College Library News

The Google Print search engine, which was covered in an earlier posting, has now launched as a standalone Google search service with its own front page. Previously, Google Print results were listed within Google’s standard results pages.

Google Print is basically a Google search of books. Google has invited publishers to send them pdf versions of their books or to let Google scan them - the incentive for publishers to do this is that they could be rewarded by increased sales of the books they allow Google to hold on its database (in the search results, a link to ‘buy this book’ is offered - Google says it gets no revenue from this). Also, Google has been (and is, as I write this, and will be for many years to come) scanning books and storing them as digital - and searchable - text files in collaboration with a select few large U.S. academic libraries plus the U.K.’s Bodleian Library at Oxford. The submissions of books by publishers is known as The Project for Publishers and Google’s own library scanning venture is known as the The Library Project. I like to think of Google Print as a way of extending the internet back in time, theoretically back to the 1450s and the invention of the printing press - and perhaps even earlier (when Google can develop reliable enough handwriting recognition software)!

Just type your search term in Google Print and any book which includes that term within its pages will be listed in the results (along with a small image of the book’s cover). Clicking on a book in the results displays an image of the page on which the search term appears (helpfully highlighted for you) and you can view a couple of pages either side of the found page. The small matter of copyright means that Google shows only a couple of pages of works still in copyright (which, generally, means those written less than 75 years ago - but this varies between different countries and depends on the edition of the work). So, you cannot just read the whole book and after browsing a few pages Google will ask you to log in (eg with your Gmail account) or create an account if you want to see more pages.

In fact, the Google Print project has been the subject of much negative comment recently and is accused of being in breach of copyright. Business Week had a good article: A Google Project Pains Publishers and even published the text of a letter sent to Google by American publishers: The University Press Assn.’s Objections (also pdf version). An excellent article in Information Today sets out the whole thing very clearly.

In addition, Europe wants to start up a competitor to Google Print to broaden the scope away from mostly English language texts. Then there’s the Internet Archive which has existed for years, not to mention a number of websites already offering full texts of out of copyright books, especially fiction, (notably Project Gutenberg), some listed in the column to the left.

I tried searching for Moby Dick (written in 1851, so it should be well out of copyright) in Google Print. I could not quickly find an unrestricted out of copyright edition. I searched for it at Project Gutenberg, and immediately came up with at least four unrestricted full text versions (albeit not images of actual book pages, but plain text files labouriously typed/scanned in by volunteers). So, Google Print is perhaps not the best source for out of copyright full text access, but it is superb as a book browsing service.

News from Patricia Killiard, University Library:
(From the University Library Map Department) - The University has for several years subscribed to Digimap, an online service run by EDINA that delivers current Ordnance Survey maps and map data of Great Britain to UK tertiary education. Also now available through Digimap is historic Ordnance Survey (OS) map data and I am pleased to say that the University has been able to take out a subscription.

To use the historic data you need a Personal Athens Account. [Note: Athens passwords, available to all students and staff, can be obtained from the College Library enquiry desk]. Then login to Digimap and select the ‘Historic Maps from Landmark’ option.
[Note that the ‘Ordnance Survey Maps and Data’ option will take you to the current data only. To use this you need a Personal Athens Account and you must also register with Digimap - see http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/maps/Dig.htm].

The Landmark Historic Map Collection includes:
- Ordnance Survey County Series maps at 1:2,500 and 1:10,560 scales published between 1843 and 1939
- all available OS National Grid maps at 1:1,250, 1:2,500 and 1:10560/10,000 scales published from 1945 and before the introduction of the OS digital Land-Line product in the early 1990s.

The maps cover England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man - though full coverage of all areas at all scales and dates is not available. The historic maps can be viewed online, printed and downloaded as images for use in image processing and GIS software. You can also compare simultaneously up to four maps of the same location across different dates. More information is available at Digimap’s historic map availability page.

If Digimap does not provide the maps you want remember that the Map Department of Cambridge University Library has OS maps on paper as well as many other maps from different publishers and of different dates, for Great Britain and overseas.

