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Magna Carta

Magna Carta

15/06/2023 / / 0 Comments

Magna Carta

You’ve heard of the Magna Carta, right? You know – the obscure, 63-clause document written 800 years ago and probably the most enduring legislation in history? But have you any idea what it says or why it still matters? The Magna Carta (“great charter” in Latin) has been held up throughout the centuries as a beacon of liberty and freedom, for the first time giving the common man (and a few women) access to legal rights.

The History

However, the document was drawn up by the aristocracy in order to protect their own wealth. King John’s knights and barons were alarmed by the significant taxes he was raising to fund wars in France and the 13th century cost of living crisis (yes, really).

The rebels got together in June 1215 and put into writing for the first time the principle that the king and his government were not above the law. It sought to prevent the king from exploiting his power, and placed limits on royal authority.

This was so radical an idea that the charter led – indirectly and gradually – to the 1689 Bill of Rights, the United States Bill of Rights in 1790, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France in 1789, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948.

Magna Carta and Today

Most of the clauses would be unfathomable to us today. You’ll never be required by law to pay a knight’s fee, seize corn or return Welsh hostages. In fact, of the 63 clauses, only clauses 39 and 40 still apply. These are: “that no free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land”.  And “to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” These clauses establish the rule of law, due process, and the principle of trial by jury.

Of course, King John resisted the legislation (which was not one document, but several, tweaked and amended over time). However, it prevailed. It became the cornerstone of the English legal system before its principles were adopted by societies across the globe. Recently Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, has called for a “Magna Carta for the web” to protect rights and privacy of users worldwide.

You can still see original copies of the Magna Carta in Lincoln Cathedral, the Cathedral of St Mary in Salisbury and the British Library. In addition, you can find editions from 1216, 1225 and 1300 in Durham Cathedral; a 3rd edition (1217) in Hereford Cathedral and 3 copies of the surviving 1217 editions in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Additional Reading

https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta

https://lincolncathedral.com/education-learning/magna-carta/

https://www.salisburycathedral.org.uk/discover/magna-carta/

https://www.herefordcathedral.org/magna-carta

 

Want to read more about historical documents, read about the Edward Clark Collection 

Lego figure with moustache

International Men’s Health Week 2023

12/06/2023 / / 0 Comments

International Men’s Health Week 2023

 

Today is the start of International Men’s Health Week, running until the 18th. The goal is to increase awareness of men’s health which can prevent health problems, encourage the development of health policies and support a healthier lifestyle. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of the 65. Together we can all change that.

International Men’s Health Week and the UK

Each year, each country that participates in International Men’s Health Week has a theme. The theme for International Men’s Health Week 2023 in the UK is Men’s Health and the Internet – examining the benefits of being able to access health services and information on your phone but also examine the downsides. The forum also examines the dopamine that our phone apps give and what dangers can be. You can explore more at the Men Health’s Forum UK There is also a registration for upcoming events for the week.

History

Men’s Health Week was created by the U.S congress in 1994 to raise awareness of preventable health problems and encourage early detection and treatment of illnesses. It was sponsored by former Senator Bob Dole and former Congressman Bill Richardson. It wasn’t until 2002 that it became internationally recognised when six representatives from men health’s organisations met in Vienna, Austria.

Additional Reading

Don’t forget to check out our blog post on the importance of Movember.

And you can read about more mental health support

Check out the NHS 

Men’s Health Fourm/UK

and International Men’s Month

photo source Alan Hardman

Pride flag

Pride 2023

09/06/2023 / / 0 Comments

Pride 2023

It’s Pride 2023.

June is here, Pride is here. Happy Pride Month everyone!!!

Our libraries are all decorated to celebrate Pride. We ‘pride’ ourselves on being an inclusive and welcoming space for all our staff and students. At the library, we want to avoid tokenism. We are working hard to diversify our collections to be inclusive and more representative.

Please get in touch if you have any feedback about our Library stock.

Library Support

The Library has a wealth of books and articles on the subject. We have a dedicated reading list over on our LibGuides. Reading includes the history of LGBTQ+ rights and the current Legal information to keep you informed. Use LibrarySearch to find what you are looking for, or contact us for help with any of your research needs.  Or you can check out our virtual bookshelf here at the blog.

Edinburgh Napier University Support

If you are an LGBTQ+ student you can join Edinburgh Napier’s LGBTQ+ Society or find out more about the student LGBTQ+ community on the Queer Napier site. Staff can join the University’s thriving LGBTQ+ Network or visit our web pages to learn more about becoming an ally.

Pride and Edinburgh

Pride March will take place on June 24th, starting at 12.30 pm at the Scottish Parliament.

