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Joy Cadwallader, Aberystwyth University (Aberystwyth Online User Group). Please Send Your Submissions for the Next Edition to jrc@aber.ac.uk

Exchange rate crisis for research libraries

Research libraries in the UK are struggling to meet the costs of electronic journals charged in dollars and euros. An article by Zoë Corbyn (1) in the Times Higher Education Supplement this month quotes Research Libraries UK (RLUK) chair Mark Brown, head of the library at the University of Southampton, expressing his fear of libraries being forced into making cancellations. Another RLUK member, Tony Kidd, assistant director of Glasgow University Library, explains how they have had to request extra funding to cover the shortfall. He also mentions how the problems are exacerbated by VAT being payable on electronic journals but not on printed journals. Michael Jubb, Director of the Research Information Network (RIN), described the serious situation for university and other research libraries required to provide essential journals for quality research while costs rise. The RIN are investigating the problem as a matter of urgency.

192.com

192.com have augmented their online people search with 22 million names and addresses from the 2009 Electoral Roll, including 3.5 million registered to new addresses last year. A further three million records will become available in February. A premium service providing detailed information from the Roll including director information is available on subscription.

Adam Matthew Digital

http://www.amdigital.co.uk/

Digitised papers contemporary to the Nixon presidential administration are available for subscription via Adam Matthew Digital in a new online product. Sourced from Foreign and Commonwealth Office files in The National Archives, Kew, the Nixon Years 1969-1974 provides specialist content of interest to researchers including Nixon's successes including the creation of the EPA, and the more infamous activities resulting in Watergate.

ARTstor

http://www.artstor.org/

ARTstor are to enhance their Digital Library with 80,000 high quality photographs through a collaboration with Magnum Photos this spring. Magnum Photos is owned by its contributors, and was formed in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour. The collection will provide more depth to ARTstor in documentary subjects, spanning from the Spanish Civil war to present day.

Europeana

http://dev.europeana.eu

Europeana is a free portal directing users to prestigious digital content hosted by national libraries throughout Europe, funded by the EU, member states and cultural institutions. The site was launched on November 19 and received unexpectedly high numbers of hits. The service, hosted on three servers in the Netherlands, failed a number of times under load with 13 million hits per hour from 4,000 concurrent users (measured on November 20) and was taken down. A successful relaunch took place on December 22 following a significant hardware upgrade.

Gale Cengage

http://www.gale.cengage.co.uk/

State Papers Online 1509-1714 is a new database of digitised historical documents from the Tudor and Stuart Period. Devised in partnership with the National Archives and an advisory board of academic staff, the completed database will consist of four parts. Part I of State Papers Online consists of the State Papers Domestic for the Tudor era (1509 – 1603) and is available now. When completed, by 2011, State Papers Online will provide a comprehensive resource for research into the Tudor and Stuart periods.

In December 2008 Gale acquired HighBeam Research Inc. Highbeam's premier product is HighBeam Research Library, a CODiE award-winning online reference service, which includes selected articles from important newspapers, magazines, journals, archives and other reference works. HighBeam also produces Encyclopedia.com.

The Geological Society

http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/

As part of the Charles Darwin bicentenary, the Geological Society have made the 10 papers submitted by Darwin to the Society available for viewing online as PDFs in their Lyell collection for 2009. The papers, three in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London and seven in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society , include the first and second parts of the geology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1832-36).

JISC Collections UK National Academic Archive

http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/ukna_archive.aspx

Following a purchase by JISC Collections, the Burney Collection has been made available free of charge for unlimited online access by UK HE, FE and Research Councils until December 2013. Digitised in 2007 through collaboration between the British Library, Gale/Cengage and the National Science Foundation, the collection was acquired by the British Library a year after the death of Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817), a classical scholar and schoolmaster. The online collection contains 1,270 titles and consists primarily of parliamentary papers, London newspapers, periodicals, English regional papers, Irish, Scottish and American newspapers.

British Periodicals Collection I and II consists primarily of the digitised UMI microfilm collections Early British Periodicals, English Literary Periodicals and British Periodicals in the Creative Arts, and consists of nearly 500 titles from the 1680s to the 1930s. Editors and subscribers include William Cobbett, Daniel Defoe, George Eliot, and Samuel Johnson, and the periodical versions of stories such as Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South in their original context. Subject areas include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts, the social sciences, music, drama, archaeology and architecture. The collections have been made available free of charge for unlimited online access by UK HE, FE and Research Councils until December 2013 via JISC Collections. Subscribers to ProQuest's Periodicals Archive Online will be able to cross-search British Periodicals content in the same platform.

