Attention New Postgrads!

Library tours are being held this week for students beginning their Postgraduate Diploma in Education. If you haven't had yours yet you can check the remaining slots here. Just turn up at one of the times allotted for your group and we'll take it from there!

Easter Rising Online Resource

Continuing on from their wonderful Yeats Online Exhibition, the National Library of Ireland bring 1916 to your web browser with The 1916 Rising: Personalities and Perspectives - an online exhibition.

The exhibition features, studies and analyses over 500 images from the Library’s rich holdings of books, newspapers, photographs, drawings, proclamations and manuscript material. It looks at those who set the stage for the events of Easter Week 1916, the seven signatories of the proclamation, the others executed in the aftermath of the Rising, the casualties and the survivors.

Click here or on the image above to access the exhibition. (It requires Flash Player 7)

British Periodicals Trial

The Library has acquired trial access to Proquest's British Periodicals Databases. You will require a password to access this resource which can be obtained from our Information Desk.

This resource contains digital reproductions of journals dating from the 17th century up to the 1930's and includes articles authored by Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, to name but a few.

The Collection is divided into Periodicals I (covering mainly literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences) and Periodicals II (covering literature, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture).

Our trial access is available until March 12th. You can always see what we have on trial on the trial databases section of our website, and we welcome suggestions for new resources from staff or students.

Pathé News Archive

A wonderful digitised video archive of British Pathé's newsreels containing over 3,500 hours of footage, can be viewed free of charge at www.britishpathe.com.

British Pathé began in the 1890s and from 1900 onwards they produced an Irish edition. This searchable digital archive allows you to sift through remarkable footage of seminal moments in history.

You can see footage of things like Queen Victoria visiting Ireland in 1900, O'Connell Street after the 1916 Rising or even Kilkenny losing an all-Ireland final.

Ask About Ireland...

AskAboutIreland.ie is a free open access resource that could be useful for those studying in Education, English, History or Geography.

A couple of areas of particular relevance to St. Pat's are:

Learning Zone - online activities and games for primary school students

Griffith's Valuation - a digitised version of 19th Century land valuations

Excellent articles on Irish history, myth and culture can be found by browsing through the Reading Room - things like Ghost Stories of Dublin, Cúchalainn's wooing of Emer or the Seven Septs of Laois. There's an article on Irish Authors by Dr. Derek Hand from our English Department.

The site is an initiative of public libraries, museums and archives in Ireland to digitally preserve our cultural resources. It was founded in 2008 and resources are still being added to it as they become available in digital form.

The project is managed by An Comhairle Leabharlanna and supported by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government with funding from the Information Society Fund.

Children's Literature Resource

As well as alerting you to subscribed or trial databases, we like to draw your attention to worthwhile open access resources which are available online free of charge.

One we've come across recently is International Children's Digital Library (ICDL), a project of the University of Maryland founded with the Internet Archive.

The ICDL Foundation aims to make "the best in children's literature available online free of charge" and it currently contains 4365 books in 54 languages, all readable not just in full text but with quality scanned images of every page.

The collection can be searched or browsed in various ways - by location, language, year, author or reader age. The books could be used with a projector and there's a teacher training manual with ideas on how to apply the resource in the classroom. There's even an iphone application which allows you to browse and read titles from the ICDL on the move!

Have a look!

Check out Chekhov

This Friday sees the 150th anniversary of the birth of Anton Chekhov. To mark the occasion, at the entrance to the main Library we currently have a display of items written by or about him.

All items displayed are available for loan so why not pick one up and familiarise yourself with one of the true greats of literature and drama.