Libraries Week 2019: Celebrating Liaison Librarians

Libraries Week takes place between 7th – 12th October 2019. This year’s campaign is focused on celebrating the role of libraries in the digital world. Over the course of the week we’ll be introducing you to different teams within the Library and explore how they use technology to support our community.

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To round-off this year’s Libraries Week celebrations we’d like to highlight the work of our Library Liaison team and how they can help you connect with the right digital resources at the right time to grow your learning and, ultimately, improve your grades, practice or research.

Meet the team

For each of our distinct user groups – students, academic staff and researchers and NHS practitioners – you will find dedicated Library Liaison staff, available throughout the year to provide specialist help and support with the Library’s resources, in print as well as online.

Your Liaison Librarians for SGUL students, staff and researchers are:
Zena Ali zali@sgul.ac.uk
Beth Jackson eljackso@sgul.ac.uk

Your Liaison Librarians for Faculty of Health and Social Care students, staff and researchers are:
Anna El-Jouzi aejouz@sgul.ac.uk
Anne Binsfeld abinsfel@sgul.ac.uk

Your Liaison Librarians for NHS staff, researchers and placements students are:
Karen John-Pierre kjohn@sgul.ac.uk
Stephen Reid sreid@sgul.ac.uk

The team provides one-to-one support for staff and students and offers innovative, practical teaching sessions for all on a range of topics such as online literature searching for your assignments or evidence-based practice and managing your references.

How do we support our users?

Finding Information

For each course or trust clinical workforce group, Liaison Librarians have developed online Subject Guides curated by the relevant Librarian. These guides outline the key high quality digital resources (think literature search databases, websites, search engines and evidence-based tools) for your bespoke area and are a great launch pad to start your resource exploration.

Liaison Librarians also design and run curriculum-embedded and open information skills courses to help you use these digital tools efficiently and find the best available evidence. Users can also make an appointment to see one of the team or drop in to our Research Enquiries Desk for advice.

Evaluating Information

In this era of fake news and health scams, how do you know you can rely on the information you find online? Liaison Librarians can empower you with useful frameworks to help you be more discerning when looking for academic information for your assignment. Liaison Librarians also know about the best checklists to use to critically appraise the quality of scientific papers and we’re happy to share this knowledge with you during one of our training courses.

Managing Information

To keep information overload at bay and assist you in keeping track of your references, ask your liaison librarian about tools like RefWorks or Mendeley. These tools allow you to create personalised databases of references which can be integrated into Microsoft Word, saving you time when writing  up assignments or research manuscripts. They can also introduce you to Cite Them Right, the online bible for formatting citations for a whole host of material ranging from academic journal articles to tweets.

Get connected, get creative and learn new skills

If you want to brush up on your searching or referencing skills, there are plenty of opportunities to get face-to-face help from the Liaison team

Visit the Research Enquiries Desk (RED)
When? Monday to Friday 11am – 2pm (subject to change)
Where? Small, quiet study area towards the rear of the Library

Book on to our Information Skills workshops
See the Training pages of the website for course information and our booking form.

Book 1-2-1s or bespoke group training
By emailing liaison@sgul.ac.uk

Library @ IMBE
Zena Ali runs office hours on the 6th floor of Hunter wing and the 2nd floor of Jenner wing. Upcoming dates include:

Hunter:
Thursday 7^th November 1pm – 4pm
Tuesday 3^rd December 1pm – 4pm

Jenner:
Thursday 17th Oct 1pm – 4pm
Tuesday 19th Nov 10am – 1pm
Thursday 19th Dec 1pm – 4pm

We hope you’ve find this brief introduction into the range of work and support our liaison team carry out informative and inspiring. To find out more, visit our new website  where you will find audience-focused pages that highlight what’s on offer for students, teaching staff, researchers and NHS staff, as well as contact details for your Liaison Librarian.

Libraries Week 2019: Celebrating Digital Skills Training

Libraries Week takes place between 7th – 12th October 2019. This year’s campaign is focused on celebrating the role of libraries in the digital world. Over the course of the week we’ll be introducing you to different teams within the Library and explore how they use technology to support our community.

