Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
Helsinki
Helsinki is the capital and most populous city of Finland. Located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, it is the seat of the region of Uusimaa in southern Finland, has a population of 650,058; the city's urban area has a population of 1,268,296, making it by far the most populous urban area in Finland as well as the country's most important center for politics, finance and research. Helsinki is located 80 kilometres north of Tallinn, Estonia, 400 km east of Stockholm, 390 km west of Saint Petersburg, Russia, it has close historical ties with these three cities. Together with the cities of Espoo and Kauniainen, surrounding commuter towns, Helsinki forms the Greater Helsinki metropolitan area, which has a population of nearly 1.5 million. Considered to be Finland's only metropolis, it is the world's northernmost metro area with over one million people as well as the northernmost capital of an EU member state. After Stockholm and Oslo, Helsinki is the third largest municipality in the Nordic countries.
The city is served by the international Helsinki Airport, located in the neighboring city of Vantaa, with frequent service to many destinations in Europe and Asia. Helsinki was the World Design Capital for 2012, the venue for the 1952 Summer Olympics, the host of the 52nd Eurovision Song Contest. Helsinki has one of the highest urban standards of living in the world. In 2011, the British magazine Monocle ranked Helsinki the world's most liveable city in its liveable cities index. In the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2016 liveability survey, Helsinki was ranked ninth among 140 cities. According to a theory presented in the 1630s, settlers from Hälsingland in central Sweden had arrived to what is now known as the Vantaa River and called it Helsingå, which gave rise to the names of Helsinge village and church in the 1300s; this theory is questionable, because dialect research suggests that the settlers arrived from Uppland and nearby areas. Others have proposed the name as having been derived from the Swedish word helsing, an archaic form of the word hals, referring to the narrowest part of a river, the rapids.
Other Scandinavian cities at similar geographic locations were given similar names at the time, e.g. Helsingør in Denmark and Helsingborg in Sweden; when a town was founded in Forsby village in 1548, it was named Helsinge fors, "Helsinge rapids". The name refers to the Vanhankaupunginkoski rapids at the mouth of the river; the town was known as Helsinge or Helsing, from which the contemporary Finnish name arose. Official Finnish Government documents and Finnish language newspapers have used the name Helsinki since 1819, when the Senate of Finland moved itself into the city from Turku; the decrees issued in Helsinki were dated with Helsinki as the place of issue. This is; as part of the Grand Duchy of Finland in the Russian Empire, Helsinki was known as Gelsingfors in Russian. In Helsinki slang, the city is called Stadi. Hesa, is not used by natives of the city. Helsset is the Northern Sami name of Helsinki. In the Iron Age the area occupied by present day Helsinki was inhabited by Tavastians, they used the area for fishing and hunting, but due to a lack of archeological finds it is difficult to say how extensive their settlements were.
Pollen analysis has shown that there were cultivating settlements in the area in the 10th century and surviving historical records from the 14th century describe Tavastian settlements in the area. Swedes colonized the coastline of the Helsinki region in the late 13th century after the successful Second Crusade to Finland, which led to the defeat of the Tavastians. Helsinki was established as a trading town by King Gustav I of Sweden in 1550 as the town of Helsingfors, which he intended to be a rival to the Hanseatic city of Reval. In order to populate his newly founded town, the King issued an order to resettle the bourgeoisie of Porvoo, Ekenäs, Rauma and Ulvila into the town. Little came of the plans as Helsinki remained a tiny town plagued by poverty and diseases; the plague of 1710 killed the greater part of the inhabitants of Helsinki. The construction of the naval fortress Sveaborg in the 18th century helped improve Helsinki's status, but it was not until Russia defeated Sweden in the Finnish War and annexed Finland as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in 1809 that the town began to develop into a substantial city.
