Out of this world

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first flight into space. Gagarin became the first man in space when he orbited the Earth in Vostok 1 on the 12th April 1961. You can find out more about the Russian cosmonaut and the history of space exploration through Oxford Reference Online, a comprehensive collection of reference material that's accessible from one database.

Gagarin's flight paved the way for human space travel, but how did people feel about it at the time? We've got a database that can help with that question! You can step back in time to see contemporary news footage of Yuri's 1961 visit to the UK on NewsFilm Online. For an up-to-date perspective on the mission, try Newsbank, which lets you search and read hundreds of archived and current newspaper issues from all over the UK.

If you'd like to know more about any of these resources, please ask a librarian.

Need a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia?

Have you checked out Oxford Reference Online yet? It’s a collection of dictionaries and reference works which is accessible at any time from the database pages of the SMU Library website. It’s perfect for finding reliable information about people, places and events. For instance, if you’d like to know more about Winston Churchill (whose birthday it is today), a Quick Search of Oxford Reference Online finds entries from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, A Dictionary of Political Biography and the Oxford Companion to Military History among many other results.

It’s not just history buffs who will find this database useful. Oxford Reference Online has reference books for science, art, literature, computing, business, social sciences... The list goes on! And for the linguists out there, Oxford Reference Online includes language dictionaries for Welsh, French, Spanish, German, Irish and Latin, plus a number of English language dictionaries. So, if you’d like to know what a “logophile” is, try the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. (Go on, look it up!)