The Library hosted its first ever Science Discovery Day on Saturday 1 March. Rebecca Withers and Allan Sudlow participated. It was a day that was exhilarating, inspiring and exhausting in equal measure, and reached a brand new audience of budding scientists!

We were nervous. Our first Beautiful Science event aimed at families with children and accessible to deaf people. We knew we were in the capable hands of the BL Learning Team, who had organised the day with the wonderful Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children and Camden Family Learning. But it was a free event, it was sunny outside and we had no idea if anyone would turn up….

We needn’t have worried – over 300 families, with around 1000 people in all – enjoyed a fantastic range of activities. From photo booths, poster painting and amazing bubble shows (our friends from the Science Museum), to animal skulls (thanks to the Grant Museum), music for the deaf, and sign language storytelling. A huge cheer to all the organisations who helped deliver such a varied and exciting day!

The Science Team hosted a show and tell on some of the stories behind the Beautiful Science exhibition, including an opportunity for the budding young scientists to determine the source of a cholera outbreak in Victorian London.

 Science Team Stickers and Storytelling, with Esther, our fantastic BSL interpreter.

Families contributed their own data visualisation on their favourite bits of the exhibition through the medium of sticker science! And we received some wonderfully colourful feedback from the younger critics…

 
Voting on Beautiful Science themes and colourful feedback!

The day was a great success and we hope that the families that attended enjoyed themselves and learnt something new.

Beautiful Science is open everyday during library hours until 26 May 2014. It is a free exhibition, and after our experiences on Saturday we can guarantee it is an exhibition that appeals to all! 

 

 

Rebecca Withers shares an exciting new development about the Access to Understanding competition. Get involved now!

We are pleased to announce the launch of our first ever People’s Choice Award for the Access to Understanding science-writing competition! The competition is run by Europe PubMed Central in partnership with the Science team at the British Library.

This award gives you - the public - the opportunity to read our shortlisted entries and have your say. Our entrants rose to the difficult challenge of writing plain English summaries of research articles (all available from Europe PMC), which cover fascinating cutting-edge science including investigating alternative approaches to target tumours, clinical trials that aim to improve physical impairment associated with normal aging, using fruit fly models to understand human gene function and determining key factors in the development of Parkinson’s disease. Our rigorous judging process has ensured the scientific accuracy of the accounts, so now we want to know what you think!

The competition will remain open until 12.00 on 24 March 2014, and the winner will be announced that evening at our awards ceremony. You can vote for as many articles as you like, once a day. We encourage you to share any and all comments at any time.

When you have finished reading and voting, don’t forget to tell your family, friends and colleagues! We know these exceptional pieces will be of interest to all!

A recent enquiry about the Library’s telecommunications holdings led Ian Walker to investigate just how broad our collections in this area really are. In this blog post he shares some of his discoveries….

The beginning of the ‘modern’ telecommunications era is often associated with the optical telegraph line developed in France during the late 18^th-century which allowed a semaphore message to be sent along a chain of signalling stations. But it is with an improved understanding of electromagnetism, and the subsequent development of electrical telegraphy during the mid-19^th century, that the telecommunications ‘revolution’ really began. This technology allowed us to communicate vast distances - across oceans and continents – almost instantly. Further achievements in the field of telecommunications have been dramatic, and the past 150 years have witnessed progress which today has given us the world-wide web, mobile phones and - to the excitement of Star Wars fans everywhere – the prospect of holographic telephone calls.

The British Library offers rich resources charting the development of this technology and the major innovations which form the cornerstone of the modern telecommunications network. Although we do not hold a specific telecommunications collection (as relevant material is spread throughout the Library) our holdings on this topic encompass a broad range of materials. While books and journals make up the largest portion of the technical literature, our collections contain a wide variety of resources in both physical and digital formats.

For example, the Patent collection boasts a number of patent applications from some of the pioneers of the telecommunications era, including the American inventor Thomas Edison - who made significant improvements to Bell's telephone - and Guglielmo Marconi - the Italian inventor and electrical engineer.

Original letters patent, no.384 of 1875, granted to Thomas Alva Edison for improvements in duplex and multiplex telegraphs ; with great seal attached (British Library, London, Woodcroft Collection)

The recently launched Voices of Science website contains over 100 recordings which tell the story of some of the most remarkable scientific and engineering discoveries of the past century. The collection includes interviews with a number of scientists and engineers associated with the field of telecommunications, including Steve Furber – the principle designer of the ARM chip which can be found in millions of mobile phones worldwide and George Hockham – one of the fathers of fibre optic telecommunications. The Library also holds recordings from the National Life Stories project  An Oral History of the Post Office  which includes interviews with a wide range of Post Office staff, including engineers and telegraph operators.

[Click here to listen to George Hockham talk about his work on fibre optics at the Standard Telecommunications Laboratory, Harlow]

The Library’s trade literature collection contains numerous product catalogues, brochures and technical information from a wide range of telecommunications and engineering companies from the 19^th-century to the present. The collection contains literature from many pioneering British companies, some of whom no longer exist, through to today’s large multinationals such as Nokia and Vodafone.

The British Library, in common with many other libraries throughout the world, acts as a depository for publications from the United Nations and holds numerous documents and statistics from the International Telecommunications Union – the UN agency responsible for issues relating to information and communication technologies.  As telecommunications plays an important role in nearly all social, economic and cultural domains of life, publications from other UN agencies such as UNESCO and the World Bank Group  also contain useful information in the form of statistics, surveys and reports. 

Finally, a wide collection of print and digital market research reports from leading figures such as KeyNote, Mintel and Frost & Sullivan are available at the Library.  These reports provide market intelligence on all aspects of the telecommunications industry, with coverage on a national and global level.