Before the internet, before computers, before typewriters and the skill of typing was commonplace, there were handwritten catalogue cards. What few people realise is that librarians developed a distinctive handwriting style specifically to make these cards easily readable and therefore functional. Enter the ultra-clear written script of ‘Library hand’.
Far from being dense, symbol less tomes recounting endless explanations of the same referencing problems, these fifteen books make the life of a librarian seem interesting, almost romantic. Joking apart, reading them might give you a slightly better idea of …
The Enquiries team have been doing something unusual this week. We’ve been talking about ourselves. This isn’t something that comes naturally, and it can seem a bit awkward, but as part of the Library’s staff development programme, we’ve been presenting …
He’s black and white, soft, and walks closer to the floor than most visitors to his library. No, not Pablo our resident penguin, but Library Cat, frequenter of Edinburgh University Library. Just like Pablo though, Library Cat *does* have a unique …
The Tale of Library Cat (and his penguin reviewer)… Read more »
Finally, I watched the books being expertly labelled (and all of them the right way up) and “wanded out”, I presume to add that little sparkle of Library magic, and then I rode out atop the procession of books into the …
What does it mean when it says, “Thank you for deleting all the financial records of the University Library”? I am going to blame this on keyboards not being designed for those of us with flippers!
Others in the Metadata Team also repair books that have suffered a little wear and tear. They tend to have more success than I did when I tried.
This year the Library has provided access to 3,946 new e-books and 661 databases and made them available on Discovery and the library catalogue. All this requires people to make sure the “metadata” is all present and correct.
More books! Our students demand it. So do their lecturers for that matter. All the orders from academics and the Faculty Librarians are fed into a big computer in P&M that talks to another computer owned by a big book supplier “across …
I asked one of the nice Library Assistants why we still had any journals in print. “Is it because some people like to harken back to “ye good olde” days when electronic resources were limited to light switches and portable heaters?” …
