The Balfour Library will be unstaffed on Thursday 6th January

This is due to library staff attendance at the annual libraries@cambridge conference.

However, the library photocopiers and PCs will be switched on and available for use during normal library opening hours. The scanner and the self-issue facility will be also available 24/7, as usual.

Research Libraries UK Calls for Journal Pricing Restraint

At its recent conference, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) announced it would not support future journal big deals unless they showed real price reductions. With a cut to the teaching grant and research budgets flat at best, RLUK members believe that unless this happens they will be forced to cancel significant numbers of subscriptions which will fatally compromise the UK’s capacity for research. (RLUK Press Release, 25 Nov 2010)

RLUK Press Release:http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/RLUKPressReleaseJournalPricing.doc

Following this press release, the following two articles have been published in the media:

Times Higher Education: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=414367

Wall Street Journal (European edition): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703678404575636820757036514.html

New Version of the Oxford English Dictionary

OUP launch a new version of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The new version includes a new design and new functionalities as well as over 2,400 revised entries, new words across the dictionary and the additional of the Historical Thesaurus to the OED. The new version of the OED is available from a new URL http://www.oed.com and is recommended for all off-campus users with a raven password. Your raven password can be used whenever prompted to log-in with Shibboleth.

The new version will be available in parallel with the old version of the OED until the 31st of March 2011. The old version will remain accessible through the old URL http://dictionary.oed.com until this time.

The OED also publishes four updates each year with the next to be added in March 2011.

Please take the time to read this special Christmas package of information as there are some changes this year.

Balfour Library end of term information

Michaelmas Term 2010 ends on Friday 3rd December. All books on loan from the Balfour Library must be returned by this date, or can be renewed for further periods unless they have been requested by another reader. Saturday morning opening has now finished until next term.

Borrowing regulations

Remember that research workers of the Department of Zoology will be able to borrow books that are normally for Overnight Loan for an extended period of 2 weeks at a time during vacations. Undergraduates have special vacation borrowing rights this year, please see below.

Please remember that (except if you are eligible for vacation borrowing) you should not take books away from Cambridge, especially if you are going on field work or on business trips for example - please return any books you have on loan from us first so that they are readily available for other readers.

Vacation borrowing for undergraduates

This academic year we are trialling vacation borrowing for undergraduates for the Christmas and Easter vacations. An email advertising this has been sent to your relevant CamTools course site.

Please see the library website at: http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/library/booksborrow.html for more information on how to borrow, return and renew books on loan from the Balfour Library.

How to access online resources when you are away from Cambridge (and you are still a valid member of the University)

The recommended route for accessing ejournals provided by the University remotely is as follows:

• Go to the ejournals@cambridge website at: http://camsfx.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/cambridge/az
• Enter the title of the journal you need (if it does not appear then there is no online subscription to it)
• Click on the 'find journals by title' button
• When you click on the name of the journal the Raven login box should appear
• Enter your Raven userid and password and click on the 'Submit' button
• You should then be taken to the host page for that journal and you can find the article(s) you need from there
• (You only need to enter the Raven login once per session so you won't have to keep logging in and out each time you need a different journal)

You may well be able to get the full text of ejournal articles through searching PubMed or Google / GoogleScholar for example, but sometimes you may not necessarily be recognised as being a valid member of the University of Cambridge (it uses IP addresses of computers to identify you). You may therefore sometimes be asked for payment for the full text of an article or be prevented from accessing it, even when a subscription to the ejournal has been paid for by the University. The recommended route as above should guarantee you the access you are entitled to.

It is strongly recommended that you check the ejournals@cambridge website as above to see whether you will actually be able to access particular online journals remotely BEFORE you leave Cambridge. See also the eresources@cambridge website at: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/electronicresources/ for access to particular databases. See the 'Access Route' link next to the journal or database title to check this. Some online journals are not accessible outside of the University network so you may wish to download or print off articles from these before you leave Cambridge.

Raven passwords

If you do not currently have a Raven password and think you may need one to access the Web of Knowledge or Scopus databases (to search scientific literature) or online journals and databases when you are away from Cambridge, you should apply for one following the instructions given on the University Computing Service 'How do I get a Raven password?' website at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/docs/faq/n5.html This page will also help you if you have lost your Raven password.

