The Oxford Bodleian Libraries Cotswold Calendar Bodleian Libraries - the working heart of Oxford University All Oxford colleges have their own libraries, which in a number of cases were established well before the foundation of the Bodleian Library. Historically, the college libraries were entirely independent of the Bodleian. However, recent years have seen them brought together for certain purposes under the umbrella of what was formerly known as Oxford University Library Services (OULS), and now as Bodleian Libraries. The Bodleian Library is a working library which forms part of the University of Oxford. It is housed in a remarkable group of buildings which forms the historic heart of the University, and you can explore the quadrangles of these magnificent structures at no charge. The Bodleian Library is not one library but many, housed in buildings spread all over the city of Oxford. The historic core of the Bodleian is located around Radcliffe Square, however, with the oldest parts being the magnificent Duke Humphrey's Library (1488), and the Divinity School. The Bodleian buildings began in 1613, at the bequest of former Oxford student Thomas Bodley (Sir Thomas Bodley, a Fellow of Oxford’s Merton College).

It is now the second largest library in the UK (after the British Library in London). The Bodleian receives a copy of every new book printed in Britain, a practice that began in 1610, so that the library contains an unrivaled 400 year record of British literature. INTERESTING FACTS It was Bodley’s innovation to store books on their ends rather than on their sides as had previously been the custom; this not only allowed more books to fit in a smaller space but also made them more easily accessible. A strict policy of the library was that no fire may be brought into the library buildings. For this reason, the library was completely unheated until 1845, when Victorian engineers installed channels in the floor to carry hot water into the building after being heated in boilers outside. The library also lacked artificial lighting until 1929. Reliance on the sun for light and heat kept the library’s hours of operation quite short—as little as five hours per day during the winter. The Bodleian is unique in that it is not a lending library - no books can be borrowed, only read on the premises.

The Bodleian takes this restriction seriously; in two famous cases, King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell was refused permission to borrow a book. The general public cannot enter the reading rooms; that right is reserved for members. Other parts of the library can be seen on one of the frequent guided tours. One of the highlights of these tours is the Divinity School, which possesses a remarkable vaulted ceiling. It is rightly regarded as a masterpiece of English Gothic architecture. Different ticket options allow you to visit the interior of some of the buildings, such as the University’s oldest teaching and examination room, The Divinity School (built 1427-88). Here you can discover more of the University’s fascinating history. The guided tours go behind the scenes in the Library, including its oldest research library, dating from 1602-20. With the exception of the Shop and the Exhibition Room, admission to the interior of the buildings is charged for. Books by the Mile The Bodleian Library is one of several copyright deposit libraries, which means that it automatically receives a free copy of all books and periodicals published in Britain.

(The library purchases tens of thousands of foreign publications each year to supplement this collection.) The library currently holds over seven million volumes, which occupy 110 miles (180km) of shelving. Each year, the collection grows by more than 100,000 books and nearly 200,000 periodicals; these volumes expand the shelving requirements by about 2 miles (3.3km) annually. Much of the library’s vast storage space is in underground tunnels built in the early 1900s. A system of conveyor belts delivers volumes through the tunnels to 29 reading rooms in the various library buildings. Readers may not browse the stacks freely; each book must be requested in advance and retrieved by a librarian. The system of requesting and delivering books ensures that the library knows the exact location of every volume at all times—down to the particular chair in which each reader is sitting. The Oxford University Reading Rooms The Bodleian Library is composed of a number of separate buildings and offers readers seven reading rooms to work in. Details and the subject focus of each of the reading rooms is listed below.

Duke Humfrey's Library - Old Bodleian Library, Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BG Duke Humfrey’s is the oldest reading room in the Bodleian Library and is composed of three major portions: the original medieval section (completed 1487, rededicated 1602), the Arts End (1612) to the east, and Selden End (1637) to the west. It is the principal reading room for those studying codicology , bibliography and local history. The Gladstone Link - Bodleian Library, Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BG The Gladstone Link is a new area of the Bodleian Library that houses a large interdiscplinary collection of open access material. This area also links the Old Bodleian Library and the Radcliffe Camera, connecting the reading rooms in these buildings for the first time, and offers 120 extra reader spaces, as well as facilities such as reader terminals and photocopiers. It also now holds significant amounts of the History Faculty Library main lending collection.

The Lower Camera - Radcliffe Camera, Bodleian Library, Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BG The Lower Camera Reading Room now houses the beginning of History Faculty Library's main lending collection, since this library's recent relocation into the Radcliffe Camera and Gladstone Link. This collection continues in the Upper and Lower Gladstone Links. The Lower Reading Room - Old Bodleian Library, Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BG The Lower Reading Room of the Old Bodleian Library is the principal reading room for all those studying Classics and Ancient History, Theology (including Patristics) and Philosophy. It is also home to the open shelf General Reference collection. The Special Collections Reading Room - Radcliffe Science Library, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QP The Special Collections Reading Room at Radcliffe Science Library is the research reading room in which western medieval and modern manuscripts, oriental manuscripts and rare books are consulted. Readers may use only pencil in the Special Collections Reading Room. Bags and cases may not be taken into the reading room and other security measures may be enforced.

