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interactive language learning
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About this collection
 

This collection contains 6125 pieces of proficient assessed PhD student writing from disciplinary areas of the Life Sciences. It is a sub-collection of the PhD thesis abstracts collections in FLAX and is derived from the EThOS Open Access toolkit, which is made available by the British Library for reuse by third parties for not-for-profit purposes. The copyright remains with the authors of the PhD theses unless otherwise stated in the licensing information provided by EThOS.

The PhD Abstracts Collections in FLAX provide interactive open text analysis tools for investigating the lexico-grammar of academic English at the text and corpus level. The user interfaces of these tools have been designed specifically for learners and teachers so that the abstracts in these collections can easily be browsed by specific academic subject areas. Furthermore, the PhD Abstract Collections are augmented with larger corpora, including the British National Corpus and the Wikipedia Collocation Learning System in FLAX, for a more powerful and integrated authentic language learning experience.

EThOS at the British Library uses the Dewey Decimal Classification system, which organizes library materials by discipline or field of study. The main divisions of the Dewey Decimal Classification system include philosophy, social sciences, science, technology, and history. These main divisions fall within a scheme made up of ten classes, each divided into ten divisions, and each having ten sections. Here with the PhD Abstracts Collections in FLAX, abstracts are directed into one of four over-arching discipline divisions to make up the following sub-collections: Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences and Life Sciences. This Life Sciences collection in FLAX includes abstracts that have been classified into discipline sub-divisions from the 500 and 600 classes of the Dewey Decimal Classification system, specifically:

  • 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
  • 570 Biology
  • 580 Plants
  • 590 Animals (Zoology)
  • 610 Medicine and health
  • 630 Agriculture

Shaoqun Wu, Alannah Fitzgerald, Ian Witten and Chris Mansfield were recently awarded the runner-up prize in the 2016 British Library Labs Awards for their work with the PhD Abstracts Collections in the Teaching and Learning category for the reuse of digital content managed by the British Library.

Image: Paolozzi's sculpture "Newton" which draws upon William Blake's print Newton. The statue was commissioned for the British Library's new home in St Pancras, London. Licensed under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

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