Library Blog

Please note that summer vacation opening hours start Monday 8^th June. Vacation opening hours are as follows:

The McClay Library

Monday – Thursday: 8.00am – 8.30pm
Friday: 8.00am – 5.30pm
Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sunday: closed

The Medical and HSC Library

From Monday 8th June – Saturday 1st August
Monday – Friday: 8.30am – 5.30pm
Saturday: 9.00am – 12.30pm
Sunday: closed

From Monday 3rd August – Saturday 26th September
Monday – Friday: 8.30am – 6.00pm
Saturday: 9.00am – 12.30pm
Sunday: closed

The Biomedical Library

Monday – Friday: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Saturday: 9.00am – 12.30pm
Sunday: closed

Normal late opening resumes Monday 28th September 2015.

All Queen’s libraries will be closed from Monday 13^th July to Tuesday 14th July (inclusive).

If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change. Gaia, the totality of life on Earth, would set about healing itself and return to the rich environmental states of a few thousand years ago. But if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months. Most of the fishes, amphibians, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and with them the physical structure of the majority of the forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world. The earth would rot. As dead vegetation piled up and dried out, narrowing and closing the channels of the nutrient cycles, other complex forms of vegetation would die off, and with them the last remnants of the vertebrates. The remaining fungi, after enjoying a population explosion of stupendous proportions, would also perish. Within a few decades the world would return to the state of a billion years ago, composed primarily of bacteria, algae, and a few other very simple multi-cellular plants.

*The Little Things That Run the World (The Importance and Conservation of Invertebrates)

Edward O. Wilson Conservation Biology
Vol. 1, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 344-346

Queen’s University Belfast has set up trial access to The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection until the end of 2015. This collection provides access to over 1,500 online seminar style talks presented by many of the world’s leading experts, including a number of Nobel Laureates.

Access is via QCat Library Catalogue at https://encore.qub.ac.uk/iii/encore_qub/record/C__Re1000773.  If you have any feedback or comments about this resource, please contact c.a.dunlop@qub.ac.uk

A state-of-the-art wireless service is being rolled out to all areas of the campus. The £1.93m Wireless Campus Project will be mostly completed by December 2015, with over 2,000 new wireless access points installed.
 
The project is part of the University’s commitment to provide world-class facilities for its staff and students, and will enable users to have anytime, anywhere access to the resources they need and to work flexibly across the campus.
 
Details of the project, including timescales, can be found here. These web pages will be updated as the project progresses.

Library Services has now achieved certification against the Customer Service Excellence (CSE) Standard following an accreditation visit in March.

We are delighted with the outcome and very grateful to colleagues and customers who helped in any way, especially those who were involved in the assessment visit.

The assessment concluded that the Library successfully achieved compliance against 49 criteria, “Compliance Plus” against 7 criteria and partial compliance against only one criterion. This has involved a lot of hard work by many Library staff over the last eighteen months but has brought real benefits in terms of team working, service development and further embedding of a customer-focused culture.