Welcome to this IoA Library
Bulletin, the first to be available online.
Royal Society throws open its doors…
The Royal Society, founded in 1660 is Britain’s
premier scientific organization. Its
large range of scientific publications has now been made available free on the
internet for an experimental period from 1 September to 30 November 2007. This includes the entire
back runs of journals such as Philosophical
Transactions A, (see its recent issue on gamma-ray bursts - no. 1854) and Proceedings of the Royal Society (which carries
many mathematical papers). Find out more
at: www.royalsoc.ac.uk
What we found in the attic!
As part of the project to clear the SPO Building, Paul
Aslin, Sue Cowell and
librarian Mark Hurn started clearing the SPO attic on
Friday 17 August. Among the
miscellaneous clutter of ages we found, 2 mens
jackets, a carpet cleaner, a sock, curtains, ski boots, a road sign to Prague, a fishing net and a picture of the SS Great Britain!
We also found
some interesting astronomical relics, including a collection of 63 large
volumes with photographs of the disc of the Sun for each day for approximately
46 years. These were taken at Ely
(1863-1874), India (1878-1909) and Mauritius
(1888-1903).
The
Ely pictures are particularly interesting, they were taken by Canon William Selwyn (1806-1875) he was
Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and a
leading clerical figure of his day. It
seems he also had astronomical interests and arranged to have these photographs
taken by local Ely photographer John Titterton using a
6-inch achromatic telescope by Slater of London. These enormous bound volumes are now stored
in the Michael Penston Room (see picture). We have
since found that a collection of Selwyn’s solar photographs is also held in the
RGO archives (RGO.202).
Also
of great interest was the discovery of the original photographs for ‘An atlas
of representative stellar spectra from λ 4870 Å to 3300 Å
/ by Sir William Huggins and Lady
Huggins’ published in London by William Wesley (1899). We
have mentioned previous discoveries of Huggins material in the Observatory (see
IoA Library Bulletin no. 32) Sir William and Lady Huggins were pioneers
in astronomical spectroscopy from their private observatory at Tulse Hill in London, later their telescopes were removed to Cambridge. These photographs show spectra from various
bright stars and the Orion Nebula compared to the Sun.
The Ely sun pictures in their new location (photo by
Rosie Bell)
New
Books – each month a list of new books is placed on
the IoA Library website. The books themselves are placed on display in
the Hoyle building library area. There
is a clipboard underneath the display so you can reserve books of your choice.
Appeal- please fill
out a loan card before removing any book from the Library. It only takes a few minutes and it can save a
lot of time and expense. There are trays
with loan cards in every library room.
If you do not, the book becomes missing causing frustration for other
users.
Society for the History of
Astronomy
Autumn Conference
Saturday 6 October 2007
At the Birmingham Midland Institute
Talks on Challis-Herstmonceux-Lincolnshire-Dolland-Antikythera
See
Librarian for more details
From
Afghanistan to Zulu: there are many ways of searching the library online catalogue, Newton. After some recent work all records for books
in the IoA Library are now coded for their language
and country of publication. Since our
collection includes quite large numbers of books in French, German and Russian,
you might want to include or exclude these in a search. You can use these codes
to limit searches of Newton, just click ‘more search limits’ on the bottom right hand of the Newton search
screen. As you will see it is also
possible to limit the search by date of publication and many other criteria.
Public
Observing Nights restart at the Institute on
Wednesday 10 October. There is normally
a short public talk starting at 7.15pm followed by observing on
the Thorrowgood Lawn.
For more information see:
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/public/public_observing/welcome.html
As from August 2007 the IoA
Library will no longer be able to issue new ATHENS accounts. It is planned that
new access will now be controlled through RAVEN userids
and passwords, although we understand there are some technical issues to be
resolved. However, if you have an
existing ATHENS account, this should work as normal until summer 2008.
If
you do not have an existing account and require access to ATHENS
authenticated services, for example ISI Web
of Knowledge (a very useful citation database) we will in future refer you
to the Betty & Gordon Moore Library (Wilberforce Road).
Have
you seen half the Library?
The Michael Penston
Room is the IoA Library’s main stack area. Here is where we keep back runs of journals,
Observatory Publications and much else.
Recently, much of the stock from Room G has been moved to the Michael Penston Room.
On Newton, items
marked as ‘Location: Astronomy Library: Stacks’ are held here. The two runs of mobile shelving in this room
account for nearly half the shelf space available to the library, so if you
have never seen the Michael Penston Room you haven’t
seen half the Library!
This room in
Greenwich House is only accessible through the link room from the Observatory Building and
requires a code (available from the Librarian) to enter.