The Birkbeck Library blog
This short screencast presented by Emma Illingworth, Subject Librarian for Science at Birkbeck, gives you an overview of the challenges and opportunities presented by the move from traditional journal subscriptions to transformative agreements which aim to make content, such as journal articles, open access.
Each year, thousands of items are deposited by our academics on BIROn (Birkbeck Institutional Repository Online). The Library hosts these items and tracks the number of downloads each receives. We also have data on the proportion of items which are Open Access.
To help you understand the numbers, we’ve created this visualisation. (You can also find the data behind this listed at the bottom of the post).
As can be seen, deposits of articles are increasing and so the number of Open Access outputs by Birkbeck authors is also increasing. With the coming implementation of Plan-S and new initiatives such as the UK Scholarly Communications Licence, we might see the proportion of OA articles going up even more in the future.
Follow @BIROnbbk on Twitter to keep up to date with the latest deposits.
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The data contained in the above infographic is listed below.
Items:
Total Items: 22,199
Full-text files: 8,736
Total Downloads: 2,130,722
Full text by Department:
Applied Linguistics – 50.31%
Biological Sciences – 42%
Computer Science – 44.95%
Cultures & Languages – 19%
Geography – 43.72%
Earth & Planetary Sciences – 34.67%
Economics, Mathematics & Statistics – 73.88%
English, Theatre & Creative Writing – 56.97%
Film, Media and Cultural Studies – 30.42%
History of Art – 23.54%
History, Classics & Archaeology – 23.79%
Iberian & Latin American Studies – 100%
Law – 28.58%
Management – 47.78%
Organizational Psychology – 37.54%
Philosophy – 29.05%
Politics – 25.85%
Psychological Sciences – 38.3%
Psychosocial Studies – 29.5%
Note: Iberian & Latin American Studies have 3 deposits, which helps account for their 100% full-text.
Download history:
2007 – 3,158
2008 – 36,567
2009 – 39,941
2010 – 51,897
2011 – 67,358
2012 – 83,482
2013 – 42,042
2014 – 146,037
2015 – 152,715
2016 – 296,085
2017 – 233,463
2018 – 338,037
2019 – 639,940
Top authors:
Open Access Week is a global event, now in its tenth year. It is an opportunity for the academic, library and research community to learn more about the benefits of Open Access and to share their experiences with colleagues, and to inspire wider participation in making Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
At Birkbeck we usually organise a range of online and in-person activities, such as panel discussions and workshops, as well as opportunities to share your thoughts on OA topics.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this year we have opted for a series of blog posts written by our librarians. Through these we aim to highlight what Open Access means for the Library and the collections. We’ll focus on ebooks and ejournals, demonstrating the importance of making content available openly as well as offering some insight into the power of platforms and publishers. We’ll also provide an overview of the barriers we face as a library service in being able to truly participate and contribute to the Open Access movement.
We invite you to start the week by watching and listening to a short screencast from Professor Martin Eve on The Ethos of Open Access.
Other posts published so far this week include:
Lockdown research: how COVID-19 and Open Access shaped a new project: Dr Fiona Tasker, a Reader in Psychology at Birkbeck, discusses her research during the pandemic.
Surfing the free resource wave: managing temporary access to online resources during the COVID-19 pandemic: Karen Attar, our E-Resources Support Assistant, describes how she managed access to the online resources made temporarily free after the lockdown.
Birkbeck Open Access in numbers: BIROn visualised: a graphical illustration of the research deposited and available in Birkbeck’s institutional repository.
The road to open access: from journal subscriptions to transformative agreements: Emma Illingworth, Subject Librarian for the School of Science, explains how the move from traditional journal subscription models to transformative agreements could lead to more content being open access.
You’re welcome to comment on and share our blog posts. You can also tweet using the hashtag #OAweek.
This guest blog by Birkbeck MA Victorian Studies student Imogen Grubin discusses her collection of early twentieth-century editions of Victorian literature. Imogen was a finalist for this year’s Anthony Davis Book Collecting Prize, organised by UCL Special Collections. To our delight, several Birkbeck students submitted entries for the prize, and we are happy to be able to feature Imogen’s runner-up entry and to have her share her thoughts on book collecting with the readers of Bookish.
I have been collecting books for a while, but never considered myself a ‘collector’, or even that my books could be called a collection. When I saw the Anthony Davis Book Collecting Prize hosted by UCL, however, I started looking at my books in a new way and realised that some of them told an interesting story about publishers in the early twentieth century. Even though they were all cheap and have never been considered rare, they actually show a lot about reading habits and publishers’ traditions.
