Balfour Library Conservation Project - article published in volunteer newsletter

Our wonderful team of five NADFAS (National Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies) Heritage Volunteers has been cleaning our rare books since July last year. I have written an article all about the project and the progress made so far (with pictures!) for the NADFAS Review Volunteer Supplement which was published on 25^th May. 

I have posted the article on our special collections website: http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/library/special.html#clean

See here for further details of the project http://www.balfourlibrary.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/book-cleaning-project-in-library.html (you can also click on the ‘cleaning’ label further down on the right hand side of the blog to see additional blog posts relating only to this project).

The current team will hopefully continue to work throughout the Summer Vacation 2012. They are starting again next Thursday 7^th June following a break during the Easter Term.

Subscription to Birds of North America (BNA) Online renewed for another 3 years!

We are very pleased to announce that the Balfour Library has just renewed the subscription to BNA Online for another 3 years, until June 2015. 

This has proved to be a very popular resource over the last three years and we are glad to be able to subscribe to it for a further three years.

Published by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the American Ornithologists' Union, the resource provides comprehensive life histories for each of the 716+ species of birds breeding in the USA (including Hawaii) and Canada.You can search for species by common or scientific name, and you can browse these. Account contents are frequently updated, with contributions from researchers, citizen scientists, and designated reviewers and editors. There are image and video galleries showing plumages, behaviors, habitat, nests and eggs, and more. Most accounts now feature recordings of the songs and calls of their species, selected from the extensive collection of Cornell's Macaulay Library http://macaulaylibrary.org/ 

Access is available throughout the University of Cambridge and off-campus. When on the university network you should be able to go to the BNA Online website at http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/ and access it directly from there. However if you are 'off-campus' you will need to go to the eresources@cambridge website http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/eresources/index.php (click on the Databases tab and search for it there) and you will be prompted for your Raven password.

We hope you continue to enjoy using this resource.

Wellcome Trust digitizing the papers of the pioneers of modern genetics

The Wellcome Trust will be bringing the papers of the pioneers of modern genetics together in one place for the first time as part of their digitization project 'Modern Genetics and its Foundations'.

Tens of thousands of notes, letters, sketches, lectures, photographs and essays, produced by the key players in the discovery of the structure of DNA and the development of genetics will be freely available online.They include the papers of Francis Crick, James D Watson, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.

The Wellcome Trust will be collaborating with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, The Churchill Archives Centre, the University of Glasgow, King's College London and UCL (University College London) to make their archival collections available.

Find out more about exactly which material will be made available by reading the the press release here: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2012/WTVM055104.htm

10 websites to help you keep up to date with scholarly journal articles

Check out this blog post for information on 10 websites to help you keep up to date with current scientific literature.

They include SciFeeds, tic-TOCs, Cite U Like, MyJournals.org, Zetoc, My Favourite Journals.

Click here to go to the blogpost: http://hwlibrary.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/10-websites-to-help-you-keep-up-to-date-with-scholarly-journal-contents/

SPIE Digital Library trial access until 14th June

Trial access has been set up to the SPIE Digital Library by the Journal Co-ordination Scheme (in conjunction with ebooks@cambridge) and will run until 14th June 2012.

The SPIE Digital Library includes more than 310,000 conference proceedings, peer-reviewed journal articles and eBooks from the areas of astronomy, biophotonics, nanotechnology, sensors, lasers, electro-optics, communications, imaging, and more. SPIE is a not-for-profit educational society with over 17,000 Members worldwide.

Journals:

The journals are available in the ejournals@cambridge A-Z http://camsfx.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/cambridge/az listing      

• Proceedings of SPIE
• Optical Engineering
• Journal of Electronic Imaging
• Journal of Biomedical Optics
• Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS
• Journal of Applied Remote Sensing
• Journal of Nanophotonics
• Journal of Photonics for Energy
• SPIE Reviews
• SPIE Letters Virtual Journal

eBooks:

There are currently 164 ebooks  from 1989 to present available as an add-on (with an additional cost) to the SPIE Digital Library. The ebooks include titles from the SPIE Press series in optics and photonics:

·         SPIE Press Monographs are authoritative reference books, textbooks, and handbooks.

·         Tutorial Texts cover fundamental and emerging topics at introductory and intermediate levels.

·         Field Guides present key information that students and practicing  engineers and scientists need in a concise format.

A user guide http://spie.org/Documents/Publications/Digital%20Library/DL-User-Guide-2011.pdf with information about the SPIE Digital Library and tips on how to search the site is available. It also shows how to set-up RSS feeds and utilize bibliographic, bookmarking, and research tools.

This trial is available both on and off campus. Off campus access is available via Raven logins, but for off campus access, users should use the links above, the Off campus access bookmarklet http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/toolbox/bookmarklet.html or the ejournals@cambridge A-Z http://camsfx.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/cambridge/az listing for journals. Shibboleth access (Institutional login) is being set up but is not yet available.

Please send all feedback on this trial resource to ejournals@lib.cam.ac.uk by 16th June 2012.

Wellcome Trust joins 'academic spring' to open up science - Guardian article

This interesting article from the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/wellcome-trust-academic-spring?INTCMP=SRCH discusses how the Wellcome Trust is supporting the growing 'academic spring' campaign to allow all research papers to be shared online.

Nearly 9,000 researchers have now apparently signed up to boycott journals that restrict access to research papers (i.e. those published by Elsevier). The Wellcome Trust itself is about to launch a "'high calibre scientific journal called eLife that would compete directly with top-tier publications such as Nature and Science".

These are interesting times in the world of academic publishing. There will inevitably be consequences for academic libraries across the world. British universities currently spend £200m a year on journal subscriptions, which represents around 10% of the block grants that they receive from government, as outlined in this article.

Why do old books smell?

Readers in this library have said in past surveys that they either love or hate the 'smell of musty old books' in the library.

What do you think? I personally like it but am in fact now immune to the smell here now! It's nice when people come in and say how much they like it too.

Here's an article all about the science of why old books smell. It's all to do with volatile organic compounds, apparently:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/grrlscientist/2012/may/01/1