August Bank Holiday

Please note that the Library is closed from Saturday to Monday inclusive this weekend due to the bank holiday. We reopen on Tuesday, Aug 2 at 10am.

E-books are 200!

We now have over 200 e-books in our collection. With one or two exceptions, all of these titles are also held in print format in the Library. This way, if the 'real' book is out on loan or you can't make it to the Library on time you know you can access the content in an online format. So no excuses!

Our e-books are viewed through your web-browser and can be found on our Catalogue in the same way you search for print items. To see a list of all titles available in this format just click on the 'SPD E-books' icon on the Catalogue home page. Staff can also put links directly to e-books within their Moodle topics.

If you haven't accessed on of our e-books before the online tutorials page on our website has a couple of videos to get you started, like the one below. Or if you'd like a run-through in person or have any questions such as how to link to them via Moodle, just contact Síol, our information and research skills service:

• info.library@spd.dcu.ie
• 01-8842170

Eneclann Display

We currently have a selection of Eneclann digital publications on display at the entrance to the main library. These titles are in CD-ROM format and contain digitised versions of various 18th, 19th and early 20th century works.

Titles available include:

• 1798 Rebellion, Claimants and Surrenders
• Pigot's Commercial Dictionary
• Slater's Commercial Directory
• Thom's Almanac & Directory
• The Dublin Almanac
• Confederation of Kilkenny
• Census Reports of Co. Dublin and Ireland
• and lots more...

Print editions of many of these titles are also in the Library and all of the CD-Rom versions are available to borrow as main lending items.

Go to Harvard For Free...

We like to point our users to open access resources on the web that might be of use for your study or research. One such recommendation is Academic Earth (academicearth.org), an excellent site containing (mostly) free access to courses and lectures recorded by professors from institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale and other colleges.

You can watch an individual video or, if you're feeling ambitious, a full series of lectures on a single course. Topics vary from the philosophy of death to the American novel since 1945.

In total there are over 1,500 video hosted on the site, searchable by subject, university or instructor. Why not have a look to see what they have in your area of study or work? At least it's not hard to sneak out of the lecture halfway through...

Happy Bloomsday!

Some of the celebrations for Bloomsday 2011 have taken an unusually digital slant on Joyce's great novel. David Molloy in the Irish Times reports how computer programmer Rory McCann has taken up Leopold Bloom's challenge to “cross Dublin without passing a pub”. Stranger still is the Ulysses meets Twitter experiment which is posting the entirety of Ulysses in 140-character tweets throughout today. You can follow the blasphemy here!

Alternatively you could keep it traditional and take a look at our selection of titles about Ulysses or even the thing itself available on our shelves.

Colum McCann wins IMPAC Award

The winner of the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced last night and went to Irish author Colum McCann for his novel Let the Great World Spin.

The prize for the IMPAC award is €100,000, the largest for a single novel published in English. It is also unique in that the shortlist is drawn from nominations received from public libraries around the globe, with the winner then chosen by the IMPAC judging panel. As well as being selected by the judging panel, McCann's novel also received the highest number of nominations from the participating libraries this year.

The first half of the novel is framed by a real event in New York in August 1974 when Frenchman Philip Petit performed a tightrope walk between the twin towers. The judging panel remarked of the novel

"In the opening pages of Let The Great World Spin, the people of New York City stand breathless and overwhelmed as a great artist dazzles them in a realm that seemed impossible until that moment; Colum McCann does the same thing in this novel, leaving the reader just as stunned as the New Yorkers, just as moved and just as grateful."

The book is in stock in the library so if you'd like to be stunned, moved and grateful, check it out today from our literature section here!

New English Literature Articles

43 new articles on different aspects of English literature have been added to Literary Encyclopedia, including 3 by Irish-based authors:

• Anne Enright by Heather Ingman (TCD)
• Maeve Brennan by Dolores McLoughlin (TCD)
• Rawi Hage by Rita Sakr (UCD)

Other new additions include articles on J.M. Coetzee's debut novel Dusklands, Toni Morrison's Beloved and an excellent piece on Antrim poet Samuel Thomson (1766-1816), known as the "Bard of Cangranny" and described by author Jennifer Orr as a figure of "unique significance".

Literary Encyclopedia is an online collection of specially commissioned articles written by university teachers and academics around the world and relating to authors, works and themes of English Literature.

The full list of new articles can be seen here and the database is also accessible via the database A-Z on our website.