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Today’s post focuses on the Library’s role in developing the digital skills of staff and students across the University and the Trust. Read on to find out more about the range of training on offer in the Library.

Meet the trainer

Fiona Graham is our IT Trainer and has over 18 years experience in delivering training for St George’s University staff and students as well as St George’s Trust staff.

Her aim is to provide hands-on training and guidance for various Microsoft Office applications and equip our community with the practical digital skills needed in the workplace. From helping students draft essays in Word, to supporting staff with plotting data in Excel, Fiona plays a vital role in improving the digital literacy of the St George’s community.

How do we support our users?

Free Microsoft Office 365

St. George’s Information Services has made Office 365 and Microsoft Office 2016 available free for all students and staff to use on personal devices.

Office 365 is an online set of apps designed to allow you to work anywhere on multiple devices. As it is cloud-based, you can upload, access and edit your work quickly and easily, share your work with others and collaborate using the various apps in one place with internet access. It can be used on Microsoft Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices for all your study and communication needs, with 1 TB of storage space. 

As well as well-known applications like Word and Excel, Office 365 also provides access to collaborative tools like Planner, Yammer and Teams that are perfect for sharing in the workplace, or for group assignments and case-based learning

All current SGUL students and staff can download free copies of the desktop version of Microsoft Office 2016 on up to 5 personal devices, with access provided for the duration of their course or employment at St George’s. See our Microsoft Office FAQs here for download instructions.

Improving digital literacy

Providing access to these tools is just the first step, we also want to support you to use them effectively, and transform the way you work, learn and teach.

As we mentioned in our introductory post, digital literacy skills are vital in a digital world. Research shows that people with good IT skills earn 3-10% more than those without and that digitally competent and confident citizens are far more likely to lead healthier, happier, more productive and satisfying lives.

To help you get the most out of MS Office, there are a whole suite of training sessions are available to all St George’s students and staff, including the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education. Sessions can also be arranged for NHS Trust staff.

Find out more by visiting the IT Training and Digital Skills pages of the Library website or contact Fiona Graham directly:

Phone: 020 8725 5662 (ext. 5662)
Email: ittraining@sgul.ac.uk

Get connected, get creative and learn new skills

Besides our bookable sessions, there are other opportunities to get face-to-face support with Microsoft Office

Visit the MS Office Drop-in Clinic
When? Tuesdays and Thursdays 11am – 1pm
Where? Main computer room, 1st floor Hunter wing

Book 1-2-1s or group training
Email ittraining@sgul.ac.uk for more information

Online Training for Office 365

If you can’t make it to a session, or prefer to learn at your own pace, there are a number of useful online resources to help you get started with Microsoft Office:

Office 365 Basics – video training
Office 365 Training Portal
Office 365 Training Centre

Libraries Week 2019: Celebrating our Content and Digital Infrastructure team

Libraries Week takes place between 7th – 12th October 2019. This year’s campaign is focused on celebrating the role of libraries in the digital world. Over the course of the week we’ll be introducing you to different teams within the Library and explore how they use technology to support our community.

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Today’s post features a contribution from our Content and Digital Infrastructure Team and will be highlighting what goes on behind the scenes to facilitate user access to our physical and digital resources.

In terms of connecting our library users to content, digital has transformed the parameters of our service and brought many benefits to our users, but with it has also come additional complexities and challenges. The Content and Digital Infrastructure team work together closely to meet these challenges and facilitate the opportunities offered by digital innovations to better meet the information needs of our users.

Meet the team

Lawrence Jones, our Content and Digital Infrastructure Manager, oversees the library’s activities in this area and has particular responsibility for systems such as our Library Management System and our library search tool Hunter – these integrated systems enable all the core activities around the library from access to the library space itself through to finding and accessing articles online.

Clementina Sanchez, our Acquisitions Librarian, supported by Georgina Coles, Information Assistant – takes care of the purchase, processing and cataloguing of books and e-books to ensure our book stock is kept current and in good condition – ready for when you need it!

Verity Allison, our Journals and E-resources Librarian, supported by Hilary Garrett, Information Assistant – manages the journals that the library subscribes to along with other specialist e-resources such as healthcare databases like Medline, and audio-visual resources such as Acland’s Video Atlas of Human Anatomy.

