There's nuffin like a Puffin!

Puffin books celebrates its 70th birthday this May.  Ruth & Jo, from the Reader Services team, have put together this display to commemorate the occasion and highlight the popularity of Puffin in Polhill's Teaching Practice collection.

Shortlist announced for Carnegie and Kate Greenway Medals

CILIP have announced the shortlist for the 2010 Carnegie Medal for children's writing here.

The shortlist for the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustrations in children's books 2010 is available here.

The Library will be buying copies of all the shotlisted titles for the Teaching Practice collection.

Just a minute guide to referencing

Our latest 'Just a minute' guide on referencing is available to watch online.

All our 'Just a minute' guides can be found online here

RefWorks help sessions

If you would like to learn more about how to use RefWorks (the University's reference management software) for assignments or preparing for publication, why not come along to a workshop at Polhill Library this Spring? Details can be found on the Learning Resources website here. These one-hour sessions will be led by Hilary and Adele, the Academic Liaison Librarians for education. Each session is limited to 24 places so please book your place using the onscreen booking option.

You will also find more information about this reference management software on our Guide to Referencing site.

New Social Learning Space at Putteridge Bury

The social learning space at Putteridge Bury is open and all students are invited to use this new space.  

Evergreen children's books

The Bookseller has just published a list of the top selling children's books.  The list looks at titles which have never fallen out of the top 5,000 selling books (by ISBN) from 1995-2005.  The Nielson BookScan (from which the data has been collated) is the book world's equivalent of the Billboard chart for music.  

Amazingly, Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone still sells 650 copies per week, 13 years after it was originally published.  

The Teaching Practice collection has all but 4 of the books listed.  And we will buy the missing titles in August.  We also have the DVD and story sacks for The Gruffalo (shown below).

Weekend 10th & 11th April - electrical shutdown

Extensive building works are taking place at the Luton campus at the moment as part of the £70 million project.  

Unfortunately, this is going to cause problems between Saturday 10th and Sunday 11th April 2010 because electricity at the Park Square site will be shutdown.  This means

• The Library Catalogue will be unavailable  
• External and internal access to databases, e-journals, e-books and Library self service functions from the Library Catalogue will also be unavailable.

Most of the Digital Library resources will still be accessible at: http://lrweb.beds.ac.uk/libinfo/electrics.  This inclues Education Research Complete and the main electronic journal collections like Academic Search Elite and EBSCOhost ejournals (accounting over 85% of our online journals).  Unfortunately, British Education Index and ERIC will not be accessible but Education Research Complete and PsycInfo are good alternatives.