You can find out more information at Pride Edinburgh

And you can find more information on more Pride events taking place on the city.

Bike Week 2023: On yer bike! cyclist on bike

Bike Week 2023

05/06/2023 / / 0 Comments

Bike Week 2023

No disrespect to Giovanni Fontana. I’m sure he meant well, but that bike he designed way back in 1418 really wasn’t practical.  For a start, it had 4 wheels and its gears were connected by rope. Still, he was on to something, and a mere 400 years later German baron, Karl von Drais, invented what is regarded as the first modern bicycle – or the steerable running machine as he called it. So what if it didn’t have pedals and the rider had to push it along the ground with his feet? It was the big bang of cycling – the realisation that mechanized personal transportation was a thing, and that thing was here to stay.

Not long afterwards the first pedal-driven bicycle with rear wheel drive was invented by a Scotsman – yay! He was either Kirkpatrick MacMillan or Thomas McCall. It’s been disputed since the 1860s – and that’s when cycling really started to, erm, motor.

Today, of course, bike technology is so advanced that there is a type and model for every type of cyclist, whether you’re into racing, mountain-biking, recreational weekend tootling, getting to work or just nipping down to the shops. And of course, cycling is not just a convenient way to get around, it’s healthy and good for the environment too.

According to charity, Cycling UK, British cyclists notched up 5.03 billion miles in 2020, and the trend is going up by an average of 3 billion every year.  We’re still lagging well behind our European neighbours, though.  Out of 28 countries surveyed, the UK came 25th for cycling.  So let’s all get saddled up and bump up those statistics.

Bike Week 2023

This month national Bike Week takes place from the 5th to the 11th of June. To see how you can get involved, see here:

Bike Week 2023 | Cycling UK

And for more local information, check out: Edinburgh Festival of Cycling | Cycling UK

We at Edinburgh Napier are keen to promote safe cycling in and around the city.  To see what resources are available and how we can encourage you to get on your bike, please see here:

Cycling (napier.ac.uk)

By Lesley McRobb

Exercise is a great way to practise self-care and get fit. For more ideas why not check out some of the books here.

banner image for A Quick Guide to Using Boolean: Top 5 Tricks

A Quick Guide to Using Boolean: Top 5 Tricks

29/05/2023 / / 0 Comments

A Quick Guide to Using Boolean: Top 5 Tricks

Improve your search results with Boolean search operators.

Introduction to Boolean

First off, what the heck is Boolean you may be asking? Boolean search operators are simple terms like AND, OR and NOT or modifiers like quotation marks “”, parentheses () or an asterix*. You use these in conjunction with your search terms to help narrow down your search.

Most search engines, databases and of course library catalogues allow you to use these when looking for books or articles.

Top Tip 1: AND

This makes sure that your search results include all the words you need.

e.g. Zombies AND Aliens

It will remove any results that do not contain all these terms.

Top Tip 2: NOT

This is a great option for editing out results when searching.

e.g. Apocalypse AND Zombies NOT Aliens

Top Tip 3: Quotation marks “”

Quotation marks are one of my favourite search modifiers. Use them to make sure you have an exact match returned. This can be handy for a book or article title if you know exactly what you are looking for.

e.g. “Brave new world”

Top Tip 4: Asterix *

This little “star” is better known as a wildcard and is a pro tip for those who struggle with spelling or want to find results with a variation of the keyword.

e.g. If you use it with say the word Develop* it will return results including “development,” “developer,” and “developing.”

Top Tip 5: Parentheses ()

This is where you can start to get fancy! Use parentheses to group together keywords and control the order they will be searched for.

e.g. (Alien OR Zombie) AND Apocalypse

Now there is another Boolean operator OR (seen above helping out the zombie and alien search) which didn’t make the top 5 but is definitely top 6. Use OR to allow results using multiple keywords.

e.g. (Aliens OR Zombies OR Kittens) AND Apocalypse.

Combining Terms

The best thing about Boolean is it allows you to combine all these operators to make highly specific searches saving you time and effort trawling through pages of results.

e.g. (Aliens OR Zombies) AND Apocalypse AND “Tuesday Morning” Start*

LibrarySearch

Our LibrarySearch Library catalogue helps you to get started with this. Simply click on “Advanced Search” and you will see options to use Boolean operators.

Screenshot of Librarysearch Boolean search operators

So why not give them a go today!

By Juliet Kinsey

Read more study tips in our article on preparing for exams.