The Upper Camera Reading Room - Radcliffe Camera, Bodleian Library, Broad Street Oxford OX1 3BG The Upper Camera Reading Room holds the Bodleian teaching collection for History and English, including some material on the History of Art and Archaeology, as well as its open shelf collection of Film Studies materials. It also holds the History Faculty Library's Undergraduate Set Text reference collection. It is where History Faculty Library's new staff office is located. The Upper Reading Room - Old Bodleian Library, Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BG The Upper Reading Room is the principal research reading room for access to printed books published after 1640 in the subject fields of Medieval and Modern History, History of Science, English Language and Literature. The New Bodleian Library - Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BG Currently being redeveloped & will be renamed Weston Library. The redeveloped New Bodleian library building will be renamed the Weston Library in honour of the £25 million donation given in March 2008 by the Garfield Weston Foundation toward its transformation into an advanced special collections library and cultural centre.

The report of a University Commission published in 1931 led to the building of the New Bodleian Library, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, at a cost of £1 million. It was opened in 1940 by King George VI, when unfortunately the silver key broke in the lock. As well as reading rooms, the library had an eleven-floor book stack with space for 5 million volumes connected to the old Bodleian Library by an underground conveyor belt. A south-facing extension was built on the roof to the designs of Robert Potter in 1966–68 to accommodate the Indian Institute Library when the old Indian Institute was converted into offices. The library is now closed and the large redevelopment taking place will revitalise the 1930s facility, originally constructed essentially as a book store and known simply as the ‘New Bodleian’, in contrast to the ‘Old Bodleian’ (Duke Humfrey’s) library, into a major new research centre. More History Oxford’s libraries are among the most celebrated in the world, not only for their incomparable collections of books and manuscripts, but also for their buildings, some of which have remained in continuous use since the Middle Ages.

Among them the Bodleian, the chief among the University’s libraries, has a special place. First opened to scholars in 1602, it incorporates an earlier library erected by the University in the fifteenth century to house books donated by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester. Since 1602 it has expanded, slowly at first but with increasing momentum over the last 150 years, to keep pace with the ever-growing accumulation of books and papers, but the core of the old buildings has remained intact. The library follows a traditional policy that is considerably liberal - scholars from any university in the world are given free access to the library as readers, and those without a university affiliation can become readers by paying a nominal fee.

The only stipulation is that all readers must swear this oath:- “I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; nor to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.” These buildings are still used by students and scholars from all over the world, and they attract an ever-increasing number of visitors. Library futures: University of Oxford | Higher Education Network | The Guardian Higher Education Network Library futures Library futures: University of Oxford We need to shape the skills of library staff to meet user needs while maintaining specialist knowledge, says Richard Ovenden The Radcliffe Camera building was built in the 18th century and serves as a reading room for the Bodleian Library.

Photograph: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford Share on Messenger Close Richard Ovenden: 'Grant writing may be a skill that libraries have become adept in over the past 20 years, but philanthropic fundraising is a different ball-game.' The Bodleian is more than just a university library – it is first and foremost an institution that supports research and learning for our own scholarly community in Oxford. But it also serves as a national library, with major obligations for preservation and dissemination of knowledge. It's an international cultural and scientific institution in its own right, engaging in major collaborative projects ranging from international exhibitions, to data analysis, digitisation, and scientific investigation. Scale and demand is big challenge The Bodleian's problems and its great strengths both stem from the reality of its vast scale: maintaining major collections, buildings, skills, and scope of activity requires equally considerable resources to sustain and develop them – financial, human, and intellectual.

As higher education becomes increasingly global and connected, and as the use of digital media expands and changes so rapidly, keeping pace with the demands of users at all levels is a major challenge for the Bodleian, especially when graduate students and researchers come with high expectations from their previous institutions which may have libraries which are better resourced. Resourcing a large library at a time of financial constraint is hard, but we are fortunate to have a well developed fundraising programme – for capital activities, research projects, and endowment building – that has built up serious momentum in recent years, but needs to perform at an even higher level in the future. Raising funds Grant writing may be a skill that libraries have become adept in over the past 20 years, but philanthropic fundraising is a different ball-game, especially when this activity is becoming highly competitive. It takes years to build a network of supporters, and the experience of dealing with foundations and individuals. The head of the organisation has to devote many unsociable hours to the task. The Bodleian also aims to support core activities by raising income through entrepreneurial initiatives, such as licensing, publishing and retail.