The collection I put together for the Prize consists of mostly Victorian novels published in the twentieth century: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Romola and Silas Marner by George Eliot, Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley, Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis, and three collections of short stories: The Toys of Peace and Other Papers by Saki (pen name of H. H. Munro), The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane and Other Tales by Henry James and Island Nights’ Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson.
I bought these for no more than £3 each, partly because, for me, reading an old novel in an old book adds to the charm of the story being told. The mystery of where they were before, and sometimes of when they were published, adds to my enjoyment.
The first four books, by Collins, Eliot and Kingsley, were published as part of the Collins Clear-Type Press, cheap reprints of popular novels. Probably because they were cheap editions, they have no date of publication in them, although similar editions online most commonly put them between 1910 and 1920, with some as early as 1902 or as late as 1960. They are similar in colour and size but do differ slightly. Romola and The Moonstone have a decorative pattern directly above and below the novel’s title and author on the spine whilst Westward Ho! and Silas Marner have a decorative leaf pattern all the way down the spine and the author’s autograph on the front cover.
After collecting these, I started to look for books from other publishers around the same period to see how they compared or differed. Elmer Gantry, published in 1930, is the book most like the Collins editions. It is the same shade of red as the Collins books, has Sinclair Lewis’s signature on the cover and has a decoration all the way down the spine, although not of leaves, but is a slightly larger size. It was published as part of a ‘Collected Edition’, so may have been purposefully adopting similar traditions to the Collins Clear-Type Press to try and appeal to a certain readership. It was published by Jonathan Cape, a London publisher and one of the first British publishers to seek out American novels, and so may have been trying to appear more ‘English’.
The other three books differ greatly. The collection of Saki stories is a blue volume with a decorated spine and the author’s signature on the front. The spine, however, lists the author both as Saki and H. H. Munro, making it appear more formal and perhaps marking it as more expensive. Both Island Night’s Entertainment and the collection of Henry James’s stories have their titles rather than their authors’ signatures embossed on the front covers, possibly signifying greater expense at the time of publication.
I collected these books because I was interested in how different publishers tried to make their books stand out or fit in. I find it wonderful that even cheap editions were made to look beautiful. I bought them because I wanted to read them, but in doing so began, unknowingly, to build a collection. Competing for the prize made me realise that any group of books can be a collection, and that anyone can be a collector just from buying the books that interest you.
At the heart of the university, an academic library space offers fertile possibilities for interdisciplinary research, cross-department discussion and serendipitous discovery. At Birkbeck we offer a variety of study spaces, diverse print and electronic resources, and specialist staff to support researchers. Since our refurbishment last summer, we’ve also been able to provide a space for teaching and events – something that had been lacking before.
This February, we utilised this new space to run a series of events celebrating both LGBT+ History Month and Love Data Week.
Founded in 2005, in the wake of the abolition of Section 28, LGBT+ History Month is well embedded in the UK library world, particularly in public libraries. At Birkbeck, we’ve celebrated the month with displays of LGBT+ books from across disciplines.
Love Data Week is an annual celebration of research data. It’s an international event, which has been hosted in the College by the Library for the last three years. Previous events have included interdisciplinary panels, workshops, and cross institution collaborations.
Library staff were able to draw from the wealth of experience of our academic staff and students to produce some enjoyable and thought-provoking events, culminating in a cross-over LGBT+ History Month/Love Data Week event.
The LGBT+ History Month events celebrated Birkbeck’s poets and writers from our Creative Writing department. Course Director for the MA in Creative Writing, Julia Bell, read extracts from her new book of essays Radical Attention. This was followed by a lively conversation with fellow lecturer Richard Hamblyn. Later in the month, we hosted an Evening of Queer Poetry with poets Fran Lock, Valentine Carter, Golnoosh Nour and Keith Jarrett. We hold many of the collections by these writers, as well as the full run of the Mechanics’ Institute Review, an annual literary review published by Birkbeck’s Creative Writing department.
For Love Data Week 2020, we ran two training sessions: An Introduction to Research Data Management, and Data Management Plans for Postgraduate Students. Both were organised in collaboration with the Birkbeck Graduate Research School.
The LGBT+ History month/Love Data Week cross-over event was titled Researching LGBTQ+ Communities: openness, ethics and consent, and explored the interplay between open research and participant groups who may require anonymity. Two Birkbeck researchers, Fiona Tasker, an academic in the Department of Psychological Sciences and Ralph Day, a doctoral researcher in contemporary history, presented their work.