Interlibrary Loans Team – AKA Jane Appleton and Hilary Garrett, Information Assistants, locate books and articles from outside our collections on those occasions when we just don’t have the item you’re after.

Further information about using our resources can be found on the Using the Library webpages and on our  Help with Library Resources webpages.

How do we use technology to support our users?

Using the benefits of digital to enhance our physical services

The move from print to electronic journals has had a fairly dramatic impact on the physical layout of the library. With most journal subscriptions now online, we no longer require the rows and rows of shelving to accommodate print copies and can offer far more study spaces, which is of real benefit to our users today. The slideshow below shows before/after images of our silent study section after our last refurbishment:

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In addition to this, recent upgrades to our Library Management System, Entry Gates and the installation of RFID self-service machines have made it easier than ever for our library users to self-manage their library accounts and borrowing activities, enabling the library to offer extended 24-hour opening. As long as users have their ID/Library access card with them they can access study spaces in the libraries and computer rooms 24 hours a day, borrow and return books throughout the day or night. Given the 24-hour nature of healthcare this facilitates better access for both our students and NHS trust users, as access to the library and our resources can be accommodated around any shift or study pattern.

To further support continuity of access for our users, our collection development policy supports where possible the purchase of e-book copies in supplement to print copies for reading list materials – so even if a physical copy of the book is not available, or if you are unable to be onsite, the content remains available.

Using the benefits of digital to enhance online access

The Library now manages access to thousands of journal titles, far in excess of what we ever could have accommodated physically in print, giving staff and students at St George’s access to far more content than before, with the added convenience that in most cases it can be accessed from anywhere and at any time.

However, with online journals the Library typically licenses the content for a specific period of time, whereas with print journals we owned the volumes and issues of the journals we purchased. The Journals and e-resources team negotiate the terms and conditions of these licences with our suppliers each year, making these transactions far more complex, but giving us the opportunity to ensure the licence enables us to use the content in ways that meet our needs in the ever changing Digital context. For example, in recent years we have seen improvements in licence terms around the use of content in VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments – such as Canvas, used at St George’s, University of London) to better support teaching and learning, and improvement in terms around data-mining to support research activities.

Supporting access to online subscriptions also requires maintaining a number of key systems, such as our link resolver, in addition to the more conventional library catalogue – which is also completely digital these days. The upgrades to our Library Management System and Library Search Tool – Hunter, implemented over the last two years have now integrated the functionality of the library catalogue and link resolver in to a single search tool, Hunter, enabling users to search in one place for books, journals, articles and more with live holdings information for all books and links through to the full text of articles that we have access to. These full text links are also integrated in to our other healthcare databases, and popular free tools such as Google Scholar (some set-up steps required, see below) and PubMed – look for the ‘Find it @ SGUL’ links to check for availability via St George’s Library.

Get connected, get creative and learn new skills

Use our library search tool Hunter– it is designed to search on material that St George’s University of London owns/subscribes to, focusing your search on the high-quality information resources selected by St George’s academics, researchers and librarians that you will be able to access with your university login.

Set up ‘Find it @ SGUL’ links in Google Scholar – for easier access to the full text of your search results where available via St George’s Library:

1. Click on the menu at the top left of the Google Scholar home page
2. Select ‘Settings’
3. Select ‘Library links’
4. Search for ‘st george’
5. Select ‘St George’s University of London’
6. Click Save

Bookmark the Library’s PubMed link: this link is customised to our holdings so that you will see ‘Find it @ SGUL’ links in for your PubMed search results, giving you easier access to the full text where available via St George’s Library.

Check for access via your local library:

At St George’s Library we manage a highly specialist collection – occasionally we get requests for resources which are just too general for our service but these can often be accessed for free via your local library. Wandsworth Libraries provide online access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Dictionaries Online, and Press Reader (offers instant access to over 4000 newspapers and magazines) and more…why not register online today?

Need help?

We can provide help and support in person from the Library’s Helpdesk and Research Enquiries Desk, or if you have a query for a specific member of the team contact us on journals@sgul.ac.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.

