Update Tuesday July 7th: a fix was rolled out overnight, and access to resources is stable again. Once again, we apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
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We are currently experiencing problems linking to content in eJournals and eBooks.
This is due to a global problem arising from an update from our Library Management System providers. They are aware of the issue and are working towards a solution as a critical priority.
At the moment, you may not be able to link through to journal or ebook content via our Library catalogue. As a workaround, you can access the database that holds the journal, and go via the database link in the catalogue instead.
For example, the catalogue link to the journal 'Engineered Regeneration' says it's available via ScienceDirect. So searching for ScienceDirect, and accessing the database through that link will bring you the ScienceDirect homepage, allowing you to navigate through to the title from there.
Apologies for the inconvenience this causes, we hope access will be restored properly today, July 6th.
Monday, 6 July 2020
Thursday, 25 June 2020
As we are allowed to expand our horizons to travel anywhere in
Ireland from 29 June, it is worth looking back at some of the tourist accounts
and travel guides relating to Ireland published during the twentieth century.
The first half of the century witnessed the zenith of the Irish railway network
when the whole island was connected by rail. In 1906 a map was published to
accompany the report of the Vice-regal Commission on Railways in Ireland.
It is contained in the Commission’s full report which is available through the
House of Commons Parliamentary papers database on the library website or the
Enhanced Parliamentary Papers Ireland website. You can
also access the map on Wikimedia Commons
The Midland and Great Western Railway Company’s branch line to
Clifden ran through our university campus. When you walk from the library
towards Distillery road, you are walking on the railway! If you would like to
read some of the guides to excursions on this and other West of Ireland lines
you can do so here.
We have the original edition of the Midland & Great Western’s detailed
handbook from 1900, Ireland from Sea to Sea but sadly that’s not yet available
digitally.
While lots of travel guides for 19th century Ireland have
been digitised and made available online, fewer volumes from the 20th
century are on offer yet, mostly because quite a lot of the material is still subject
to copyright. You will have to wait for the reopening of the Archives and Special
Collections Room, hopefully in the next few months, in order to read these
volumes for yourself but here are a few illustrations from them to whet your
appetite!
Image of the round tower at Swords, County Dublin, with an unfamiliar coat of ivy, from O’Neill Lane, T. Round Erin or Highways and byways in Ireland
(Abbeyfeale, County Limerick: [the author], c.1900).
Irish Tourist Authority. Ireland: Official Guide (Dublin,
c.1946), [Cover]
We can see that back then, people liked to lean over the bridge to see the salmon too! The bridge in Galway we now call the Salmon Weir Bridge, which celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2019.
From Bord Fáilte. Illustrated Ireland guide. (Dublin, 1968), a great juxtaposition of old and modern, in Portarlington, County Laois!
and finally, this spectacular shot of the Burren, taken from Newby, Eric & Petry, Diana. Wonders of Ireland: a personal choice
of 484 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969)
In the meantime, you might alos like to try Thomas O’Neill
Russell. The beauties and antiquities of Ireland (1897), and Dorling
Kindersley’s Eyewitness Guide to Ireland (2012), the full text of which
is available through the library catalogue. If you would like to read more
about Irish travel writing the journal Studies in Travel Writing devoted
a special issue to the subject in 2016 (Volume 20, Issue 2) which can also be
accessed via the library catalogue. Enjoy your trips and stay safe!
Monday, 22 June 2020
Access to Medici.tv, a leading classical music channel, is now available until 17 July
Medici.tv’s library features over 1,800 programmes (3,000 original works), including:
- concerts and archived historical concerts
- operas
- ballets
- documentaries, artist portraits and educational programs
- master classes
Trial access to Medici.tv is available until 17 July via the library catalogue.
Collection Development
Friday, 19 June 2020
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global - access ends 30 June
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| A sample thesis from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global |
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global is the most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the world with over 5 million entries.
The full text PDF of more than 2.5 million of these titles are now available, until June 30th as a generous response to the COVID-19 situation by ProQuest.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global facilitates:
- post-graduates students to do carry out background research on proposed theses or dissertations
- students, faculty, and other researchers to search for titles related to their scholarly interests
- instant access to high-quality, multidisciplinary research materials
It includes works from nearly 100 countries and more than 50 languages.