Fiona talked about her work with LGBT+ parents. She took us through the three ‘waves’ of research on same sex parenting mothers, then presented some ideas from her work on a fourth wave. She also showed very interesting data from the Empowering Adoptive Families survey on adoption for non-traditional parents, and alternative data from the family mapping exercise. A copy of Fiona’s slides are available at the bottom of this post .
Ralph provided insight into the early years of the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. He presented data from the log books, described the challenges faces by the operators, and the sort of information they would record while facing these challenges.
Despite Ralph and Fiona drawing from different disciplines and consequently using a different set of methodologies and research assumptions, it was a useful discussion, in part due to these very differences. The audience was made up of students, academics and library staff with differing interests and research backgrounds, and our new teaching room provided an inclusive space for exploration and sharing of experiences.
Fiona is currently running a LGBTQ* UK COVID-19 Lockdown 18-35 Experiences Online Survey. This is a short survey for those in the 18-35 age group, which looks at experiences during the current pandemic and lockdown. If you are interested in taking part in this timely research, you can follow this link to the survey and information sheet.
Both Love Data Week and LGBT+ History Month will return in 2021, as well as many other exciting events hosted in Birkbeck Library. Look out for updates on our News and Updates page.
Tim Spring, Senior Library Assistant (Acquisitions and Metadata), writes:
Birkbeck Library has an amazing image collection and I’ve always been intrigued by the people and places in these photos. Within the ‘Birkbeck History’ collection there is a set of photos taken of the family mausoleum of George Birkbeck, located in Kensal Green Cemetery. I don’t live too far from there, so a few months ago I decided to go explore and see if I could find it myself.
Discovering the Birkbeck mausoleum made me wonder how many other places in London have a link to the College. I started off with some notable Birkbeckians, and very quickly found out that most of them have a blue plaque somewhere in London. I also started to learn about the history of the College, and it turns out that Birkbeck’s influence can be seen all over London.
This year Birkbeck is celebrating 100 years as a member of the University of London. In the Library we have a small group working on projects for this occasion and it was here that we came up with the idea of creating walking tours of Birkbeck history in London.
The first tour is an exploration of Birkbeck buildings, from the site the College was founded at through to our current location. This walk takes you all over central London, starting at the Strand, then heading towards the Barbican, and eventually ends up at the main Birkbeck building on Torrington Square.
The other two walks will take you past the homes of notable Birkbeckians. Some of the more famous figures on these walks include Rosalind Franklin and T. S. Eliot, but there are many other interesting people that passed through Birkbeck’s door over the years, such as Professor Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, pictured below. My hope is that these tours will get you to enjoy going for a walk in London whilst also discovering more about the history of Birkbeck. We are a unique institution with a rich past and I think a lot of people would be surprised by what they learn about the College and all the interesting people who have helped make it what it is.
More than 13,000 people from across the globe came together on Saturday 20th June to watch the online world premiere of Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas of David Bohm. The recording of this screening is now freely available to watch online, any time. This new feature-length documentary sheds light on the life, ideas and work of the groundbreaking Birkbeck scientist David Bohm, Einstein’s “spiritual son”, whose archive is held here at the Library.
Who is David Bohm? Discover more in our previous blog.
A lively Q&A panel session with Paul Howard, the film’s director and producer, Professor Basil Hiley, quantum physicist and longtime collaborator of Bohm, and Dr Jan Walleczek, Director of Phenoscience Laboratories (Berlin), chaired by Susan Bauer–Wu, followed the premiere and is also available to watch online: Q&A panel session
There’s another opportunity to watch the film online with a different Q&A panel which has been organised to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 85th birthday as well as his lifelong love of science. Since the mid-1980s the Dalai Lama has engaged in dialogue with scientists, including David Bohm, around the broad topics of psychology, neurobiology, quantum physics and cosmology. Register for this screening and Q&A panel.
World premiere. Saturday 20th June at 8pm BST
This Saturday sees the world premiere – now taking place online – of a new feature-length documentary which sheds light on the life, ideas and work of the influential Birkbeck scientist David Bohm whose archive is held here at the Library.
The film, titled Infinite Potential, draws together contributions from a host of eminent guests from different fields, demonstrating the depth and breadth of Bohm’s mind. Those featured include not only long-time collaborators quantum physicist Professor Basil Hiley and theoretical physicist Yakir Aharanov, but also H.H. the Dalai Lama and sculptor Sir Antony Gormley.