Libraries Week 2019: Celebrating Research Support

Libraries Week takes place between 7th – 12th October 2019. This year’s campaign is focused on celebrating the role of libraries in the digital world. Over the course of the week we’ll be introducing you to different teams within the Library and explore how they use technology to support our community.

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Today’s post features a contribution from our Research Support Team and will be highlighting:

• How the Library supports our researchers with making their publications and data findable and accessible online so it can be used by others
• How we work to preserve these important digital research assets for the future.

So how does research take place?

This diagram gives a birds-eye view of what researchers are doing at various stages of their work – how ideas are tested, what is recorded, and how results are written up and shared.

Once shared, the research can be used by others – for example, other researchers, policy makers and health professionals – to further medical knowledge and clinical practice.

How is the Library involved in the research process?

The Library is involved in supporting SGUL researchers throughout their research process, from the early stages when they apply to medical and other funders to make a case for grant funding for their research projects, right through to the long-term availability and preservation of the research that they produce.

Meet the Research Support team

Michelle Harricharan, our Research Data Support Manager, works with our research teams to help them to create, manage, share and preserve high quality digital data that is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) – and in line with funder and publisher data policies.        

Jennifer Smith Research, Research Publications Librarian and Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant, help researchers understand how they can make their research papers freely available online via our publications repository, SORA, and advise researchers on the fast moving world of open access publishing.

We all are available for face to face meetings with researchers, we provide guidance on our webpages and blogposts, and can be contacted by phone or email (see below).

The Library also procures and manages a range of software systems to help provide our services to researchers.

How do we use technology to support our users?

Making research papers freely available

The government allocates funding to universities based on the impact and reach of their research out in the wider world. As part of the next assessment by the government, known as REF, any research papers SGUL wishes to use as evidence of our research impact will need to be freely available online.

Our researchers can track and record their publications in our Current Research Information System (CRIS), which uses Symplectic Elements software. The CRIS captures and records detailed information about the research publications, such as how often their research is picked up and referred to by other researchers, and allows researchers to upload their publications to be made open access in our repository. Publications information from the CRIS is also transferred into researchers’ public profiles on the SGUL website.

The CRIS links to our institutional database for publications, St George’s Online Research Archive (SORA) which is hosted and supported by Cosector. This repository uses open source software, and information about the papers in SORA is picked up by indexing services such as Google Scholar, CORE, and Unpaywall,  and many of our researchers’ papers are also freely available in the big medical databases PubMedCentral and Europe PubMed Central.

Both systems show Altmetric scores, which visualise how many times the research has been referred to in traditionally non-scholarly places such as news media, social media, public policies and so on.  

Having the research findable and accessible in so many places helps ensure there are as few barriers to reading and re-use as possible. To date we have over 3,700 papers freely available online via SORA – with downloads currently averaging 3,600 per month from all parts of the world.

Research Data Infrastructure

In 2016 the university partnered with Jisc on the Research Data Shared Service project. This allowed us to establish the foundations for a state of the art digital data infrastructure at our Library.

In mid-2017 we launched our figshare-based research data repository which is a digital archive for discovering, storing and sharing research data (and wider research outputs) produced at St George’s. Since its launch we have shared some 45 outputs from a range of SGUL research and collected hundreds more that are publicly available via PLOS. To date, our 45 public items have been viewed more than 20,000 times and downloaded almost 4,000 times, a testament to the contribution open research can make to enabling public access to high value digital research.

Together with Records Management and Archives, we are also in the process of implementing a digital preservation system, Preservica, to ensure continued access to our valuable research data assets (as well as our unique institutional records). Digital content are fragile; they can quickly become inaccessible as the hardware and software to open them become obsolete. By continually migrating digital files to their latest formats, Preservica will ensure that our digital content remains accessible and usable for the long term.

Get connected, get creative and learn new skills

The following websites are a useful starting point if you would like to know more:

Understanding Health Research
If you are trying to make sense of health research, this website was funded by the MRC to guide you through some steps to help you read scientific papers and think about the value of the evidence or conclusions made.

Open Access Publishing
A course for those who wish to understand more about how to publish open access – some of the terminology that is often used and funder expectations are explained.

