Dear all in the MEMS Community,
We hope that all is going well as a new term gets underway. It is with great excitement that we invite you to join MEMSlib, a new initiative from several of the MEMS students which we are delighted to be able to launch today! You may already have seen hints of this through our social media channels and emails, but now that the project is live, we wanted to say a bit more about its motivation and our vision for the project as a whole.
The Resources
MEMSlib is a digital resource platform which hopes to offer some help in these new days of online-only research. The site, which we have been building over the last few weeks, brings together a wide range of digital resources and research materials, grouped according to time period and subject. We are extremely grateful to the lecturers and department staff who have contributed to these growing collections, and offer particular thanks to Dr Alison Ray (Canterbury Cathedral Archives), and to Emma Furderer, our MEMS Librarian. Ranging from charters to Chaucer, from illuminations to Islamic studies, we hope that our curation of online materials will speak to the breadth of research within our department, and will allow for an efficient transition to remote working. We intend the MEMSlib to be a lasting resource, with an impact beyond our present remote conditions, and we therefore welcome the addition of resources and materials which you feel would be worth sharing with others.
The Forum
Our intention was also for MEMSlib to provide a platform for communication between all members of our community, as well as friends and alumni of MEMS, to help with the recommendation and sharing of resource material. For this reason, we have integrated a members-only Forum into the site to allow users to reach out to others to request specific research materials. Guidelines for posting can be found on the site itself. We hope that the Forum, too, will allow present and future users of MEMSlib to benefit from the wealth of expertise and academic material within our research community.
Become a member!
We encourage you to sign up to become a member of MEMSlib, which will allow you to access the forum and to create a research profile. All memberships are individually approved to ensure that the Forum remains safe and protected, and email addresses are confidential unless you choose to share them with another member.
(Guides on how to become a member and post can be found on our guidelines page and here.)
We invite you to take the time to browse the resources we have put together, and to create a profile to showcase your own subject knowledge for use within the Forum. If you have any questions at all about the project, or would like to hear more from us, please do get in touch.
Happy researching!
The MEMSlib team:
Dr Daniella Gonzalez
Roisin Astell
Anna Hegland
Emma-Louise Hill
Anna-Nadine Pike
Special thanks also to Dr David Rundle for all his assistance and encouragement of this project.