Royal Veterinary College

The foundation of The Royal Veterinary College, London, in 1791 marked the establishment of the veterinary profession in the UK. The College was granted the first Royal Charter in 1875. To this day the RVC remains the only veterinary college in the UK to have its own Royal Charter. In 1949 The Royal Veterinary College (RVC) became a full part of the University of London.The Royal Veterinary College has two campuses; one in Camden, Central London and the other in Potters Bar,  Hertfordshire.The Camden campus is the principal location for first and second year Veterinary Medicine students and all students on the BSc Bioveterinary Sciences course. The campus houses the Beaumont Sainsbury Animal Hospital, the London BioScience Innovation Centre and the College's central administration.The Hawkshead Campus in Hertfordshire is a 15-minute train ride from London King's Cross and is the base for the third, fourth and fifth years of the undergraduate Veterinary Medicine course, alongside all Veterinary Nursing students. It is also home to the Queen Mother Hospital (the largest veterinary referral hospital in Europe), the Equine Referral Hospital, Equine Practice and the Farm Animal Clinical Centre. The RVC's working farm at Boltons Park is also located nearby.

The RVC has extensive library facilities at both the London and Hertfordshire campuses. Our librararies have approx 30,000 volumes of books and journals. The material at Camden reflects the pre-clinical and taught post-graduate courses here, while the Hawkshead stock covers the clinical and taught post-graduate courses based at that site. MetaLib federated search software allows students to search all the RVC databases in one go and provides links to the full text when it is available. Podbooks are another innovation soon to be introduced which will be set up to access various learning materials including WikkiVet, eLearning DVD’s and eJournals. In the 2010–11 academic year we launched our PodBook project which provides quick access to online resources via short-loan netbooks and this has been expanded to Hawkshead having being piloted at Camden in conjunction with Electroninc Media Unit. There are now 30 PodBooks for loan from each LRC and as these have proved tremendously popular with student users, and the collection will be expanded for the 2011–12 academic year.

One future project that we will soon deliver is real-time PC availability information for all open access and Directed Learning rooms to screens at the entrance to each LRC. This information is something that students have said that they would find useful and should help alleviate pressure on access to PCs at peak times.The open access computers (approx 175 at each campus) had a major upgrade in the summer (2010) with a change of operating system from XP to Windows 7. There have also been substantial software upgrades so that each computer has; any Video Convertor, Endnote X4, Inspiration 9, Internet Explorer 8, Live Messenger, Spellex and SPSS 18.