The HardiBlog

The Library's Service of the Month is a way for us to showcase services which you may not be aware of, we would like to introduce you to the this month's service which is the Library & IT Service Desk - Library Services (Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask!) Your Library Account Using your Student ID and Password you can log into the Library’s catalogue . The catalogue is a listing of all the books, journals, theses etc… that the Library owns as well as our electronic resources that you have access to. Your Library account will list the books you have out on loan and the associated due dates. The due date of an item will change if is auto-renewed (where the date is extended) or if the item is recalled (where the date will be shortened). Your account also keeps a record of any items you have requested, items that are either on loan to another user or that are not accessible on the Library’s shelves and it keeps a note of any fines that you have accrued. Fin...

The Library is in the process of publishing digitised versions of Tomás Ó Máille's wax cylinder recordings. Ó Máille (1880-1938) was the inaugural chair of Irish at UCG, appointed in 1909. The collection consists of roughly 33 hours of content that dates from 1929 onwards and contains audio recordings of Irish speech, singing, and storytelling. The contributors to these recordings were from Achill and Aran Islands, and all over Connacht and county Clare. This work is part of a wider collaborative effort to enable research by digitally and openly publishing the audio of the Tomás Ó Máille wax cylinders. Work is also underway to create a Tomás Ó Máille exhibition. Dr Deirdre Ní Chonghaile is the curator of the exhibition. Lillis Ó Laoire, Professor of Irish in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, NUI Galway is the academic lead for the programme of work on Tomás Ó Máille. Dr Cillian Joy, NUI Galway Library, provides project management and technical direction. With grea...

    Open Access and Archives: Publishing, Collaboration, and Discovery by Dr. Barry Houlihan, Archivist, NUI Galway Library The work, opportunities (and challenges!) of open-access and archives are becoming increasingly entwined. Recent reports such as those published by the Royal Irish Academy, entitled Libraries and Archives and the Word Hoard by Siobhán FitzPatrick and Mary O’Dowd, media articles by Fintan O’Toole in which he decried Ireland as ‘a nation of historical vandals’ in the wake of lack of resourcing and care towards Ireland’s digital and physical heritage, and others, have made the case for increased digitisation of unique heritage collections, as well as for their digital preservation. Last month, in October 2021, the Irish Government published their ‘Project Ireland 2040’ document. Within the roadmap for the Department responsible for Arts and Culture (among many other portfolios) was the increased projection for digitisation of materials within nationa...

Update 17-01-22 You should now be able to login to most third party e-resources normally by accessing them via the Library Catalogue using your NUI, Galway Office 365 login details.  There is no longer any need to use the blackboard login workaround so it has been removed.  There may be some issues with resources hosted by NUI' Galway as these may take longer before they are available. You may also encounter the following message while accessing any resource that requires the new university IDP: If you encounter this page, clearing your browser cache can resolve the issue. For instructions on how to do this please click here . If you are having difficulties accessing a particular electronic resource please email  library@nuigalway.ie  with E-Resource Access in the subject field.

  Transformative Agreements: a path to Open Access? This blog post is an update to a previous post “ SFI’s updated Open Access Policy – The Why and How ”, published in February 2021. It explains what Transformative Agreements are and looks at why our researchers recently received a message saying that our Open Access allocations for 2021 for four publishers are due to run out before the end of the year.   What are Transformative Agreements? In Ireland, Transformative Agreements (sometimes called Open Access Agreements or Publish & Read deals) have been negotiated between publishers and Libraries through the consortium IReL .  IReL pays the publisher for both subscription and Open Access publishing fees (often called Article Processing Charges or APCs). The idea is that library subscription expenditures will be repurposed to cover Open Access APCs. Over time it is expected that subscription expenditures go down (because more and more content will be available ...