The Graves Collection of more than 10,000 historic mathematical and scientific books bequeathed to UCL by John Thomas Graves has now been added to the online Explore library catalogue. Graves who died in 1870, was a Professor of Jurisprudence at UCL in the mid-nineteenth century.

The collection contains examples of all the major classics in science and mathematics including first editions of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton and the works that reflected the controversies surrounding them. The major Greek and Arabic classics in the development of geometry and trigonometry are represented by authors such as Archimedes, Apollonius, al-Jabir and al-Khwarizmi in the original languages and in translation. Other subjects covered include the development of navigation techniques and instruments, shipbuilding and mapping during the age of exploration and empire. The great number of Asian and European textbooks in the collection reflect the donor's time as Chair of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Technical terms, and symbols such as the humble plus and minus signs, took time to be standardised: these processes are illustrated in the collection and it is also a major resource for the study of printing history and the structure of the book as an object. Sir Hans Sloane and Charles Babbage are among the previous owners of items in the collection.

The original donation also included titles now in the Rare Science Periodicals Collection, a number of incunabula, the Euclid Collection and a number of tracts.

Images taken from UCL Special Collections Digital Archive Earliest photograph of the Wilkins Building Campi Phlegrae, by Sir William Hamilton Observations on the volcanoes of the two Sicilies The General Library, now the Donaldson Reading Room

UCL Library Services is a partner with the UCL School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) in a project to evaluate electronic book usage. This is the first project of its kind and the overall aim is to investigate actual patterns of usage in the light of reported expectations, preferences and concerns.

An initial survey was completed by over 1800 staff and students at UCL. Amongst the results: more than 40% of respondents currently use ebooks, with textbooks and reference works the most popular; catalogue entries are the best way of identifying individual titles; user guides should be provided in e-format.

The main benefit at the moment for users at UCL is that they currently have access to around 3,000 ebooks, which three major publishers - Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley InterScience - have made available for one year from 1 November 2006. The subjects covered include Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Economics, Engineering, Geography, Life Sciences, Philosophy and Political Science, which the Subject Librarians are promoting to the relevant academic departments.

Users will also benefit in the longer term as the findings will help the Library to provide the service that they want. For example, in addition to links from Ebooks at UCL and Reading Lists Online, a sample of 1 in 3 titles has been catalogued on eUCLid. One of the results of the analysis being undertaken by UCL SLAIS will be to see whether these titles are used significantly more than the others. This in turn will inform our policy about how best to make users aware of the eresources available to them.

We are also investigating whether we should be putting more resources into buying ebooks to support taught courses. Many of the comments added by respondents to the survey were from students stressing the usefulness of ebooks for getting access to books in very high demand. This appears to be borne out by an initial analysis of usage, with over 600 hits over six weeks on a title with a direct link from the reading lists module.

Knovel is a collection of nearly 1,000 ebooks covering science and applied science. It's an excellent resource for Chemists and Engineers. Knovel is accessible through the A-Z list of databases, and on the ebooks pages under Science and Technology.

Ullmanns Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry is a new addition to our ebook collections. Useful for Chemists, Chemical and Biochemical Engineers it is also available via the A-Z list of databases. It appears on the ebooks pages under Reference ebooks.

The Royal Free Medical Library, UCL Library Services, has been awarded the contract to provide information support to the pilot National Library for Health Specialist Library for Neurological Conditions, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Medical Library at the UCL Institute of Neurology & National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery. The pilot Specialist Library will aim to provide high quality, relevant sources of information to NHS healthcare professionals, patients and their carers. This award follows the successful launch of the Specialist Library for Gastroenterology and Liver Diseases in 2006, information support for which is also provided from the Royal Free Medical Library.

The Specialist Libraries are being developed as part of the National Library for Health, a library and information service for the NHS, and aim to deliver a range of services to support patient care, staff development, and research. Visit the National Library for Health website for information about the Specialist Libraries. To find out more about the Specialist Library for Neurological Conditions please contact neurological@medsch.ucl.ac.uk

Fred Bearman began his career in library and archive preservation at The National Archives (then the Public Record Office), London, where for many years he supervised the central London conservation studio focusing on the conservation needs of the The National Archives' pre -1800 books.

In 1990 he moved to the US as Preservation Advisor to the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. There he conserved the Folger's renowned collection of Shakespeare's first folios (all 92 of them), and catalogued many of the library's fine bindings, work that culminated in an exhibition and its catalogue.

He then spent several years as Head of Conservation and Collections Care at Columbia University Libraries, New York. Upon returning to the UK in 1998 Bearman became Director of Conservation at Camberwell College of Arts. At Camberwell he established the preservation programme for the Library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, Sinai, the world's oldest library.