Issue number 30 of the University Library Readers’ Newsletter, dated April 2005, has arrived in the library. It is also available online as the above link indicates. It contains an interesting (from our point of view) article on SUNCAT, a project to create a single tool for researchers to locate serials [journals] held in libraries throughout the UK. Basically, SUNCAT is created to make clean unified high quality journal catalogue records from the mixture of cataloguing standards and journal holdings spread around the UK, so that we can actually find stuff - quickly.
The University is one of of 22 major UK research libraries to contribute data to the pilot service which was launched in February. Try it out. Or visit the SUNCAT site for more information.

The spring 2005 edition AHDS Newsletter from the Arts and Humanities Data Service, a JISC and AHRC funded online resource.

“Includes articles on the Digital Picture, an AHDS project reviewing image use in the visual arts; De Montfort University’s ARIA project, which attempts to introduce arts and humanities researchers to basic methods of ICT research; new digital collections relating to war in 19th- and 20th-century Spain; and details of historical maps now supplied via EDINA. Beside the newsletter articles, you should also find details of the latest AHDS collections, with particular reference to resources relevant to the study of the Reformation”

The AHDS “collects, preserves and promotes electronic resources in the arts and humanities”, specifically covering the five areas of:
- archaeology
- history
- literary, linguistic and other textual studies
- visual arts
- performing arts.
A hard-copy version of the newsletter is available in the library.

The winners of the Aventis Prizes for Science Books were announced last night in a webcast ceremony at The Royal Society’s headquarters in central London. The Aventis Prize celebrates the best books in popular science for both adults and children.

The 2005 General Prize winner for grown-up science books is: Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball (William Heinemann) ISBN 0099457865 (£9.99) *IN THE LIBRARY*

The other five books on the General Prize shortlist were:
- The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) ISBN 0297825038 (£25.00) *IN THE LIBRARY*
- Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older by Douwe Draaisma (Cambridge University Press) ISBN 0521834244 (£19.99) *IN THE LIBRARY*
- Matters of Substance: Drugs – and why everyone’s a user by Griffith Edwards (Penguin, Allen Lane) ISBN 0713996897 (£18.99)
- The Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey (HarperCollins) ISBN 0006551378 (£9.99) *IN THE LIBRARY*
- The Human Mind by Robert Winston (Bantam Press/ Transworld Publishers) ISBN 0553816195 (£7.99)

The 2005 Junior Prize winner for science books aimed at under-14s and picked by under 14s, is: What Makes Me, Me? by Robert Winston (Dorling Kindersley) ISBN 140530359X (£9.99). Winston also had a book in the General category.

The other five books on the Junior Prize shortlist were:
- Kingfisher Knowledge: Endangered Planet by David Burnie (Kingfisher) ISBN 0753409623 (Rec. Price £7.99)
- Mysteries and Marvels of Science by Phillip Clarke, Laura Howell & Sarah Khan (Usborne) ISBN 0746062494 (£12.99)
- Leap Through Time: Earthquake by Nicholas Harris (Orpheus) ISBN 1901323803 (£4.99)
- Night Sky Atlas by Robin Scagell (Dorling Kindersley) ISBN 1405303093 (£12.99)
- Kingfisher Knowledge: Microscopic Life by Richard Walker (Kingfisher) ISBN 0753409232 (£7.99).

The Guardian’s Books web pages, already up with the news as usual, headlines its article: ‘Outsider scoops Aventis Prize’. So, presumably, an unexpected winner. Of the General Prize, that is - the Junior Prize, as usual, gets only a small mention towards the end.

Last year’s winners were, for the General Prize, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (Doubleday/Transworld) ISBN 0552997048 (£8.99) and, for the Junior Prize, Really Rotten Experiments by Nick Arnold & Tony De Saulles (Scholastic Children’s Books) ISBN 0439977355 (£4.99). The Aventis Prize site includes a list of all previous winners since the award’s inception as the ‘Science Book Prizes’ in 1988.

The rumours are true! Royalty, namely The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, will be visiting the University on Wednesday 8 June as confirmed in The Cambridge Evening News this afternoon. Recently, we have seen alleged security and police personnel looking around our very own College, so the Royals could be planning to drop in on us! If a library is on their itinerary, it will be no doubt be the glorious new Education Faculty Library - not us

Just in case you didn’t know (I didn’t until today…!), the opening hours for this term have been way extended - especially at weekends.
Thanks to our student helpers, our hours this term (Easter Term 2005, ie. Apr-Jul 2005) are:
- Monday -Friday: 9-22
- Saturday - Sunday: 10-22
Pretty good, huh? So, if you need somewhere quiet to work/revise, come visit us.

