The Biodiversity Heritage Library provides free access to hundreds of thousands of books and over 125,000 illustrations, from the 15th-21st centuries.
The illustrations can be seen in numerous albums on Flickr. For example:
Daily Mail Historical Archive
UEA Library now has access to the Daily Mail Historical Archive, which covers 1896 to 2004.
Daily Mail (1989) ‘Scientists dig in to save the rabbits’, 29 November, p.37. Daily Mail Historical Archive.
Rothermere, Viscount (1934) ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’, Daily Mail, 15 January, p. 10. Daily Mail Historical Archive.
UEA Library at 50
UEA Library opened in 1968, so this year is its 50th anniversary.
The architect was Denys Lasdun and the first librarian was Willi Guttsman. Tag, the UEA Library blog, has appreciations of both men.
An appreciation is an assessment (usually positive) of a person and their work.
Photo © N Chadwick (cc-by-sa/2.0)
Synonyms for “unkempt”
Two days ago we quoted a letter to The Times from 1968, which described some UEA students as “childishly noisy”, “completely lacking in manners” and “unkempt”.
The Oxford English Dictionary has various defintions of unkempt. The one intended by the letter-writer would seem to be:
Of a person’s or (occasionally) an animal’s appearance, condition, etc.: characterized by uncombed or untidy hair; (more generally) scruffy, dishevelled.
The OED’s Historical Thesaurus lists this meaning under: the world > physical sensation > cleanness and dirtiness > dirtiness > [adjective] > dirty and mean. Words in this category (with the earliest year in which they were recorded) are:
- ungoderly c1400
- sluttish 1549
- squalid 1596
- scrubbing 1603
- sordid 1611
- snotty 1681
- frowzy 1710
- grub 1719
- seedy 1725
- unkempt 1838
- grubby 1844
- crumby 1859
- ratty 1867
- scruffy 1871
- scrutty 1914
- scummy 1932
- ribby 1936
- raunchy 1937
- sleazy 1941
- scroungy 1948
- manky 1958
- grungy 1965
- scungy 1966
- scuzzy 1969
- scrungy 1974
Words with similar meanings include grimy, tatty, shabby, dowdy and mangy.
You may have noticed how most of these words have two syllables and end in y. About half of them begin with s. This may be an example of sound symbolism or iconicity.
Peking, Peiping and Beijing
Beijing has had many different names over the last 3,000 years. This Google Ngram chart shows the three that were most common in English-language sources during the 20th century.
Old HK newspapers
Hong Kong Public Libraries have an online collection of old newspapers, both Chinese and English, from 1853 to 1991.
Hong Kong was then a British colony and the English-language newspapers reflect the preoccupations and views of the expatriate population. Nevertheless, they are an interesting historical source.
To see the newspapers, click on Explore, then (under Collections) Old HK Newspapers. Reading them requires a web browser with Flash.
Old newspapers online
If you want to know how past events were reported at the time, you should consult old newspapers. Some are available online. UEA Library provides access to these collections:
| Collection | Years | Region |
| Burney Collection | 1600-1799 | Mainly Britain and its colonies |
| British Library | 1800-1900 | Britain |
| Google Newspaper Archive | 1750s-2009 | United States, Canada and others |
| The Guardian and The Observer | 1791-2003 | Britain |
| The New York Times | 1851-2014 | United States |
| The Times | 1785-2012 | Britain |
| Nexis | 1980s-present | International |
| Nikkei Telecom | 1975-present | Japan* |
| Independent Voices | 1950s-present | Mainly United States (alternative press) |
| Daily Mail | 1896-2004 | Britain |
Wikipedia has a more comprehensive List of online newspaper archives. Some are free to access; others are behind a paywall.
*For an English menu expand the item: スペシャルコンテンツ.
The gerbil who won a UEA election
From The Associated Press, February 13, 1988
Ken The Gerbil Wins Student Election At University
DATELINE: NORWICH, England
A gerbil named Ken, campaigning on a platform of free beer and soft toilet paper, beat five other candidates to become president of the Student Union at the University of East Anglia. Ken’s owner, chemistry student Julian Campbell, 21, said he entered his pet as a joke and was amazed that the mouselike rodent won the job, which pays $94.50 a week.