Russians besieged the Sveaborg fortress during the war, about one quarter of the town was destroyed in an 1808 fire. Russian Emperor Alexander I of Russia moved the Finnish capital from Turku to Helsinki in 1812 to reduce Swedish influence in Finland, to bring the capital closer to Saint Petersburg. Following the Great Fire of Turku in 1827, the Royal Academy of Turku, which at the time was the country's only university, was relocated to Helsinki and became the modern University of Helsinki; the move helped set it on a path of continuous growth. This transformation is apparent in the downtown core, rebuilt in the neoclassical style to resemble Saint Petersburg to a plan by the German-born architect C. L. Engel; as elsewhere, technological advancements such as railroads and industrialization were key factors behind the city's growth. Despite the tumultuous nature of Finnish history during the first half of the 20th century, Helsinki continued its steady development. A landmark e
Finns
Finns or Finnish people are a Finnic ethnic group native to Finland. Finns are traditionally divided into smaller regional groups that span several countries adjacent to Finland, both those who are native to these countries as well as those who have resettled; some of these may be classified as separate ethnic groups, rather than subgroups of Finns. These include the Kvens and Forest Finns in Norway, the Tornedalians in Sweden, the Ingrian Finns in Russia. Finnish, the language spoken by most Finnic people, is related to other Finnic languages, e.g. Estonian and Karelian; the Finnic languages are a subgroup of the larger Uralic family of languages, which includes Hungarian. These languages are markedly different from most other languages spoken in Europe, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. Native Finns can be divided according to dialect into subgroups sometimes called heimo, although such divisions have become less important due to internal migration. Today, there are 6–7 million ethnic Finns and their descendants worldwide, with majority of them living in their native Finland and the surrounding countries, namely Sweden and Norway.
An overseas Finnish diaspora has long been established in the countries of the Americas and Oceania, with the population of immigrant background, namely Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The Population Register Centre maintains information on the birthplace and mother tongue of the people living in Finland, but does not categorize any as Finns by ethnicity; the majority of people living in the Republic of Finland consider Finnish to be their first language. According to Statistics Finland, of the country's total population of 5,503,297 at the end of 2016, 88.3% considered Finnish to be their native language. It is not known how many of the ethnic Finns living outside Finland speak Finnish as their first language. In addition to the Finnish-speaking inhabitants of Finland, the Kvens, the Tornedalians, the Karelians in the historic Finnish province of Karelia and Evangelical Lutheran Ingrian Finns, as well as Finnish expatriates in various countries, are Finnic people. Finns have been traditionally divided into sub-groups along regional, dialectical or ethnographical lines.
These subgroups include the people of Finland Proper, Tavastia, Savo and Ostrobothnia. These sub-groups express regional self-identity with significance. There are a number of distinct dialects of the Finnish language spoken in Finland, although the exclusive use of the standard Finnish —both in its formal written and more casual spoken form—in Finnish schools, in the media, in popular culture, along with internal migration and urbanization, have diminished the use of regional varieties since the middle of the 20th century. There were three dialects: the South-Western and Karelian; these and neighboring languages mixed with each other in various ways as the population spread out, evolved into the Southern Ostrobothnian, Central Ostrobothnian, Northern Ostrobothnian, Far-Northern and South-Eastern aka South Karelian dialects. The Sweden Finns have emigrated from Finland to Sweden. An estimated 450,000 first- or second-generation immigrants from Finland live in Sweden, of which half speak Finnish.
The majority moved from Finland to Sweden following the Second World War, taking advantage of the expanding Swedish economy. This emigration has been declining since. There is a native Finnish-speaking minority in Sweden, the Tornedalians in the border area in the extreme north of Sweden; the Finnish language has official status as one of five minority languages in Sweden, but only in the five northernmost municipalities in Sweden. The term Finns is used for other Finnic peoples, including Izhorians in Ingria, Karelians in Karelia and Veps in the former Veps National Volost, all in Russia. Among these groups, the Karelians is the most populous one, followed by the Ingrians. According to a 2002 census, it was found that Ingrians identify with Finnish ethnic identity, referring to themselves as Ingrian Finns; the Finnish term for Finns is suomalaiset. It is a matter of debate how best to designate the Finnish-speakers of Sweden, all of whom have migrated to Sweden from Finland. Terms used include Sweden Finns and Finnish Swedes, with a distinction always made between more recent Finnish immigrants, most of whom have arrived after World War II, Tornedalians, who have lived along what is now the Swedish-Finnish border since the 15th century.
