Reception for Distance Learners

The pre-Diploma Day reception for Distance Learners will be held in the Library once again this year. The Reception is on Friday 4th March from 4pm to 7pm, and the Library will close at 1.30pm that day to allow preparations to take place. This year the Library will be open as usual on Diploma Day itself (Saturday 5th March) from 9am.

Open Access Africa 2010 Conference

A 2 day conference on the state of the Open Access (OA) movement in Africa was held in Nairobi in November 2010 and the slides and videos from the presentations are now freely available online http://www.biomedcentral.com/developingcountries/openaccessafrica/

Hosted by BioMed Central in partnership with ComputerAid this conference explored the wide range of issues, challenges and benefits of Open Access in Africa. Open Access is a movement that promotes and provides free online access to research to all. There were a number of speakers from African academic institutions, open access journal publishers in Africa, UNESCO, BioMed , African Journals Online, Malaria Atlas, African Journal of Food Agriculture Nutrition and Development, SunScholar and ComputerAid.

Among topics discussed were the importance of Open Access Repositories in providing access to research that was previously unavailable. How OA helps to remove the barriers of high journal subscriptions. The sharing of knowledge among African research communities and the developed world. Highlighting important resources such as African Journals Online http://www.ajol.info/ and the Malaria Atlas http://www.map.ox.ac.uk/ . How OA can challenge traditional ideas of impact and citations as true measures of research. ComputerAid http://www.computeraid.org/ role in reducing poverty through ICT. The role of OA in preventing ‘lost science’ and building inclusive knowledge societies and tips on how to get published.

Open Access proves that greater access to knowledge benefits all and the greatest fear for research is obscurity.

Repository Manager

I’m Andrew Gray the newly appointed Repository Manager at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I am very happy to join not only the Library but the whole of LSHTM and I’m sure it will be a fruitful experience. My goal is to set up an institutional repository for the research output of the school. Repositories are online databases that collect, share and preserve the intellectual output of an organisation or institution. Repositories are closely aligned with the Open Access movement which aims to provide free, permanent web access to peer reviewed research articles to anyone who has an internet connection. This is a 2 year project and by the end I hope that our repository will be a place and a service that not only shares and preserves research but promotes the research, researchers and LSHTM to a wider audience.
I am located in the library, Monday to Wednesday, so if you have any questions or just want a chat please come and say hello. My email is andrew.gray@lshtm.ac.uk and my number is 020 7598 8193.

Love in the archives

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, we are focussing on our most romantic item in the collection – the Carpenter diary. This is a joint diary between a married couple, Geoffrey and Amy Carpenter, who lived and worked in Uganda in the 1920s researching sleeping sickness.
The diary starts in 1919 with the engagement of Geoffrey and Amy, her maiden name was Peter and this is how he refers to her throughout the diary. They got engaged in Fowey in Cornwall and revisited in 1926, where there is a photo in the diary of them by the engagement stone. Geoffrey writes ‘Where the best thing in the world happened to me ’. There are news clippings of the engagement announcement and also a poem written by Geoffrey entitled 'Peter, my rock', and then an invitation and news clippings on their wedding on 30th Dec 1919. They travelled to Africa in August 1920 to begin their new life in Uganda.
The diary gives a great insight into the life and work of a scientist and his wife living in Africa in the 1920s, this diary is available in the archives for researchers, please see the archives website for further information on access: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/archives/

The winner of the Alumni Photo Competition is the photo entitled 'Patiently waiting' by Dan Wiklund MD, DTM&H, taken during a medical mission to Africa.

The judges were impressed by the high standard of photos entered into the competition and would like to thank all those who participated.
To view all of the competition entries go PhotoLibrary and search under the Competition entries/Alumni Competition2010 category.

Watch this space for details of the 2011 photo competition for staff and students.