Jisc Research Data Management Toolkit
A curated portal with up-to-date resources on research data management, data sharing and preservation.

If you have any questions about open research, get in contact with the team using the information below:

CRIS & Deposit on acceptance: sora@sgul.ac.uk
Open Access Publications: openaccess@sgul.ac.uk
Research Data Management: researchdata@sgul.ac.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager
Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant
Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Celebrating Libraries Week: 7th-12th October 2019

If you didn’t already know, next week is Libraries Week! This year’s campaign is focused on celebrating the role of libraries in the digital world. Whether they are helping individuals, local businesses or community groups, libraries are at the forefront of developing information skills, encouraging digital inclusion and supporting health, wellbeing and education.

Between the 7th-12th October, Libraries across the country will be showcasing the ways in which they support people of all ages to get connected, get creative and learn new skills. But why are digital literacy skills so important?

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• Research shows that people with good IT skills earn 3-10% more than those without. Libraries are at the forefront of developing digital literacy skills by providing access to digital resources, training and support.
  
• Increasing digital literacy helps people to make better lifestyle choices that can prevent health problems. Many public libraries work with health professionals and health librarians to improve public access to reliable, accessible health information.
  
• Digitally competent and confident citizens are far more likely to lead healthier, happier, more productive and satisfying lives.

Public Libraries help to reduce inequality by providing safe, civic spaces open to all: part of this offer is access to computers and the internet. Communities that have access to timely and relevant information and to the internet are better positioned to eradicate poverty and inequality and support people’s health, culture, research, and innovation.

The critical importance of libraries in supporting digital inclusion and skills development continues to grow, with nearly half of public libraries reporting an increasing number of customers request this kind of help. 

St George’s Library is no different – we play a vital role in identifying and supporting the information needs of our complex and diverse user base. From students to academics and researchers to NHS professionals we offer a variety of training, support and resources centred around digital inclusion and information skills.

So, to celebrate Libraries Week and mark our contribution to our community, over the course of the week we’ll be publishing a series of blog posts featuring different teams across the Library and Archives services.

Each post will introduce a different team and explore what they do to support our users and how they use technology to do so.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what goes on behind the scenes, or see how we support the University and Trust beyond the Library Helpdesk, our featured posts this week will give you a closer look at what Library staff do.

Source: https://www.cipfastats.net/news/newsstory.asp?content=23379

You should also join us over on Twitter next week, where we’ll be sharing local Libraries Week events and our favourite celebrations from Libraries across the UK. Follow us @sgullibrary or keep up with the conversation here: #LibrariesWeek

As October is also Black History Month, we’ll also be sharing our favourite reads from our BHM Book Collection over on Instagram: follow us @sgullibrary for great book recommendations.

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Inspired to explore other libraries? If you live in London, you’re spoilt for choice!

A top-tip for medical and healthcare students is to check out the Medical Museums website as several member museums have library and archive collections that are accessible to the public. Terms of use will vary, so make sure you check with the institution before you visit.

If you are local to Tooting, why not join your local library? See the Wandsworth Libraries website for a list of their locations.

St George’s Library Then & Now: 1998

Libraries Week takes place between the 8th – 13th October 2018. Over the course of the week we’ll be exploring our Archives to look at how the library has – and hasn’t! – changed over time.

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In this final retrospective look at the Library, we’ve delved into a really interesting commemorative brochure produced by library staff to celebrate 21 years of being based in Tooting.

Back in the early 1990s staff were singing the praises of their “several CD-ROM machines, word processing facilities and a scanner” which warranted instating an enquiries desk where library staff could be on hand to answer IT related questions.

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It’s interesting to note that even with the differences and improvements in technology over the past 20 years, many of the enquiries that helpdesk staff answered back in 1998 will be very familiar to users and helpdesk staff today!

Needless to say the type of enquiries facing the library staff are mainly computer related. The most common ones are

‘My Printer is not working’
‘The printer has stopped printing half way through’
I can’t open my file on the computer’

The rest of the commemorative brochure makes for an interesting read: it captures a pivotal point in the development of modern academic libraries as the way we access information began to rapidly change. Technology has streamlined many library services whilst also generating new challenges – especially over the two decades that have passed since the publication of this brochure.

