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Level 6 of the Central Library is now accessible

You are now able to access levels 2, 6, 8-11 and the study area of level 3. The shelving area of Level 3 and all of Level 4 will be available once the seismic joints have been reset and smoothed over.
If you require a book from levels 3 or 4 please place a request for it and the book will be retrieved for you.

Library staff have access to all floors.

The Library apologises for any inconvenience the construction work may cause you.

Please keep checking the Library website for updates.

Joan Simpson
Manager Central Library and Learning Hub

Library catalogue - not working properly

Please use Multisearch rather than the Library catalogue this afternoon (Friday 27 January), as there are short term problems with the catalogue indexes, that we are working to correct.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Friday Free Stuff: NASA ebooks and code

I wrote about NASA's images and videos back in September, but I wanted to come back to them with the release of some other very cool things:

• their ebooks cover aeronautics, history and more. These are available in .epub format (for the majority of ereaders), .mobi (for Kindles), and .pdf (for computers or printing).
• code.NASA is an alpha release of a site showcasing a huge variety of open source projects including flight software, 3D aircraft modelling, solar physics, and data compression software.

Deborah Fitchett Liaison Librarian

Central Library DVD collection

The Central Library DVD collection has now been moved back to the Self Loan Area on Level 2 of the Central Library.

Joan Simpson
Manager, Central Library and Learning Hub

Library borrowing period increased and Library charges reinstated

The Library is pleased to announce that the borrowing period for normal items and journals has increased for undergraduate students to 28 days before you need to renew them. For research students and staff, you can now borrow journals for 28 days before you need to renew the item.

Please note that the Library will be reinstating charges for overdue items from 23 January 2012. Applying charges encourage borrowers to return items on time so that the resources of the libraries are shared fairly. To avoid charges please renew overdue items or return them to one of the UC Libraries. You can renew all items online at My Library Account or in a library at the self loan stations or at the information desk .

All items still overdue on 23 January 2012 will incur charges from the time the item was borrowed.

• The overdue charge for normal loans has decreased to 25c per day.
• The charge for overdue High Demand material is $1.50 per hour or part hour. You now have a grace period of 15 minutes to get the item back to the library you borrowed it from.
• The charge for recalled items not returned by the due date is $3.00 per day or part day.

Visit My Library Account to renew any item which is overdue.

For further details check Borrowing Information

Joan Simpson

Renewals now working in the catalogue

Renewals via My Library Account on the Library catalogue are now available again.

Please contact the Library if you encounter any more problems.

Friday Free Stuff: The Biodiversity Heritage Library

A consortium of natural history and botanical libraries have digitised 14 collections, or almost 100,000 books, on biodiversity and related topics. The books are available as pdfs, jpgs, or OCR'd text, and records can be downloaded into BibTex or Endnote. Works are either in the public domain or given a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

One of its collections is particularly cool: the Charles Darwin collection currently has 330 of the titles from Darwin's own library and where possible has scanned his own copy so you can see the marks and notes he made in the margins.

Deborah Fitchett
Liaison Librarian

Library catalogue - no renewals

The Library Catalogue should be working for searching and most functions in My Account, but renewals are currently not available.

We are working to correct this. In the meantime please ring 364 2198 (internal 6198) or email lending@libr.canterbury.ac.nz to get library staff to do renewals for you.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Wikipedia to shut down for 24 hours

On Wednesday US time (so approximately Thursday our time), the English language Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours in protest against the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the US. Other language versions should stay available.

For some background on SOPA, read Stanford Law Review Online's Don't Break the Internet, and Eric Hellman's Foreign Libraries Will Be Infringing Sites Under SOPA (which points out that this means, among other things, that US-based search engines such as... well, most of them... could be forced to remove said libraries from their search results).

Another proposed US act, the Research Works Act, would make open access mandates like the NIH mandate illegal - meaning more research would be locked behind publisher paywalls instead of being in institutional or subject discipline repositories. There's a thorough roundup of blogposts on this, including discussions of which publishers are behind it and supporting it, and what researchers can do about it.

Deborah Fitchett Liaison Librarian

Library system outage, Wednesday 18 Jan 2012

The Library catalogue and large parts of the library website will be unavailable on Wednesday 18 January from about 7.30am until about 10am. This is to allow an upgrade of the Library's Horizon system, and the catalogue. Lending functions will be limited during this time.

