The books and journals in the library contain all kinds of different facts and data, ranging from the population change in Aberystwyth over time to the river heights along Rheidol during periods of flooding. These facts and figures are very useful to support the observations which you have made while studying a particular area, it allows you to back up comments with facts and figures. The books can tell you information about the development of the town and the reason for building on the Rheidol floodplain, also tell you about the population pressures on the town and the need for more facilities and housing. Other books and journals can also tell you about the defences along river to prevent flooding and the major floods which have occurred in Aberystwyth. There are some difficulties accessing sources as firstly you have to register with the library before you are able to access literature, and once you have requested a book from the catalogue you have to wait at least an hour for the book to be brought to you for reading. Using the online catalogue is also difficult, as it is hard to find books and journals which are relevant and are of interest.
Relevant history sources are also available from the Hugh Owen library on the main campus, this also has a search engine called voyager that allows the user to search for specific books and journals in the Hugh Owen library as well as other library’s around campus. Voyager also allows you to see whether the book is currently available or whether it is on loan, also tells you the books reference number so that you can find book of interest. All or most of the books in the Hugh Owen library are available to be loaned to students, so you can study books outside of the library. However, as the books are available to be loaned they can also go missing, all the books which may have been useful to answer title question where either unavailable or missing. This is why the national library of Wales is excellent because the books and journals are not allowed outside of the university so they are always available.
The other resource that I used to help answer the title question were local newspaper’s, I accessed local newspapers via the internet and located local newspaper websites. The newspaper websites allow you to search for article titles containing words that you have specified; this will then display a list of articles which could be relevant. However, searching for articles can be very time consuming because if you search for articles containing a word, for example, “Rheidol”. It will display every article containing that word, so you have to look through articles to find ones which may be relevant. When searching for articles it is also difficult to specify your search, you have to search for single words which may occur in the article, for example, “Rheidol” or “flood”. Instead of searching for, “floods on the river Rheidol floodplain”.
Also many of the articles only contain accounts of flooding or development which has occurred in the area and the opinions of local residents; they don’t contain many facts or statistics. Newspaper articles can also be accessed from the newspaper archive which contains all the articles printed in local papers from the first newspaper to the present day. The newspapers can provide you with an understanding of the opinions of local people living within the area of Aberystwyth, also gives you information about why the local council and welsh development agency decided to develop on the area. This gives you an overview of why the area has been developed on and tells you the order and development schemes which have taken place. This allows you to increase your knowledge of the area after you have been out observing it.
All of these resources are very costly to maintain especially the National library of Wales as it has to constantly maintain all the books, so they can be accessed by the students and the public. The local newspaper websites would have also been costly to develop, but would be fairly cheap to maintain.
- Cambrian News