For example, the move from print to electronic journals has had a fairly dramatic impact on the physical layout of the library. With most journal subscriptions now online, we no longer require the rows and rows of shelving to accommodate print copies and can offer far more study spaces, which is of real benefit to our users.

 

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The Library now manages access to thousands of journal titles, far in excess of what we ever could have accommodated physically in print, giving staff and students at St George’s access to far more content than before, with the added convenience that in most cases it can be accessed from anywhere and at any time.

However, with online journals the Library typically licenses the content for a specific period of time, whereas with print journals we owned the volumes and issues of the journals we purchased. Our Journals team must negotiate the terms and conditions of these licences with our suppliers each year, making these transactions far more complex.

Supporting access to online subscriptions also requires maintaining a number of key systems, such as our link resolver, which generates the links through to the full text of articles we have access to; either from search results in Hunter or our other healthcare databases.

The Library also needs to manage the process of authentication: whereby journal sites identify a user is from St George’s and entitled to access that particular resource. The Journals team work hard to make this process as smooth as possible and provide the necessary support for users where difficulties arise. Responding to the pace of change as technologies develop is a real challenge for library staff and will undoubtedly continue to shape the academic library of the future.

On a final note, the brochure also offers interesting snippets of social history too. Present day staff thankfully have much more input over their own sartorial choices!

…and female staff are now permitted to wear trousers for the task.

 

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library and the St George’s Archives project, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from the Archives.

 

 

St George’s Library Then & Now: 1977

Libraries Week takes place between the 8th – 13th October 2018. Over the course of the week we’ll be exploring our Archives to look at how the library has – and hasn’t! – changed over time.

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In this exploration of the Archives, we’re looking at some of the physical incarnations of the Library throughout St George’s illustrious history. Today the hospital and medical school are located in Tooting, but until the 1970s were situated in central London at Hyde Park Corner.

The Library at Hyde Park had many traditional features: lots of dark wooden furniture, high shelving, and books behind glass cabinets. There also appear to be desks perched very precariously on the balcony below the lovely domed ceiling, which today might cause all manner of health and safety headaches.

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As St George’s moved to Tooting in 1976, the Library settled into a more modern looking space. These photos, from 1977, give us a sepia-toned glimpse into the Library as it was then: slightly more accessible shelving, hundreds of print journals, much lower ceilings and a slightly sterile looking staff office. That said, the black and white image in the slideshow below shows a much brighter, wider study space that isn’t that dissimilar to the library back in 2012, before our last refurbishment.

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Do you have any pictures taken in or around the library from your time studying at St George’s? Whether it was last year or 20 years ago, we’d love it if you could share them with us!

     

 

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library and the St George’s Archives project, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from the Archives.

 

 

St George’s Library Then & Now: 1953

Libraries Week takes place between the 8th – 13th October 2018. Over the course of the week we’ll be exploring our Archives to look at how the library has – and hasn’t! – changed over time.

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The Library gets a very short mention in the 1953 St George’s Hospital Medical School prospectus:

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The Library, which is under the supervision of an Honorary Librarian, contains current textbooks and standards works of reference in Medicine, Surgery and allied subjects. It is open daily from 9.30 am to 8 pm, except on Saturdays, when it is closed at 12.30 pm. A book is kept by the Librarian for students to enter the title of any publication they may wish to be added to the Library.

These days, we’re a little less shy about promoting the variety of services and resources that are on offer to all our users, from traditional books and journals to databases, apps, point-of-care tools and visual e-resources. We’ve developed a series of LibGuides to introduce you to topics such as literature searching and reference management and well as subject guides that will help you find, manage and evaluate the information you need for your course.

We also offer embedded and bookable training sessions and drop-in services, run a literature searching service for NHS/SGUL staff and support researchers through the research life cycle, including Research Data Management and Open Access publishing. We still welcome resource suggestions from users, although through much more convenient web forms.