To access, search for ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global in the Library Catalogue
Collection Development
Academic Video Online - access ends 30 June
Academic Video Online provides unlimited access to more than 69,000 videos all cross-searchable from a single platform. This database includes scholarly video material of virtually every video type:
- documentaries
- interviews
- performances
- news programmes and newsreels
- field recordings
- commercials
- demonstrations
- original and raw footage including tens of thousands of exclusive titles
Academic Video Online contains thousands of award-winning films, Academy®, Emmy®, and Peabody® winners along with the most frequently used films for classroom instruction, plus newly released films and previously unavailable archival material.
*Please note some titles on Academic Video Online may not be available due to territory restrictions.*
Access to Academic Video Online is available until 30 June via the library catalogue.
Please help us evaluate Academic Video Online by completing the feedback form available via the library catalogue.
Please help us evaluate Academic Video Online by completing the feedback form available via the library catalogue.
Collection Development
Thursday, 18 June 2020
New Special Collections related material available electronically
Irish Manuscript Commission
Digital Editions
IMC has begun a programme of digitisation of its
back list of publications, many of which are now out of print. Digitisation is
being carried out on a phased basis. Searchable PDFs of texts will be uploaded
on their website as they become available but we have added in 46 electronic
records to our catalogue pointing to each publication. Titles include “The Correspondance of Daniel
O’Connell”, “Books of Survey and
Distribution”, “Registry of Deeds” and other manuscripts. They can be looked at in their entirety at https://www.irishmanuscripts.ie/product-category/imc-digital-editions/
Full-Text local studies publications
Carloviana
Mallow Field Club Journal
Rathmichael Historical Record
Rathmichael
Historical Society
Galway Heritage
Old Limerick Journal
Decies: journal of the Waterford Historical &
Archaeological Society
This material can be accessed through https://library.nuigalway.ie
Tuesday, 2 June 2020
Catalogue Improvements
Filters can help you find the results you desire more efficiently by removing unnecessary topics and subjects. After searching the library catalogue, you can now apply persistence to all active filters in the "Active Filters" section. Before this improvement, persistence had to be applied to each filter individually.
Instead of clearing only the non-persistent filters in the "Active Filters" section, the "Reset Filters" option in the "Active Filters" section now behaves like the "Library Search" button in the main menu, which clears all filters in the Active Filters section, including the persistent filters.
1. Perform a search and filter your results by selecting one or more facets individually or in bulk. The non-persistent filters have the white background colour.
Instead of clearing only the non-persistent filters in the "Active Filters" section, the "Reset Filters" option in the "Active Filters" section now behaves like the "Library Search" button in the main menu, which clears all filters in the Active Filters section, including the persistent filters.
To make all non-persistent filters persistent:
2. Select the "Remember all filters" button to make all filters persistent. When made persistent, the system changes the background colour of the filter to yellow.
Note: Once you have selected "Remember all filters", they will be applied to all of your searches until you remove them (click the "x" next to each) or log out.
Friday, 29 May 2020
Place Names in Ireland - do some digital travelling!
Place Name research:
County Galway and elsewhere
As a particular tribute to our friend and esteemed donor, the late
Tim Robinson, who passed away on 3 April 2020 in London, this month’s Special Collections blog focuses
on resources for research on place names in Ireland. Tim’s extraordinary
multi-disciplinary approach to this aspect of his research is typified in a series
of Index Cards, created for his maps of Connemara and the Aran Islands. More
background to this collection is provided by our Digital Archivist, Aisling Keane, on our Digital Scholarship page where you can also see Tim Robinson’s Townland Index Connemara & the Aran Islands
This image shows the detail to
which Tim aspired in his quest for the correct meaning and spelling of the
place name. It also illustrates the types of sources he used. Happily for us in
this period when our library is closed a significant number of these are available
in digital format. These include the classic three volume work on Irish place names
by Patrick Weston Joyce, The origins and history of Irish names of places,
which is available from the Readiing Room of the AskaboutIreland website. We in County Galway are especially
fortunate in that our public library service hosts the Galway Places database.
Dedicated researchers transcribed the Name Book manuscripts created during the initial
Ordnance Survey in the 1830s. This has resulted in a searchable database which
includes a link to the text of the Ordnance Survey Name Book entry for each townland as well links to other related resources. It is available at County Galway Library Places.