Troubleshooting ejournals access

Finally, if you are having trouble accessing ejournals and eresources remotely using your Raven password please see the guidance provided on the Central Science Library's 'Raven FAQs' website at: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/CSL/ravenqanda.htm

Library Christmas and New Year closing dates

The Balfour Library will be closed from Saturday 25th December 2010 and will re-open on Tuesday 4th January 2011.

Thank you for your cooperation.

We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Best wishes,

Clair & Jane

Rare book on display - Bewick's 'History of British Birds'

The rare book on display from our collection is: History of British birds: the figures engraved on wood by T. Bewick. Vol. 1, containing the history and description of land birds. Vol. 2., containing the history and description of water birds. Newcastle, 1797 and 1804.

Balfour Library class mark: HBF 2 (1-2)

The book is open at: Vol. 2, p.54 - Curlew. This is a first edition copy of the work. This woodcut of a curlew beautifully defines the bird’s features, as well as the surrounding water, foliage and rocks, and conveys the sense of movement caused by the wind in the reeds. Bewick was a pioneer of wood engraving technique.

Thomas Bewick, a wood engraver, was born near Eltringham, Northumberland, on 10th or 12th August 1753, and died in Gateshead on 8th November 1828. He was apprenticed aged 14 to Ralph Beilby, a Newcastle engraver who taught him how to engrave metal, silver and copperplate.

Bewick entered into partnership with Beilby in 1777. Beilby apparently did not like wood engraving but Bewick preferred it. His skill soon became evident and well-known in the work he was producing for printers of children’s books and books of fables. He refined the ‘white line’ technique; the block surface was seen as solid black before cutting took place, and each cut made was to create white light. This technique was very expressive, and he handled texture and the balance of light and shade particularly well.

Bewick eventually published his own natural history books that incorporated his own wood engravings. The General History of Quadrupeds was published in 1790. He produced the woodcuts for this in his own time after his days at the workshop, and the text was written by Beilby. For the History of British Birds Bewick wrote the text as well as producing the woodcuts, demonstrating his knowledge and skill as a naturalist as well as an engraver. His publications were especially noted for their ‘tail pieces’, vignettes used to fill space after text. They expressed varied aspects of north-country life, with humour and affection, a love of nature, and often had a moral point to them. These were regarded perhaps even more highly than the main illustrations.

The scientist William Yarrell named the Bewick's swan in honour of Bewick in 1830.

Sources:

Bain, Iain. “Bewick, Thomas (1753–1828).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman, May 2005. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2334 (accessed November 26, 2010).

Colin Campbell. "Bewick, Thomas." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T008554 (accessed November 26, 2010).

Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) http://www.wwt.org.uk/our-work/wetland-wildlife/bewicks-swans

Further reading:

Uglow, Jenny. Nature’s engraver: a life of Thomas Bewick. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/id/Natures_Engraver/9780571223756

Attention student book-collectors!

The Rose Book-Collecting Prize

Your chance to win £500

You can enter any type of collection provided it is solely owned by you and has been collected by you. The books do not have to be especially valuable - a collection of paperbacks, put together with imagination, is equally eligible. The contest is open to all current undergraduate and graduate students of the University of Cambridge.

The closing date for entries is the first day of Lent Full Term Tuesday 18 January 2011

Full details of how to enter are given on the University Library website at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/bookprize.html

New books:

Acoustic communication in insects and anurans: common problems and diverse solutions, by Carl H. Gerhardt and Franz Huber. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press; 2002. Balfour Library shelfmark: Q.7 (51ii). (Overnight Loan Shelves).

Cognition, evolution, and behavior, 2nd ed., by Sara J. Shettleworth. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2010. Balfour Library shelfmark: GFU (278bii-iii) (Overnight Loan Shelves).

Ecology of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, by Cindy Van Dover. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2000. Balfour Library shelfmark: GHR (16ii) (Overnight Loan Shelves).

The evolution of cognition, edited by Cecilia Heyes and Ludwig Huber. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 2000. Balfour Library shelfmark: GF (214iii-iv) (Overnight Loan and Open Shelves).

Evolutionary behavioral ecology, edited by David F. Westneat and Charles W. Fox. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2010. Balfour Library shelfmark: GFU (338i-iv) (Overnight Loan and Open Shelves).

Lewin's genes X, by Jocelyn E. Krebs, Elliott S. Goldstein and Stephen T. Kilpatrick. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers; 2011. Balfour Library shelfmark: EN (137ji-ii) (Overnight Loan Shelves).