These too have developed to a considerable scale and require specialist expertise in order to grow and sustain this income, for the ultimate benefit of our scholars. Ensuring that our buildings – over 40 of them which date from the 15th to the 21st centuries – are safe, secure, and fit for purpose is an activity for this century and beyond. In the coming year we will complete an £80m redevelopment of a major research library building, the Weston library, and a smaller scale specialist library for Chinese studies within the university's new China centre. The Weston library in particular will enable the Bodleian's core activities – acquisition and preservation of major collections, high-level support for researchers, and enhanced access to our collections for the wider public – to be dramatically improved (and our running costs reduced). The Weston project is part of an eight-year academic strategy which aims to bring serious additional investment into our buildings, digital library, and collections. This includes the construction of a high-tech nine million volume book storage facility, giving the Bodleian decades of growth in the storage for its physical collections.

Sustaining key relationships A spin-off benefit from all of this activity has been introducing new ways of working and organising our activities, lots of programme and project management, and much closer ties with colleagues in other parts of the university (for example, estates, IT services, finance and HR), who have been hugely supportive. In a large and distributed organisation such as Oxford, sustaining these key relationships can be very difficult, but of critical importance in challenging and stressful times. Just as challenging as coping with major projects is the long term issue of matching the intellectual demands of our work with the skills of our staff. As we grapple with both familiar challenges and newer ones – such as open access, copyright and IPR, digital preservation, and research data management – we need to strengthen legal, technical, and project management skills in our organisation. The 'headache' of open access The speed in which the open access (OA) policies have been developed and implemented poses major headaches for institutions like Oxford, as library staff cope both with keeping academics up to date with the shifting sands of hastily developed policies and the differing responses of myriad publishers.

It's also difficult to keep track of the funds given to support gold OA and make it as swift and easy as possible for our scholars to go down the green OA route. At the same time, skills such as palaeography and codicology are still highly sought after and librarians have increasingly rare skills to impart to new generations of researchers. As more and more of our scholars want us to archive blogs and websites, help them with data archiving or visualisation, or enable their editorial collaboration with three other universities in multiple time-zones, we need to help shape the skills-set of our staff to cope with these new demands while maintaining (even extending) existing specialist knowledge and expertise in subjects, languages and collections. As we move further into our fifth century as a library, our challenges can be summed up in one sentence: matching the legacy of the past with the promise of the future. Richard Ovenden is interim Bodley's librarian , University of Oxford, UK This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional . To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network .

Ada Lovelace | Celebrating 200 years of a computer visionary Celebrating 200 years of a computer visionary News Dan Q As our Bodleian Libraries Lovelace display closed at the end of 2015, it’s time to look back at a wonderful celebration of the bicentenary of computer pioneer Ada, Countess of Lovelace. At the heart of the Oxford celebrations were the archives of Lovelace family papers , deposited by their owners in the Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and thus kindly made available to scholars from all over the world. The 200th anniversary celebrations saw a particular focus on Lovelace’s mathematics, with a new study in preparation by the first professional historians of mathematics to work on this material, Christopher Hollings, of Oxford’s world-leading History of Mathematics group, and Adrian Rice of Ralph Macon University.

They’ve studied the exchange of letters between Lovelace and Augustus De Morgan, one of the leading mathematicians of the day, and shown that in this ‘correspondence course’ Lovelace, in her twenties, is studying at the level of university students of the day, with a knack for asking perceptive questions, and that De Morgan thought highly of her abilities and discussed with her cutting edge research of the time. Thanks to the generosity of the Clay Mathematics Institute and the descendants of Ada Lovelace, a digital edition of Lovelace’s mathematical papers, based on this research, has been made available online. Display, Bodleian Library The Bodleian’s display drawn from these papers, curated by Dr Mary Clapinson and Professor Ursula Martin, opened on 15 October 2015, and also included items from the Oxford Museum of the History of Science and Somerville College. Items on display included Lovelace’s childhood exercise books and a charming letter in which she speculates about making a flying horse; her correspondence with Babbage and her complaints to her mother about him; her mathematical notes and speculations, and the only known photographs of Lovelace , kindly loaned by a private collector.