The term "Finn" also has the meaning "a member of a people speaking Finnish or a Finnic language". Historical references to Northern Europe are scarce, the names given to its peoples and geographic regions are obscure; such names as Fenni, Phinnoi and Skrithfinni / Scridefinnum appear in a few written texts starting from about two millennia ago in association with peoples located in a northern part of Europe, but the real meaning of these terms is debatable. The ear
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". It is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books; the project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on any computer. As of 23 June 2018, Project Gutenberg reached 57,000 items in its collection of free eBooks; the releases are available in plain text but, wherever possible, other formats are included, such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, Plucker. Most releases are in the English language, but many non-English works are available. There are multiple affiliated projects that are providing additional content, including regional and language-specific works. Project Gutenberg is closely affiliated with Distributed Proofreaders, an Internet-based community for proofreading scanned texts. Project Gutenberg was started by Michael Hart in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.
Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. Through friendly operators, he received an account with a unlimited amount of computer time. Hart has said he wanted to "give back" this gift by doing something that could be considered to be of great value, his initial goal was to make the 10,000 most consulted books available to the public at little or no charge, to do so by the end of the 20th century. This particular computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. Hart believed that computers would one day be accessible to the general public and decided to make works of literature available in electronic form for free, he used a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence in his backpack, this became the first Project Gutenberg e-text. He named the project after Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century German printer who propelled the movable type printing press revolution.
By the mid-1990s, Hart was running Project Gutenberg from Illinois Benedictine College. More volunteers had joined the effort. All of the text was entered manually until 1989 when image scanners and optical character recognition software improved and became more available, which made book scanning more feasible. Hart came to an arrangement with Carnegie Mellon University, which agreed to administer Project Gutenberg's finances; as the volume of e-texts increased, volunteers began to take over the project's day-to-day operations that Hart had run. Starting in 2004, an improved online catalog made Project Gutenberg content easier to browse and hyperlink. Project Gutenberg is now hosted by ibiblio at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Italian volunteer Pietro Di Miceli developed and administered the first Project Gutenberg website and started the development of the Project online Catalog. In his ten years in this role, the Project web pages won a number of awards being featured in "best of the Web" listings, contributing to the project's popularity.
Hart died on 6 September 2011 at his home in Urbana, Illinois at the age of 64. In 2000, a non-profit corporation, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, Inc. was chartered in Mississippi, United States to handle the project's legal needs. Donations to it are tax-deductible. Long-time Project Gutenberg volunteer Gregory Newby became the foundation's first CEO. In 2000, Charles Franks founded Distributed Proofreaders, which allowed the proofreading of scanned texts to be distributed among many volunteers over the Internet; this effort increased the number and variety of texts being added to Project Gutenberg, as well as making it easier for new volunteers to start contributing. DP became affiliated with Project Gutenberg in 2002; as of 2018, the 36,000+ DP-contributed books comprised two-thirds of the nearly 57,000 books in Project Gutenberg. In August 2003, Project Gutenberg created a CD containing 600 of the "best" e-books from the collection; the CD is available for download as an ISO image.
When users are unable to download the CD, they can request to have a copy sent to them, free of charge. In December 2003, a DVD was created containing nearly 10,000 items. At the time, this represented the entire collection. In early 2004, the DVD became available by mail. In July 2007, a new edition of the DVD was released containing over 17,000 books, in April 2010, a dual-layer DVD was released, containing nearly 30,000 items; the majority of the DVDs, all of the CDs mailed by the project, were recorded on recordable media by volunteers. However, the new dual layer DVDs were manufactured, as it proved more economical than having volunteers burn them; as of October 2010, the project has mailed 40,000 discs. As of 2017, the delivery of free CDs has been discontinued, though the ISO image is still available for download; as of August 2015, Project Gutenberg claimed over 57,000 items in its collection, with an average of over 50 new e-books being added each week. These are works of literature from the Western cultural tradition.
