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Working in partnership with the Welsh Assembly Government, Cardiff Council, and the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW), Cardiff University has secured the future of a large collection of Welsh rare books.

The collection of around 14,000 rare and antiquarian books dating between the 15th and 20th centuries was assembled by Cardiff public library during the late 19th and early 20th centuries from donations, purchases and bequests.

It was feared that the collection would be dispersed when the sale at public auction was announced, as the real value lies in the groupings of works. A major set of 17th century editions of Shakespeare, for example, is extremely rare, and the restoration drama collection appears to be unique in its comprehensiveness.

The collection will be held in the University's Special Collections and Archives (SCOLAR), located in the Arts and Social Studies Library. Following conservation work, the works will become available to members of the public, and, in time, digitized versions of some of the most interesting items will also be accessible online.

Of enormous academic and historical significance, the collection includes 175 incunabula (the earliest printed books from around 1500), around 500 rare Bibles, a comprehensive range of Restoration and Quarto drama volumes, 19th and 20th century British private presses and a rare set of early Shakespeare works.

For more information, visit SCOLAR's webpages.

Information Services provides a wide range of tools and services in support of the University’s research community, to enable them to meet their research goals more easily.

The Division’s IT, Library and Graphics and Media services routinely support and enable Cardiff’s researchers in undertaking research of international distinction and impact. Some key initiatives of particular relevance to researchers include:

Bibliometrics
Bibliometric data – data about publications, including citations and impact factors – might be included for the assessment of some disciplines in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF). It can provide useful comparator information to demonstrate the position and profile of research undertaken at Cardiff. Increasing the visibility of research and access to the full text (through tools such as Cardiff’s publications repository, ORCA) may increase the citations to a piece of research, and indicate its perceived 'impact'. Information Services is enabling researchers to exploit the bibliometric data available from databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, which in turn helps Cardiff University to be better informed about the impact of publications within different fields, as well as aiding collaborative and interdisciplinary work.

ORCA – Online Research @ Cardiff
ORCA is the University’s open access repository service, designed to make research from Cardiff’s authors more widely available and easier to find on the web. When populated with bibliographic information from all publications since 2008, ORCA will help with the collation of publications for the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework, and will help deliver increased visibility, impact and citation counts for the University’s research outputs.

I-WIRE - Integrated Workflow for Institutional Repository Enhancement
I-WIRE is a JISC-funded project that aims to significantly improve the ease and effectiveness of managing Cardiff’s research publications. By the time it completes, in March 2011, the project will have developed an enhanced workflow and electronic toolset (integrated into the University’s Modern IT Working Environment) for the easier submission of Cardiff’s research publications into ORCA, which can then be re-purposed for use in researcher profiles, CVs etc.

ARCCA – Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff
ARCCA operates as a sister organisation to INSRV for the support of computation-based research at Cardiff. The centre supports research across a range of disciplines, including traditional mathematical and computational subjects, but also increasingly biomedical, humanity and social science disciplines. ARCCA has already enabled 175 different research outcomes in the year following its launch. These include journal publications, conference proceedings, invited lectures and presentations, poster presentations and research projects.

Find out more about how ARCCA is enabling previously impossible research on the ARCCA website.

These are just a small sample of the support that Information Services and ARCCA are developing for Cardiff’s researchers. For more information on these and other research support services, please visit the 'For Researchers' section on the Information Services website.

We all want to do our bit to create a ‘greener’ world. Making IT sustainable and minimising its environmental impact is a challenge that resonates throughout the Further and Higher Education communities. INSRV is playing its part in this through a new pilot project funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Council).

The University has an increasing need for data storage and our ‘Planet Filestore’ pilot project will investigate how we can continue to meet that demand in a more sustainable way, through using more energy efficient data storage that requires less physical space.

The aim of the project is to use a system which automatically identifies the files which are used less often, and then moves them into ‘greener’ storage locations. These will use less electricity to run and have a smaller number of redundant parts than conventional disks, therefore saving energy and resources.

The pilot will explore methods of using this more efficient storage without a discernible loss of service, as data will remain instantly accessible for users.

Paul Rock, Project Leader and Information Services' Principal Consultant Engineer, said: "Not only is this pilot project a great opportunity for Information Services and Cardiff University, but its findings will hopefully benefit the entire Higher Education sector, bringing wide-ranging lessons and a solid demonstration of what the more sustainable technology can achieve.”

You can find out more on the Planet Filestore webpages, our read the Planet Filestore blog.

More information on JISC's Greening ICT programme and Planet Filestore is available on the JISC website.

Refurbishment is now complete in the Arts and Social Studies Library (ASSL).

The Library, which was awarded funding from the Wolfson Foundation, has carried out significant improvements to its top and lower ground floors.

On the top floor, rainbow-coloured mobile shelving has been installed to create an improved study and research environment where items are easier to locate and use.

The most recent changes have taken place on the newly-named Wolfson Floor (the lower ground floor in the Library) to create an informal and collaborative space.

The new ‘e-lounge / e-lolfa’ boasts 16 networked PCs, 3 group study rooms, and comfortable sofas and seats for accessing the wireless network, which is enabled across the whole floor. Users are permitted to eat, drink, and use mobile telephones in this area – unlike the rest of the Library – so it doubles up as a social meeting space for students where they can work together if they wish.

The progress of the project has been recorded on the ASSL blog.

Did you know that the University received 55 million spam messages during February?

Not only is spam inconvenient for users, but if it is not detected at an early stage, it increases the chance that phishing emails could compromise user accounts and potentially result in the University mail systems being blacklisted.

Spam is received in vast quantities – February’s 55 million spam messages equate to 96% of all emails received into the University during the month. These messages were rejected before delivery as they were from known spam sites.

In order to keep catching spam before it arrives with users, Information Services replaced the mail gateway servers in early March.

These servers are responsible for directing emails to the appropriate location and identifying spam messages. Replacing the servers has resulted in improved performance for email delivery, and the ability to detect spam on a greater scale – enabling INSRV to keep the University’s mail systems working efficiently.