Kia ora koutou,
It’s my turn this week to write Inside Out, a fortnightly piece where each manager takes it in turns to write about happenings inside and outside of the Library from their perspective.
2022 packages
This has been a lot of work over the last couple of months for our team and I’m pleased to say we are almost there. Last week we reached agreements both parties can live with each with LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters. Apologies to those working in my vicinity in recent days with my sighing and muttering. We are very grateful to have the assistance of UC Procurement. The EBSCO database package is almost ready to be renewed and we are about to lock horns with ProQuest over their 2022 renewal proposal which currently does not meet with our approval. Now all the invoices are coming in so it’s all go.
Read and publish agreements
Tomorrow will feature the first CAUL webinar talking us through the new read and publish agreement with Cambridge. Details about inclusions, who is participating, information for authors and libraries etc were released by CAUL yesterday for the Cambridge package.
The four read and publish agreements negotiated by CAUL (Wiley, Springer, OUP and CUP) maintain our existing ‘read’ access and include a new benefit of open access publishing in hybrid journals (up to a cap). All publishers except Cambridge insisted on a cap which range from 75% (Springer) to 101% (Wiley) based on expected publishing output across the consortium. However this is provided at no extra cost (0% increase on our 2021 spend). Major negotiations CAUL is targeting in 2022 includes Elsevier, Taylor and Francis and SAGE.
2022 operational planning
Last week the managers did some reflection and environment scanning as we think ahead to our 2022 operational plan. One of the articles we considered was The higher education environment driving academic library strategy: A political, economic, social and technological (PEST) analysis. This gave us some helpful pointers for our discussion.
We acknowledged that a lot of what we might call our ‘business as usual’ contributes in many ways to our operational plan goals in support of the UC Strategy. This was a fresh and useful reminder for me as to how much work you all do that supports this.
On the 17th November we will meet again to create the plan. Next step will be communicating this to stakeholders and seeking feedback from our teams. The aim is to have our operational plan finalized by mid December.
Staff development
Within Access and Collections, some reflection for me has been becoming more intentional about moving into new and interesting areas of work as the nature of our work changes. With that in mind we are creating a staff development series over the summer within LAC to provide a range of sessions that hopefully will facilitate this. Ideally these would match to individual interest areas so as we look for fresh challenges or more development there are a range of topics to choose from and what areas staff would like to explore.
Microsoft 365 Teams and OneDrive
A number of us have been using Teams for a few weeks now. From next Monday 15th November Teams and OneDrive will be rolled out to all staff across UC. Teams is a collaboration space that brings together chat, video calls and documents. It’s likely to replace Skype and Zoom eventually, more instant messaging/chat and fewer emails, especially ones with attachments. Book into the 2 training sessions on offer which are being delivered online. More information in Tū ki te tahi.
An example of one of the things we’ll need to get our heads around at some point is what does this all mean from an information management perspective as Teams and OneDrive becomes another player in the file storage space. I’ll leave that meaty conversation for another day for now ..
Yay for the short week!
Tim