Online

Joy Cadwallader, Aberystwyth University (Aberystwyth Online User Group). Please send your submissions for the next edition to jrc@aber.ac.uk

British Library

http://www.bl.uk/

In partnership with Birkbeck College, King's College London and Olive Software, the British Library have announced (May 13) the launch of a complete digital edition of six 19th-century newspapers and periodicals. The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) has been funded by the AHRC, and will be freely available; selected titles include Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature (1806-1837) and Northern Star (1837-1852).

Darwin Online

http://darwin-online.org.uk/

The private papers of Charles Darwin have been made freely available to view online thanks to Cambridge University making the 1990s microfilms of the originals available to the Darwin Online project. The collection comprises approximately 20,000 items, in nearly 90,000 facsimile images, and includes the first draft of Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwin Online is supported and funded by a number of individuals and institutions including the AHRC and the Charles Darwin Trust.

Emerald

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/

Emerald formally launched their fully-searchable backfile at the UKSG Conference in Torquay early in April, following the digitisation of their journal archive into PDFs with the British Library. The collection dates back to 1899, and comprises more than 60,000 articles in 120 titles in business, management, library and information services, materials science and engineering.

Gale

http://www.gale.com/

Gale are implementing text-to-speech capability in their online databases. ReadSpeaker (a VoiceCorp service) will be incorporated into the databases; users will be able to listen or download the vocal as an MP3 of an article.

H.W. Wilson

http://www.hwwilson.com/

HW Wilson are offering free trials to their Short Story Index Retrospective: 1915-1983 , which indexes more than 150,000 published in the U.S., England, and Canada dating from the 1830s to the 1980s, from sources including 350 periodicals and collections of short stories.

Index to Theses

http://www.theses.com/

The Index to Theses (a product of Expert Information) now contains links to full-text availability where available. Records will link to full text, for example in university repositories, where available, or provide advice on where the full text might be found. Index to Theses has found 3000 doctoral ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations), increasing by a 100 a month, a rate that is expected to increase significantly as further doctoral records are added. Index to Theses currently has nearly 515,000 entries for higher degrees by British and Irish universities, and is growing by 18,000 each year.

INTUTE

http://www.intute.ac.uk

INTUTE have announced eight new subject booklets for HE and FE, with permission to copy, re-purpose and distribute the printed or electronic versions for educational use. Subjects include Internet resources for philosophy, Internet resources for Olympic studies and Internet resources for pregnancy and childbirth.

JISC

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/

JISC's “Libraries of the future” campaign has begun debate on the future of academic and research libraries, in particular with the “Libraries Unleashed” supplement in The Guardian focusing on Library 2.0, new business models in information, ebooks and digitisation (including a piece on the £1m project at the National Library of Wales to digitise 600,000 pages of 90 Welsh journals published since 1900) and much more. JISC has more activities planned, and is encouraging further participation from librarians and others through their campaign blog.

JORUM

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

Lecturers and teachers worldwide will be able to share in part of JORUM, the JISC-funded online repository of UK teaching and learning materials, under the Creative Commons licence framework in a new service to be called JorumOpen. A UK-only area with prior registration (as now) will still be available. Managed by Mimas and EDINA, JORUM provides access to over 2,500 learning resources online use in teaching and in VLEs.

OCLC

http://www.oclc.org/

OCLC has announced the addition to WorldCat of approximately 20 million article records (from 20,000 journals) from the British Library Inside Serials service. This represents an increase in article metadata in WorldCat of 60%, giving a total of 57 million article records.

Old Bailey Online

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

The proceedings of the Old Bailey online have been augmented by 100,000 trial accounts published between 1834 and 1913. The service now offers content from 1674 through to 1913, and the site has also been redesigned and updated. The service is published by Humanities Research Online, funded by grants from the AHRC, the ESRC and the Big Lottery Fund, and assisted by the universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield, and the Open University.

ProQuest

http://www.proquest.com/

A JISC-funded partnership between ProQuest and the Bodleian Library has undertaken the digitisation of more than 65,000 items from the Bodleian's John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera. The first content release of more than 6,300 facsimile images includes “more than 4,000 pieces of theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category, and more than 1,000 items from the Book trade category”. Over 14,400 catalogue records are also included, and users can restrict searches to only those records linking to images. The complete collection is due to comprise 65,000 items, and will be available mid-2009. The content is freely available to HE, FE and on public library workstations.

ProQuest are also launching a collection of 400 technology e-book titles aimed at the public library market called Safari Select, which includes the “For Dummies” and “Microsoft Press Step by Step” series. 100 titles will be added annually to the collection.

Publishing Technology

http://www.publishingtechnology.com/

Publishing Technology, formed by the merger of Ingenta and Vista in 2007, are working with the BBC to provide a new Web platform and subscription service to the BBC Monitoring Library, aimed at the academic/institutional market. The BBC Monitoring Library is a global service collating news from over 3000 sources in 150 countries. Free trials are available now to academic institutions.