In addition to literature such as novels, short stories and drama, Project Gutenberg has cookbooks, reference works and issues of periodicals. The Project Gutenberg collection has a few non-text items such as audio files and music-notation files. Most releases are in English, but there are significant numbers in many other languages; as of April 2016, the non-English languages most represented are: Fren
Leonard Hobhouse
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse was a British liberal political theorist and sociologist, considered one of the leading and earliest proponents of social liberalism. His works, culminating in his famous book Liberalism, occupy a seminal position within the canon of New Liberalism, he worked both as an academic and a journalist, played a key role in the establishment of sociology as an academic discipline. He was the founder and first editor of The Sociological Review, his sister was the British welfare activist. Hobhouse was born in St Ive, near Liskeard in Cornwall, the son of Reginald Hobhouse, an Anglican clergyman, Caroline Trelawny, he attended Marlborough College before reading Greats at Corpus Christi College, where he graduated with a first-class degree in 1887. Upon his graduation, Hobhouse remained at Oxford as a prize fellow at Merton College before becoming a full fellow at Corpus Christi. Taking a break from academia between 1897 and 1907, Hobhouse worked as a journalist and as the secretary of a trade union.
In 1907, Hobhouse returned to academia, accepting the newly created chair of sociology at the University of London where he remained until his death in 1929. Hobhouse was an atheist from an early age, despite his father being an Archdeacon, he believed that rational tests could be applied to values and that they could be self-consistent and objective. Hobhouse was never religious, he wrote in 1883 that he was "in politics... a firm radical. In religion... an agnostic." In terms of his political and philosophical views, Hobhouse was Gladstonian, a devoted follower of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, an admirer of Morley and Dilke. These influences him to various feminist and secularist political stances, he proposed republican and democratic motions at debating societies while at school. Hobhouse was important in underpinning the turn-of-the-century'New Liberal' movement of the Liberal Party under leaders like H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George, he distinguished between property held'for use' and property held'for power'.
Governmental co-operation with trade unions could therefore be justified as helping to counter the structural disadvantage of employees in terms of power. He theorised that property was acquired not only by individual effort but by societal organisation. Wealth had a social dimension; this means that those who had property owe some of their success to society and thus had some obligation to others. This, he believed, provides theoretical justification for a level of redistribution provided by the new state pensions. Hobhouse disliked Marxist socialism, describing his own position as liberal socialism and as social liberalism. Hobhouse occupies a important place in the intellectual history of the Liberal Democrats because of this, his work presents a positive vision of liberalism in which the purpose of liberty is to enable individuals to develop, not that freedom is good in itself. Hobhouse said that coercion should be avoided not because we have no regard for other peoples' well-being, but because coercion is ineffective at improving their lot.
While rejecting the practical doctrines of classical liberalism like laissez-faire, Hobhouse praised the work of earlier classical liberals like Richard Cobden in dismantling an archaic order of society and older forms of coercion. Hobhouse believed that one of the defining characteristics of liberalism was its emancipatory character, something that he believed ran constant from classical liberalism to the social liberalism he advocated, he emphasised the various forms of coercion existing in society apart from government. Therefore, he proposed that, to promote liberty, the state must ameliorate other forms of social coercion. Hobhouse held out hope that Liberals and what would now be called the social democrat tendency in the nascent Labour party could form a grand progressive coalition. Hobhouse was disappointed that fellow collectivists in Britain at the time tended to be imperialists. Hobhouse opposed the Boer war and his sister, Emily Hobhouse, did much to draw attention to the abject conditions in the concentration camps established by the British Army in South Africa.
