The HardiBlog

In anticipation of the return of Wimbledon this year, we took the opportunity to review some of our tennis related Library resources.  Open : an autobiography. Andre Agassi.  Considered one of the finest and most honest of sports autobiographies, Andre Agassi documents the many highs and lows of his career.  Available at 796.342092 AGA   Game, set, match : Billie Jean King and the revolution in women's sports. Susan Ware  In this winning combination of biography and history, Susan Ware argues that King's challenge to sexism, sparked a women's sports revolution in the 1970s.  Available at  796.342092 KIN.W    Battle of the Sexes This engaging 2017 film, details the Billy Jean King match against the controversial Bobby Riggs (covered in the title above). This was a huge event in 1974- notably, drawing the largest crowd ever to watch a tennis match at the time. Emma Stone and Steve Carrell get to enjoy themselves.   Available at...

ARAN downloads and page views have now surpassed 10 million, leaving no doubt that authors can reach a much wider audience and boost their citations by adding their publications to the institutional repository. Since January this year 616,524 files have been downloaded from ARAN, 424 publications have been submitted to it by NUI Galway authors, including 81 PhD theses. The largest number of download hits in the past 6 months have come from Russia and the US.  In 2019 the Irish Government outlined Ireland’s ambitions for open research in the National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment (NORF, 2019) which includes 28 objectives. Progress and challenges are summarised in a recent landscape report . One of the challenges in relation to institutional repositories such as ARAN is ensuring that they meet evolving Open Access technical and metadata requirements. ARAN is OpenAIRE compliant meaning that funder and project information is captured in the req...

  Beauty in Nature As befits the time of year, this blog focuses on some of the wonderfully illustrated botanical works held in Special Collections. The library has been collecting such works since it opened in 1849. In the 19 th century, painstaking and accurate representation of plant characteristics was critical as there was no other media to convey the plant’s appearance. This is so unlike today when we can use film and digital images so successfully. Despite this, however, the art of botanical illustration is still alive and well as some of the fine drawings in more recent publications will attest. This example of 19 th century illustrated works was among a series, unusually at that time, more aimed at the amateur gardener and botanist rather than the scientific or professional gardening community . Familiar Garden Flowers is primarily the work of James Shirley Hibberd (1825-1890), credited with promoting amateur gardening in Britain for the first time.   Familiar Wild...

It is timely, that as part of developing our advocacy and engagement programmes, we look at embedding Open Scholarship skills training in a more structured approach. Already, events such as Open Scholarship Week have developed a more layered and thematic approach. Early indicators suggest the possibility of a credited module on Open Scholarship for researchers or adding Open Scholarship related content to an existing module or training programmes.   Advocacy, training and community building has emerged from the Open Scholarship Community Galway , taking an informal Cafe approach.   We also have strong opportunities to lead and partner, in publishing Open Educational Resources (OER) and also provision of skills training in area of Open Education resources. OER skills include areas such as: searching for content using OERS, designing and building an OERoer , issues connected with copyright and licensing, integrating with existing programmes.   Nationally, NO...

The NUI Galway OER project is delighted to announce the funding of 10 impactful and innovative OER projects in NUI Galway. This project will create OER that will be used in teaching and research in NUI Galway and further afield. 

  The Centenary Historical Advisory Panel appointed by the British government to advise on the events relating to the centenary of the state of Northern Ireland declared 3 May 2021 as the official centenary date. As we know only too well there are almost as many opinions on this event as the number of years that have elapsed. Even the existence of the panel itself has not been without controversy. Perhaps, in order to inform oneself further about the issues, it would be worthwhile examining some of the resources available through Special Collections and Archives in order to gain a better understanding of its history. The printed collections include some significant examples of tourist literature produced by and for the Northern Ireland administration, particularly in the years following World War II. The slim volume, Northern Ireland , is No.13 of a series entitled About Britain . It was published to coincide with the Festival of Britain in 1951.  It includes a portrait...

 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...