Friday 21 December 2012

A Wartime Christmas from the Archives




This collection of seasonal recipes dates from December 1945. The recipes were produced by the Ministry of Food during the period of food rationing in Britain during and following the Second World War. (Click on the images for a better view)

The recipes for Christmas pudding and Christmas cake are fairly standard, apart from keeping the dried fruit to a minimum, but it’s doubtful whether the ‘mock’ cream and marzipan tasted anything like the originals.

This and many other Ministry of Food leaflets form part of the LSHTM Archive's Nutrition Collection, which contains over 4500 records relating to all aspects of nutrition research. Please see the Archives website for further information. 

Image: LSHTM Library & Archives Service, Nutrition/06/05 Ministry Of Food cookery leaflets and pamphlets

Tuesday 18 December 2012

The Library & Archives Service will be closed over Christmas and New Year

The Library and Archives Service will be closed from 8.25 pm on 21 December, re-opening at 8.30 am on 3 January 2013. E-resources continue to be available throughout this period and can be accessed via http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/index.html.



Friday 14 December 2012

Christmas Cards from the Archive Collections



The LSHTM Archive’s Ross Collection contains more than just material relating to Ronald Ross’s scientific and medical research – there are also are large number of his photographs, notebooks, postcards and sketchbooks that tell us more about Ross as a person and his wide array of interests.

Scattered among Ross’s correspondence are several Christmas cards that Ross received from his friends and colleagues. These formed a distinguished and wide-ranging group, including politicians, statesmen and dignitaries from the counties that Ross visited during his time in the Indian Medical Service and his expeditions to advise on the extermination of malaria.

They date from the early 1900s to the 1920s and provide a fascinating snapshot into the lives of the circle of Ross and his wife Rosa.

The collection also contains 2 copies of cards Ross and his wife had printed to send out to ‘Our friends in Sweden’. Ross travelled to Sweden several times and had many friends there. After winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine, he was awarded an honorary M.D. degree in Stockholm in 1910, as well as being made a fellow of the Royal Society of Sweden in 1919.

 Ross was remembered with particularly great respect in India, due to his revolutionary work on malaria. This is reflected in several very impressive looking cards from His Highness Raj Rana Sir Bhawani Singh of Jhalawar, one of which shows a picture of ‘The Kemball Library’, a large library established by the Maharaja.


The Ross Collection can be viewed at the LSHTM Archive. Please see the archives website for further information: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/archives/.

Wednesday 12 December 2012

MeSH - changes for 2013

NLM have released details of the changes to MeSH for 2013. The new MeSH terms will go live in PubMed in mid-December and in Ovid with the completion of the 2013 global reload on 7 January.

New MeSH terms are added to new records in the database, they are not retrospectively changed. Therefore, you may need to use both old and new MeSH terms in your search to ensure you retrieve all relevant articles.

Changes which may be relevant to School staff and students include:

New MeSH terms (complete list)

  • Binge drinking
  • Community integration
  • Controlled substances
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Drug overdose
  • Epidemiological monitoring
  • Food quality
  • Genocide
  • Geographic mapping
  • Geography, medical
  • Hand hygiene
  • Health impact assessment
  • Health information management
  • Health information systems
  • Healthcare financing
  • Homophobia
  • Human migration
  • Human papillomavirus DNA tests
  • Maternal death
  • Prescription drug misuse
  • Public health surveillance
  • Racism
  • Smoke-free policy
  • Social discrimination
  • Social marginalization
  • Solid waste
  • Spatial analysis
  • Tobacco products
  • Waste water
  • Water resources
Deleted MeSH terms (complete list)
  • Overdose - use Drug overdose instead
  • Residential mobility - use Population dynamics instead
Changed MeSH terms (complete list)
  •  Handwashing - replaced by Hand disinfectant
Contact the Library if you have any queries about how this may impact your saved searches. For more information about MeSH see the National Library of Medicine help pages.

Tuesday 4 December 2012

Definitions: hybrid and open access journals



Image credit: Osteospermum hybrid Soprano Purple  (18 June 2009) by Ltshears
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Osteospermum_hybrid_01.jpg)

Terminology in open access publishing can be confusing, so below we have defined what we
mean when we use the terms ‘hybrid’ and ‘open access’ journal.

Hybrid journal

A hybrid journal offers authors the choice of publishing via the ‘traditional’ method of access to
articles via a subscription OR making individual articles freely available online (often termed ‘open access’). Hybrid journals usually charge authors, their institutions or funders an additional fee for making an article open access. The open access article will appear in the subscription-based print and electronic versions as normal. Open access articles in hybrid journals should be marked as ‘open access’ or have a symbol that signifies they are open access.

Examples of publishers that have hybrid journals include:


Fully Open Access Journal

A fully open access journal makes every article freely available without a subscription to the
user. An Article Processing Charge (APC) will usually have to be paid to cover the cost of making the publication open access. Many open access journals are peer-reviewed in the same way as traditionally published journals and are gaining high impact factors.

