Pictured: Moylish campus, its doors (carefully) thrown back open
LIT Library welcomes new and returning students to the 2020/21 academic year. While things may look very different from last October, life goes on for staff, for students, and for librarians.
Our physical spaces are once again open for business. The libraries at Moylish, Thurles, Clonmel, and LSAD all now operate Monday to Friday, nine to five. Apologies to any night owls who used to stay in until nine o'clock at night, but reduced hours are just more workable for the moment.
In the meantime, we have a continuing focus on digital services as part of the blended model of teaching LIT will be pursuing this coming year. For example, we have now instituted a Click and Collect service, allowing you to pick up books with a minimum of in-person contact. Now, by placing a hold on an item via the library website, you can expect your selection to be ready for you at the library desk, already bagged and checked out to your account. For more information, you can consult this guide: lit.libguides.com/c.php?g=662416&p=4898791
On the subject, our collection of LibGuides are still available for your perusal. (If you don't know what a LibGuide is: you're reading one right now!) These comprehensive but clear introductions to library concepts are a great way for students to get familiar with the library, so please feel free to browse our full list of topics: https://lit.libguides.com/
If you're looking for something more direct than an online FAQ, don't worry! The library is offering a consistent stream of online training sessions, detailed in the section below. And, as always, we're happy to help you directly! You can contact the library by email, by phone, by using the live chat feature that may be advertising itself in the corner of your screen at this very moment, or by simply asking your question in-person from a distance of at least two meters. Whatever else has changed, the library staff are still here to support you - you can rely on that much.
Best of luck in the coming year!
A screenshot showing a sample of our online tutorials
As part of our commitment to keep delivering services through new, safer formats, the library is offering a suite of online tutorials. These sessions cover the same ground we might have previously covered through short, in-person lectures. As well as general library inductions, you can tune in to learn how to search through online databases, how to get started with your final year project, how to search for e-books, or how to get started with referencing. We've got a lot of topics on offer, split between a number of our staff.
In order to book yourself in to one of these sessions, simply go to the library website, click on the Support and Training button near the middle of the page, and then click the Read More prompt next to Library training and workshops, also near the middle. From there, select a session and register using your student email.
The start of the academic year is a natural time to schedule tutorials, but we intend to keep offering these sessions throughout the year, covering a variety of topics. Keep an eye out for emails from the library!
LIT Library have recently been awarded a grant of almost €450,000 under the ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnerships in Higher Education funding programme. This comes as part of a major EU-funded project focused on enhancing intellectual property education in the European Union.
The project, entitled Introducing Intellectual Property Education for Lifelong Learning and the Knowledge Economy (IPEDU), is aimed at introducing education in the field of intellectual property (generally known as IP) to the curriculum of Technical Universities. This will be achieved through training the library, teaching and support staff in IP.
The project is led by LIT Library, and has nine partners from universities across Croatia, Germany, Spain, Romania, Greece, Portugal, and Slovenia.
The objective of the IPEDU Project is to set out and forecast the needs of both the current and future labour market in the field of intellectual property, and to develop relevant learning methodologies towards this end. The IPEDU project will identify the gap between skills acquired in higher education and the demands of the real labour market, implement best practices, and design methods for the protection of industrial property.
In addition, LIT Library have also been awarded a further grant of €24,000 from the EU under the ERASMUS+ International Credit Mobility programme. This grant is to fund collaborative work with universities in Georgia and other non-EU countries to help modernise libraries and develop information literacy initiatives for lifelong learning.
