Watch the Inauguration at the RAI

The RAI will be hosting a party to mark (and watch) the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States tomorrow from 4.30pm in seminar room 2. Wine and soft drinks will be provided. The President will take the oath of office at 12 noon EST (5pm GMT).

Image from Wikimedia Commons

WISER sessions this term

The programme of WISER training sessions this term is now available online at: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/humanities. Attending these workshops, delivered by subject librarians, will give you an excellent opportunity to gain understanding of the specialist information resources available. These sessions will save you time and make your searches more efficient. Please note that individual assistance is also available on request direct from subject librarians. The workshops are free and will usually take place each lunchtime, 12.30-1.30 at Oxford University Computing Services or the Radcliffe Science Library.

New resource: Lyndon B. Johnson telephone conversations

The library has just acquired a set of recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson's telephone conversations from May 1968 to January 1969. The full set of 30+ CDs provides over 600 hours of phone conversations, and printed transcripts are also available. It will take us a while to get these catalogued, but they are available for use - please just ask at the desk. They can be listened to on the PC in the group study room, or, if you have headphones, on your own laptop or another library PC.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

New Year, new loan policies, and new books for December

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year! We have a couple of new things related to loans to announce for 2009.

1. Fines: For all our registered borrowers (RAI Fellows, academics and graduate students in US Studies), we are introducing fines on overdue loans at a rate of 20p per day from now on.
2. Staff Desk Collection: We will now be issuing books from the staff desk collection as short loans for two hours at a time. The books will still be confined to the library, and will be able to be renewed for further two hour periods provided no-one else has reserved them. This should help improve access to these in-demand titles. If you are not already a registered borrower at the VHL and would like to use the staff desk collection, please bring your card to the desk in the library to register. Once you have done this you will be able to check books out from the staff desk collection and place reservations. Please note that if you are not otherwise entitled to borrow, registering for the staff desk loans system will not entitle you to take out any other books.

And finally, the list of new books received in the library in December is now available on our website and LibraryThing page.