A Symposium in Oxford on 9 and 10 December 2015 attracted around 300 participants, including around 50 students who were sponsored by AdaCore, Elsevier, the Clay Mathematics Institute, Google and the London Mathematical Society. Support from the ACM allowed recording and archiving of the lectures on the Oxford Podcasts website. Babbage addition mechanism, RHUL Interdisciplinary presentations included computer scientists, mathematicians, historians and a graphic artist, and demonstrations from UK and German research projects. A workshop organized by students in the Faculty of English reflects an increasing appreciation of Lovelace’s cultural role. Taylor and Francis, who as Taylors, published Lovelace’s paper on Babbage’s analytical engine in 1843, sponsored an excellent birthday cake. A dinner in Balliol College was preceded by a reception in the Blackwell Hall of the Bodleian Library, with the Earl of Lytton proposing a toast to his great-great-grandmother Ada Lovelace, and the premiere of pieces by James Whitbourn. The Earl of Lytton We have had an amazing and positive response in thank you notes, articles and tweets.

Valerie Barr summed up the interdisciplinary awareness: ‘As a computer scientist, I was humbled by the extent of research the scholars from the humanities disciplines have done. They have faced a significant big data problem, reading letters and diaries from multiple people that spanned decades, drawing connections between them, using calendars and newspapers to confirm and clarify details.’ Others wrote: ‘incredible experience, dramatic, moving, educational, cathartic. Will never forget it’, ‘in terms of interdisciplinary engagement across very different disciplines, it was one of the best conferences I have been to’ and ‘I have never attended a Symposium of such multi-disciplinary interest, and such constant intellectual and imaginative stimulation, provocation, nudging’ and many more kind things. Exhibition, Science Museum, London The Oxford team advised on a BBC Radio programme of Lovelace’s letters , developed by Georgina Ferry.

We also provided material and advice for the Science Museum, London, whose Ada Lovelace exhibition runs from October 2015 to April 2016, and includes a magnificent portrait of Ada Lovelace from the UK government art collection, a lock of Lovelace’s hair, Babbage’s demonstration models of his difference engines, Lovelace’s whimsical correspondence with Faraday, and letters of Lovelace and her family borrowed from the Bodleian archive. 3-D printing at the hackathon Lovelace’s interests in music were also celebrated with a music research event led by Professor David De Roure and composer Emily Howard. Wadham College ran outreach activities based on the display, the Bodleian Library and Sandbox Education hosted a kids mini-hack , a team of students put together an Ada Lovelace hackathon with 3D printing designs for an analytical engine provided by Sydney Padua , and the Bodleian Library celebrated Ada Lovelace Day with a week of Wikimedia editing events .

Women in science were the focus of the Oxford Department of Computer Science’s inaugural Ada Lovelace lecture given by Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov, and sponsored by Facebook, and Somerville College hosted a women in computing event with international speakers. With EPSRC support, we partnered with Queen Mary University of London, whose cs4fn is a global campaign to enthuse and teach both students and others about inter-disciplinary computer science research. They have created a special ‘Ada Lovelace’ edition of their cs4fn magazine, with around 20,000 copies distributed to UK schools, and linked web activities. Working with The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, UK, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, we developed a competition for young women to ‘Write a letter to Ada’, which attracted over 1,000 entries. The National Museum of Computing houses the largest collection of functional historic computers in Europe, including a rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer, and we were delighted that Colossus veterans Irene Dixon and Betty O’Connell were able to present the UK prizes at the Ada Lovelace Symposium.

Computer History Museum Internationally, we partnered with the Computer History Museum , the world’s leading institution exploring the history of computing and its ongoing impact on society. The Museum is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computer history, and is home to the largest international collection of computing artifacts in the world, encompassing computer hardware, software, documentation, ephemera, photographs, oral histories and moving images. Computer History Museum, Thinking Big ‘ Thinking Big: Ada Countess of Lovelace ‘, which opened on Lovelace’s 200th birthday, 10 December 2015, is a re-presentation of the curatorial material from the Bodleian’s display, under the direction of the Computer History Museum’s Vice-President of Collections & Exhibitions, Kirsten Tashev. Supporting activities included an opening event with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, family fun days, demonstrations of the modern reconstruction of Babbage’s unbuilt Difference Engine, a parallel US version of the ‘Write a letter to Ada’ competition, and a panel discussion with Oxford’s Ursula Martin, Ada Lovelace biographer Dr Betty Toole, and Charles Babbage expert Tim Robinson.

There is more to come, including a movie biopic from Alison Owen and Debra Hayward’s Monumental Pictures , in partnership with google and the National Academy of Sciences. All this was made possible through generous sponsors and partners. We were delighted to partner with the Clay Mathematics Institute, the Computer History Museum, cs4fn, the National Museum of Computing and the Science Museum. Within Oxford we gratefully acknowledge support from: the Bodleian Libraries, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of English, Mathematical Institute, Balliol College, Jesus College, Somerville College, Wadham College, the Oxford e-Research Centre, Oxford Women in Computer Science Society, and The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities. We gratefully acknowledge sponsorship from: AdaCore, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Association for Computing Machinery, British Computer Society, Clay Mathematics Institute, Elsevier, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Google, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the London Mathematical Society, and Taylor and Francis. Post written by Professor Ursula Martin, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Director of Oxford’s Ada Lovelace Bicentenary Celebrations.

