Category Archives: Current Affairs

Feeling Lost Without Wikipedia…?

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Wikipedia may have closed its doors for 24 hours, but don’t despair if you’re looking for some gem of general knowledge – we’re still open!

In addition to our wealth of electronic databases, we still have a vast range of traditional Library print resources such as encyclopedias and dictionaries of all sorts to cater for any kind enquiry (within reason!) in our Reference collection on Level 3.

And don’t forget that behind every Information Desk in the Library sits a veritable walking Wikipedia, in the shape of our ever-helpful, ever-obliging Customer Services Team! (And even if they don’t know the answer, they’ll know someone who does…)

Come and Meet Pudsey!

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This evening the BBC hosts its annual Children In Need appeal, with televised charity spectaculars going on all over the country. And this year, the University is entertaining one such event!

The evening will be hosted by CBBC presenters Sam and Mark, who will be joined by BBC East Midlands Today reporter Anne Davies (and Pudsey the Bear!) for a night of live music and entertainment.

This five-hour free party  is being held in the Sir David Wallace Building and is open to the public, with doors opening at 6pm.  There will be the opportunity to meet Pudsey, buy official Children In Need merchandise and hand over money collected at fundraising events.

Music will be supplied by Loughborough’s big band Tuxedo Swing and the Derbyshire A-cappella chorus DaleDiva. BBC East Midlands Today weather presenters Sara Blizzard, Anna Church and Sally Pepper will be also perform Walking On Sunshine. Two hundred school pupils from Leicestershire will join 12 other choirs from across the country to sing Avril Lavigne’s Keep Holding On and BBC radio presenters will take part in a general knowledge quiz for the Pudsey Trophy. BBC TV will be broadcast live from the venue too!

The first Children In Need telethon was held in 1980 and raised £1 million. By contrast, the 2010 event raised a staggering sum of over £40 million through events throughout the year.

The University does its bit too! This Children In Need event will mark the culmination of this year’s fundraising activities by Loughborough Students’ RAG. Loughborough Students’ Rag is one of the biggest and best student fundraising organisations in the country – last year it raised over £1.1 million for local, national and international charities.

The Queen Elizabeth Engineering Prize

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Image copyright freefotouk, reproduced under CC Licence

A new award, worth £1 million, was launched by Prime Minister David Cameron at London’s Science Museum yesterday, with the primary objective of raising the profile of engineering globally.

The Queen Elizabeth Engineering Prize,  funded by an endowment from a number of engineering companies, will be awarded biannually to an individual or team for making “groundbreaking advances in engineering which has created significant benefit to humanity”. The competition is open to anybody of any nationality.

Mr Cameron – joined at the launch by rival political leaders Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband in a rare show of cross-party unity – hopes the prize will go on to assume the same stature and importance as the Nobel Prizes.

Loughborough University enjoys a proud history of engineering achievement, and this is reflected by the rich selection of engineering resources available from the Library, easily searchable via our Library Catalogue Plus system.

National Apple Day

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Image copyright Lisa Clarke, reproduced under CC licence from Flickr

Today, October 21st, marks a day celebrating a fruit which is popular, ubiquitous and occasionally notorious (particularly when offered by a snake!) - the apple.

Apple Day was initiated by the ecological charity organisation Common Ground in 1990 and has been celebrated in each subsequent year by people organizing hundreds of local events across the country, using the apple as a symbol that links nature to local culture and diversity, raising awareness not only of the importance of orchards to our landscape and culture, but also of the growing interest in locality and in the provenance and traceability of food. Many medical organisations and charities, such as the Cancer Research Campaign, have also used the event to promote healthy eating.

To find out more, visit the Common Ground website. Don’t forget that the Library has access to a wide range of electronic resources containing a wealth of information about health & nutrition, including the Cochrane Library and Highwire Press, as well as resources about culture, ecology and the environment, including the British Humanities Index and GreenFILE, all available through the Library’s new-look search engine, Library Catalogue Plus. Why not take a bite today?

And the Winner of the 2011 Booker Prize is…

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Image copyright Kara Allyson, reproduced under CC Licence from Flickr

… Julian Barnes with his novel The Sense of an Ending. But not without a whiff of controversy!

 Judges of the Award have faced some criticism for their criteria in selecting the crop of likely winners this year, with some people accusing them of lowering the standard of the competition by putting popularism – or ‘readability’, according to chairwoman Stella Rimmington – ahead of true literary merit.
 
Which ever way, most commentators seem to agree that Mr Barnes is a worthy winner, having already been nominated for the award three times in the past.
 
The Library is quite well stocked with his earlier works which are included in our ever-expanding English literature section, where you can find books from Chaucer to J.K. Rowling, as well as plenty of other Booker Prize award winners and nominees; something for students and casual readers alike!

Library in a… Phone Box?

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Villagers in the aptly-named Gloucestershire village of Box have come up with a ’novel’ use for their recently decommissioned British Telecom phone box… they’ve turned it into a mini lending library!
 
