Thank you for all your lovely messages of welcome. I am thrilled to be back at Canterbury in my new role as Academic Liaison Manager. My office is on level 3 of the James Hight building and my regular office hours will be 8.00 – 4.00. I’m looking forward to meeting with the team so that I can be useful as the busy first term approaches and as we plan for further development of the Liaison Librarian service.
It seems like not time at all has passed since I left, except that I missed all of the disruption of 2010 that you have all lived through. For the last year I have been working at Plant and Food Research Limited, a Crown Research Institute at Lincoln. It was very exciting being an integrated member of science teams and business teams in their pursuit of patentable new knowledge or to solve problems for New Zealand’s seafood and plant food industries. I worked as one of 5 Knowledge Navigators serving 11 regional research centres situated throughout New Zealand close to client industries and growers. For example the wine research centre in Blenheim, Seafood in Nelson and Pip Fruit in Clyde etc. I really enjoyed visiting the research centres and hearing about the science conducted at each of them. In turn I offered competitive intelligence, EndNote support, database and patent searching and advised on information sources and information management techniques. There was a lot of interest in tools for collaboration such as SharePoint, in data mapping and visualisation tools and in RSS for current awareness.
A particular highlight for me was when a team of bioresource engineers made a breakthrough in the lab. An excited delegation of scientists wearing white lab coats and safety glasses burst into my office reverentially bearing a grey glob of something in a petri dish. After a thorough patent and literature search it seemed that they may indeed have come up with a novel material which would be very desirable in the food processing industry. The manufacturer for whom the research was being conducted expects to go into production – not of grey globs but some very useful thing that it will be made into but which I cannot reveal – and to have these things in supermarkets later this year.
Based on my very positive experience in a commercial research environment I am enthusiastic about the role of Liaison Librarians and the very real value they add to the teaching, learning and research here at the University of Canterbury. I am delighted to have such a highly skilled team of librarians to work with.