Hiley describes Bohm as a “radical independent thinker”. Bohm had a unique way of looking at physics and his philosophical views were inseparably intertwined with the science. This holistic approach meant that he actively worked also with people from outside the subject area. Bohm’s ground-breaking work remains relevant today and informs current research which has the potential to radically change our world view in the future.
The online world premiere screening of Infinite Potential is free: you only need to sign up via the film’s website in order to attend.
The screening will be followed by a live panel discussion and Q&A session with director Paul Howard and other special guests, including Professor Basil Hiley.
Who is David Bohm?
David Bohm (1917–1992) had an interesting and varied life, a significant part of which was spent as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck, from 1961 until his retirement in 1983.
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Bohm went on to study at Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 1939. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology for post-graduate work, going on to complete his PhD in 1943 at the University of California at Berkeley under J. R. Oppenheimer. He subsequently worked on the Manhattan Project at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. You can listen to David Bohm talk about J. R. Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project in an interview from 1979 as part of the Voices of the Manhattan Project oral history.
In 1947 he was appointed Assistant Professor at Princeton University. He worked there until 1950, when Princeton refused to renew his contract after he had fallen foul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). While working at the Radiation Laboratory during the war, Bohm had been active in the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT) trade union.
In 1949, as Cold War tensions increased, the Committee on Un-American Activities had begun investigating staff who had worked at the Radiation Laboratory. As a member of FAECT and as a former member of the Communist Party, Bohm came under suspicion. He was called upon to testify before the Committee but pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to give evidence against colleagues, including J. R. Oppenheimer. After the USSR tested its first atomic device in September 1949 it was thought that atomic bomb secrets must have been passed to the USSR. It was alleged that members of the FAECT had been in a Communist cell working at Berkeley during the war.
In 1950 Bohm was charged with Contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions before the Committee and arrested. He was acquitted in May 1951, but Princeton had already suspended Bohm and after his acquittal refused to renew his contract. Bohm left for Brazil in 1951 to take up a Chair in Physics at the University of São Paulo. In 1955 he moved to Israel where he spent two years at the Technion at Haifa. Here he met his wife Saral, who was an important figure in the development of his ideas. In 1957 Bohm moved to the UK. He held a research fellowship at the University of Bristol until 1961, when he was made Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck in London. He retired in 1983 but continued to play an active role.
Bohm made several significant contributions to physics, particularly in the area of quantum mechanics. As a post-graduate at Berkeley he discovered the electron phenomenon now known as ‘Bohm-diffusion‘. His first book, Quantum Theory, published in 1951, was well received by Einstein among others. However, Bohm wasn’t satisfied with the orthodox approach to quantum theory and began to develop his own, expressed in his second book, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, published in 1957.
In 1959, with his student Yakir Aharonov, he discovered the ‘Aharonov-Bohm effect‘, showing how a vacuum could produce striking physical effects. His third book, The Special Theory of Relativity, was published in 1965.
During his 20 plus years at Birkbeck, Bohm and Professor Basil Hiley were colleagues, discussing a wide range of topics and writing many papers together. In his biographical memoir of Bohm, Hiley recounts: “our original investigations had as their focus the need to develop a new conceptual order in which to accommodate both quantum mechanics and relativity in a more coherent way, hopefully without their present conceptual problems and their mathematical infinities. This involved excursions into other disciplines like philosophy, biology, language and even art.” At the time Bohm died, he and Hiley were putting together the final details of the book that they had been working on, The Undivided Universe.
Bohm’s scientific and philosophical views were inseparable. After reading a book by the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti in 1959, he was struck with how his own ideas on quantum mechanics meshed with the philosophy of Krishnamurti. The two first met in 1961 and over the following years had many conversations or dialogues. Bohm’s approach to philosophy and physics is expressed in his 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and in the book Science, Order and Creativity, written with F. D. Peat and published in 1987. F. D. Peat also appears in the new documentary.
In his later years, partly through his connection with Krishnamurti, Bohm developed the technique of Dialogue, in which a group of individuals engaged in constructive verbal interaction with each other. He believed that if carried out on a sufficiently wide scale these Dialogues could help overcome fragmentation in society. Bohm led a number of Dialogues in the 1980s and early 1990s, the most well-known being those held at the Ojai Grove School in California.
Bohm was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990. He died in 1992.
