College Library News

From 1 June access to wireless networking from laptops will be available in the University Library’s West Room for staff and students of the university via the Computing Service’s pilot “Lapwing” service. Raven passwords will be required (see the Computing Service web pages for details).

Lapwing, a wireless hot-spot service, is currently being piloted within the Computing Service. Advice and instruction leaflets will be available shortly. Lapwing should enable many users to dispense with the installation and configuration of VPDN client software, and set up a wireless connection more straightforwardly via Raven.

The College has subscribed to 3 simultaneous logins to the Naxos Music Library since October 2005. Naxos Music Library is a large web based music listening service owned by the Naxos classical record label. It provides access to over 130,000 tracks from 8,800 CDs and almost 7,000 composers which comprise the entire Naxos and Marco Polo catalogues, plus other licensed independent labels [figures as at 3 November 2005]. You can listen to whole CDs or individual tracks from the complete Naxos and Marco Polo (less well known classical music worldwide) catalogues encompassing classical, jazz, blues, world, folk, and Chinese music.

Naxos Music Library is available at all times, round the clock. The music is streamed in Microsoft WMA 9.0 format at near-CD quality (64Kbps - broadband or DSL/ISDN required) or FM quality (20Kbps - suitable for a dial-up connection). You can select works by composer, artist, period, year of composition, instrument or genre. Playlists can also be easily created for educational use, or for hours of continuous enjoyment. Whilst listening, you can read information about the works (the ’sleevenotes’), artists and composers. Music students with personal computers can ask to be put on the Library’s list of approved IP addresses so that they can connect to the service from their own rooms.

It is not possible to download or burn to CD any music on Naxos Music Library.

Please remember to log out after using the service, as there is a maximum of three simultaneous users.

Download a copy of the Naxos Music Library brochure (PDF, 3MB)

The College website recently appeared in a new format. Unfortunately, it has a tedious ‘enter here’ front page (not so good - but at least it is not some ‘Flash’-based ‘intro’). Better to use this URL to get straight in. Also, again unfortunately, the website designers changed the URL of the library web page with no prior warning and no redirection - not web-friendly standard practice, surely? The library is now even more securely hidden away under ‘Teaching’ at http://www.homerton.cam.ac.uk/teaching/library/index.html (the ‘old’ web address still does not work at time of writing). Some of the text on our web page has still not been updated either - but we hope to have this done before next week when students are starting to return for the new academic year. On the positive side, at least they’ve got rid of the awful dark blue background.

Coincidentally, the University Library (UL) site has also had a change of format. Now this is definitely an improvement. There is even a more obvious link from the front page (under ‘Digital Library’) to DSpace@Cambridge - the university’s institutional repository where research and other material produced by University staff can be archived - mostly in ‘open access’ form so that anyone with internet can access it.

The way University of Cambridge libraries are arranged can be confusing at first. The UL front page includes this useful introduction:

“Welcome to the website of Cambridge University Library. As well as being the main library for the University we are one of six legal deposit libraries in the British Isles [like the British Library which means, incidentally, that UL should be given a copy of every item that is published]. Our main mission is to deliver world-class library and information services to meet the needs of the local, national and international scholarly community.

“The libraries in the University are organised in a tripartite system - [1] University Library and its Dependent Libraries, [2] Departmental and Faculty Libraries, and [3] College Libraries [that’s us]. Information about libraries in the University and Affiliated Institutions can be found at libraries@cambridge.”

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.

We are rather proud of our revised and expanded Library User Guide and its new progeny: the Online Resource Guide.

We have split the Library Guide into two separate documents, as it now runs to over 50 pages in total! But don’t let that put you off. We GUARANTEE you will learn at least one new thing out of each Guide. At last: the answers to the questions it is now too late in the year to ask without ridicule! Plus a Guide which gently introduces you to the world of online resources, including the University’s excellent subscribed resources (4,500+ academic journals online for starters!) and loads of useful stuff freely available on the web.

We know you must be dying to get your hands on these documents. Just click on the blue buttons above, also available on our web page. You will need the free Adobe Reader. Adobe has just released version 7. Use the minimal download link here.

At last, our comprehensive Library User Guide is ready! As well as the Library itself, it also includes sections on NEWTON, the web based catalogue of all the University libraries and UL Electronic Resources, which include access to the full text of over 4,000 journals and over 200 databases on the web.
The User Guide will be a developing document: additional sections are planned for the autumn. The User Guide is downloadable from the Homerton College Library web page.

Oh yes! There is a library web page - well hidden within the College website. You could be forgiven for not being aware of its existence. But, I’m told, it has been there for some years. We have been dusting down the cobwebs around it and starting to furnish it with something useful. A coat of magnolia would be nice, but we seem to be stuck with a gloomy dark blue.

Anyway, we hope to start making more use of the library web page, and the Guide is a start. (One small step for a librarian, one giant leap etc…)

Currently, the Guide is in Word format. We hope to offer it in pdf format as well later in the year, but the hyperlinks will need to be modified first.

Happy reading! I guarantee that, from experience behind the enquiry desk, everyone who reads it will learn something new about using the library. (I certainly learned some new stuff!)

I thought I could set up this weblog (or ‘blog’) for the Library. Any news can be posted here immediately. I hope to supply information on all aspects of the library, and resources on the world wide web.

To easily keep up with what’s appearing here, either visit this site regularly or subscribe to the ATOM news feed. First you need to have a ‘feed reader’. You can either download one from the web or subscribe to a web-based one. Then you can susbcribe to our feed using the ATOM VALID button in the left hand column (right click on it and choose ‘copy link location’, then paste it into the feed URL box in your feed reader).

ATOM is a newer, open source, type of news feed. A more common type of feed is ‘RSS’ (’Really Simple Summary’ or ‘Rich Site Summary’). You may have seen the orange RSS (or sometimes XML) buttons on websites. The BBC website provides a straightforward introduction to RSS - but it’s not quite as straightforward now I’ve looked at it. This article in the Lockergnome website is better - or, this from Librarians’ Index to the Internet is even clearer!

An easy (and free) way to subscribe to news feeds, which does not require you to download any software, is to use a web-based news feed reader. I have found Bloglines to be excellent. A ‘Subscribe with Bloglines’ button is included in left hand column, which you can click on once you have set up a (free) Bloglines account. Instructions are on the Bloglines website. There are millions of news feeds now on the web, covering any subject you could be interested in. Many websites, not just blogs, now offer news feeds.

Bloglines has a key word search facility to find news feeds on a particular subject. There are also many dedicated weblog search engines: Waypath is one of the better ones, and blo.gs is very lively. Waypath, like Bloglines, allows you to create an RSS feed out of a search! The traditional web search engines will locate weblogs and news feeds, but it is not always easy to distinguish which results are blogs. Using the Google web search engine you can add [inurl:archive] (without the square brackets) to your search term which can narrow your search to blogs (which usually have archives).

We hope launch a brand new Library Guide soon. This will include sections on news feeds, along with many other resources available on the web.