In short, we run a very busy service! We certainly need more hands on deck than our 1950s counterparts and the rapid technological advances of the late 20^th century have helped to both alleviate traditional library duties and create new ones. We certainly wouldn’t be able to run any of the above services without the support of our wonderful helpdesk staff, who are on hand between 8am – 6pm Monday to Friday. While these are not dissimilar staffing hours to the library of the 1950s, the study space and computer rooms are now open 24/7 during term times. We wonder what the Librarian (and Honorary Librarian) would have thought of that.

 

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library and the St George’s Archives project, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from the Archives.

 

 

St George’s Library Then & Now: 1941

Libraries Week takes place between the 8th – 13th October 2018. Over the course of the week we’ll be exploring our Archives to look at how the library has – and hasn’t! – changed over time.

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This excerpt from a 1941 edition of St George’s Hospital Gazette tells the tale of a very dedicated librarian who kept the library collection intact during the Blitz.

Following bomb-damage to this part of the School in the early months of the year, all books were evacuated to the Small Lecture Theatre. With the books in residence the Theatre could not be used by lecturers; the Large Lecture Theatre, like the Library, was open to the sky and the weather, and also unusable. However, this unfortunate predicament could not be helped, and while the books were there the appalling amount of brick-dust and slime that coated the covers and clogged the pages was removed by the Librarian, Miss Bond. By July 16^th, the damage to the building was repaired, and on that date the Library once again resumed its part in Medical School activities.

Many books now bear honourable scars, but very few were lost by enemy action: the Library is incomplete, however, as there are still some volumes at Luddington House.

Members of the Medical School are indebted to Miss Bond who, almost unaided, rendered fit for use, replace and re-catalogued all the books now on their accustomed shelves.

The conservation and repair of our print books is still very much part and parcel of library life and mostly takes place behind the scenes. While ‘brick-dust and slime’ aren’t high on our list of worries in 2018, spillages are usually the cause of irreparable damage – leaky bottles in backpacks being a particular culprit.

On average, our collection teams repair around 8 – 10 books per week; using specialist glues and tapes to restore pages and damaged spines. Our popular Oxford Handbooks are regular candidates for repair – their signature plastic covers are resistant to glue and have a tendency to break away from the spines with regular use.

One of our Information Assistants, Georgina Coles, takes us through a simple book repair in the images below:

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Cataloguing and processing books so that they are ready for the shelves is another important part of managing our collection. While we thankfully haven’t had to re-catalogue any bomb-damaged books, our Collections Team have been kept very busy this summer accommodating the large volume of radiography resources being transferred from Kingston University Library. This has involved a large-scale weeding project to remove old and rarely used items from the shelves, before reclassifying the radiography books under our classification scheme. The team have so far processed over 670 books and there are more to follow!

We think it’s lovely that Miss Bond’s efforts were recorded in this way – managing the library in some extraordinarily difficult circumstances is no mean feat. We’re left wondering if there are any other mentions of her or other dedicated librarians in the Archives…

 

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St George’s Library Then & Now: 1894

Libraries Week takes place between the 8th – 13th October 2018. Over the course of the week we’ll be exploring our Archives to look at how the library has – and hasn’t! – changed over time.

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This rather damning excerpt from an 1894 edition St George’s Hospital Gazette highlights a perennial problem for libraries: managing noise.

“If we were asked by a reading student to choose some familiar quotation for each room in the School, that to our mind most suited to the Library would be, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” For reading in the Library, becomes, at certain seasons of the day, a matter of impossibility. We cannot even hope that our present admonition will result in improvement. Swing doors will slam, loquacious students will converse in stage whispers, pellets will fall from choreic hands, even though an Embryo dwells in our midst. Yet there is room for great improvement without attaining complete perfection.”

We’re not short of ‘loquacious’ students these days either, but in the intervening 124 years methods of teaching and learning have changed which libraries have evolved to support. One of our ‘great improvements’ to the library has been zoning the space to cater for a variety of study preferences: from quiet, independent reading to collaborative group work.

Arguably, we’ve not attained ‘complete perfection’ either. While you won’t find us ‘sssshh-ing’ users these days (a stereotype library workers aren’t always fond of), we are still on hand to politely remind users to keep the noise to an acceptable level.

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library and the St George’s Archives project, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from the Archives.