Transcript of renewable energy video

Transcript of Catherine Booth's filmed talk about renewable energy information that's available in the National Library of Scotland.

I'm Catherine Booth. I'm in charge of the Science and Technology Collections in the National Library of Scotland.

We tend to talk a lot about the heritage material, the older material in the Library, and we sometimes don't say strongly enough that we have wonderful collections of brand new, up-to-date material.

We have a special interest in anything Scottish because we're the National Library of Scotland, and so I had a huge choice of what I could have shown you, but I've chosen a topic and centred on just a tiny sample of the kinds of resources we have.

The topic I've chosen is alternative or renewable energy, because I felt everyone has an interest in that, whether you're a student, whether you're a researcher, whether you're constructing a big wave engineering plant, or just a curious member of the public.

On this table I have a tiny sample of what we have in the Library. To supplement our printed books and journals, the Library subscribes to a large number of electronic databases and other resources noted on our website under licensed digital collections.

What's even more convenient is that if you live in Scotland and register with the Library, you don't even need to come in to look at them here. You can search for them at your computer at home or at work.

On the subject of wind turbines, here's an example from the database 'Environment complete'. After you enter in your search, a list of hits will be displayed. By clicking on each, the full text of the article - often in PDF format - will appear on the screen.

We do have a lot of science journals. The science databases increase the number of journals we have access to, so it's quite an important collection within the Library.

Scientists, of course, are often in their laboratories doing their own research, but they often need to do a bit of background reading as well as that, and we have a place there.

We can also let anyone come in and use the collections here: they don't have to belong to a university or a school. They may have no other library to go to, and that's what we would like to tell people, that's what we can do for them.

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