Opposing the First World War, he came to support the war effort. He was an internationalist and disliked the pursuit of British national interests as practised by the governments of the day. During the war Hobhouse criticised the British Idealists such as Bernard Bosanquet in his book The Philosophical Theory of the State for being Hegelians and therefore Germanizers; the Labour Movement reprinted 1912 Theory of Knowledge: a contribution to some problems of logic and metaphysics Mind in Evolution Democracy and Reaction Morals in Evolution: a study in comparative ethics in two volumes Liberalism Social Evolution and Political Theory Development and Purpose The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples The Metaphysical Theory of the State: a criticism The Rational Good: a study in the logic of practice The Elements of Social Justice Social Development: its nature and conditions Sociology and Philosophy: a centenary collection of essays and articles A. DE SANCTIS, Leonard T. Hobhouse: libero scambio e giustizia sociale, CET, Firenze, 2014 Quotations related to Leonard Hobhouse at Wikiquote Works written by or about Leonard
Finland
Finland the Republic of Finland, is a country in Northern Europe bordering the Baltic Sea, Gulf of Bothnia, Gulf of Finland, between Norway to the north, Sweden to the northwest, Russia to the east. Finland is situated in the geographical region of Fennoscandia; the capital and largest city is Helsinki. Other major cities are Espoo, Tampere and Turku. Finland's population is 5.52 million, the majority of the population is concentrated in the southern region. 88.7% of the population is Finnish and speaks Finnish, a Uralic language unrelated to the Scandinavian languages. Finland is the eighth-largest country in Europe and the most sparsely populated country in the European Union; the sovereign state is a parliamentary republic with a central government based in the capital city of Helsinki, local governments in 311 municipalities, one autonomous region, the Åland Islands. Over 1.4 million people live in the Greater Helsinki metropolitan area, which produces one third of the country's GDP. Finland was inhabited when the last ice age ended 9000 BCE.
The first settlers left behind artefacts that present characteristics shared with those found in Estonia and Norway. The earliest people were hunter-gatherers; the first pottery appeared in 5200 BCE. The arrival of the Corded Ware culture in southern coastal Finland between 3000 and 2500 BCE may have coincided with the start of agriculture; the Bronze Age and Iron Age were characterised by extensive contacts with other cultures in the Fennoscandian and Baltic regions and the sedentary farming inhabitation increased towards the end of Iron Age. At the time Finland had three main cultural areas – Southwest Finland and Karelia – as reflected in contemporary jewellery. From the late 13th century, Finland became an integral part of Sweden through the Northern Crusades and the Swedish part-colonisation of coastal Finland, a legacy reflected in the prevalence of the Swedish language and its official status. In 1809, Finland was incorporated into the Russian Empire as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland.
In 1906, Finland became the first European state to grant all adult citizens the right to vote, the first in the world to give all adult citizens the right to run for public office. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, Finland declared itself independent. In 1918, the fledgling state was divided by civil war, with the Bolshevik-leaning Red Guard supported by the new Soviet Russia, fighting the White Guard, supported by the German Empire. After a brief attempt to establish a kingdom, the country became a republic. During World War II, the Soviet Union sought to occupy Finland, with Finland losing parts of Karelia, Kuusamo and some islands, but retaining their independence. Finland established an official policy of neutrality; the Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1948 gave the Soviet Union some leverage in Finnish domestic politics during the Cold War era. Finland joined the OECD in 1969, the NATO Partnership for Peace in 1994, the European Union in 1995, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council in 1997, the Eurozone at its inception, in 1999.
Finland was a relative latecomer to industrialisation, remaining a agrarian country until the 1950s. After World War II, the Soviet Union demanded war reparations from Finland not only in money but in material, such as ships and machinery; this forced Finland to industrialise. It developed an advanced economy while building an extensive welfare state based on the Nordic model, resulting in widespread prosperity and one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Finland is a top performer in numerous metrics of national performance, including education, economic competitiveness, civil liberties, quality of life, human development. In 2015, Finland was ranked first in the World Human Capital and the Press Freedom Index and as the most stable country in the world during 2011–2016 in the Fragile States Index, second in the Global Gender Gap Report, it ranked first on the World Happiness Report report for 2018 and 2019. A large majority of Finns are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, freedom of religion is guaranteed under the Finnish Constitution.