Blog post images courtesy of Jennifer Balakrishnan, Stuart Bebb, Bodleian Library, cs4fn, Ursula Martin, Beth McMillan, and Walter Sedriks. News Image courtesy of Sydney Padua Back in November, the folks at the Oxford Hackspace kindly hosted our hackathon to celebrate the life and works of Ada Lovelace. The hackathon was co-ordinated by Computer Science PhD student Beth McMillan, who wrote the following report. Lovelace investigated and talked about many concepts that lend themselves to physical computing projects. “It does not appear to me that cerebral matter need be more unmanageable to mathematicians than sideral & planetary matters & movements, if they would but inspect it from the right point of view.” Lovelace’s idea for a so-called “calculus of the nervous system” has been realised in various ways by mathematical biologists, ever since Hodgkin and Huxley modelled a squid axon in 1952 . An entertaining recent development was the creation of a robot that responded to stimuli based on the neuronal connections of a nematode worm .

Some scientists from OpenWorm group were kind enough to come along to the hackathon to lead a project, and ended up working on a SPARKLY calculus of the nervous system. “Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” Lovelace predicted the advent of electronic music long before the birth of Delia Darbyshire . The possibilities for creating music machines and electronic compositions are practically infinite – one could use Markov chains to approximate a Bach chorale, play the ZX Spectrum like an instrument , or, as one group attempted, use a robot arm to play a glockenspiel. Sadly, the weight of the mallet overcame the little robot arm. A few days later, however, the glorious hackspace nerds collaboratively built this, using an ardiuno and some motors: As a young girl, Ada’s interest in “Flyology” lead her to investigate the best materials and designs for creating flying machines. Our Flyology department decided on a classic ornithopter design.

We’re lucky enough to be living at a time when 3D printing is cheap and readily available. This meant we could, amongst other projects, replicate this part of the Analytical Engine’s adding mechanism: We had around 45 participants, and there were around 10 experts from the hackspace volunteering as well. We had some Oxford students, some local folks, some teenagers, and a group of people all the way from Brunel! The hackathon was run in an “unconference” manner: knowledgeable people shared their skills, and people formed their own groups to work on self-directed projects. Periodically we assembled for plenaries to talk about what we were making. Three people also did short talks on their areas of expertise: the excellent Peter Lister introduced us to Arduino electronics, the brilliant Paul Murcutt explained neural networks, and the glorious Sydney Padua taught us about the Analytical Engine. There was a Twitter feed running throughout the day, showing the internet what we were up to. All in all, it was an excellent day and I think everyone left having learned something. If Ada Lovelace were alive today, I think she would have been pretty excited.

sponsored by News Emily Howard explains ‘numbers into notes’ (with permission from photographer Angela Guyton) Ada Lovelace’s significant contributions were celebrated and discussed at the Ada Lovelace Symposium last week, marking the bicentennial of her birth on 10 December 1815. Lovelace brought important early insights into mathematics and computation, especially in the context of the Analytical Engine proposed by her collaborator Charles Babbage . She also brought her vision and computational intuitions to music, asking whether ‘the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent’. On 30 November we explored mathematics, computation, and music through a performance of ‘ Ada sketches ‘, a short operatic work by composed by Emily Howard and part of her Lovelace Trilogy. More than a performance, this event with Emily Howard and musicians from the Northern Royal College of Music involved mathematical explanation and engaged the audience in composition, turning numbers into notes. We revisited this work at the Ada Lovelace Symposium through an interactive display and a conversation on stage between David De Roure and Emily Howard, herself a mathematician, computer scientist and musician.

This also featured an extract of Howard’s work ‘Mesmerism’, another part of the Trilogy, and illustrated numbers and notes by generating a number sequence on a simulator of the Analytical Engine and developing the output as a musical theme—an exercise inspired by discussions at a music hack day held at Goldsmiths in October. The evening saw world premières of ‘An algorithmic study on ADA’ and ‘ADA’, composed by James Whitbourn , performed by mixed-voice contemporary choir with violin and harp. The event was supported by digital music research projects Transforming Musicology (AHRC, led by Goldsmiths, University of London ) and “ FAST ” (EPSRC, led by Queen Mary University of London ), and organized at University of Oxford by a partnership of the e-Research Centre , Centre for Digital Scholarship , and The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities , in collaboration with symposium organizer Professor Ursula Martin, the Mathematical Institute , and Department of Computer Science . The performance was supported by the Royal Northern College of Music , Leverhulme Trust and University of Liverpool .