Examples of publishers of fully open access journals:

The Directory of Open Access Journals has a list of fully open access journals.

More information about open access publishing is available from our website or by
contacting us at: researchonline@lshtm.ac.uk






Friday 30 November 2012

Remembering World Aids Day at the LSHTM

Saturday 1st December is World AIDS Day, observed every year to raise awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of the HIV infection.To mark the day the School have put together an exhibition, including material from the Archive service, focusing on LSHTM and HIV/AIDS. It goes on display from Monday 3rd December in the reception area of the Keppel Street building.




Poster from Europe Against AIDS campaign

Around 100,000 are currently living with HIV in the UK and globally an estimated 34 million people have HIV. More than 25 million people between 1981 and 2007 have died from the virus, making it one of the most destructive pandemics in history. Staff from LSHTM are involved in working towards a better future for people living with HIV and preventing new infections with research in a wide range of disciplines.

The exhibition features material from the Archive dating from the 1980s and 1990s, originally collected by the School’s Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health. It includes a range of promotional items from campaigns and propaganda used by governments during the early days of AIDS awareness. The items, include badges, pins, condoms, lubricants, postcards and hats and were brought together from a wide range of European countries, including Russia, Romania and Switzerland. 

The material uses cheeky and humorous cartoons and whimsical imagery to get across the message of the importance of using condoms in preventing the spreading of the HIV virus. The collection as a whole serves as a fascinating visual record of the different ways the world came to terms with the threat of AIDS.


Material featured in the AIDS exhibition

To continue this theme, within the library entrance area there is a display of AIDS awareness posters from a range of European countries, also collected by the School’s Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Today, many scientific advances have been made in HIV treatment. There are laws to protect people living with HIV and we understand so much more about the condition. But despite this, it is still important to remember that HIV has not gone away – and that there is still a need to increase awareness, fight prejudice and improve education.

The exhibition ‘AIDS - It's Not Over: London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and HIV/AIDS’ will be in the entrance hall from Monday 3rd December until February. For further information, please see: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/multimedia/features/world_aids_day_2012_.html


The full collection of papers of The Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health Research are available to view in the LSHTM Archive. Please see the archives website for further information: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/archives/.

You can learn more about HIV in the UK by visiting the HIVaware website.

Friday 9 November 2012

Wartime at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine


To mark Remembrance Day on 11th November there is a display in the entrance area and reading room of the library highlighting the role played by the School during the First and Second World Wars.


Staff and students in 1916
The exhibition features photographs, official war records and reports from the School’s Archive collections and includes material relating to the activities of the School and the roles of staff, students and associated individuals during the First and Second World Wars.

During the First World War many members of staff were called up for service and student levels fell dramatically, with only two students present for the January 1918 session.  



In the Second World War the School played a vital role in providing intensive courses in tropical medicine and hygiene for those leaving on overseas service.

The School’s buildings were badly damaged by bombing in the Second World War, the extent of which can be seen in photos as part of the display.

Bomb damage to Keppel Street building in 1941



There is also a chance to read extracts from the memoirs of the malariologist Ronald Ross covering his wartime experiences.

Friday 2 November 2012

NEW DATABASE - Scopus

The Library has purchased a subscription to the Scopus database. It is available on any computer using the School network or via Remote Desktop. We are working with Scopus to provide access to all current staff and students via your network username and password as soon as possible.

Scopus is a multidisciplinary database covering: physical sciences (chemistry, physics, engineering etc), health sciences (medicine, nursing dentistry etc), social sciences (psychology, economics, business etc), life sciences (neuroscience, pharmacology, biology etc) and some arts and humanities content. Most coverage is in the physical and health sciences. Most journals are from Western Europe (47%) or North America (32%) but other geographical regions are covered. 21% of titles are non-English language sources ( English abstracts are provided).

Scopus also provides bibliometrics information. We have provided a spec sheet on Scopus detailing coverage, update frequency, search syntax and current awareness features.

The Library decided to subscribe to Scopus following positive feedback obtained in the free trial run in March 2012.

Please contact us if you have any comments or queries about Scopus, or leave a comment below.

Monday 29 October 2012

How as a Research/PhD student do I make my own article open access?






Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Take_Your_Choice_-_NARA_-_534035.jpg


As part of Open Access Week 2012 we had a drop-in session where staff and students could come and ask any questions they had about open access, publishing and/or LSHTM Research Online. One situation was presented from a PhD student who was planning a publication and wanted advice on how to make it open access. What should be simple actually reveals itself to be a careful balancing act. I've tried to list the different areas to consider when choosing a journal

1.     Choosing the journal: Many different journals to publish in and one of your first thoughts should be which journal would I like to publish in and which journal is suitable for my research. Once you have a few names then you need to find out how this journal fits with an Open Access policy

2.       Where to look:  A great place to look for specific Open Access journals is the Directory of Open Access Jounals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/ this is searchable and browsable by subject area so you should be able to find a range of journals. You then need to find out if they require a fee, this information will be at the end of each listing. 