The university is in Norwich in northeast England. Ken polled well over a third of the 1,500 votes, beating his nearest competitor by 194 votes. He celebrated his victory Friday night with sunflower seeds and a sip of vodka from a water bottle.
“I think he’ll make a great president. And he definitely won’t be making any boring speeches,” Campbell was quoted as telling The Star.
But outgoing Student Union president Rob Davies, 23, was not amused.
“The students have not taken the vote seriously,” Davies was quoted as telling the Daily Mirror. “I don’t think many know how much hard work goes into the job.”
Ken was named after Education Secretary Kenneth Baker, whose education reform bill is currently being considered by Parliament. But it turns out the name is somewhat of a misnomer.
Campbell found out during the campaign that Ken is actually a female and is pregnant.
Source: Nexis
The election was overturned and a fresh election held, in which Ken’s owner, Julian Campbell, was elected.
Unkempt
Letter to The Times, 7th December 1968:
From the Times Digital Archive.
Roy Jenkins was at that time a Labour Party MP and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Unkempt means untidy in appearance (clothes or hair), or scruffy.
A sad day for golfers
From The Times, 20th May 1961:
From the Times Digital Archive.
For more on Earlham Park Golf Club, see this page.
Film words
In its latest update the Oxford English Dictionary has added over 100 words and phrases connected to film.
20 adjectives relating to specific directors have been included, such as:
Some horror film terms have been added. For example:
For more, see this article.
More rankings than you can shake a stick at
IREG Observatory lists university rankings.
At present count there are 17 global rankings, plus various regional and specialized rankings (e.g. best fashion schools). Of the national rankings, Britain has three.
For a somewhat cynical view of rankings and related matters, see University Ranking Watch.
For the origin of shake a stick at, see this article.
Irregular verb forms
Can you give the correct forms for the verbs in square brackets?
- They fell asleep soon after they had [lie] down.
- Once again the dog had [lay] its head on her lap.
- He remembered he had [drink] the cocktail before.
- I got up immediately after I had [wake] up.
- Their efforts failed, though everyone had [strive] for success.
For the answers read This is highly irregular in the Macmillan Dictionary Blog.
World University Rankings 2019
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019 are out.
Based on citations, it appears the most influential university in the world is Babol Noshirvani University of Technology in Iran, while our neighbour Anglia Ruskin comes in 22nd, ahead of Johns Hopkins. Well done!
UEA’s rankings are here.
Bare plurals
A plural noun is “bare” if it does not have a determiner, such as the, two, many, all or my. Consider these three examples of the bare plural, rabbits:
- Rabbits are mammals.
- Rabbits eat lettuce.
- Rabbits ate my lettuce yesterday.
The meaning of rabbits is different in each case:
- All rabbits are mammals.
- Most rabbits eat lettuce.
- Some rabbits ate my lettuce yesterday.
The problem with the bare plural is the ambiguity of certain statements. For example:
- Mosquitoes transmit malaria.
In fact, only female mosquitoes from a minority of species of the Anopheles genus can transmit malaria. Most mosquitoes can’t transmit malaria.
Bare plurals are often used by newspapers to over-generalize, especially in headlines. For example:
- Women really do prefer rich men (The Times, 5 January 2018)
- UK men prefer personality over appearance in partners (The Daily Telegraph, 30 November 2017)
- Minorities distrust companies (USA Today, 14 January 2004)
- Muslims back faith killings (Sunday Express, 27 July 2008)
The article under the last headline says, “The YouGov survey questioned 600 Muslims in 12 universities across the country and found 32 per cent said resorting to extremist action to honour their beliefs was right.” So Muslims in the headline means only some Muslims – about one third of the students in the survey. The casual reader may assume it means most or all Muslims.
The lesson is: be careful of bare plurals when reading newspapers and writing assignments!
