Thursday 22 August 2013

British Library displays the original FA rule book

On this miserable, murky morning, a friend sent me this link to a story about a temporary new addition to the British Library's exhibits; the Football Association's 1863 minute book, containing the original rules of football (sounds like they're quite different to what is played to now!).

It'll be there until 17th December and you can see it for free in the British Library's Treasures Gallery (which also contains lots of other cool stuff if you're into books or history).

Thursday 8 August 2013

Universities using Premier League football to attract students?

This story from the Times Higher Education popped up in my Twitter feed this morning, and I thought I'd share as it might be of interest to those of you in Football Studies: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/sector-aims-to-score-with-premier-league-profiles/2006329.article . Apparently some UK universities are trying to forge connections with Premier League football clubs as another way of attracting international students to the institution. Read carefully though; it contains a lot of speculation on the impact of these schemes and, as the article points out, not much evidence.

There's also an excellent example here of incomplete referencing and why that's not good; the writer doesn't give us any of the information that we need to easily track down the Elliott and Soo article mentioned in the second-from-last paragraph, which, if you were going to talk about this topic in an assignment, you'd probably want to read. A little detective work in DISCOVER uncovered it however, so here's a chance to practise your searching skills if you want to try to locate it! Think about which words to put in the DISCOVER search box, play around with your search terms, and remember that you can often read abstracts when you click on the title of an item, to try to work out if it's the article you're after - it might not be obvious from the title. I'm going to let you have a go yourselves first but do get in touch if you can't find it and I'll point you in the right direction.

Finally, I hope that those of you who follow football are looking forward to the new season starting. I support Aston Villa, so "looking forward to" is not quite the term I'd use...