–Dave de Roure, Director, Oxford e-Research Centre 5 December, 10am- 1pm Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library ( Map ) This event is free but places are limited so please complete our booking form to reserve tickets in advance. Open to participants ages 11-16. Parents are encouraged to drop off children and return at 12.30pm to see the final products. Book free tickets . ______ Get creative in a hands-on computing workshop where we’ll be hacking code & sound at the Weston Library with Sandbox Education. As part of Oxford’s celebrations of the 200th birthday of computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, we’ll be exploring two of her favourite interests – music and computing. Our specialist workshop leaders are skilled educators who provide the tools and the skills for you to make and code musical instruments that respond to the environment and create unique sounds. Bare sounds Working hands-on with the amazing Electric Paint & Touch Board, you will explore the powers of code and electricity to create unique musical instruments. The Touch Board is a micro controller to prototype musical instrument. It helps you transform sensor data into sound, light or information in the cloud – without needing soldering, wiring or complex programming.

Arduino instruments With the Arduino & Tinkerkit, you will invent and assemble electronic musical instruments that can respond to the environment – learning coding, physical computing, music participation and having great fun! The Arduino is a low cost, open-source electronics hardware and software platform that senses and responds to the environment. Want to know what people have done on previous workshops? Watch Sandbox Education live at Music Tech Fest 2015 in Sweden at . News Registration is open for ‘Texts and contexts: the cultural legacies of Ada Lovelace’, an interdisciplinary workshop for graduates and early-career researchers. The workshop, taking place on Tuesday 8 December, at 10am and will include papers on a wide variety of Lovelace-related topics, from Lovelace and Literature, to Lovelace and Lego. More details and abstracts here: adalovelaceworkshop.wordpress.com The day will bring together postgraduates, early career researchers, and anyone with an interest in Ada Lovelace, to discuss the cultural influences of Lovelace’s work from the 19th century to the present day.

Our keynote address will be delivered by Professor Sharon Ruston (Lancaster University), who will later be joined in a roundtable discussion by Professor Richard Holmes, Sydney Padua, and Miranda Seymour. We also look forward to hearing papers on a wide variety of topics, from teaching and curating Lovelace in the 21st century, to Lovelace’s influence in the humanities.

The timings for the day are as follows: 9.30-10am Arrivals 10.15-11.15am Panel 1: Artistic Legacies Imogen Forbes-Macphail, ‘A sentimental mathematical correspondence: Ada Lovelace’s writing’ Anne Loveridge, ‘”Unweave a rainbow”: Ada Lovelace and the poetic mystery of science’ 11.15-11.30am Coffee 1.30-2.30pm Keynote address by Professor Sharon Ruston 2.30-3.30pm Panel 3: Ada’s Brains Madelaine Schurch, ‘Ada Lovelace, mania, and visionary scientific imagination’ Lesley Gray, ‘Magnets and mesmerism: Ada Lovelace at the cusp of reason and romance’ Rebecca Barnes, ‘Serious play with Babbage and Lovelace: Lovelace’s role in shaping Babbage’s heuristic turn of mind’ 3.30-3.45pm Coffee 3.45-4.45pm Panel 4: Public Engagement Stewart Cromar, ‘LEGO Lovelace: building a modern icon’

 Katherine Platt, ‘Lovelace at the Science Museum’ Georgina Ferry, ‘”If my wave can…follow & touch yours…”: Broadcasting the letters of Ada Lovelace’ 4.45-5.45pm Roundtable discussion with Professor Richard Holmes, Sydney Padua, Professor Sharon Ruston, and Miranda Seymour 5.45-6pm Closing remarks Abstracts for papers can be found on our website at adalovelaceworkshop.wordpress.com .

Contact us with any questions at adalovelaceworkshop@ell.ox.ac.uk . Anyone with an interest in Lovelace is welcome to attend. Registration is now closed but contact Sarah Baldwin sarah.baldwin@cs.ox.ac.uk if you are interested in attending. News The Bodleian Libraries is hosting a special display to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ada, Countess of Lovelace , the Victorian mathematician who is often referred to as the first computer programmer. It contains two remarkable daguerreotypes, one reproduced here, a pair made by made by Antoine Claudet in the early 1840s. They are the only known photographs of Lovelace. Daguerreotype of Ada Lovelace, about 1843, reproduced by courtesy of G M Bond Claudet learned the art of photography from Louis Daguerre, the inventor of one of the earliest photographic processes. He established his first Daguerreotype studio in London, in the Strand, in 1841, then moved to Regent’s Park and finally Regent’s Street.