Many web pages take information from the Library system, so will be also unavailable, for example, Library Hours, Databases and Book a Room or Equipment.

Searching will still be available via Multisearch with direct connections to online resources, but links to records of print items on the catalogue will break.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Library catalogue unavailable, Monday 16 Jan, 10-11pm

The Library catalogue will be taken down for a short period 10-11pm on Monday 16 January, for some maintenance work.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Friday Free Stuff: Sound Archives

Not always freely licensed (copyright for sound can be even more frustrating than copyright for other materials) but at least free to listen to:

• Archival Sound Recordings from the British Library includes over 25,500 recordings of "music, spoken word, and human and natural environments";
• National Jukebox from the US Library of Congress streams over 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925 (along with a page on how the recordings were originally produced on wax cylinders)
• The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project has 8,000 more pieces of old US music for streaming or downloading (and more detailed history about the various kinds of cylinder recordings)
• The Virtual Gramophone from Library and Archives Canada has downloadable music from 78rpm recordings selected for its Canadian content
• and, though most of the content at Radio New Zealand's Sound Archives/Ngā Taonga Kōrero hasn't been digitised, they do give access to a selection of featured recordings and to the popular Morning Report bird calls.

Deborah Fitchett Liaison Librarian

Central Library Update from 6 January until further notice

You are able to access levels 2, 8 -11 and the study area of level 3. Level 6 is now restricted as contractors are working on the floor of level 7 and require access via the ceiling of level 6. Levels 3 and 4 will be available once the seismic joints have been reset and book shelved.

If you require a book from levels 3, 4 or 6 please place a request for it and the book will be retrieved for you.

Library staff have access to all floors and are shelving books as quickly as they can in order to open further levels as soon as possible.

The Library apologises for any inconvenience the shelving and construction work may cause you.

Please keep checking the Library website for updates.

Public Domain Day

Every January 1st, the copyright expires on a year's worth of published literature, giving us Public Domain Day. Exactly what this means is different in different countries, as you can see on Wikipedia's list or Public Domain Day's map. In Australia and much of Europe and South America it essentially means that works from authors who died more than 70 years ago are now in the public domain; in New Zealand, Canada, and much of Asia and Africa works from authors who died more than 50 years ago are now in the public domain.

(The USA is more complicated, which unfortunately constrains US-based websites like Project Gutenberg and Librivox.)

A great place to browse what's available in the public domain is at the Public Domain Review, created on Public Domain Day 2011 - a smorgasbord of "exotic scraps and marvellous rarities" to bring attention to well-deserving items that might otherwise languish in obscurity.

Deborah Fitchett
Liaison Librarian

Depositing theses in early January

Please bring any thesis that needs to be deposited in the Library, to the Education Library, until further notice. Library Support Services has had to move out of Otakaro temporarily.

Library Support Services - temporarily moved

Library Support Services has had to leave Otakaro building temporarily. We will be based in the Education Library for the next few days, and can be contacted by our usual email addresses (collections@libr.canterbury.ac.nz, or eservices@libr.canterbury.ac.nz) or on phone extension 3321.

Central Library Update 5 January

You are able to access levels 2, 8, 9, 10 and the study area of level 3. Level 6 is now restricted as contractors are working on the floor of level 7 and require access via the ceiling of level 6.

If you require a book from levels 3, 4, 6 or 11 please place a request for it and the book will be retrieved for you.

Library staff have access to all floors and are shelving books as quickly as they can in order to open further levels as soon as possible.

The Library apologies for any inconvenience the shelving and construction work may cause you.

Please keep checking the Library website for updates.

Central Library - floors available 4 January 2012

The Central Library opens at 1 pm on 4 January with access to levels 2, 6, 8 and restricted access to level 3.

If you require a book from levels 3, 4, 9 – 11 please place a request for it and the book will be retrieved for you.

Library staff are shelving books as quickly as they can in order to open further levels as soon as possible.

The Library apologies for any inconvenience the shelving and construction work may cause you.

Please keep checking the Library website for updates.

Libaries update - Central opening 1pm 4 Jan 2012

Central Library will now open at 1pm on 4 Jan 2012 due to effects of the 30 December earthquakes. Access to floors 3, 4 and 11 will be restricted to Library staff for clean up and retrievals. Please request items that are required from these floors. All other libraries will open at the usual time. Please keep checking the Library website for updates.