Hardcore users of Wanstead library might be well aware of this, but it’s worth sharing anyway. Holders of Redbridge Library cards can, with the cunning use of their card number and PIN, get access to a quite amazing array of online reference books through the Redbridge website – including the full Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Reference Online. This is as well as being able to search the borough’s own library catalogue. Access is available at www.redbridge.gov.uk/libraries.
There’s also access to the Dictionary of National Biography, so there is now no reason not to know that Sir Charles Tilston Bright, responsible for laying the first cable across the Atlantic AND for proposing that units of electrical measurement (eg volt) should be derived from the names of scientists, was born in Wanstead.
Wansteadium hopes, as a result of this posting, for an immediate improvement in the general standard of bus stop small-talk.
It is a very good system and you can also access other Oxford reference titles as well the same way (although the system sometimes recognises my ticket, oddly, as being from the Northern Ireland Library Service). The Oxford English Dictionary, as opposed to the compact, shorter etc you normally see, is incredibly detailed.
And another little known service is that you can use your Redbridge library card in any London Consortium library – as I do regularly in Newham and Waltham Forest libraries – and, what’s more you can return that book you borrowed in Stratford etc through your nearest library such as Wanstead. I believe the consortium goes as far as West London.
And this system also works for reservations – my latest reservation, and which was delivered to Aldersbrook library for me, is an Enfield library book.