His output was phenomenal – over 1800 portraits a year – and his customers included many well known figures in fashionable, literary and scientific circles, among them Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. He would often take several pictures of his subjects at the same sitting, using elaborate painted backdrops, which recur in several of his images. These allow us to date these pictures of Lovelace to around 1843, at the time when she was writing her famous paper on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. As well as being customers of the new photographers, Ada Lovelace and her circle were intrigued by the science of photography and the contribution photographic processes might make to science. Apart from her famous paper on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, her only other known publication is in the form of long footnotes to an article by her husband, William Earl of Lovelace, in the Royal Agricultural Society journal. The article, which he describes as being written for the ‘leather-gaiter-and-top-boot-mind’, reviews a paper by the French economist Gasparin, about possible laws linking climate and the yield of crops, referring to a wide variety of observations of weather and plants collected by both professionals and amateurs.

Ada Lovelace observes that photographic devices, such as the actinograph designed by her friend John Herschel, allow the construction of ‘meteorological instruments of the utmost delicacy’, and criticises Gasparin ‘who seems to write unaware of the means which photography has offered’. In similar vein, she reflected on the potential of photography in providing objective evidence of psychic phenomena. In an unpublished article she writes, ‘If amateurs, of either sex, would amuse their idle hours with experimenting on this subject, & would keep an accurate journal of their daily observations, we should in a few years have a mass of registered facts to compare with the observation of the Scientific’, concluding that ‘we believe that it is as yet quite unsuspected how important a part photography is to play in the advancement of human knowledge’. Daguerreotype of an 1852 painting of Ada Lovelace, reproduced by courtesy of G M Bond A third poignant daguerreotype, by an unknown photographer, is a photograph of a small portrait of Ada Lovelace, frail and thin, painted by Henry Wyndham Phillips in the last months of her life, when she was in great pain from uterine cancer.

Her husband recorded progress on the portrait in his diary – on 2 August ‘she managed to remain long enough when he came for him to make some progress’, on 3 August that he was ‘getting on with the portrait’, and on 13 August that though ‘the suffering was so great that she could scarce avoid crying out’, yet ‘she sat at the piano some little time so that the artist could portray her hands’. The Bodleian archives contain a note written in her last days, in which she leaves ‘a daguerreotype from Philips’s portrait of me’ to her mother’s friend, Miss Montgomery. Professor Ursula Martin CBE, University of Oxford Mary Beard to receive Bodley Medal - Bodleian Libraries' highest honour | Newnham College Mary Beard to receive Bodley Medal – Bodleian Libraries’ highest honour March 29th, 2016 Professor Mary Beard will be presented with the Bodley Medal – the Bodleian Libraries’ highest honour – during the Oxford Literary Festival. The Bodleian Libraries will present this year’s Bodley Medal to the Newnham Fellow and alumna on April 5 when she will deliver the Bodley Lecture at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival.

The Bodley Medal is awarded by the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the worlds in which the Bodleian is active including literature, culture, science and communication. Past winners include physicist Stephen Hawking, film director Nicholas Hytner, novelist Hilary Mantel, writer and actor Alan Bennett and inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The Bodleian Library is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library with more than 12 million printed items. Libraries in the Bodleian Libraries group include major research libraries, libraries attached to faculties, departments and other institutions of the University of Oxford and, of course, the principal University library – the Bodleian Library – which has been a library of legal deposit for 400 years. Beard, who has been selected to receive the prestigious honour, holds a chair of classics at the University of Cambridge and is classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of numerous highly-regarded works on the classical period including the Wolfson Award-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town and her latest book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

Her television work includes a BBC Two documentary on Pompeii and a BBC mini-series titled Meet the Romans with Mary Beard, and she is a regular media commentator on both the modern and the ancient world. Professor Beard, pictured, will give the Bodley Lecture in the University’s Sheldonian Theatre at 6pm on Tuesday, April 5. She will appear in conversation with Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian, and will discuss her life and work. Following the event, Ovenden will present her with the Bodley Medal. The Bodleian Libraries is a cultural partner of the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival, which takes place from April 2-10 2016. Events will take place at the Bodleian’s Weston Library and Divinity School as well as at venues across the city. For more information, visit the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival website. Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services | Past Projects A selection of our past projects and partnerships is below.

Broadside Ballads Archive The Broadside Ballads Archive Project created a union catalogue using linked data from the University of Oxford, the English Broadside Ballads Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library to cluster and enrich English folk song and printed ballad resources at several descriptive and interpretive levels. The resource also incorporates an image search tool. DaMaRo Data Management Rollout at Oxford (DaMaRo) is a JISC-funded project that concluded in March 2013. The aim of the project was to create a research data management policy with a supporting infrastructure to allow researchers to store and manage their data outputs. In addition to the top-level policy, key outputs of the project included the DataBank repository, DataFinder (an online catalogue of Oxford research data), training and information for researchers and others, and policies to support Oxford's data management services. DataFlow The JISC-funded DataFlow project was carried out in collaboration with David Shotton and his team in Zoology. DataFlow developed virtualized cloud-based research management services, building on the BDLSS data repository Databank , to serve the 'long tail' of research datasets of small to moderate size.