If you are interested in further information on these EU-funded projects, please contact:
Jerald Cavanagh
MA, MSc, BSc Econ
Institute Librarian/Project Leader Erasmus+
Email: jerald.cavanagh@lit.ie
or
Padraig Kirby MSc (LIS) BA (Hons) HdipLIS
Research, Development and Innovation Project Officer
ERASMUS+ Coordinator
Email: padraig.kirby@lit.ie
LIT's campuses are currently open, but only on the basis of accepted medical guidelines. Continue washing your hands, continue to keep two metres apart from people outside of your household, and of course, continue wearing your mask! For the safety of the community at large, you will be asked to leave if you don't have a mask. While it can be bothersome having yet another thing to remember whenever you leave the house (phone, wallet, keys, mask...), try to make the most of the times. The students of LSAD, ever stylish, have been attending the library with masks ranging from leopard print patterns to recreations of famous artwork like Van Gogh's Starry Night. Taking this pandemic seriously and looking your best needn't be mutually exclusive!
Continuing from our feature in the last issue, here are a few more books library staff can personally recommend. As the days get colder and the nights get longer, a good book can prove invaluable.
Set between 1850s 
Victorian England and Florence Nightingale’s Crimea, this is the story of two cousins, Rosa and Mariella, and their individual responses to the war effort.
Inspired by Mariella’s fiancé, Henry, who is a surgeon, and following the lead of the Nightingale nurses, Rosa volunteers for the battlefield hospitals. Meanwhile, Mariella remains in the shelter of the family’s English home. She keeps a war scrapbook, runs a sewing-circle, and writes regularly to both Henry and Rosa.
When communication begins to break down, Henry becomes ill, and Rosa is feared missing, Mariella makes a life-changing decision to travel to the Crimea. She is accompanied by an Irish servant named Nora (a particularly strong character). The adventures that follow form the core of this book.
Originally published in 2007, The Rose of Sebastopol has been re-issued for Florence Nightingale’s bicentenary and The Year of the Nurse/Midwife 2020. If you like historical fiction and have an interest in medical themes, you will definitely enjoy this book.
With lockdown upon us again, where better to escape than the world of espionage in Havana, Cuba. When I think of spies, agents, intelligence, and fake news, I imagine Graham Greene, especially his famous satirical novel Our Man in Havana, written during the Cold War and subsequently made into a film in 1959. Today, I’m more interested in Christopher Hull’s Our Man Down in Havana, a biography of Greene released last year.
Despite the wry title, Hull delves deep, tracing the historical context of the tensions between East and West, love, capitalism, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Greene’s biography provides Hull with a great opportunity and a literary stage to explore Cuba’s history during the 1950s and 1960s and the position of British intelligence on the island. The book opens on background information on Greene’s life, as the author drew upon his work as an MI6 officer in Sierra Leone and London to inspire his fiction. Although Hull sometimes overdoes the level of detail, this account shows how the historical context gives Greene’s novel meaning and illustrates how the border between reality and fiction is blurred in the satirically salient Our Man in Havana.
Hull cleverly reveals how the world of Greene’s protagonist, James Wormold, bares little resemblance to Ian Fleming’s well-known “shaken-not-stirred” and flawless James Bond. Instead, Greene's work more truthfully characterises spy agents during wartime: “farcical” and “funny.” Hull notes how Wormold feeds his superiors false reports and actual events (such as the invasion of Iraq) based on subsources, fabrication, and falsehood. From there, Hull sheds light on decisions and consequences for the future of the planet made by the protagonists of the Cold War. An enjoyable read.
Great horror does more than evoke literal demons - it draws on metaphorical ones too, be they personal or societal. In Other Words for Smoke, Sarah Maria Griffin does both.
Two teenaged twins spend two strange summers with their mysterious great-aunt (archetypal for genre fiction), in order to avoid the fallout of their parents’ messy divorce (archetypal for Irish literature). The unpleasant events which unfold reflect not only their own angst, but also their relative’s trauma growing up in a town with a Magdalene Laundry.
The novel makes full use of its form to build atmosphere; I especially enjoyed how normal third-person narration is interspersed with chapters of uncomfortable second-person narration, dragging 'you' directly and forcibly into dark places. If you’re looking for a horror novel with an Irish bite to it, Other Words for Smoke will make for excellent Hallowe’en reading.
The Library, Technological University of the Shannon: Midwest