Update

Take a hike - with Oxfam!

The Oxfam Walk has been a key annual event in Cambridge for 34 years - and the 35th Walk is getting closer. Sunday 19 May is the day and the Walk will start and finish at that popular venue, Wimpole Hall. Walkers can choose to be sponsored to tackle a route of seven, 14 or 21 miles and can also enjoy the various activities and entertainments in the marquee at the Hall. Money raised will go towards Oxfam's work in more than 80 countries across the world. For further information and sponsorship forms, please contact Ken Fletcher on 01223 841783 or e-mail kdf@freezone.co.uk. Or visit our website www.oxfam.org.uk/walk. Help on the day is also urgently needed. If you could be a marshal or steward for 2-3 hours, please contact Jerry Carr-Brion on 01223 414954 or by e-mail jcarrbrion@yahoo.co.uk.

On the Move

After 30 years in 'temporary accommodation' in 9 West Road, the Faculty of English is moving into other temporary accommodation at 27 Trumpington Street, whilst a new building is constructed on the West Road site. The Faculty of English and Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic will be housed in the Trumpington Street offices from May 2002 to September 2004.

Also moving to temporary accommodation is the University's Design Studio. The team is leaving the offices at 1 St Mary's Passage (above Aunties Tea Shop) and joining the Press and Publications Office in the Old Schools.

Arachnophobes Beware!

The Sedgwick Museum Young Design Squad (SYDS) helped model-maker Jeremy Hunt and Museum staff with the installation of the first of the new displays at the Sedgwick Museum on 9 March. The display is about the fossil of the World's Largest Spider, Megarachne servinei. Megarachne ("Big Meg" to her friends) had a legspan of almost 50cm, and the body was almost 10cm across! The spider lived during the Carboniferous period, around 300 million years ago, when many other arachnids and insects also reached astounding sizes.

The new display centres on a cast of the fossil of Megarachne, which was given to the Museum by colleagues from the Academy of Sciences in Cordoba, Argentina where the original fossil is held. The SYDS were responsible for the contents and layout of this display, and had to decide on the use of the available budget. Their first decision was to commission a life-size reconstruction of the spider… The spider will be revealed to the public in all its hairy glory later in the year when the redevelopment is complete.

Fitz goes online

The Fitzwilliam Museum has launched its online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) accessible through its website. The world-renowned collections amount to half a million objects and, of these, over 57,000 documentary records - ranging from antiquities, sculpture, porcelain, glass and armour to paintings, drawings and prints - are immediately available, thanks to funding of £297,825 from the Resource/DCMS Designation Challenge Fund (DCF).

The three-year programme has enabled the Fitzwilliam to create a unified database of objects, some with digitised images, that will increase public access to the Museum's collections through the worldwide web.. ADLIB Museum was the database management software chosen to catalogue the Museum's collections and also to provide the Internet gateway to the online catalogue.

As part of the final stage of the project, The Fitzwilliam Museum's website - the portal to the OPAC - has been redesigned to improve navigation, increase speed of access, add to the information available, meet the wide range of users' requirements and meet industry recommendations for access by disabled users. The new site will have its 'virtual launch' on 25 March; the URL is http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk.

CRASSH launches annual theme

The University's new Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) is planning a series of conferences, seminars and workshops relating to its inaugural theme The Organization of Knowledge. The Centre plans to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to examine some of the many ways in which systems of knowledge have been created and sustained by different societies at different historical periods.

Several topics relating to the theme are already under development. These include museums, material culture, and the order of knowledge; the idea of the encylopaedia; electronic knowledge; biographical knowledge; and indigenous knowledge.

A two-day workshop planned for 17-18 May 2002 will focus in particular on the Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain. A number of other small-scale workshops and symposia during the current academic year will lead to a series of major international conferences in 2002-3 including the principal conference for The Organization of Knowledge in April 2003. Further information about these and other CRASSH events is available from the CRASSH website at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events.html.

Hefce funding decision

The Higher Education Funding Council for England announced the allocation of next year's university grants at the beginning of March. Following the outcome of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which demonstrated a substantial increase in international-quality work across the sector, research funding will be distributed more selectively.

Hefce has decided to maintain its real-terms funding for only the top-rated researchers - the 5* departments - and to cut all the rest. On average, the highest quality research, awarded 5* (five star) in the RAE will receive a cash increase of 2.5 per cent. Funding will be provided for departments rated at 3a and above.

A statement issued by the University following the funding announcement, said the grants demonstrated how under-funded the sector as a whole is.

"Particularly disappointing for the University of Cambridge is the level of our research grant, which is insufficient reward for our outstanding performance in the last Research Assessment Exercise. Any system of funding should facilitate bringing additional resources into universities without harming efforts to widen participation. We look to the Government's Comprehensive Spending Review announcement this summer to address the funding needed to sustain international levels of excellence."

A Material Difference

A new institute for studying pharmaceutical drug substances and products has been established through a research collaboration between Cambridge University, the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) and Pfizer Ltd. The collaboration will create a centre of excellence for the study of pharmaceutical and medical materials by combining the expertise of the University's Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, the Department of Chemistry, and the CCDC with that of Pfizer. The unit, designated the Pfizer Institute for Pharmaceutical Materials Science, will be based within the University and its aim is to provide a focus for research into all aspects of the structure, manufacture and behaviour of solid dosage forms, such as tablets. The research will range in size-scales, modelling the processes of molecular crystallisation through to achieving better powder compaction, tabletting, diffusion and release. The Institute will also provide a focus for strategic research, which will complement the on-going work undertaken by Pfizer.

Professor William Bonfield, is the Institute's new Director.
"Pfizer have provided an exciting opportunity for us to perform some world class research in establishing a distinctive approach to the formulation and delivery of pharmaceutical materials. "The collaboration will create a major interdisciplinary team that will allow for radical research and new insights."