The HardiBlog

 We are very happy to talk to Arthur Smith in this Open Voices Interview about Open Access, the role of Green Open Access repositories and how things change as we are getting more transformative agreements! Arthur was until recently the Library REF Manager at Cambridge University Libraries and secretary to the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCORR) .   Hardy: Thanks for talking to me, Arthur! First, can you please summarize your journey to into Open Scholarship and Open Access? Arthur : Well, it is a bit of a strange journey and one that's had lots of fortuitous turns along the way. I am Australian and I did my PhD in Brisbane at the University of Queensland studying physical chemistry. I published a lot of papers, and towards the end of my PhD my wife and I were deciding what we want to do, and so eventually both of us decided that we would like to do a bit of traveling and we ended up moving to the UK. One thing led to another, and we found ourselves in Cambrid...

While this year publishers' schedules are still being disrupted by the pandemic, it is always worthwhile to catchup on some amazing recent fiction from NUI Galway graduates.  John Patrick McHugh's debut collection of stories, Pure Gold , set in Achill have been published to great acclaim. John has also secured a major UK publishing deal . Ryan Denis, who completed an MA in Writing and PhD at NUI Galway, published his debut novel, The Beasts they Turned Awa y with Epoque Press. Just to mention two novels that are out a little while but have received sustained attention. Elaine Feeney's, debut novel  As You Were , published at the start of the pandemic, recently won the Kate O'Brien award.   E.M. Reapy followed up her first book, Red Dirt with the well received novel,  Skin .  Finally, Nuala O'Connor worked in the Medical Library in NUI Galway at the start of her writing career and has gone on to great success. Her new novel Nora: a Love Story of Nora and James Jo...

T he Census which was due to take place this month (April 2021) has been postponed for one year due to Covid19 restrictions. It is expected to be held instead on Sunday 3 April 2022 . This week marks the 120 th and 110 th anniversaries respectively of two earlier censuses, 1901 and 1911. The 1901 census was taken on 31 March and the 1911 Census on 2 April. For those of us in Ireland these have assumed major importance because they are the only census for which the actual forms completed in those years survive for all of the island. Due to the disastrous fire in the Four Courts building during the Civil War in 1922, all but a tiny fragment of the precious returns from 1821-1851 were lost. The returns from 1861-1891 had already been destroyed. Some sources suggest this was in the mistaken belief that the data had been abstracted into enumerators’ notebooks, which was the standard practice in England, Scotland and Wales at the time. Unfortunately, this was never the case in Ireland....

The Library now has access to Siren Films : Child Development Video Based Training , a video   clip   collection for students and professionals in Early Childhood Studies.    This resource allows students to learn about child development in all its facets and to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to work with young children. It is particularly valuable in the current situation with restricted access to work placements. It provides access to hundreds of short video clips in areas such as: child development effective learning areas of play  environment and materials  theories and approaches Additional information, in the form of prompts and reflective questions, provide support and guidance for planning training.  The resource can be accessed via the Library Catalogue. Collection Development  30th March 2021

   As part of our Open Voices series we speak to Toby Steiner, Project Manager at the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs ( COPIM ), based at Coventry University, UK. Hardy talked to Toby about his personal Open journey, setbacks and optimism, and where we are on our journey towards Open Scholarship. You can follow Toby on Twitter . Hardy : The first thing I would like to ask about – can you tell us more about your background in Open Scholarship? Toby : First of all, thanks so much for having me, Hardy! And great question...   my background in Open Scholarship is quite a mixed bag of different influences, and more of a long story... In a way it even goes back to the formative years of my early teens. I guess underneath it all, it's just this overall curiosity about all things Open. The culture of Open had sparked my interest from quite early on... going back to the early 1990s, that’s when I started dabbling around with computers, building my...