A new term
The academic year of 2018/19 is about to start and thousands of students are crossing the world by plane, train and taxi. Some of them are coming to us in Norwich.
We hope they will have a nice time here!
Not One-Off Britishisms
British people have been complaining about Americanisms – words or phrases from the United States that have become common in Britain – since the eighteenth century.
For example, nowadays you often hear train station instead of railway station, fries instead of chips and movie instead of film.
Ben Yagoda’s blog Not One-Off Britishisms is about movement in the other direction:
Over the last decade or so, an alarming number of traditionally British expressions have found their way into the American vocabulary.
Some Britishisms are advert, DIY, ginger (a person with red hair), gobsmacked, Hoover (verb), kerfuffle, mobile (i.e. a mobile phone), on holiday, queue, sell-by date, short-listed, snog, straight away, take a decision, twee.
The latest blog post is on cheesed off.
Mysterious devices in UEA Library
TED-Ed
TED-Ed is a category of TED videos. TED-Ed has short lessons on a wide range of subjects.
For example, How to use a semicolon (3:35 min) or Just how small Is an atom? (5:27 min).
Study Skills for International Students
Our four-week FutureLearn course, Study Skills for International Students, is running again – until 26 September.
Library Access browser extension
bored + with/of?
With clearly wins.
From Google Ngram Viewer.
different + from/than/to?
A clear victory for from:
From Google Ngram Viewer.
Top journals according to Google
A list of the top 100 publications in various languages is produced by Google Scholar. The journals are ranked by their h-index and h-median metrics. You can read an explanation here.
The current top 10 English-language publications are:
- Nature
- The New England Journal of Medicine
- Science
- The Lancet
- Chemical Society reviews
- Cell
- Nature Communications
- Chemical Reviews
- Journal of the American Chemical Society
- Advanced Materials
You can also see the top journals in particular fields – for example, Business, Economics & Management.
UEA IT Service Status
If there is something strange with your wifi, internet access, email, Office, UEA website, Blackboard, etc. etc., check the UEA IT Service Status web page.
Gutted
- World Cup 2018: ‘Gutted’ Harry Kane says England gave it their all as millions of Three Lions fans suffer World Cup heartbreak once more (The Sun)
- Holly Willoughby and Kate Hudson lead an army of ‘gutted‘ stars on social media after England’s crushing World Cup semi-final loss to Croatia (Daily Mail)
- ‘I’m absolutely gutted’: disappointed England fans speak of World Cup hurt from Russia (iNews)
- Your Favourite Musicians Are Gutted About The England Result (Clash Magazine)
- A gutted fish is a fish whose guts – internal organs – have been removed, so that it can be cooked.
- A gutted house is a house whose interior has been emptied or destroyed, usually by fire.
- If a person is gutted, they are bitterly disappointed. This is British slang. The adjective is normally used in the predicative position (after a verb like be, become, grow, look or seem). However, the first two newspaper headlines are using it attributively (before the noun).
BrowZine links
If you find a journal article through UEA Library Search, you can now (sometimes) go to that issue of the journal in BrowZine:
Similarly if you find a journal title, you can read it in BrowZine:
Sketch Engine
Sketch Engine is an online tool for analysing text corpora in various languages. You can use it to find collocations, compare words, generate word lists, etc.
For example, you can find objects of the verb undergo:
- surgery
- transformation
- treatment
- renovation
- change
- training
- testing
- procedure
- chemotherapy
- examination
- transition
- therapy
British universities have free access only until the effective date of Brexit, i.e. 29 March 2019.
Jatt vs IELTS
This week a new film arrives in Indian cinemas: Jatt vs IELTS. This Punjabi comedy tells the story of a small town boy struggling to get a high enough IELTS score to move to Canada.
There is singing and dancing, possibly on IELTS-related themes.
IELTS test taker performance
The results for 2017 are summarized here.