He has also been engaged as a preservation adviser to several EU-funded projects, including Makerere University Library & Archive Collections in Kampala, Uganda. Bearman has lectured widely in Europe and the United States on library preservation issues, including book conservation and the history of the book. Fred Bearman's publications include:

• Co-author, Fine and Historic Bookbindings from the Folger Shakespeare Library (Folger, Abrams, 1992).
• "The Origins and Significance of two Late Medieval Chemise Bookbindings in the Walters Art Gallery." Essays in Honour of Lilian M. C. Randall. Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, Vol. 54 (1996).
• "Nineteenth-Century Book Repair Practices: Their Influence on Modern Preservation and Conservation Ethics." International Conference on Conservation and Restoration of Archive and Library Materials, Erice, Italy (1996).
• Co-author, "Preserving the Library of Saint Catherine's: Past - Present - Future." Sinaiticus, Bulletin of the Saint Catherine Foundation, London and New York (September 1998).
• "The End is Just The Beginning: Creating A Conservation/Preservation Programme For Makerere University Libraries, Kampala, Uganda." SSCR (Scottish Society for Conservation & Restoration) Journal Vol. 11 No. 4 (November 2000).
• (Forthcoming) "An Introduction to the History of Stationery Bookbinding from the late Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century."

A full report will follow in the next issue.

<< Increasingly Unimportant	Increasingly Important >>
Quiet zones for silent work
Small, intimate reading rooms
More space for reader seats
Space to organise collections more logically
Larger, more flexible reading rooms
Extension of facilities to plug in laptops
Improved lighting
More space for bookshelves
A variety of different reading areas
	More space for IT equipment
	Controls for temperature and ventilation
	Group areas
	A coffee shop by the library entrance
	One single library building
<< Increasingly Unimportant	Increasingly Important >>

What is SOURCE?
SOURCE is a special collection of materials relating to international health, disability and development. It is housed in the Library at the Institute of Child Health, which is part of UCL.

What is in the Collection?
The Collection holds around 25,000 health and disability information resources. These include books, journals, manuals, reports, posters, CD-ROMs, videos, games and other visual aids. Many materials are from developing countries and the Collection includes both published and unpublished literature not readily available elsewhere in the UK.

Who is involved?
The Collection supports courses run by the Centre for International Health and Development (CIHD), a research department at the Institute of Child Health. Two charities, Healthlink Worldwide and Handicap International, also collaborate in SOURCE. The Collection is used by people from around the world, including students, researchers, health workers, and staff of Non-Governmental Organisations and Disabled Peoples' Organisations.

All the material in SOURCE is included in the Institute of Child Health Library Catalogue.

Visitors are welcome to use SOURCE, although borrowing is limited to staff and students of UCL and of Great Ormond Street Hospital.

UCL Library Services manages UCL's eprint repository, UCL Discovery. Eprint repositories provide open access to academic research. They make copies of research papers openly and freely available on the Web - no subscriptions are required. UCL Discovery is one of the largest eprint repositories in the UK. During Summer 2006, a significant milestone was passed when the 1000th paper was deposited. UCL researchers who deposit eprints mostly do so voluntarily, but mandatory deposit looks set to become more commonplace, as the agencies who make grants to support research - such as the Wellcome Trust and the UK Research Councils - are increasingly demanding that the research outputs which they fund are made openly available to the public.

By making research more widely accessible, eprint repositories help to maximise its impact. The usage figures for UCL Discovery show high download rates for the top papers. Details of the 20 most-downloaded papers each month are displayed at the UCL Discovery site. Material such as research reports and theses, which are often unpublished in any formal sense, frequently features alongside published journal articles in the Top 20, illustrating the potential of open access repositories to help to disseminate research to a wider audience.

UCL Library Services also manages the SHERPA-LEAP project. The project is funded by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of London to set up eprint repositories across the University. LEAP stands for London Eprints Access Project; and it is affiliated to SHERPA, a consortium of research-led UK Universities which is exploring the issues around eprint repositories. So far, the SHERPA-LEAP project has helped to establish eprint repositories for 13 University of London institutions. The creation of a single, cross-searching interface to those repositories is next on the agenda for SHERPA-LEAP.

In the UCL Main Library we now have a new and growing collection of audio CDs which are located in a separate sequence next to the videos and DVDs at the Issue Desk.

The collection contains mostly art related material incluing:

• Recordings of interviews with 20th century artists including Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys.
• Soundworks by contemporary artists, including Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller's "Acid brass" project and works by Nam June Paik, Hanne Darboven and Rodney Graham.
• Avant-garde and Minimalist music which has had a direct influence on visual art, including anthologies of noise and electronic music, an anthology of "Early American Minimalism" featuring Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and a collection of sound in the work of Laurie Anderson.
• A new subscription to Audio Arts magazine.

Most are available for two day loan.

February 1st 2007 saw the launch of the re-instated UCL Library Services Annual Report.

For the first time this report is in an electronic format, allowing us to be more generous with illustration and providing relevant clickable links. My thanks to Diana Mercer and Chris Carrington for all their hard work on the report.

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Issue 16 - Summer term, 2007