Sapiens Publishing

http://www.sapienspublishing.com/

Sapiens Publishing have launched the Global Library of Women's Medicine, a free full-text online service providing, “442 specialist chapters on women's medicine, plus 53 supplementary chapters, authored by over 650 expert contributors citing more than 40,000 references”. Features include expert peer-review of all content, continuous updating with editing led by Professor John J. Sciarra and supported by an international board, links to PubMed and FDA, a video library, interaction and a section on Safer Motherhood. Further features are available free to medical professionals. Sapiens Publishing is based in Dumfriesshire.

AHRC

http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/

A £750,000 award has been made by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool to digitise 113 previously unpublished medieval manuscripts from 1317 to 1458. The Gascon Rolls, as they are known, are administrative records including diplomatic material from England's rule of Gascony during much of the Hundred Years War 1337-1453. Outputs from the project will include a fully-searchable online resource and a printed edition of the Gascon Rolls. The project enlists the assistance of the National Archives, King's College London and the Ranulf Higden Society.

askSam Systems

http://www.asksam.com/

askSam Systems, an information management software company, have made a fully searchable collection of over 220 of Barack Obama's speeches, available online in full-text form. The speeches date from 2002 to 2009. askSam provide their own free e-book reader, and the speeches can be downloaded in an e-book format.

British Library

http://www.bl.uk/

The British Library have made more 440 hours of oral history freely available online from the “The Living Memory of the Jewish Community” project 1987-2000, which recorded 186 interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and their children. The online collection, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, has been selected from those recordings, and includes the experiences of 66 Jewish people before, during and after the Second World War, including “anti-Semitism in the build-up to the war, the ghettos and concentration camps of the war period itself, survival in hiding, and making a new life in Britain”.

East London Theatre Archive

http://www.elta-project.org/

The East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) has been digitised and made freely available to view online, following a JISC funded project, in partnership with the University of East London and others. More than 15,000 rare playbills, photographs, posters and press cuttings, mainly from the V&A Theatre Collections with additional material from photographer Jamie Lumley and theatre historian John Earl, focus on East London theatres, including the Hackney Empire. Content includes posters for early appearances by Paul Merton, Julian Clary and Jo Brand. A podcast is available on the JISC website with the ELTA project manager Yvonne Klein.

JSTOR

http://www.jstor.org/

JSTOR have merged with Ithaka, another not-for-profit organization providing research, strategic and administrative services to institutions and individual projects. The archive service Portico is part of Ithaka, containing more that 8000 e-journals and more than 4000 e-books, as is NITLE, a service collaborating in the use of technology with US undergraduate-level higher education. JSTOR and Ithaka have already worked together on ALUKA, a scholarly collection of primary and secondary resources from or about Africa.

Following a JISC-funded project in partnership with research libraries UK (RLUK) JSTOR have made an initial release of 8,200 pamphlets from a collection of over 20,000 19 th Century British pamphlets in the Universities of Newcastle, Durham, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol, as well as LSE and UCL. Online access is free to existing JSTOR participating institutions until June 30 2009, as further content is added. Contributors and subject matter include Charles Babbage, W.E. Gladstone, Thomas Paine and Robert Peel.

Open Access Week

http://www.openaccessweek.org

The first international Open Access Week will take place from October 19 to October 23 2009 to raise awareness of Open Access. In 2008 Open Access Day was “celebrated” on 120 campuses in 27 countries; new contributors this year include eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook) and the Open Access Directory (OAD). Organizers are encouraging participants to “mark Open Access Week by hosting an event, distributing literature, blogging – or even just wearing an Open Access T-shirt”.

Thomson Reuters

http://www.thomsonreuters.com/

ISI Web of Knowledge has been enhanced with Global Health and Global Health Archive from the not-for-profit organization Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI). Global Health contains more than 1.2 million records since 1973 from more than 3,500 journals and other sources, with more than 90,000 records added annually.

Thomson Reuters have announced plans to launch a streaming video service, with a mixture of live and on-demand content, to deliver financial news and related content. The new service, which is undergoing testing, is part of $1 billion programme to revamp the corporation's news coverage. Thomson Reuters have recruited 120 journalists and technical staff to build content, including staff from CNBC and CNN, although they have been making job cuts in other departments.

UK Serials Group

http://www.uksg.org/

New chapters of UKSG's The E-Resources Management Handbook have been published; one provides copyright advice to UK e-librarians (Louise Cole, Kingston University) and another considers how impact factors are considered (Jo Cross, Taylor and Francis). Five further chapters comprise interviews with senior figures from firms including SirsiDynix, Serial Solutions and SAGE. UKSG plan more updates in 2009 and provide e-mail alerts.

UK Research Reserve

http://www.ukrr.ac.uk/

1. Corbyn, Z “Journal subscriptions at risk as weak pound hits library budgets” Times Higher Education Supplement 1 January 2009 (Accessed: 19 January 2009) h ttp://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=
404810&c=1