Merry Christmas from the Archives!

We recently found this very seasonal recipe booklet in our newly catalogued Nutrition Collection. Anyone for Mock Cream? Mock marzipan?

Reference: Nutrition/06/05 Ministry of Food wartime cookery leaflets.

Library Closure Saturday 18th December

The Library will close at 4pm on Saturday 18th December due to the adverse weather conditions.

Data sharing blog

If you are interested in the data sharing debate why not take a look at Chris Taylor’s (EBI, Cambridge and NEBC, Oxford) recent guest blog for the Research Information Network at:

http://www.rin.ac.uk/blogs/guest/chris-taylor/data-sharing-forced-altruism

In the blog post, Taylor discusses the role of data sharing in the biological sciences and considers how scientists can be encouraged and supported to share their data.

Worldometers

Want to add some more interest to your statistics? Have a look at Worldometers for real time updates on a selection of world statistics.
For example:

• Healthcare expenditure by worldwide governments today
• Number of people with no access to safe drinking water
• Deaths caused by communicable diseases this year
• Number of HIV/AIDS infected people

Most of the statistics are supported with references so you can check their accuracy.

Christmas cards

The 2010 LSHTM Christmas cards are now on sale in the Library.

This year the back of the card features shots of the new Tavistock Place building as well as a festive scene on the front.

Cards are 50p each or 5 for £2.00. They can also be purchased from the Refectory and from Ruth Kipling. Proceeds go to the Student Hardship Fund.

MeSH 2011 released

Details of the changes made to MeSH for 2011 have been released on the latest NLM technical bulletin.

These changes will take effect on updates published from January 2011 onwards. The changes are not made retrospectively.

If you have saved searches in Medline or PubMed, I recommend that you check the changes to ensure your searches continue to include the most up to date MeSH terms.

MeSH is updated annually to ensure it incorporates new areas of research and reflects changing terminology.

Get in touch with the Library if you have any questions about the update and how this may impact on you.

Christmas Closure

The Library will be closed from Thursday 23rd December 2010 until Monday 3rd January 2011 inclusively. We will re-open at 8:30 am on Tuesday 4th January 2011.

Your last opportunity to take out books before the Christmas break will be 8.25 pm on Wednesday 22nd December.

NEW - geographical information available for free online

There has been a large increase in the amount of geographical data released for free online recently. I thought I would bring this together here. If anyone knows of any more sources of free, good quality geographical information, let me know in the comments and I'll add them to the list.

Firstly, yesterday Google launched its Google Earth Engine at the International Climate Change Conference in Cancun. It provides access to satellite imagery and data. More information is available on the Google Blog.

Second, the Ordinance Survey has released access to many of it's data via the OS OpenData service. From here you can view or download maps of the UK or use the API to create your own web applications.

The Ordinance Survey data has been used by Edina to create additional resources.

• Use the Digimap OpenStream to use the data in conjunction with other mapping and online services.
• Use the Unlock service to convert postcodes and grid references to coordinates, locate place names and extract place names from text.
• Use ShareGeo to search and share geospacial datasets with other UK Higher Education institutions.