“There are a series of what are sometimes known as ‘paradigm shifts’, deep discoveries which alter the way we look at the world, from Bacon and Newton to Maxwell and Crick and Watson. It seems that the often lonely, isolated, implausible, somewhat frightening pursuit of the deep mysteries of man and the natural world somehow flourished here”, states a work called Creativity in Cambridge (MacFarlane, 2013) found on Apollo, the repository of the University of Cambridge. According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories, there are 3,113 universities with repositories, and according to OpenDOAR, there are about 3,000 institutional repositories. So why should you know about Apollo, the University of Cambridge’s repository? One of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world has a repository which recently reached the landmark figure of 1,000 data sets. In total, 26,000 downloads have been performed in the past year. The famous and the infamous have graduated from Cambridge, which makes exploring their repository promising for any researcher. To name but one example, Professor Stephen William Hawking’s works have been viewed 529,717 times. A search for Kim Philby results in 12 theses and one article, all published in the past eight years.
The repository can be searched by schools (technology, clinical medicine, physical sciences, etc.), college (Trinity, Girton, etc.) or special communities, such as the British Antarctic Survey, the Fitzwilliam Museum or the Sanger Institute. The user can do a simple search such as Brexit and retrieve 49 results (everything from how cancer research will be impacted to how London may change). Choose by type of resource: thesis, book chapter, video, image, map or audio. An advanced search allows the user to start by defining type of resource, collection, affiliation and date published. Not everything is freely available. A blue lock icon indicates those that are not. A sort feature allows the user to see results by relevance, ascending or descending title or date published. A keyword search can be modified in the subsequent step to get the outcome expected. Putting in Remains Richard III results in 18,885 hits, but limiting it to the keyword Richard III in the next step gets only one: Improving the Use of Historical Written Sources in Paleopathology. It is not possible to do narrow searches, but it is certainly fun to explore. Doing a search for Tennyson, I tripped over an article about spirituality in Henry and William James. Doing a search for Alan Turing found after-dinner talks about him, including a video recorded at the Hall of King’s College. Maurice Wilkes, with a backdrop of the sounds of forks and glasses clinking, describes the life and accomplishments of Turing. Beneath the record, other items of interest are linked, including “From the Buzzing in Turing’s Head to Machine Intelligence Contests”.
Whether patrons are interested in this because of the historical import of many of the graduates or because they want to keep up with the research output of some very significant scholars, Apollo is a rewarding treasure chest to browse.