Digital Theses Thanks to the generosity and vision of Dr Leonard Polonsky, the Bodleian Libraries have been able to digitize a number of Oxford D.Phil. theses. Staff have contacted authors to identify theses to be digitized. The completed digital theses have been deposited in ORA . Europeana In collaboration with 25 other research libraries from 11 countries, the Bodleian Libraries have worked to make our public-domain digitized content accessible via Europeana . This project included several hundred thousand digital images, as well as metadata for all the items scanned in collaboration with Google Books. Fihrist Originally developed as part of the Oxford Cambridge Islamic Manuscripts Catalogue Online, Fihrist has become the national union catalogue of Islamic manuscripts. It now contains the Islamic holdings of seven different U.K. libraries, including the British Library. Genizah The Bodleian Library holds what is regarded as the best collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world. The Genizah digitization project, in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and with the generous contribution of George Blumenthal, has created an online catalogue and image database for the 4,000 manuscript fragments in the Bodleian's collection.

This project will facilitate international research to identify matching fragments in different collections. Google Books The Bodleian undertook a project to retrieve and preserve a local copy of the data created in our partnership with Google. We created PDF files from the raw data from the digitization project, and have made over 350,000 books available for download from SOLO. Queen Victoria's Journals On May 24, 2012, Her Majesty the Queen launched this unique resource, which makes available online all the personal journals of Queen Victoria. With this site, the Bodleian Libraries, working in partnership with the Royal Archives and the information company ProQuest, made the private records of one of the world's most influential public figures accessible to the public. Dr Sarah Thomas, Bodley's Librarian, said: 'This initiative is a highly engaging and significant partnership across three organizations for the benefit of public and scholarly access to fascinating historical documents, and has been made possible with the support and generosity of Oxford benefactors the Polonsky Foundation and the Zvi and Ofra Meitar Family Fund.' The Queen Victoria's Journals website , which is mobile-compliant, offers colour images and full transcription of each entry of the journals.

The site's browse function offers a 'Names and Places' content search as well as a date browse feature. SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition SECT was a JISC-funded project that investigated the impact and sustainability of the EEBO-TCP collection (see Current Projects ), developing a framework and set of recommendations for the ongoing curation of the EEBO-TCP corpus and focusing particularly on the future needs of our users. The project was a collaboration between digital editors in BDLSS and researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute. Selden Map of China The Selden Map project began the process of placing the Selden Map of China, which is held at the Bodleian Library, into a greater cultural and historical perspective through a website that juxtaposes a high-resolution image of the map with essays and blog posts about its history and scholarship. The site also describes the restoration of the map prior to imaging. Sprint for Shakespeare Sprint for Shakespeare was a public campaign that raised funds to stabilize, digitize and publish, freely online, a digital facsimile of the Bodleian's First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.

This appeal to public generosity echoed the campaign of 1905-06, when public donations enabled the Bodleian to buy the book (which first arrived at the Library in 1623) back from the Turbutt family. The volume's fragile condition means that access to it is highly restricted, but this digital facsimile has opened its pages to the world. The project was a collaboration between Dr Emma Smith, of the English Faculty, and several Bodleian departments: Conservation and Collection Care, Rare Books, Imaging Services, Communications, the University Development Office, and BDLSS.

A Digital Facsimile of Terence’s Comedies, Muir, Turner A Digital Facsimile of Terence’s Comedies Distributed for Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Multi $395.00 ISBN: 9781851243280 Published March 2012 For sale in North America only Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer, best known as Terence, was highly regarded in the second century BC for his six comedies, such as “Adelphoe,” which focused on child-rearing, and “Andria,” which contained messages about moderation and charity. Due to the fact that Terence’s plays often carried a moral lesson, they remained popular into the early modern period, and even Martin Luther suggested the plays be used for instruction in schools. Among the treasures of the Bodleian Library is a mid-twelfth-century manuscript that illustrates all six of Terence’s comedies alongside explanatory notes. This DVD presents a complete facsimile of the entire manuscript and a new transcription specially prepared for this publication. Users can navigate easily through the plays and the accompanying illustrations of the complete facsimile.

Users can also zoom in to the illustrations at the beginning of each scene, which are based on earlier Carolingian models that were themselves derived from Late Antique illustrations. This interactive digital facsimile makes readily available to scholars and students of classical drama and early modern culture an extremely valuable teaching and research tool, as well as a facsimile of a beautiful and fascinating document of the High Middle Ages. For more information, or to order this book, please visit Google preview here

Question: The Bodleian Library is part of which highly regarded universtity?
Answer: Oxford