Over 22,000 items in the Repository!
This week the University reached another milestone – with over 22,000 items now in the institutional repository! The majority of these items are freely available to view and download, free of paywalls and other barriers to access, some following embargo periods. Currently the repository is home to over 6,700 theses, over 13,000 journal articles, 60 books, over 400 chapters, as well as hundreds of reports, conference items and working papers.
All the research held in the repository is connected to the University of St Andrews, and provides a unique fusion of current cutting edge research at the University, as well as historic outputs dating back as far as 1873.
The 22,000th item was ‘Khipus, khipu boards and sacred texts: toward a philology of Andean knotted cords’ a recently published article by Sabine Hyland and Sarah Bennison from the Department of Social Anthropology and William P. Hyland from the School of Divinity.
The article concerns khipus – knotted cords that were used for over a thousand years in South America as a form of written communication and record keeping. “Khipus (also quipus) were composed of multicolored cords made of cotton or animal fiber, many of which have knots indicating numbers in a base-ten system” (http://doi.org/10.25222/larr.1032). Specifically the article looks at ‘khipu boards’ which offer a hybrid between traditional khipus and more modern alphabetic texts.
“In a khipu board, which is a kind of post-Inka khipu, single multicolored khipu cords pass through small holes in a wooden tablet rather than being tied to a top cord. The khipu board, also called a padrón or entablo, consisted of a board covered with a sheet of paper on which were written the names of individuals. Next to each name was a hole out of which hung a khipu cord associated with the person” (http://doi.org/10.25222/larr.1032).
If you want to read more about khipu boards, why not give it a read. The article was published in the Latin American Research Review, a fully open access journal published by Ubiquity Press, so anyone can read, download, and share the article via the publisher’s site (http://doi.org/10.25222/larr.1032) or from the repository (http://hdl.handle.net/10023/23401).