 

photo of carnival ride in Edinburgh

Scotland’s Gala Days

25/05/2023 / / 0 Comments

Scotland’s Gala Days

 

Scotland’s Gala Days take place in the months of May and June. A Scottish tradition of gala weeks in full swing. It’s a time for towns to get together and celebrate their history and culture. There will be sports days, horse-riding, fancy-dress. And don’t forget float parades with pipe and brass bands. And almost always there will be a gala queen who will be crowned. The queen, her maids or attendants and sometimes a king are usually chosen from primary 7 pupils. It’s seen as a rite of passage before moving on to secondary school. The queen is crowned by a lady of importance in the community such as a councillor or sometimes by the previous year’s queen. Often the homes of the queen and her entourage were decorated with colourful arches, but in recent years some families have really gone to town with their home displays!

The celebrations vary across the regions. In the central belt gala weeks were very often associated with the coal mining communities such as Newtongrange.  Gala celebrations took place to mark successful wins for workers’ rights or to raise some cheer during tough economic times. The first gala day in Scotland is thought to have been held in 1770 in Loanhead. When miners – and their children – from the Dryden Colliery were invited to a feast to celebrate the birthday of the landowner, Lord Lockhart of Carnwath. Now most have set weeks each year so as not to coincide with neighbouring towns and will have a wide range of events for all the family.

Gala Days in the borders

In the Borders towns such as Hawick and Selkirk the week is all about the common riding. This involves “ride outs” around the town borders, re-enacting the old medieval practice for the local lord or clan leader to appoint a leading townsperson. They would then ride the clan’s boundaries, or “marches”, to protect their lands and prevent reivers from stealing cattle. Today a local young man will be elected to lead the common riding. Often called the cornet lad he has a lass to accompany him. And some towns such as Lockerbie also have sports days, fancy dress competitions and of course a queen.

Gala Days on the coasts

Coastal community gala weeks (such as Newhaven and Stromness) celebrate their connections to fishing with some of the queens arriving by boat to be crowned. There will often be water-based events such as raft races as well as the usual fancy dress competitions and sports days.

Hopefully you will be able to get along to a gala week event and let’s hope for good weather for all Scotland’s gala days.

Use Library Search to find books and journal articles on events, social history and Scottish traditions.

Search on You Tube to view footage of old gala weeks, and common riding events.

Photo source Michelle Henderson

You can read more about Scottish Traditions like Burns Night

Sherlock Holmes's silhouette on baker street underground stop

Arthur Conan Doyle

22/05/2023 / / 0 Comments

Arthur Conan Doyle

All the clues are there in the first few pages: the narcotics, the torpor, the scratching on the violin, the trusty but plodding assistant. It’s not long before we’re given a treatise on “the science of deduction and analysis” and the use of the word “elementary”. This is our first introduction to the world’s most famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, who made his debut in the long story, A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887.

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes caught the reading public’s attention with his cold, calculating logic, and he went on to solve many seemingly insoluble cases, always accompanied by his loyal companion, Dr Watson.

So popular is Sherlock Holmes that he has been reincarnated in film many times over, most notably by Basil Rathbone, and more recently by Robert Downey Jnr, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Doyle’s Life

But he is, of course, a fictional creation, spun from the imagination of Edinburgh doctor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After graduating from Edinburgh university and studying in Vienna, Conan Doyle set up his own medical practice in the south of England. It didn’t do well, and to supplement his income he turned his hand to creative writing. His Holmes adventure stories were immediately successful and ensured that Conan Doyle kept writing them until they ran into several volumes.

To Conan Doyle’s lifelong chagrin, the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories overshadowed his other literary work. Who has heard of his 14th century knight, Sir Nigel, or his Napoleonic war hero, Brigadier Gerard? History was Conan Doyle’s great passion, and he wrote many fictional and non-fiction accounts of great historical events, and published his own psychic research into spiritualism.

It’s Conan Doyle’s birthday today. A pub named after him still stands on the corner of Picardy Place, the street in which he was born. Why not pop in and raise a toast? Better still, log into LibrarySearch and discover his many stories, and the films, for yourself:

https://napier.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=44NAP_INST:44NAP_ALMA_VU1

Photo source Sandip Roy

 

By Lesley McRobb

Have a love for reading about authors, you can read about Charles Dickens 

 

Celebrating Edward de Bono image and quote saying "If you wait for opportunities to occur, you will miss them"

Celebrating Edward de Bono

19/05/2023 / / 1 Comment

Celebrating Edward de Bono

To celebrate Edward de Bono’s birthday on the 19th May here is a short post about his life.

Who is Edward de Bono?

Edward de Bono was a Maltese/British businessman, born on this day in 1933. He made it his mission to teach his thinking methods to governments and businesses around the world. He wrote 84 books that have been translated into 46 languages, but he’s perhaps best known for his “six thinking hats”.  These six hats – or different aspects of thinking – are colour coded to denote control, creativity, feelings, positivity, caution and factual information.

