Christmas closing

The Library will close at 5pm on Friday 21st December, and reopen at 9am on Wednesday 2nd January.

We'd like to wish all our readers a very happy Christmas and New Year!

VHL on LibraryThing

As part of our VHL 2.0 experiment, we have created an account for the library on LibraryThing. LibraryThing, for anyone not already aware, is a social cataloguing site, and thus combines the power of 'proper' cataloguing with the collective knowledge of its users, who can add all sorts of spangly web 2.0 type things - tags, reviews, ratings - and link to each others' libraries to see what other people are reading, get recommendations and talk about books. A bibliophile's paradise, in other words! Now obviously, we do have a proper catalogue for all our books, but we thought that our readers might also like to have the access to the extra social data from the LibraryThing hive mind for books we have recently acquired. I have therefore just uploaded our new accessions list for November (also available with links to OLIS on our website), and this can be viewed on LibraryThing at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/vhllib, or via the lovely new blog widget on the sidebar here. Links will also be created directly from our webpage, and if you use RSS feeds, then you can subscribe to our new books with this url: http://www.librarything.com/rss/recent/vhllib.

As with all our web 2.0 experimental features, we'd love to get your feedback about whether this is useful, and also encourage any of our readers who librarything themselves to link to us.

New books in the library - November

November's list of new books is now available on our website at: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/vhl/collections_and_services/accessions.

Photocopier update III: the saga continues

The photocopier is stubbornly resisting all attempts by the Xerox engineer to fix it. He is now calling in the expert photocopier repair man, who will hopefully be here in the next couple of days to see if he can do any better.

We apologise for the continued interruption to the service (needless to say we are just as frustrated as you are!) and we will continue to copy for you if you have urgent photocopying requirements.

WISER: Remote access to databases

Because of exceptional demand we are running the following session twice on Thursday. Booking for the second session at:
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TZWH

WISER: Remote Access to Databases and Datasets
Thursday, 29 November 2007 2.00 - 3.00
OUCS, Banbury Road (week 8)
This session will help you to set up access to Oxford online resources from your home computer through passwords (Athens and Single-Sign On) and the Virtual Private Network.
Presenters: Peter Higginbotham (OUCS) and Judy Reading (OULS)

Information is also available in the guide "Access to online resources..." see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/guides (or collect from your library or request from usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk). You should hopefully find if you read through the guide that you would not need to come to the workshop but all very welcome.

Information about the full WISER programme at:
http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/information_skills
All enquiries to: usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk

OLIS records for Evans

Records for the new e-resource Early American Imprints I: Evans 1639-1800 are being loaded into OLIS so titles in this collection can be searched for and linked to within the catalogue.

Photocopier update continued...

I'm sorry to have to report the photocopier is still not working. The engineer has been this morning with the new parts but the copier stubbornly refuses to come back to life, so he will be back tomorrow with more new parts. We're keeping our fingers crossed and praying to the photocopying gods for mercy...