what we can do for you!!

Cardiff Metropolitan Library Service can obtain materials for you that we do not have in the Collection already.

 Our Document delivery team based at Llandaff will send for journal articles and books using our Inter Library Loan service, they can also obtain DVD's for you to view from TRILT , a database of  programmes broadcast on British Television and you can order digital versions of theses using the British Library ETHOS service.

Come along to our event on April 29th to meet members of Doc Del and hear about what they can do for you!

Invitation

Come along find out about the new developments in Document Delivery, Inter Library Loans & Digitisation.

New Developments:

·       eRequesting

·       TRILT

·       EThOS

Where: Yellow Room, Howard Gardens Library

When: 1pm – 4.00pm, April 29^th, 2013

sonic experimentation

 

 

On Thursday 11 APRIL 2013 at  8PM  Russian author Andrey Smirnov will be giving an illustrated talk entitled
'The WIRE Salon: Synthesized Voices of the Revolutionary Utopia:Early Sonic Experiments in the Soviet Union'.

 The talk will mark the official launch of Andrey Smirnov’s book
‘Sound In Z: Experiments In Sound And Electronic Music In Early20th Century Russia’

This publication offers an introduction to Russia’s contribution to the birth of electronic music, sound synthesis and audio technology in the early 20th Century. It is a story of politics and power, of the institution and the avant-garde, of collaboration and personal achievement, of ambition, opportunity and oppression. It is a story of remarkable personalities, curious inventions, astonishing performances, radical ideas, complex mathematics, pioneering electronics, engineering, design and experimentation. It is also a story of patents and funding applications, of success and failure, support and rejection, optimism and disillusionment, hunger and poverty.

The book produced in partnership between Sound & Music, London and Verlag de Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Cologne is currently on order and when received will be added to Howard Gardens Library .
More of Smirnov's projects here including the Laptop Cyber Orchestra (2006), Sound out of Paper (2005) and Brain JAZZ (1985/2001)

The talk and book launch will be at

 Cafe Oto
22 Ashwin Street
London E8 3DL
020 7923 1231
cafeoto.co.uk

Cafe OTO opened in April 2008 with the aim of providing a home for creative new music that exists outside of the mainstream. Cafe OTO is comprised of one large cafe/performance space open during the day as a cafe and hosting an evening programme of adventurous live music almost seven nights a week.

 

Myths Magic Mayhem

Want to go on a zombie walk? Learn about illustrating children’s books? Hear tales from around the world? Go to a comic book workshop? All this and more is on offer from Wednesday through to Sunday.

This week is the start of the first Cardiff Children's LiteratureFestival.

Information about the programme and how and where to buy tickets are available from the Festival website.

You can keep up with their activities by following @CDFKidsLitFest on Twitter. 

Sessions from experts encouraging adults to both read and write children's books run alongside appearances from famous authors & illustrators for children of all ages.There will also be plenty of FREE activities to get involved in including a Roald Dahl themed Treasure Hunt, craft sessions in the Cardiff Story and a hunt for Wally and Wenda.

Cardiff University is hosting some of the events, and in Cardiff UniversityLibrary Special Collections (SCOLAR) they are putting on an exhibition celebrating the history of children's literature, from the 17th century up to the 20th century.  They are looking at the chronological development of children's literature by highlighting several themes such as books for education and fantasy literature.

The Library has gathered items from SCOLAR's collections, including the Children's Literature Collection which can be seen in part in the glass cases at the entrance to SCOLAR, and from the modern children's literature collection held in the main part of the library.  Items from the modern collection are also being utilised in a display on level 1 of the library (ASSL), where readers can vote for their favourite children's novel.The exhibition is available online and at the Arts and Social Sciences Library, Colum Road  from March-May 2013

Cardiff Metropolitan University undergraduate students may access Cardiff University Collections through a reciprocal scheme. Postgraduates through SCONUL Access. See details here

 

 

 

 

Cardiff again!