For example, the average bands in the Academic test for speakers of these first languages:
| First language | Listening | Reading | Writing | Speaking | Overall |
| Arabic | 5.63 | 5.37 | 5.06 | 5.88 | 5.55 |
| Chinese | 5.97 | 6.15 | 5.41 | 5.46 | 5.81 |
| Indonesian | 6.54 | 6.67 | 5.78 | 6.26 | 6.37 |
| Japanese | 5.90 | 6.09 | 5.41 | 5.59 | 5.81 |
| Kazakh | 6.06 | 6.04 | 5.51 | 5.81 | 5.92 |
| Korean | 6.20 | 6.21 | 5.46 | 5.79 | 5.98 |
| Malay | 7.03 | 6.86 | 6.07 | 6.54 | 6.69 |
| Punjabi | 5.92 | 5.47 | 5.56 | 5.67 | 5.72 |
| Russian | 6.74 | 6.71 | 5.89 | 6.52 | 6.53 |
| Spanish | 6.65 | 6.89 | 5.93 | 6.62 | 6.59 |
| Thai | 6.24 | 6.03 | 5.46 | 5.90 | 5.97 |
| Turkish | 6.42 | 6.42 | 5.70 | 6.22 | 6.25 |
| Vietnamese | 5.97 | 6.17 | 5.59 | 5.71 | 5.93 |
Credo Reference
Credo Reference is a collection of online reference books. It can be browsed and searched like an encyclopedia.
For example, if you search for global warming, you are shown the topic page on climate change (“the now commonly used term, having replaced “global warming”), extracts from many books, a list of related topics (Climate change, Greenhouse gas, Kyoto Protocol, etc.), images, and a mind map.
It might be a good place to start research for your long essay or project.
HSTalks
HSTalks are video lectures and case studies. UEA has access to the Business & Management Collection.
The lectures are accompanied by slides and some have transcripts.
Presessional
Photograph by Leo Reynolds
A big welcome to everyone on the presessional course.
Have a wonderful time.
Don’t work too hard!
Mintel
Mintel Academic provides consumer and market research.
For example, this month has a report on the UK fizzy drink industry. It seems more people want less sugar in their fizzy drinks.
Meanwhile women are getting comfortable with looking older. This could be bad news for the hair colourant market.
MarketLine
MarketLine provides company and industry reports, market research, case studies and business news.
You can use it to look up particular companies, such as the John Lewis Partnership, or industries, such as the Indonesian mobile phones market.
Bailey 5th edition
The textbook Academic Writing : A Handbook for International Students by Stephen Bailey is now in its 5th edition. Some of our students will have copies of the printed book.
The ebook is available through UEA Library.
Nexis
Nexis is a database of newspapers and other news sources. It contains full-text articles.
For example, you can search for UEA in the headlines of UK national newspapers:
- UEA criticised by notable alumni for ‘thuggish’ development plans (The Guardian, September 7, 2016)
- UEA academics from different subject areas unite in disappointment at Brexit result (The Independent, June 24, 2016)
- UEA fighter jet ‘missing’ during Yemen combat mission (mirror.co.uk, March 14, 2016)
I bet you never knew this university had its own fighter jet.
Statista
Statista provides statistics, reports and infographics on a range of subjects: for example, social media, e-commerce, smartphones, China, the United States, the food industry, cosmetics, gaming.
- Did you know that 78% of people in Thailand were interested in football, but in China and the US it’s only 32%?
- In 2007 there were 59 million vehicles in China; in 2016 there were 194 million.
- Last year McDonald’s was the most valuable fast food brand in the world with an estimated value of 98 billion US dollars, while the brand value of Starbucks was 44 billion dollars.
The Vogue Archive
UEA has online access to every issue of the American Vogue, from 17 December 1892 to the present day. You can read the magazine exactly as it was printed, including the pictures and advertisements.
To leaf through the magazine, choose an issue and click on any item on the contents page. Then click on Browse this issue at the top of the page:
A Vision of Britain through Time
A Vision of Britain through Time combines maps and population census data from 1801 to 2011. You can look up statistics for particular areas of the country. For example, here are some of the key findings about Norwich:
- The population grew from 31,770 in 1801 to 132,512 in 2011.