Staying in
Galway, the James Hardiman Library has digitized the 17th Century Pictorial map of Galway City which includes some interesting place names on the
city’s periphery. For those who would like to research place names elsewhere in Ireland the
invaluable Logainm website is the place to start. Not only does it offer an
explanation in both Irish and English of the place name’s origin but it also
provides links to many other resources.
Maps are always a visual aid to locating the names of older administrative units and our digital collections
include the Memorial Atlas of Ireland, originally published in Philadelphia in 1901, which
includes the names of Irish civil parishes and baronies. This image shows some of the civil parishes in and around the town of Sligo. There are plenty of resources
for place name research so take the time to some digital travelling!
Thursday, 30 April 2020
An April Wedding in Galway
On 30 April, 1901 a wedding took place at the Roman Catholic
church in Castlegar, three miles from the centre of Galway City. It would, perhaps,
have been unusual for that church to see such a fashionable wedding party,
accustomed as it was to the more restrained and plainer outfits of its parishioners,
most from humbler or middle-class farming families. The bride on this occasion
was Henrietta Kathleen Joyce, daughter of Pierce Joyce of Merview House. The
eagle-eyed reader will spot that this photograph was taken in front of
Merview/Mervue House, known to Galwegians in more recent times as Royal Tara
China.
Kathleen was marrying a “neighbour’s child”: Thomas David
Wilson-Lynch, of the Lynch family of Renmore House though at the time of his
marriage he indicated he was living at Kilcornan House in Clarinbridge, the family
home of his mother, Frances Redington.
Though he was the son of a family who had and still held a large landed
estate, it is telling that Thomas recorded his profession as “local government inspector”,
signalling the changing times that were then overtaking the landed gentry of
County Galway. The witnesses to the marriage were Dr. Edward Stapleton and Lily
O’Neill Power. Thomas and Kathleen had a daughter in 1906, baptised Catherine Anne
Mary Wilson Lynch, afterwards known as Maureen, and in time she inherited the
substantial archives of both the Wilson-Lynch and Redington estates. In the
later 20th century she took the decision to deposit this archive in
the James Hardiman Library where it is the collection known as LE6. While the
archive is not, as yet, available in digital format, the detailed list of its
contents can be accessed on the Archives Catalogue at
The descriptive list illustrates the breath of content of the collection,
covering themes such as estate administration, social and political life as
well as personal correspondence.
It is the largest of
our landed estates collection and has provided the foundation for a number of
studies including a monograph history of the Redington family of Clarinbridge
by Joe Murphy (reprinted 2017 ) and articles by Geraldine Curtin (Galway Roots:
journal of the Galway Family History Society, 1998) and Brigid Clesham (The
Other Clare, 2001). In 2019 the archive was augmented by the addition of
some photographs from the Redington family collection, including this splendid
photograph of a Galway wedding that took place 119 years ago today.
Wednesday, 22 April 2020
Online Resources now available
To help with Study & Research during this period of Covid-19 publishers have made freely available a number of online resources and collections. These include a variety of formats, e.g. teaching videos, eBooks including textbooks, journal articles, theses and dissertations. Note that in some cases we are being offered an enhanced access and not full access.
Listed below is a selection of these resources available via the Library Catalogue (remember to login).
Cite Them Right shows how to reference all types of items from eBooks to Twitter. It covers the usual formats such as books and journal articles as well as formats such as legal documents, speeches, annual reports, RSS feeds, theses, blog posts, manuscripts, parish registers, and many more.
Styles covered include Harvard, IEEE, APA, Chicago, MLA, OSCOLA and Vancouver.
eBooks including textbooks
- ProQuest eBook Central
- Selected Roundhall Irish Law books
- Bloomsbury Irish Law Books
- Cambridge Core Textbooks
- Cambridge Reference Collections
- Proquest eBook Central
- Elsevier Science Direct Textbooks
- Springer Textbooks
- Project Muse eBooks
If you are having difficulty accessing any of these resources or using them please direct your queries to library@nuigalway.ie
*NOTE: We have access to some of these resources for a limited time only and once the expiry date is reached the collection/resources will automatically deactivate and will no longer be discoverable.
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| video tutorials here |
If you are having difficulty searching the library catalogue we have a number of online tutorials
here which will assist you. These include videos on searching for an eBook, an electronic journal article, etc.
Note that a complete list for those Studying & Researching Covid-19 is available at here
library@nuigalway.ie
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