3.       Fees: Since you are a research/PhD student you probably, or lets say definitely don’t have funds to pay an open access article processing charge (APC).  So What do you do? Some journals don’t make any charge but some do. If the journal you want to publish in has a fee you should check that whether or not they have a ‘waiver’ for students, if they don’t list one you should still contact them to find out if they would consider a ‘waiver’ or if the fee can be reduced.  Publishers such as PLoS state that they will not refuse to publish and article that they have accepted due to inability to pay their fee http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/. BioMed Central state that when you submit your paper you should request a ‘waiver’ and they will consider your situation http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/apcfaq/waivers

4.       Licenses: These are important for Open Access since it allows others to be able to use your publication in various ways. The ideal license is CC-BY which is a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to reuse or redistribute your publication in any manner they see fit as long as you are credited.  Both PLoS and BioMed Central use these licenses.

5.       Deposit into an open access institutional repository such as LSHTM Research Online:  This will also make your publication open access. For many publishers such as Elsevier you can publish with them but make an earlier version, the author accepted manuscript (after peer review but without publisher pagination, typesetting) available in an institutional repository. This would mean that you would not have to make any payment. You can check what publishers/journals allow by looking on SherpaRomeo http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

6.       Contact us at researchonline@lshtm.ac.uk and we can provide more information and help on choosing a journal



Tuesday 23 October 2012

Open Access Week 2012: Opening Research and Data, Monday 22 October

Yesterday, to mark the start of Open Access Week, staff from LSHTM, Birkbeck, SOAS, LSE and City University London organised the above half-day event to bring together academics, funders, students and open access advocates to discuss the increasingly important role of open access within the scholarly community and how to engage with the opportunities and challenges it has generated.

The afternoon kicked off with Fred Friend, Honorary Director of Scholarly Communication at UCL, who gave delegates with an excellent summary of the history of the open access movement to date and his views of where we are now and how we can progress.  Following Fred, Stephen Curry (Professor of Structural Biology, Imperial College London), discussed a wide range of topics, including how he recently become engaged in the open access debate, the Internet and its impact on scholarly communication, the Finch Report and RCUK policy and his views on why we haven’t been able to reach the full potential of open access.


In the next session, Melissa Terras (Co-Director, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities) shared her experiences of the impact that using social media to promote her open access publications had on the number of downloads. I was particularly impressed by the statistic that the papers she made available in an open access repository and promoted via social media were downloaded 11 times more than those on the journal platform behind a paywall. Next up was Antonio Gasparrini a Lecturer in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at LSHTM who is working on a 3-years MRC-funded fellowship. He spoke from a very practical perspective about his experiences of under budgeting for Article Processing Charges (APCs) in grant applications, the role of impact factors, copyright transfer and costs in selecting which journal to publish in and whether APCs are really value for money.


The final two sessions of the day were given to representatives from two major research funders. David Carr of the Wellcome Trust outlined the Trust’s open access policy and the launch of a new open access journal eLIFE which is
supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust. He also spoke about the benefits and challenges to opening research data and the importance of funders and institutions working together to overcome the barriers. Ben Ryan (Senior Evaluation Manager, EPSRC) who was speaking on behalf of RCUK, gave the audience an introduction to the background of the development of the much debated RCUK policy and clarified some of the points that I was previously unclear about.

The day ended with a group discussion which covered topics such as confidentiality clauses in library subscription packages, publisher embargo periods for green open access papers in the wake of the RCUK policy and how other research outputs such as learned monographs can be made open access. As usual with such discussions more questions were raised than could be answered in such a short space of time but it was a great forum to start the debate which I hope will continue throughout Open Access Week and beyond…

Gems of the Collection

On Tuesday 30th October we will be running our Gems of the Collection event in association with the Sanitation Exhibition.

The event will be in the Manson Foyer from 12-2pm and will showcase some key sanitation material from within our archival collection. This includes various publications, reports and images from the papers of notable figures:

Andrew Balfour (1873-1931)
Photographs illustrating reports on medical and sanitary matters in Mauritius 1921
Report on the sanitation of Port Louis, 1921
Catalogue of his collection of lantern slides on Bermuda

 


 
Hygiene: a manual of personal and public health 

Arthur Newsholme (1857-1943)
The relation of vital statistics to sanitary reform
Moral aspects of social hygiene
The study of hygiene in elementary schools


 

Ronald Ross (1857-1932)
Photos of Ross and Panama
Sanitation rules for Europeans in the Tropics by Ross in the Sanitary Record
Handwritten draft of a proposed Imperial Institute of Tropical Medicine and Sanitation


J H Burton (1809-1881)
and Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890)
Papers of Sir Edwin Chadwick, which comprise of copies of letters from Chadwick to John Hill Burton on public health matters, 1840-1851



There will be many other items on display, including a selection of texts from our rare book collection. By providing a hands-on session we hope to provide an insight into the diversity of our collections whilst promoting the school’s rich history.

Please come along and visit us, if you have any further queries please contact us at: archive@lshtm.ac.uk