Yesterday was International Women’s Day! This year’s theme was #BreakingTheBias and we wanted to explore and celebrate this concept in the Library by highlighting some of the inspirational women who are featured in our collections.
With our beloved mascot Billy Bee leading the helm, we took a dive into the many thousands of books here at Billy B and picked a selection of amazing female authors, scientists, medieval mystics, and poets!
If there’s one thing we’ve all seen a lot of in the last couple of years, its change – new routines, new methods and new normal. And we’ll be seeing more changes for University Library and Collections in the coming months and years, but they’ll be positive ones.
One of these changes is a new Library Management System (LMS). This is the software that underpins the core functions of the library, such as the library catalogue and the circulation system. We’ve had the current system in place – albeit with upgrades in the interim – since 1996. So change is somewhat overdue!
Continue reading “Improvements to come…”
Trying to find a new book to read isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. Of course, you can easily take to the internet, searching for leisure title inspo, but inevitably you find yourself getting lost in the long lists of recommendations online. You spend all your time trawling through the titles, debating between this one and that one before realising the spare time you once had has now slipped away, resulting in you making your own list of ‘books to read when I find the time.’ Ironic, don’t you think? (Alanis Morissette classic – couldn’t resist!)
Continue reading “Don’t judge a book by its cover – go on a Blind Date with a Book”
This week, to mark the Lovestruck celebration that is Valentine’s Day, we asked our users to tell us… Is This Love?
They were invited to write a love note to share their admiration/love/affection for the library on one of our specially designed postcards, and add it to our display in the Billy B. And, well…what can we say? We Found Love!
Continue reading “Love is in the Air: Love notes to your Library”
Last week, the Faculty Librarians (FLs) took over the library’s Twitter and Instagram feed – it wasn’t a coup, it was to highlight the help and support they offer! This included emphasizing the FLs various responsibilities and sharing some top research and study tips.
We’ve posted previously about the suite of online tutorials we have been developing. There are now 12 of these that are live, covering a range of different topics:
Graduate intern Elisabeth Prestgard updates us on what she’s been up to in the last month or so…
Hello everyone! Happy 2022! Since the last time I spoke to you, I’ve got big news to share. In November I started a new position as a part-time Customer Service Assistant. It is a permanent position which I am doing along with my internship.
Continue reading “Graduate intern update: Elisabeth”
The festive season might have come and gone, but being a librarian is a bit like being Santa Claus – all year round. Instead of delivering toys and games (or a lump coal, if you’ve been naughty…) we deliver KNOWLEDGE. Or, perhaps more accurately, we provide access to it. In fact, we provide access to a huge range of resources, including the physical items held in our libraries, archives and museums, subscriptions to electronic journals and databases and guidance on accessing open research resources. Something for everyone, surely. But sometimes, this is not enough. Sometimes our users need MORE!
Continue reading “Requesting resources”
Every month, statistics about Durham Research Online (DRO) – our institutional publications repository – are published here. As part of this, we pick a publication of the month.
In November, there was an online talk given by members of the Department of Psychology’s Centre for Neurodiversity and Development about their project: Triple-A: Attention, Arousal and Anxiety in the classroom. The project draws attention to the fact that classrooms are busy, noisy and multi-sensory places and some children, often those who are ‘neurodivergent’ (e.g. have conditions such as autism), can face difficulties in this environment. The project is dedicated to raising awareness of these difficulties and helping develop tools to support children and educators. The talk was recorded and is available here. To celebrate the public talk, we picked a fully open access article, related to the research:
Distraction, distress and diversity : exploring the impact of sensory processing differences on learning and school life for pupils with autism spectrum disorders by Elizabeth K. Jones, Mary Hanley and Deborah M. Riby
Continue reading “The Triple A project: how open access research is helping children”
In the next of our series introducing members of staff, #DULibIntroducing meets Repository Coordinator Martin Gleghorn.
Please state your name, full job title, and a brief description of what that entails:
Martin Gleghorn, Repository Coordinator. Which means I coordinate the repository… Alongside the legend that is Kelly Hetherington, and working as part of the Scholarly Communications team, I help look after the University’s open access repository, Durham Research Online. Day-to-day, this involves a lot of liaising with academic staff, providing training for whoever might need it, advocating for open access research more generally, working with metadata, and – ultimately – making sure that the research being published at Durham is as widely accessible as physically possible. I’m also one of the people behind the @DROdurham twitter account, which we use to promote that research.
Continue reading “#DULibIntroducing Martin Gleghorn”
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