The HardiBlog

Please note   Due to the Refurbishment Project underway at the Clinical Sciences Institute the Medical Library is currently  off limits in order to facilitate required structural works. The precise duration of the closed period is at present unknown, but is likely to extend well into July.     Please check our Medical Library Opening Hours website page for the latest updates: http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/usingthelibrary/openinghours/medicallibrary/        We apologise for any inconvenience caused  

W.B. Yeats - subject of a new Library exhibition The exhibition will be open from 29 June 2015 and will run throughout 2015. Admission is free and all are welcome. 2015 is a year dedicated to the national and international celebration of the life, work and legacy of Ireland's Nobel-prize winning poet, W.B. Yeats. 'Yeats150' marks the 150th anniversary of Yeats' birth and is the inspiration behind the upcoming exhibition, Yeats and the West taking place at the Hardiman Building. The foyer space will be transformed into a story-telling space of the influence of the West of Ireland on W.B. Yeats; his spiritual home and eventual burial place, and how the West was a living presence in Yeats' work but also on those around him, who collaborated with him and inspired those who came after Yeats. The exhibition will present a range of items from the Archives and Special Collections of the Hardiman Library in a display of material and digital content. The themes of th...

The inaugural CONUL (Consortium of National and University Libraries) annual conference, which took place in Athlone from 3-4 June featured wide representation from across the Library. With eleven speakers in total across the two days of the conference programme, the Library was well represented among peers and colleagues from across the country. The conference thme was 'Innovation and Evolution: Challenges and Opportunities for 21st Century' and considered the broad challenges facing academic and research libraries in Ireland. The conference identified and debated such challenges and provide an opportunity for staff to network, learn, discuss and share their expertise and best practice. Among the speakers from the Hardiman Library were John Cox, Ann Mitchell, Evelyn Bohan, Peter Corrigan, Monica Crump, Cillian Joy, Aisling Keane, Barry Houlihan, Ronan Kennedy, Marie Boran and Connell Cunningham. The issues address by this group in their individual and joint presentations ...

The LibQUAL+ survey Ipad-mini winner was Ms Aoife McHugh, 3rd year Bachelor of Arts (Mathematics and Education). Congratulations Aoife!

The Hardiman Library counts among its holding an unrivalled array of Irish theatre archives spanning from the late 19 th century to present day. With major archives including Druid Theatre, Thomas Kilroy, Arthur Shields, Siobhan McKenna, the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe. The Abbey Theatre digital archive, the largest theatre archive digitization project in the world, comprising more than 1 million items including scripts, costume designs, prompt books and performances is also available to study for generations of scholars to come at the Hardiman Library. Capitalising on this expertise, 'Performing the Archive' is an international conference taking place from 22-24 July 2015 at NUI Galway and will gather together academics, researchers, artists, archivists and librarians engaged in working with archival materials on research and performance projects to explore the uses and possibilities of the archive today from theoretical and methodological pers...

The LIR HEAnet User Group for Libraries aims to explore and develop awareness of electronic information resources and to promote the use of the HEAnet network in exploiting these resources. Since its inception in 1993, it has provided a forum for discussion on the use of electronic resources and networks by HEI libraries and encouraged communication and co-operation between member libraries in accessing electronic resources. Each year, LIR hosts a seminar organised around a central theme, and in the past has covered topics such as Open Access and Open Source, Cloud Based Collaboration and the Management of Electronic Resources. This year’s seminar was entitled ‘Uncharted Territory? What Next for Webscale Discovery’, and dealt with the topic of library discovery tools. Keynote speakers on the day included Gareth Owen & Mark Hughes from WHELF (Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum) who discussed their recent assessment and selection process for their resource discovery tools: ‘ ...

The Little Free Library movement is a community based book exchange scheme. Working on the principle of ‘leave a book, take a book’, the scheme aims to promote community arts programs, positive mental health, and most importantly, literacy, particularly amongst children. The movement began in Wisconsin, USA in 2009, by Todd Bol, but has spread worldwide since then, with now over 25,000 little libraries spread across over 70 countries. The first little free library built by Bol was a model of a one room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother, a former school teacher who loved reading, which he filled with books and put on a post in his front yard. These libraries are handcrafted structures, with designs that range from Bol’s very first schoolhouse model, to those of phone boxes, tree stumps, wine casks, and even the TARDIS from Doctor Who. They vary in size, but are usually big enough to contain 10 to 50 books, the majority of which are donated. The movement is now in Ireland, started...

Trish Finnan has recently joined the Research Services team in the Library as Digital Publishing and Data Management Librarian . Her previous roles at NUI Galway include Collection Management Librarian and Subject Librarian, Business and Economics. She has also worked in the libraries at DCU and UL, as well as for the European Commission and in the private sector. As part of the Research Services team in the Library her remit is focused on supporting researchers in relation to open access publishing on ARAN, NUI Galway’s institutional repository. She will also develop support services related to research data management planning. Trish is currently reviewing all workflows that relate to depositing material in ARAN, NUI Galway’s institutional repository. The platform for ARAN is currently being upgraded to the latest version. This will improve its functionality and usage data. The goal is to provide a deposit process that simplifies procedures for the researcher, making it ...