Museum Librarians and Archivists Group

Dear colleague

As you may have seen on the museum’s website, the Caird Library at Royal Museums Greenwich will close from Monday 2 July to Tuesday 4 September 2012 inclusive due to the preparations and hosting of the London 2012 Olympic Games Equestrian and Modern Pentathlon events. For further information, please see the notice on the website.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused to our users. The Archive and Library staff will be using the closure period to rehouse offsite collections to bring them onsite, and to reorganise stores to make future retrievals more efficient.

The National Maritime Museum galleries will be open throughout the Games, with some changes to opening hours starting from 26 April. For further information see the visitor information on the website. Our special exhibition, Royal River, will also be open throughout.

We look forward to welcoming you to the Caird Library on Wednesday 5 September 2012 at 10.00.

Eleanor Gawne
Head of Archive and Library
Royal Museums Greenwich
National Maritime Museum | Royal Observatory Greenwich | The Queen’s House
Greenwich, London SE10 9NF
direct +44 (0) 208 312 6507

Please find attached information about the forthcoming ‘Manuscripts Still Matter’ conference at the British Library.

Manuscripts Still Matter publicity

Dear MLAG Colleagues,

I have recently been invited (in my capacity as Chair of MLAG) by the Secretary of the Working Group on UK Literary Heritage, Helen Melody, to participate in a panel discussion with archivists and curators from across the heritage sector, which will be taking place at a forthcoming conference that the Working Group is organising at the British Library on 30th April 2012.

This conference follows on from one that took place in 2006 on the theme of collecting modern literary archives, which included discussion of the concerns about the “loss” of British archives abroad, and the perspectives of institutions, dealers and creators of archives. The aim of this second conference is to consider the situation for archival institutions, archive creators and users given the changing financial and political climate since 2006.

Unfortunately though I am unable to attend this conference as the date clashes with a prior commitment so I am posting this message to ask whether somebody else from MLAG would be willing and able to attend and participate as a MLAG representative instead. If you are interested then please could you contact Helen Melody at Helen.Melody@bl.uk as soon as possible as she is hoping to finalise the agenda and list of participants by the end of February.

For information, The Working Group on UK Literary Heritage was established in March 2005 in response to increasing concerns about the dispersal abroad of the archives of British writers, mostly to well-funded U.S. collecting institutions, in a competitive international acquisitions market. The Working Group lobbies for the implementation of tax incentives to benefit living writers wishing to deposit their papers with UK institutions. It also works to raise awareness of the value of literary archives in terms of their research, educational and creative uses and the cultural benefits to be derived from such collections remaining within the UK.

Thanks,

Rupert

Rupert Williams
MLAG Chair (Head of Library & Archives, Science Museum)

You may like to consider signing this e-petition and circulating it to colleagues - see below for details

Helen

As you know universities and colleges are obliged to pay VAT at the full standard rate, which is currently 20%, on their subscriptions to electronic academic journals, books, newspapers and magazines.

 We believe that they should be treated in the same way for VAT as printed publications; printed versions of the same resources are zero-rated in the UK; in the rest of Europe VAT is applied at the reduced rate, currently 5%.

 We have set up an e-petition to urge our Government to do one of two things;

1.         Introduce zero-rated VAT on electronic academic publications.

 2.         Or, if it is not feasible to add electronic publications to the list of zero-rated goods then to follow other European countries and apply VAT at the reduced rate now and consider reducing this to 0% as soon as possible.

 We need 100,000 signatures for the topic to be considered for debate in the House of Commons. Anyone can sign and we would like you and your library colleagues, academic staff, students, researchers friends and family to sign the e-petition:

 * They will need to provide their name, address and email

* They can choose to receive email updates from the government about the e-petition

 Sign here:  http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/28226

 To help publicise the campaign we have created an A4 poster which can be downloaded and printed for display in public spaces.

 To download the poster see www.eduserv.org.uk/newsandevents/news/2012/fair-vat-campaign  

 If you would like some small business cards to distribute then please contact Jenny Carroll.

 You can follow the campaign on Twitter #fairVAT4epubs