The earliest written appearance of the name Finland is thought to be on three runestones. Two have the inscription finlonti; the third was found in Gotland. It dates back to the 13th century; the name can be assumed to be related to the tribe name Finns, mentioned at first known time AD 98. The name Suomi has uncertain origins, but a candidate for a source is the Proto-Baltic word *źemē, meaning "land". In addition to the close relatives of Finnish, this name is used in the Baltic languages Latvian and Lithuanian. Alternatively, the Indo-European word * gʰm-on "man" has been suggested; the word referred only to the province of Finland Proper, to the northern coast of Gulf of Finland, with northern regions such as Ostrobothnia still sometimes being excluded until later. Earlier theories suggested derivation from suomaa or suoniemi, but these are now considered outdated; some have suggested common etymology with saame and Häme, but that theory is uncertain
University of London
The University of London is a collegiate federal research university located in London, England. As of October 2018, the university contains 18 member institutions, central academic bodies and research institutes; the university has over 52,000 distance learning external students and 161,270 campus-based internal students, making it the largest university by number of students in the United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836, as a degree-awarding examination board for students holding certificates from University College London and King's College London and "other such other Institutions, corporate or unincorporated, as shall be established for the purpose of Education, whether within the Metropolis or elsewhere within our United Kingdom", allowing it to be one of three institutions to claim the title of the third-oldest university in England, moved to a federal structure in 1900, it is now incorporated by its fourth royal charter and governed by the University of London Act 1994.
It was the first university in the United Kingdom to introduce examinations for women in 1869 and, a decade the first to admit women to degrees. In 1948 it became the first British university to appoint a woman as its vice chancellor; the university's colleges house the oldest teaching hospitals in England. For most practical purposes, ranging from admissions to funding, the constituent colleges operate on an independent basis, with many awarding their own degrees whilst remaining in the federal university; the largest colleges by enrolment as of 2016/17 are UCL, King's College London, Queen Mary, the London School of Economics, Royal Holloway, Goldsmiths, each of which has over 9,000 students. Smaller, more specialist, colleges are the School of Oriental and African Studies, St George's, the Royal Veterinary College, London Business School, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the Royal Academy of Music, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Institute of Cancer Research.
Imperial College London was a member from 1907 before it became an independent university in 2007, Heythrop College was a member from 1970 until its closure in 2018. City is the most recent constituent college, having joined on 1 September 2016; as of 2015, there are around 2 million University of London alumni across the world, including 12 monarchs or royalty, 52 presidents or prime ministers, 84 Nobel laureates, 6 Grammy winners, 2 Oscar winners, 3 Olympic gold medalists and the "Father of the Nation" of several countries. University College London was founded under the name “London University” in 1826 as a secular alternative to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which limited their degrees to members of the established Church of England; as a result of the controversy surrounding UCL's establishment, King's College London was founded as an Anglican college by royal charter in 1829. In 1830, UCL applied for a royal charter as a university; this was rejected, but renewed in 1834. In response to this, opposition to "exclusive" rights grew among the London medical schools.
The idea of a general degree awarding body for the schools was discussed in the medical press. And in evidence taken by the Select Committee on Medical Education. However, the blocking of a bill to open up Oxford and Cambridge degrees to dissenters led to renewed pressure on the Government to grant degree awarding powers to an institution that would not apply religious tests as the degrees of the new University of Durham were to be closed to non-Anglicans. In 1835, the government announced the response to UCL's petition for a charter. Two charters would be issued, one to UCL incorporating it as a college rather than a university, without degree awarding powers, a second "establishing a Metropolitan University, with power to grant academical degrees to those who should study at the London University College, or at any similar institution which his Majesty might please hereafter to name". Following the issuing of its charter on 28 November 1836, the new University of London started drawing up regulations for degrees in March 1837.
The death of William IV in June, resulted in a problem – the charter had been granted "during our Royal will and pleasure", meaning it was annulled by the king's death. Queen Victoria issued a second charter on 5 December 1837; the university awarded its first degrees in 1839, all to King's College. The university established by the charters of 1836 and 1837 was an examining board with the right to award degrees in arts and medicine. However, the university did not have the authority to grant degrees in theology, considered the senior faculty in the other three English universities. In medicine, the university was given the right to determine which medical schools provided sufficient medical training. In arts and law, by contrast, it would examine students from UCL, King's College, or any other school or college granted a royal warrant giving the government control of which colleges could affiliate to the university. Beyond the right to submit students for examination, there was no other connection between the affiliated colleges and the university.
In 1849 the university held its first graduation ceremony at Somerset House following a petition to the senate from the graduates, who had received their degrees without any ceremony. About 250 students graduated at this ceremony; the London academic robes of this period were distinguished by their "rich velvet facings". The list of affiliated colleges g
