Wednesday 21 September 2011

More DVDs

Over the summer, the Faculty Library was fortunate to receive a donation of around 40 opera DVDs which has increased our collection by around 50%. Although second-hand, most had never been played. Some have provided us with our first DVDs of particular operas, e.g. Berlioz, The Trojans, (Monteverdi Choir/Gardiner), or Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (Kirov Opera/ Gergiev), others supplement our existing collection with alternative versions which offer a choice of productions for the purposes of comparison or just to cater for different tastes. There are also a few recordings which might now be considered ‘historic’, such as Lanfranchi’s production of Turandot (1958), with the legendary Franco Corelli as Calaf, and Karl Bohm’s performance of Ariadne auf Naxos from the 1965 Salzburg Festival. Progress is gradually being made in adding them to SOLO so they should soon all be available for use.

MH

Friday 16 September 2011

OLIS R.I.P.

Another big development over the summer has been the implementation of a new integrated library system. The most noticeable thing from a reader’s perspective is that OLIS has disappeared. SOLO now provides the only public access to our catalogues and has been adjusted to accommodate the new Aleph database that now holds our bibliographic data. It has also been developed to include the circulation and patron functions formerly included in OLIS so it will no longer be necessary to change systems to check the availability of a book, to reserve or renew an item or to place a stack request. All these functions are now accessible from within SOLO. 


As well as the public-facing side of the system, all the behind-the-scenes functionality has changed for circulation, acquisitions, cataloguing and stack requests so please be patient with staff while we get up-to-speed with the new software. 


Click here for help on using the new SOLO.


MH

Tuesday 13 September 2011

News from the central Bodleian

In the central Bodleian, a large underground area between the Old Bodleian and the Radcliffe Camera has been redeveloped as a new open access area for readers. With space for more than 250,000 volumes, the area (known as the Gladstone Link, after the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone who designed the original rolling bookcases housed there) is intended to hold all the academic books received in the last three years (other than those selected for open shelves in the reading rooms) and books identified as being ‘high use’.
Old Gladstone shelving


Tunnel between the Old Library and Gladstone Link


This should greatly increase the amount of material immediately accessible to readers and reduce the amount of traffic to and from the book storage facility in Swindon. Look out for books with the location 'Bodleian - Gladstone Link Open Shelves' on SOLO (see below). These cannot be requested to other locations but may be read in the Gladstone Link or taken by readers to any reading room within the Old Bodleian or Radcliffe Camera.




Accessible from both the Old Library and the Radcliffe Camera, the Gladstone Link is well worth a visit.

You will be pleased to hear that the music book moves are complete and that staffing levels in the Music Section are now back to normal. This means that there should now be a regular presence of Music staff in Duke Humfrey’s Library to help with your enquiries, Sally in the study on the left as you enter Duke Humfrey and Juliet on the enquiry desk in Selden End. 


MH/JM

Monday 12 September 2011

New academic year, revamped music library

The 2011/12 academic year is nearly upon us and, with it, come several changes. First of all, welcome to our new Music@The Bodleian blog! The driving force behind this has mainly been the need to improve our communication channels but we have also been inspired by the efforts of our opposite numbers in Cambridge whose MusiCB3 blog has made interesting reading over the last few months. Our occasional postings will chiefly be aimed at the users of our libraries but we hope that some of them might be of interest to the wider world. We are going to be posting here about any changes to and developments in the library services for music, projects that we're involved in and the music collections that the Bodleian Libraries have to offer. You can follow our new Twitter feed @Bodleian_Music to find out when we've written a new post or you can subscribe via email to make sure that you don't miss any of our news. The Faculty Library also still has a Facebook page.

Though the Bodleian Music Faculty Library was closed for most of August, the library staff were working away doing vital jobs that would have been impossible to do had the library been open. One of the biggest undertakings was the rearrangement of the first floor to enable the Library of Congress sequence to grow in the new academic year as we buy new books (keep an eye on our LibraryThing page for details of new acquisitions) and reclassify some other sections of the library. The move has resulted in all of the scores on that floor being shelved to your left as you walk through the door from the staircase and the Library of Congress sequence being moved to where the Periodicals used to be. Here is a downloadable map of the new layout. This is why we couldn't do the book move with the library open:

Meanwhile, the photocopying room has had a makeover. We now have new, faster machines, the room has been painted and we've had a new carpet. We think it's a massive improvement and hope you agree!

JM/MH