- The highest infant mortality rate recorded was 229.72 infant deaths per thousand live births in 1861, and the lowest was 3.94 in 2001.
- In 1841, 50.16 per cent of all workers worked in manufacturing, but in 2011 this had fallen to 6.52 per cent.
- The highest male unemployment rate recorded by the census was 14.95 per cent in 1991, and the lowest was 1.94 in 1951.
- In 1911, 12.89 per cent of people were living in households with over 1.5 persons per room, but in 2011 this had fallen to .53 per cent.
British Council course at FutureLearn
A 4-week course called Exploring English: Language and Culture starts today at Futurelearn.
It is for non-native English speakers who have studied English to around intermediate level. It’s made by the British Council and it’s free!
Uh. Uh? Uh-uh. Uh-huh. Uh-oh.
Do you know the meaning of these interjections?
uh
I’m thinking or unsure what to say next.
- We’ll be meeting them at, uh, 4 o’clock.
- Of course I still love you, it’s just, uh…
- Uh, maybe.
Sometimes written as “er”.
- She’s, er, busy.
uh?
What did you just say? What do you mean?
– Amy, Question 5?
– Uh?
– Please pay attention. What’s the answer to Question 5?
– I’m going to marry your sister.
– Uh?
uh-uh
No.
– Have you seen Bill?
– Uh-uh.
uh-huh
Yes or I understand/agree/am listening.
– Then we went on to the party…
– Uh-huh.
– … and Sarah was there – you remember Sarah?
– Uh-huh.
– … and she goes up to Tom and you know what Tom’s like.
– Uh-huh.
uh-oh
There’s a problem.
– Hey, the red light is flashing.
– Uh-oh.
– Isn’t that your teacher?
– Uh-oh.
For more information, try these definitions at Collins English Dictionary: uh, uh-uh, uh-huh, uh-oh.
BoB is back online
https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/
To celebrate, here are some random BoB playlists I made earlier: Continue reading →
COBUILD Grammar Patterns
COBUILD Grammar Patterns is a guide to how adjectives, nouns, verbs and other words fit together.
For example: it + link verb + adjective + for + noun + to-infinitive:
| It | is | costly | for | rivals | to compete. |
| It | was | fashionable | for | the rich | to eat white flour. |
A series of videos explains how it works.
BrowZine
BrowZine is a collection of academic journals, arranged in subject categories.
For example: Business and economics > Business > E-commerce
BrowZine makes it easy to browse journals and articles, when you’re not looking for anything in particular. UEA has access to the full-text of the journals, though sometimes recent articles cannot be viewed.
World Cup Prediction Competition
Apparently there’s some kind of international ball-kicking contest starting soon.
The British Council’s Premier Skills English website has a competition in which you can predict the results (and improve your English at the same time).
Searching with site:
When searching the internet, you can limit your search to a particular website or type of website. Put the word site: (with the colon) in front of a domain name such as uea.ac.uk or ac.uk.
For example, you could use these search terms to find information on Chinese societies at different universities:
| Limit search to these websites | Search terms |
| UEA | chinese society site:uea.ac.uk |
| Edinburgh University | chinese society site:ed.ac.uk |
| any British university | chinese society site:ac.uk |
| any American university | chinese society site:edu |
Some other examples of searches:
- probiotics site:nhs.uk
- visas site:gov.au
- peace site:mfa.gov.kp
The site: operator works on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo.
For more information, see our Researching page.
MyiLibrary assimilated by ProQuest
ProQuest bought MyiLibrary three years ago, but only recently have the ebook links changed.
All the MyiLibrary links on this website have been updated and now point to ebooks on ProQuest Ebook Central.
BoB offline
If you’re seeing 404 Not Found at the main BoB page, it’s because the TV recording website is “currently undergoing essential maintenance”.
It should be back by 10pm on Wednesday 13 June.
UEA Library Search and EBSCO offline
UEA’s Library Search and EBSCO databases will be unavailable from 9am on Tuesday 19 June 0900 to 9am the next day.
Source: tag