Although not as infinitely capacious as Dr Who’s TARDIS, this phone box currently contains around 40 books, all donated by the villagers, which people can borrow for as long as they like, whenever they fancy a read… with no fines for late returns either!
 
The kiosk was bought from BT – for the princely sum of £1 - because the villagers wanted to keep what they believed was an “integral part” of the local area. The idea to turn it into a library apparently was inspired by an episode of the BBC radio serial The Archers!
 
This isn’t the first time a local community have found such a literary use for an old phone box – villages in Derbyshire and Hampshire have already done so – besides other ’interesting’ uses as well. Villagers in Shepreth, Cambridgeshire converted their kiosk into a temporary pub for the local village fete following the closure of their local inn!
 
BT have said that the Box ‘Box’ was the 1,500th phone box in the UK to have been adopted by its local community – a remarkable form of preservation for one of the most enduring icons of 20th century British heritage.
 

Domesday Reloaded

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Domesday Books (image copyright Electropod, reproduced under CC License)

The BBC often revisits the past – too often for those who aren’t keen on TV repeats! - but at the moment they’re turning the clock back to a very worthwhile project they embarked on 25 years ago, itself inspired by a historic chronicle of England begun under the reign of William the Conqueror some 900 years ago.

The Domesday Project, begun in 1986, was an ambitious attempt to capture the essence of life in the United Kingdom, as the original Domesday Books had attempted to do nearly a millenium ago. Over a million people contributed to the project, and now the BBC is looking to refresh the venture for the digital age. 

From now until October 31st the BBC are asking people to help bring the project back up to date, by re-examining and updating the data provided by local communities and scholars in 1986. All you have to do is browse an interactive online map on the BBC website, search for a location you know, or try finding articles about something you remember, and then send in your updates, new stories or photos using the links provided. 

To find out more information and download information packs visit the BBC Domesday Reloaded site here.

Don’t forget that the Library has a large and extensive history section itself, including works on local, national and global events, all searchable through Library Catalogue Plus.

Heyyyyy! Look Who Got An OBE…

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Henry Winkler as The Fonz (by geoftheref, reproduced under CC license)

Actor Henry Winkler may be better known to millions as TV icon Arthur ‘The Fonz’ Fonzarelli from the hit US TV comedy Happy Days, but this week he received an honorary OBE in recognition of his work to highlight awareness of dyslexia in schools.

For the last two years, Mr Winkler, who was himself diagnosed with dyslexia as a adult, has toured UK schools talking to children about the learning disability, with the aid of a series of children’s books he has written chronicling the day-to-day issues facing a youthful dyslexic, Hank Zipzer.

British ambassador Nigel Sheinwald presented the OBE to Mr Winkler during a ceremony at the British Embassy in Washington and said of the actor when presenting the award: 

“Thousands of young people have seen him as a role model and an inspiration for overcoming their learning challenges.”

Although the University can’t call upon the services of the Fonz, we do have the next best thing, courtesy of our own Disabilities and Additional Needs Service (DANS), which is here to provide support, advice and guidance to students suffering from physical and learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

To find out more, why not visit their website here?

University Library’s London Olympics projects

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The Library has been working with the University’s Centre for Olympic Studies & Research on 3 projects about the London 2012 Olympics. These projects were funded by the UK’s Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).  The results of these projects are available to all:

  1. The first one was in 2009 and gathered views from Loughborough people about previous Olympics, the Beijing Games and the forthcoming London 2012 Games
  2. In 2010, videos were produced of elite Loughborough University athletes talking about the Olympics, their aspirations and what their sport means to them
  3. Further videos were produced for the next project in 2011 exploring with various groups the perceptions of the impact and value of the Paralympics Games.

These are part of the Peoples Record project (managed by the MLA) which is the first co-ordinated record by a host nation of the public’s reaction to the Games. If you would like to know more about the Library’s contribution, contact Dr Graham Walton (j.g.walton@lboro.ac.uk).

Image  produced by familymwr and available via Creative Commons licence on FlickR

Out of Copyright, But Not Out of Circulation!

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The British Library and Google announced a partnership last week to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections, encompassing works spanning nearly 300 years – some of which probably haven’t seen the light of day for as long!

The out-of-copyright books from around 1700 to 1870 will be digitised over three years, with the majority being books from continental Europe. The first works to be digitised will range from feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette (1791), to the invention of the first combustion engine-driven submarine (1858), and an account of a stuffed Hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange (1775)!!

Once digitised, these works will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the British Library’s website  within their digital archive, and will be accessible from anywhere in the world. For their part, Google has already scanned around 13 million books in partnerships with other libraries around the globe, and these are readily available from their site.

Our own Library possesses a vast (and ever growing!) stock of e-books, which are all readily accessible through the Library catalogue.

To find out more about the scheme, visit the British Library homepage here.