Don't forget we have a fabulous Public Library here in Cardiff. The Central Library in town has been named one of the top libraries in the world as well as one of the greenest buildings. To join all you need to do is turn up with one form of identification. If you're already a member of another library service in Wales, England, or Northern Ireland, you can join Cardiff Libraries simply by presenting your existing valid library card.
As well as including 90,000 books, the Central library  has a white concert grand piano, which if you know how to, you are allowed to play for free, there are plenty of music scores to choose from if you do. There is a also a good DVD and music library and childrens section.
Electronic resources that can be searched in the library include Which? online and Grove Art Online. On the 5th floor there is a Local Studies Library with books and maps and photographs galore on Wales and Cardiff.

'Animate Earth' a film about ecology, place and nature

Animate Earth - with the Cardiff Philosophy Cafe

Thursday 7 March 2013, 8.00pm, The Gate , Keppoch Street, Roath

FREE Admission

Modern humans have lost a vital connection to "animate Earth", says ecologist Stephan Harding . Re-connecting with the natural world and the true place of humans in the cosmos is the best route, he argues, to sustainable societies and economies.

Cardiff Philosophy Café as part of their ongoing 2013 event series 'The Future for Wales', is presenting a special showing of Animate Earth, a film written and presented by Dr Stephan Harding, renowned ecologist and colleague of James Lovelock. In the film, Dr Harding offers a view of our connection to nature that, through interviews undertaken with a variety of commentators, lays out a vision of interconnectedness that builds on the Gaia theory of the biosphere, together with Johann von Goethe‘s theories of the role of intuition in scientific knowledge. From this perspective, if we face an economic crisis now, then its causes can be traced to the lack of a meaningful connection with nature which characterises contemporary societies.

Following the film, a specially invited panel will lead a discussion on the issues it raises, reflecting on the links between them and their own work, and offering some thoughts on the future prospects for our relationships with place and nature in Wales.
 The panel includes a bio-archaeologist, a geographer and two artists, all of whose work features a strong relation to place. They are Dr. Jacqui Mulville, Dr. Jon Anderson, Glenn Davidson and Stefhan Caddick


The screening will take place on 7 March 2013, in the Theatre at The Gate, from 8pm, with the event finishing around 10.00pm.
Howard Gardens Library will be buying a copy of the DVD shortly

water paper scissors film

Nearly a year in the making and shot in a continuous take, Revolution follows the cyclical journey of a single water droplet.

Photography - Chris Turner
Paper Engineering - Helen Friel
Animation - Jess Deacon
Post Production - Neil Cunningham
Music - Joe Shetcliffe

 

Culture Grid and Porphyry

This is porphyry. Stephen Cox sculpts in this stuff because he likes a challenge-its very hard (literally). In 1988, he was commissioned to carve sculpture for the new Cairo Opera House, Egypt, and was allowed to quarry Imperial porphyry at Mons Porphyrytes in the Eastern Desert, which had not been used since the end of Roman Empire.  Below is 'Chrysalis' a work from 1991, the  image is  from the Tate website . The artist describes this work as having to do with transition and reincarnation. It suggests a recumbant Egyptian funerary figure in the process of changing and mutating

Marble Roman emporers used to be dressed in porphyry togas because it is the colour of Roman Imperial Purple.

The first image of  porphyry in this blog entry  is not from an art image database  but from a geological one which I found by searching The Culture Grid. If you are after images from Ethnography, Geology and other non art and design objects then have a look at the Culture Grid.

Culture Grid opens up a wealth of information from museums, galleries, libraries and archives: giving greater access to UK culture, arts and heritage. It contains approximately  3 million items from hundreds of collections on all topics.

University College London (UCL) and University of Reading have just added 6,500 images of objects from their museum collections to Culture Grid. The images can be freely viewed, downloaded and used under a Creative Commons licence.The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in twenty-first-century 3D; digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, sixteenth-century portraits, and intriguing nineteenth-century scientific gadgets.

 Preserved infant lemur Grant Museum of Zoology UCL. Image from the Culture Grid