De Bono believed that by learning how to use these different ways of thinking, we can all become more effective and work with greater collaboration and communication in our personal and professional lives. It was his passion to prove that creative and effective thinking can be taught and learned using structures and systematic techniques.

While his business methods became hugely influential, de Bono was not without his detractors. Some academic critics say his ideas weren’t tested and don’t stand up to scrutiny when they are.

Lateral Thinking

When Edward de Bono coined the term “lateral thinking” in 1967, he wasn’t inventing a new concept. Instead, it was just a different way of looking at an old one.  De Bono took his inspiration from the behaviour of self-organizing information systems and insisted that the best thinking didn’t have to be linear, sequential or logical, but could also move sideways. The term lateral thinking became so popular that it soon entered the Oxford English Dictionary.

Why not make up your own mind? We have his full range of titles which you’ll find by logging into LibrarySearch.

Check out: Teach yourself to think, Simplicity or The happiness purpose to begin opening your mind.

To mark his birthday, I’m going to dip into one or two of his books. I’m new to this thinking lark, so I’m going to start off with the basics:

By Lesley McRobb

Read more on our blog by Lesley like International Haiku Poetry Day

ball pen writing

Aye Write

15/05/2023 / / 0 Comments

Aye Write!

It’s not often we give a shout-out to our west coast cousins, but this month we want to sing Glasgow’s praises high. Congratulations to the 2023 Aye Write festival for arranging a cracking programme of events.

https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/arts-music-and-cultural-venues/aye-write-glasgows-book-festival

What is Aye Write!

Founded in 2005, this literary festival has gone from strength to strength, and this year 175 international authors are participating in more than 120 events between 19th and 27th May, with a spinoff Wee Write festival on 3rd June for the little ones in our lives.

They’ll be speaking on topics as diverse as fiction, climate and the environment, music, politics, health issues, social activism and my own personal favourite subject – food.

There are also creative writing classes available if you fancy yourself as a budding novelist or poet. And there will be musical entertainment too, as well as an open mic poetry session.  With so many different events, there is bound to be something to appeal to anyone interested in reading, writing, and engaging with the cultural and social worlds around them.

Aye Write Festival

The festival has always been housed in the impressive Mitchell Library – a good enough reason in itself to visit Glasgow.  And this year the festival organisers have added the Royal Concert Hall as a bonus venue.

https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries/venues/the-mitchell-library

https://www.glasgowconcerthalls.com/glasgow-royal-concert-hall/Pages/default.aspx

 

We, of course, are unbiased in our support of the festival, so we don’t want to pick out particular events or authors. Oh, all right. We can’t resist highlighting one event from the Wee Write festival. It’s never too early to get wee ones into reading and books. Indiana Bones is a magical talking dog! He’s on a perilous adventure and sounds like a very clever boy.

https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/event/1/harry-heape-indiana-bones-and-the-invisible-city

By Lesley McRobb

You can read more about writing posts 

Photo source Aaron Burden

limerick image

National Limerick Day

12/05/2023 / / 0 Comments

National Limerick Day

National Limerick Day celebrates Limericks. A limerick is a short, often humorous, and sometimes rude poem consisting of five lines. The first, second and fifth lines should rhyme with each other, and the third and fourth lines should rhyme with each other. The first line usually introduces a person and place, and the place name will be at the end of the line eg.

There was a Young Lady of Dorking,
Who bought a large bonnet for walking;
But its colour and size,
So bedazzled her eyes,
That she very soon went back to Dorking.

This establishes the rhyme scheme for the second and fifth lines. Due to their short and simple structure limericks are a popular form among amateur poets.

Although the word “limerick” is a reference to the Irish city and county, it may be derived from a form of nonsense verse parlour game which included the line “Will/won’t you come up to Limerick” and it is believed that limericks actually originated in England.

Edward Lear

They were popularized by Edward Lear in his books A Book of Nonsense (1846) and More Nonsense Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc (1872). He wrote 212 limericks which would accompany an absurd illustration on the same subject. Amongst the most famous of these is the opening poem from A Book of Nonsense:

https://napier.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/44NAP_INST/n96pef/alma9923649263602111

Feeling inspired? Why not try writing your own limerick, you might be interested in reading more about them. You can use LibrarySearch to access several e-books and articles. And if you are interested in poetry there are over 1,500 poetry books at Merchiston campus library and thousands more e-books available online. You can also read Edward Lear’s work online here.

By Vivienne Hamilton

 

Read more articles on unusual days such as May the Fourth and World sleep day

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