Posts Tagged ‘library’

Academic textbook publishing seems like a right racket to me. Take the above book, for example. It’s an electronic textbook in Leeds Beckett’s collection. You’ll notice they have three copies. It’s electronic, but they have presumably had to buy three copies to allow multiple people to read it at once.

The OED is considered the closest thing to the definitive record of the English language that there is. They claim to be the definitive record. However, without a British equivalent of the Académie française (whose judgements are not even binding), it is difficult to argue a definitive document.

Nevertheless, it is the best thing we have. I had never taken a look at it before, but the depth of information is astonishing. For each word, sometimes over multiple entries, it contains the spellings, forms, frequency in current usage, etymology and a long list of definitions with extensive citations for each. The definitions are followed by a list of phrases, compounds, and derivatives. There is a thesaurus entry for each definition.

In short, it is difficult to image a more complete reference on the English language.

Why do I mention this? Because it turns out that it is totally free!

I have used Dictionary.com for many years because it is easy and for a free product, it is very good. It too contains pronunciation, synonyms, and a limited amount of auxiliary information. It was perfectly adequate for what I wanted. The idea of paying the £215.00 a year subscription to get access to the OED was clearly laughable.

However, it turns out that we all have the ability to access it for free. The OED website allows you to log in using your public library membership number. They say almost every library subscribes, but given my Leeds Library card worked, it is hard to imagine any council cheaper than Leeds.

I registered my library card about eight years ago and it was still valid. It is well worth digging out of the wardrobe. Or, if you do not have one, pop down to your local library and register for one. Once you do, you can access the service online at home, or from anywhere else.

For some reason, James had accidentally scheduled the A-Soc weekly social at The Library pub again.

However, when we got there, it turns out they had closed the kitchen. I’m not sure whether this was a blessing or a curse, but we made everyone down their drinks and headed out to find some food. We made it to The Eldon – who had also closed their kitchen! In the end, we found ourselves at Nation of Shopkeepers. Bad times.

Having announced the Humanist Library Project in December, we have slowly been building up quite a collection of books for it which have until now just been sat around in piles of the office, waiting to be dealt with.

Thankfully, our volunteer David (or Fonze as he is better known) was finally able to spare some time and do a little construction work for us. So after a few cryptic texts about “building a library”, he turned up hammer in hand to start building some book shelving for us.

If you haven’t heard about the project yet, the idea is to build a Humanist Library, right here in Leeds. We’re currently building our collection so if you have any appropriate items you are willing to donate to the project, do get in touch!

At CWF, one of our core aims is promoting education, be it via our courses, our public understanding of science lectures or the online resources and educational material we provide. Today, we are adding a new initiative to this list.

We are creating the Humanist Library of Leeds, a project to build a world standard collection of humanist and naturalist publications in Leeds, United Kingdom. A shining light of reason in the North of England.

You can learn more about the project on its website.

As part of the project, we are looking for donations of items for the library on topics of humanism, naturalism and secularism, and the surrounding subjects – philosophy, theology, natural sciences and other such topics. If you can help the project, please get in touch! You may also want to consider supporting our work by becoming a patron of the library.

You can read more of Chris’s thoughts on the first post of the project’s blog. You can also watch the video below.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our latest web resource, the Secular Portal Resource Library! This is exactly what it says on the tin – a library of resources for secular groups. It houses a huge variety of talks, slides, presentations, letters, forms, document templates and much more all available for secular groups to make use of.

Many groups develop some fantastic resources which would be of great value to other groups and we’re hoping this will provide a great way for groups to exchange material and save time and energy on not having to start from scratch every time they want to put together a top quality presentation, leaflet or document.

There are already several hundred documents in the system with more on there way so do browse around and see if you can find anything which may be of use to you. If you would like to contribute any documents for other groups too, please email them over to us!