The editor of the New Statesman, Peter Wilby, has resigned his post. The Guardian was one of the first with the news in this article on its website. Mr Wilby has released a brief statement which includes the following:

“Peter Wilby has resigned as New Statesman editor after seven years in the chair. His successor is John Kampfner, the magazine’s political editor […] I have had seven exciting and wonderful years, working with brilliant staff. Geoffrey Robinson, the chairman, gave me as much in dependence as any editor could wish for. John Kampfner has been an excellent political editor, and I know he will also be a fine editor. I wish him and the New Statesman every success in the future.”

It is reported that John Kampfner will be the new editor of the New Statesman, or ‘The Staggers’ as it is affectionately known. Britain’s best known left-wing weekly, in its heydays was edited by such literary big names as Martin Amis, and was well known for its literary reviews now no longer so prominent.
Just six months ago the magazine’s deputy editor, Christine Odone, resigned after reports of ‘heated rows’ with Wilby. Both Odone and Wilby denied this reason, Wilby claiming: “…she felt that the time was right to leave to work on the religious series and spend more time with her baby”.
The New Statesman has a small weekly average sale of around 23,000 (ABC July-December 2004). Its larger ‘rival’, the right-wing The Spectator, has a weekly sale of 66,000.
By the way, one of those copies is purchased by the library - we get both the New Statesman and The Spectator, as well as other high quality ‘general weeklies’ such as The Economist and The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) plus, of course the TES and the THES. We also get The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph on weekdays.
Addendum [Mon 16 May]: article by Christine Odone in The Guardian: “Why Wilby was pushed”.

With thanks to Patricia Killiard, Head of Electronic Services and Systems, Cambridge University Library, I pass on the following excellent news:

The University Library (UL) has today announced the official launch of a new portal for online journal access: ejournals@cambridge. The new portal, which staff have been trialling, provides a more comprehensive list of all titles available electronically in the university. The portal will be maintained by the University Library, replacing its current list of ejournals, and will include its own subscriptions along with those of the dependent, faculty and departmental libraries, and those arranged through departmental co-ordination schemes.
ejournals@cambridge contains over 9,500 journal holdings and more than 7,500 individual titles, including 2,700 open-access journals and brings in, for the first time, ejournals acquired as part of databases such as Literature Online and SourceOECD. As a comparison, the UL’s previous electronic journals site listed around 4,500 journal titles.
The new ejournal list can be browsed by journal title, title keywords, subject, or ISSN. It simplifies the process of locating ejournals where back issues and current copies are held by different providers. Extensive help pages are provided for users, including access information, forms for reporting problems and recommending new titles, and FAQs. Users are encouraged to take time to explore this additional information, particularly if you cannot locate the title you are looking for.
Alongside the creation of ejournals@cambridge, the UL is extending off-campus access to ejournals not covered by Athens, using the University’s own Raven password system. Publishers whose journals have been made available via Raven so far include: ACM, American Chemical Society, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, American Institute of Physics, American Mathematical Society, American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, CSIRO, Nature, and Oxford University Press.
Off-campus access to journals from other non-Athens publishers will follow in the next few weeks when they have granted permission and more titles will be added shortly to ejournals@cambridge, particularly in the field of law.

The current issues of PC Pro, an excellent magazine for those who are interested in the workings of their computers, contains a superb article on Windows XP maintenance.
As the magazine says:

“[…] the most comprehensive guide to XP since the operating system was first released. We show you how to fix it, tune it and defend it. But this is more than just an annual service or selection of the best tips and tricks. By following even some of the simple steps we have detailed, you will get an operating system that’s in better shape than when you first bought it. And let’s face it, with the added pressure of spyware, viruses, and the numerous applications you have installed on your system, this is not simply a nice little project to keep your operating system ticking over - it is an absolute necessity.”

One small annoyance for such a key text - viewing the article seems to require [free] registration…