Read more about Bohm’s life and work in the following:
B. J. Hiley, ‘David Joseph Bohm’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 43, 105–131 (1997).
The David Bohm Archive at Birkbeck Library
Following Bohm’s death, Birkbeck took the first deposit of his papers and correspondence in 1997: this was the start of the David Bohm Archive at Birkbeck. You can find out more about what is held in the David Bohm Archive at Birkbeck on the Archives Hub, along with links out to other organisations holding related material.
If you have any questions about the Bohm Archive at Birkbeck please contact Emma Illingworth, Subject Librarian (School of Science), Birkbeck Library.
In 2018, the Library received, as a bequest, the research and teaching slides of Alison Kelly, an expert on the work of Eleanor Coade. These slides complement another of our collections, London Architecture Online.
Eleanor Coade was a brilliant businesswoman who, in the late eighteenth century, developed a formula for the manufacture of artificial stone. She wasn’t the first to try this, but her product was superior to anything that had been made before. It is stronger than natural stone and stands up better to the elements. In her book, Mrs Coade’s Stone, Kelly suggests that this might be the reason the product isn’t better known: people simply don’t realise that it’s not stone. Coade called her product Lithodipyra, but it is more commonly known as Coade Stone.
Eleanor Coade insisted on high standards of production and employed renowned sculptors to make the originals for her moulds. Very quickly, her pieces started being used by the most important architects of the time. This means that you can see Coade Stone on many prominent buildings: Buckingham Palace (John Nash), The Bank of England (Sir John Soane), Kenwood House (Robert Adam) and the Radcliffe Observatory (James Wyatt). Closer to home, it was also used in this Bedford Square doorway.
Since the pieces were made in moulds, they could be reproduced quickly and more cheaply than was possible using natural stone. Coade exploited this and marketed her work to the increasingly prosperous middle classes. The same mould could be used and adapted very easily to produce different pieces. A classical statue of a Vestal could be transformed into Faith simply by adding a chalice, or into Flora with a sheath of flowers. The collection includes many examples of the use of Coade Stone.
A good place to start an appreciation of the work of Eleanor Coade is with the Westminster Bridge lion, made in 1937. This thirteen-tonne sculpture is on the eastern bank of the Thames at the end of Westminster Bridge. Originally, it stood high on the parapet of the Lion Brewery which was demolished to make way for the Royal Festival Hall in 1949.
If you pass the lion, take a moment to look at how pristine it is, despite decades in the elements, and at the quality of the workmanship. The sculptor was William Frederick Woodington, curator of the Royal Academy’s School of Sculpture.
You can view the Coade Stone collection here.
There is more about the lion here.
Bibliography
Kelly, A. (1990) Mrs Coade’s Stone, Upton-upon-Severn: The Self Publishing Association Ltd.
This summer, Level 1 of the Library was extensively refurbished, creating expanded group and silent study areas, two additional rooms for disabled and dyslexic students, and more than 80 extra study spaces overall.
Overall, the refurbishment has proved very popular with our users. Over 70% think it’s a big improvement.
However, not all of our users are happy. In particular, some students have asked: where have all the silent study spaces gone?
The refurbishment has radically changed the layout of the Library. Whereas before, Levels 3 and 4 were silent and the group study area was located at the far end of Level 1, the new layout reverses this.
The group study area is the first thing you see when you emerge from the lift or stairs on Level 1.
It continues through the arches to the Malet Street side of the building.
But where has the silent study area gone?
The new location of the group study area means that the upper floors cannot always be totally silent, since at busy times some noise will travel upstairs. Levels 2, 3 and 4 are now designated for ‘individual study,’ although in practice they are usually extremely quiet.
The new silent study area is actually on Level 1 and begins through the double doors which lead off the group study area on the Malet Street side.
If you walk down this corridor, passing the Accessibility Centre and doors leading to the toilets and the Phone Zone, you will find Room 107, which has computers for silent working.
Then, on the left through the glass link, is another silent room with computers.
Finally, at the far end of Level 1, you will find the main new silent area.
There are more seats upstairs on the Mezzanine.
We thought deeply about zoning when we planned the refurbishment and worked with the Students’ Union and our Student-Library Partnership to ensure it reflected their preference for a range different study environments. Overall, we think that the new layout is more logical, with a busy and bustling area at the start of Level 1 and a secluded and silent one at the back. However, we realise that, for returning students in particular, it may take a little time to get used to.
There are actually more silent study spaces in the refurbished Library than there were before: you just have to know where to look!
