moved to London where he remained until his death in 1891.
Adolph Saphir – photograph by T. Roger, Swan Electric Engraving Co.
Despite Duncan’s inner battles of the spirit and his lack of prowess as a formal teacher, his personal piety, linguistic and informal teaching abilities, as well as his success as a missionary, were impressive. Saphir and he contributed significantly to the collection of items in New College Library, particularly with reference to the Christian mission to the Jews during the 19th century. Their legacy is to the ongoing benefit of scholars of Judaism and Jewish Studies.
A small exhibition of some of our Duncan and Saphir material will run from 26th February-31st March 2019 in New College Library.
Bibliography
http://www.clan-duncan.co.uk/john-rabbi-duncan.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Duncan_(theologian)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolph_Saphir
https://archive.org/stream/rschsv028p1barr/rschsv028p1barr_djvu.txt
Mighty in the Scriptures: a memoir of Adolph Saphir, D.D./by Gavin Carlyle. J.F. Shaw and Co.; 1893.
Gina Headden, IS Helpdesk Assistant, New College Library and Christine Love-Rodgers, Academic Support Librarian, School of Divinity, New College.
With many thanks to Jessica Wilkinson from the School of Divinity who contributed so much to identifying and listing the relevant New College Library collections.
E-Resources on trial for LGBT+ History Month
Alongside our print book display in the main library, we are also trialling the following E-Resources for LGBT+ History Month:
LGBT Magazine Archive
LGBT Magazine Archive is a searchable archive of major periodicals devoted to LGBT+ interests, dating from the 1950s through to recent years. 26 leading but previously hard-to-find magazines are included in LGBT Magazine Archive, including many of the longest-running, most influential publications of this type. Of particular note, The Advocate is made available digitally for the first time. The Advocate is the oldest surviving continuously published US title of its type (having launched in 1967). LGBT Magazine Archive also includes the principal UK titles, notably Gay News and its successor publication Gay Times. More info about this e-resource can be found on the SPS Librarian Blog.
Trial ends 28th Feb. – for off campus access please use the University VPN
Archives of Gender & Sexuality
Archives of Sexuality & Gender provides a robust and significant collection of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender. With material dating back to the sixteenth century, you can examine how sexual norms have changed over time, health and hygiene, the development of sex education, the rise of sexology, changing gender roles, social movements and activism, erotica, and many other interesting topical areas. This growing digital archive offers rich research opportunities across a wide span of human history. The database currently includes 3 collections: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940, Part I and Part II and Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century. More info about this e-resource can be found on the HCA Librarian blog.
Trial ends 18th March.
Further info
Visit our e-resources trials webpage for more details about currently running trials and to complete feedback forms on trialled e-resources as your comments influence purchase decisions.
Collections
Hill and Adamson Collection: an insight into Edinburgh’s past
My name is Phoebe Kirkland, I am an MSc East Asian Studies student, and for...
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...
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
Presentation My name is Lishan Zou, I am a fourth year History and Politics student....