International Women’s Day 2022

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!

#BreakTheBias
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To book, or not to book…

If you’ve visited the Library over the past year or so, you’ll have no doubt become quite familiar with our Space Booking system.

This is still playing an important role for our libraries, ensuring that users can have the opportunity to book in advance and ensure they have any resources they need, such as a PC or an individual study room. However, since Welcome and Orientation Week at the end of September, we have also been offering study spaces in Bill Bryson Library that don’t require a booking. For the more spontaneous users, I’m sure this will be good news. It means you don’t need a booking to just browse the shelves, pop in for a coffee, or come in to use the printers.

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#DULibIntroducing… Richard Holmes

Please state your name, full job title, and a brief description of what that entails:

Richard Holmes, Faculty Librarian for Social Sciences. The central element of my role is to communicate between the departments in the faculty and the University Library and Collections to ensure we are delivering services and resources that meet their diverse needs. I do this by attending key committees within each department to promote new and impending library developments and to pick up changes that may have an impact on the Library, Special Collections or Museums. I also provide support to enable members of Durham University at all levels of study to get the best out of the wonderful collections available. This can range from answering basic email enquiries, through one-to-one tuition, to delivering research skills classes embedded within teaching programmes. I also have a role in collections development, ensuring the right materials are available when needed to support each department’s teaching and research activities.

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Ask DULib: Our Virtual Enquiry Desk

It’s very easy to still think of libraries in purely physical terms. You walk in  – (lidded) coffee in hand – tip your hat to the friendly librarians, and pull a beautiful, hard-back tome from the shelves, feeling primed to escape into its milky white, or perhaps slightly yellowing, pages. Delightful.

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Photo from pexels.com

As you can probably tell, I get a lot of joy from working in a place that holds so many physical books, but as a Library intern this year, I have also found it really exciting discovering the joys, practicalities and usefulness of the “virtual library”.  Our online resources are constantly expanding and evolving, with new e-books and online access being made available weekly, if not daily, in our catalogue.

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#DULibIntroducing… Dr Richard Pears

In the next of our series introducing members of the team who you might meet at our sites or across the University, #DULibIntroducing welcomes Dr Richard Pears who you may meet in your own department if you work or study in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, delivering workshops & inductions or meeting staff and students. Or you may find him doing the same, amongst many other things, at the Bill Bryson Library. Do Say Hello!

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