Exhibition: Under the Southern Cross

The Weston Room, Maughan Library & Information Services Centre in Chancery Lane is offering an exhibition, entitled Under the Southern Cross, until Saturday 13 December 2008.
It is open 09.30-17.00 Monday to Saturday.

The exhibition is based around items from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Historical Collection, which was transferred to King’s College London in 2007, and explores the experiences of the early European settlers in Australasia, and the effect they had both upon their new homelands and on the indigenous populations of both countries. The exhibition also focuses on the early explorers of the Australian interior and their motivations. For more information, please see the exhibition's web pages at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/library/spec/exhib

Library survey 2008

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library would like all recent users to complete the following survey, in order to help us plan and improve our services, so they best meet user needs. This is especially critical at a time of many changes for the Institute and Library.

There are only 10 questions and this shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes. Please do click on the link below which will take you to the survey, and respond by the 30th of September 2008.
Click here to go to the survey

Books received in July and August 2008

Click to view all additions to the Reference Collection in July and August 2008.

Resource for Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Data base http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces - this free website, created by Emory University, is an enlarged and revised edition of the Cambridge 1998 CD-ROM dataset. It is much easier to use, and consists of four main databases:

• Voyages - search for particular voyages in this database of documented slaving expedictions. Lists, tables, charts, and maps can be created using information from the database.


• Estimates - this database offers an interactive feature to help you to analyze the full volume and multiple routes of the slave trade.


• Images - this database is a collection of digitised maps, manuscripts, paintings, sketches, and photographs of people, places, and vessels. Many of these also link to related voyage records.


• African names - this database identifies over 67,000 Africans aboard slave ships, using name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation.
  

Staff at the Library

August has been a month of goodbyes and hellos to Library staff:

Yvette Bailey, Acquisitions Officer for the past six years, left to take up the post of ULRLS Procurement and Accounts Officer at Senate House Library. The rest of the Library team will be joining her there next year, of course. Rodney Bill is our new Acquisitions Officer, joining us from Senate House Library.

Beth Sockett, our Graduate Trainee Library Assistant, completed her year with us. Our new trainee is Sheena Ginnings.

We would like to give our thanks to Yvette and Beth, who both contributed so much during their time with us, and we'd like to offer a warm welcome to Rodney and Sheena.

Register of Commonwealth Research

We're pleased to announce that we have updated the version of the Register of Commonwealth Research hosted on SAS-Space, our institutional repository. The updated version, current to May 2008 and containing over 16000 records, can be downloaded here. The Register is a database of Commonwealth-related doctoral research undertaken within the UK, with coverage extending back to the 1920s.

Each year, the Institute publishes Theses in Progress in Commonwealth Studies, a list, derived from the Register, of all current doctoral research. The 2008 edition is available to download here.

Change to Library admission procedure

From August onwards, all Library readers will be given a simple form to indicate their status, which should be completed for every visit they make. Anyone intending to use the Library is given the from by Reception staff. Requiring only a single tick to complete, it should be passed to Library staff at the Service Desk in the Reading Room.

The purpose of this new form is to enable us to have a much better idea of how many visits are made to our Library each year, and by whom. Please note that existing admission procedures continue as before: all Library readers must sign the Institute visitors' book and anyone who has not used the Library before, or who needs to renew their membership, will need to complete the Library registration form.

Library staff would like to thank all of our visitors for their cooperation in completing this form.