Modelling binary data, 2nd ed., by David Collett. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall / CRC; 2003. Balfour Library shelfmark: EBB (89b) (Overnight Loan and Open Shelves).

Primate behavioral ecology, 4th ed., by Karen B. Strier. Upple Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall; 2011. Balfour Library shelfmark: YW.7 (33di-iv) (Overnight Loan and Open Shelves).

Downtime of photocopiers in the Department of Zoology

All the photocopiers in the Department of Zoology will be unavailable for use from 12:00pm on Wednesday 10th November.

New photocopiers and card readers are being installed, which will be available for use from Monday 15th November.

The Balfour Library in the Department does have a scanner which can be used 24/7. It is located at the back of the room that the photocopiers are normally situated in. You must bring a memory stick to save your images onto.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Downtime of ScienceDirect and Scopus this Saturday

Elsevier have notified us that there will be a scheduled outage this weekend for the following SciVerse products:

• ScienceDirect
• Scopus

The products and services mentioned above are expected to be offline and unavailable for approximately 9 hours on Saturday, November 13^th due to scheduled upgrades from 12:30 - 21:30.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Jane's success on an online Web 2.0 course

Over the Summer Vacation Jane Acred, the Assistant Librarian, participated in '23 Things Cambridge', an online Web 2.0 programme for University of Cambridge departmental and college librarians, see: http://23thingscambridge.blogspot.com/.

'23 Things' was a self-directed course designed to introduce University of Cambridge UL, faculty and college library staff to Web 2.0 technologies (such as blogs, wikis, Google documents and apps, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Mendeley etc.). The aim was for staff to spend a little time each week over 12 weeks exploring online tools for communication, promotion, and new ways of working. Throughout the course the practical application and relevance of the tools to the library setting were explored. The programme ran from 24 May to 27 August 2010.

The course was quite demanding - each week participants were introduced to 2 things and were asked to spend 1 hour on each, and to blog about them - but in reality Jane sometimes had to spend much longer than that if the things wouldn't work, and often setting them up took longer than expected.

As a result of the course Jane has introduced using Doodle to schedule the Saturday invigilation rota, created a Google calendar that we can both access, and we are planning to use Delicious to create a list of useful bookmarks for specific types of reader. It has been really useful for Jane to learn about and use the new technologies that our readers are now using. We both now understand them and can develop them to our own advantage, and support our readers' use of them.

Not all of the participants managed to complete the course, but Jane persisted and attended the 'Oscars' style Grand Closing Ceremony at the end of the course, where she received her Amazon gift vouchers. Well done to Jane!

In case you're interested, here's the complete list of Things:

Week 1 (24 May)
• Thing 1 - Set up your Google ID and build an iGoogle page.
• Thing 2 - Add the RSS feed of the Cam23 blog to your iGoogle page.

Week 2 (31 May)
• Thing 3 - Create your own 23 Things blog on which you will record your progress.
• Thing 4 - Register your blog. Add a screenshot. Explore other Cam23 blogs.

Week 3 (07 June)
• Thing 5 - Use Doodle to schedule a peer support meeting with another participant.
• Thing 6 - Sign up for Google Calendar and add it to your iGoogle page.

Week 4 (14 June)
• Thing 7 - Create a Twitter account and interact with other Cam23 ‘tweeple’.
• Thing 8 - Review your blog tags.

Week 5 (21 June)
• Thing 9 - Explore Flickr.
• Thing 10 - Using images and Flickr Creative Commons.

Week 6 (28 June)
• Thing 11 - Explore SlideShare.
• Thing 12 - Investigate Delicious.

Week 7 (05 July)
• Thing 13 - Reflection week. Think about what you’ve explored so far and the tools you may adopt.

Week 8 (12 July)
• Thing 14 - Explore LibraryThing.
• Thing 15 - Create a library or personal LibraryThing account.

Week 9 (19 July)
• Thing 16 - Explore library Facebook pages.
• Thing 17 - Using LinkedIn

Week 10 (26 July)
• Thing 18 - Explore Zotero and Mendeley.
• Thing 19 - Blog about using the Things for library marketing.

Week 11 (02 August)
• Thing 20 - Create a Google Document and share it.
• Thing 21 - Explore podcasting: YouTube, Audacity and iTunes.

Week 12 (09 August)
• Thing 22 - Explore and evaluate a selection of wikis.
• Thing 23 - Explore Wordle and blog about your Cam23 experience.