News News Archive University of Sussex Library
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Yet another extremely busy period for the University of Sussex Library with more exciting projects underway. Of particular interest are the following: Refurbishment Our major refurbishment project is now technically at an end. Whilst there are a number of snagging issues and a few minor defects to be resolved, the Library is now looking at its best. The footfall so far this year has exceeded all expectations and the new infrastructure appears to be coping well. We are in the process of gathering data to help us evaluate the impact and success of the changes. Retrospective Digitisation and e-theses: Following on from a digitisation project in the Summer of 2011, we are now embarking on the retrospective digitisation of pre-2009 doctoral theses currently held as bound copies in the Library store. As a member of EThOS, we already have 1,370 doctoral theses digitised and available on open access - approximately 25% of our print theses collection. Over the next few months, we are planning to add to this by digitising a further 200 theses (where digitisation is appropriate), making our print theses collection open access on EThOS from 2005. Since 2009, doctoral students are required to submit an electronic copy of their thesis for inclusion in our Institutional Repository, Sussex Research Online (SRO). Additionally, e-theses in SRO will be harvested and made available via EThOS. Sabre In September we launched a new catalogue covering the holdings of both the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton. The new service is called sabre and can be found at: http://sabre.sussex.ac.uk/ It uses the open source catalogue software VuFind and runs independently from the main catalogues provided by each University. Search & Discovery We are now beginning to implement the e-strategy for search and discovery that we developed in 2011. The first phase will be the introduction of Capita’s Prism 3 catalogue. We plan to run this in parallel with our Aquabrowser catalogue from April and then go fully live with Prism 3 as our main catalogue in August. Observing the 1980s The Library has been awarded £100k JISC funding, to digitise 1980s materials from the Mass Observation Archive and place them online as Open Educational Resources (OERs) for use by a wider group of university students, school pupils and researchers to support their history studies. The project will be complemented and enhanced by oral history recordings from the British Library’s sound archive collection. A selection of the digitised material will be embedded in the University of Sussex “Thatcher’s Britain” course run by Dr Lucy Robinson in History and this in turn will be made available as OERs for re-use. Mass Observation Seminar Series To celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Mass Observation, the Library is hosting a series of lectures starting in October 2011 and ending in May 2012. hH first two well-attended lectures in the series were Juliet Gardiner, ‘Writing the mid century with Mass Observation’ and Virginia Nicholson, ‘The Living Archive’. Reading Lists and Aspire We continue to engage with academics across the University to ensure we have the correct resources in the correct quantities to support teaching. This liaison has largely been though the introduction and promotion of the use of Aspire Reading List tool to manage the lists, but we have also been supporting academics by inputting their lists onto Aspire for them within the limits of our own staffing resources. Sussex Research Hive Seminar Series The Sussex Research Hive seminar series will run every other Tuesday lunchtime throughout the Spring Term from 31st January. This series supported by SAGE publishing is aimed at the Research community at Sussex, bringing them together in the Library. The themes for this year are the REF, copyright in the digital age, increasing the impact of research through public engagement and the changing research environment. The Keep Work has begun on building a new £19m archival resource centre to store the University's Special Collections, The Keep. It is being funded by East Sussex County Council and Brighton & Hove City Council who are working on the project in partnership with the University of Sussex. At The Keep, the collections of all three partners will be available under one roof for the first time. The building will provide a purpose-built home for the University's Special Collections: a number of archival, manuscript and rare-book collections, mostly relating to 20th-century literary, political and social history. Sally Faith, Adrian Hale, Jane Harvell & Annette Moore. |
