Kōrero with Kat

Kia ora koutou

Daylight saving commences this weekend!  Remember to put your clocks forward one hour before you go to bed tomorrow night (having first watched the Wahs beat the Broncos, just saying). And somewhat topically, given the fire evacuation at PJH this morning, it’s also a good time to check your smoke alarms.

I’m back this week from a CAUL/CONZUL two-day meeting in Melbourne. I squeezed in a visit to Monash University’s Caulfield Library while there, and have a swag of images and insights to share. Will look for the nearest chance!

On the theme of sharing back from professional development experiences, we’ll have a raft of ‘share-backs’ to look forward to in due course, once our Rosalind Patrick recipients have availed themselves of various exciting professional development opportunities!  It was so impressive to see the variety and high quality of applications to this year’s award fund.  Ka pai to the recipients, who are:

  • Fiona Tyson – Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Institute: Heritage, Science, Research, Academic – Reconnecting the Whole (Wellington, November 2023)​
  • Jemma Wiki – International Indigenous Librarians Forum​ (IILF) (University of Hawai’i, November 2023)​
  • Lydia Baxendell – ‘Gloves On’ Symposium ​(Victoria University, Wellington, October 2023)​
  • Matthew Oram – New Zealand Photographers of Cultural Collections Forum​
    (Wellington, November 2023)​
  • Theresa Buller – Teaching the Teachers Conference for Law Librarians ​(Philadelphia, USA, May 2024)​

At the same awards ceremony, we also celebrated Long Service for a number of the team:

  • Anton Angelo – 10 years
  • Damian Cairns – 10 years
  • Beth Mannix – 15 years
  • Margaret Paterson – 15 years
  • Glenna Wong – 20 years
  • Sue Thompson – 20 years

We subsequently realised that we had inadvertently overlooked the 15 year anniversary for Swee Hoon Goh, so I’d like to take the opportunity to acknowledge this milestone achievement here.  We will celebrate properly Swee Hoon’s (by then) 16 years of Long Service, at next year’s award ceremony.

As always, it was great to come together in celebration over shared kai, to acknowledge and show appreciation for your dedicated mahi, and for your embracing of future development opportunities. Pictures of some of the recipients are posted here for posterity, thanks to the photographic brilliance of Isabella and Glenna!

In other good news, I’m delighted to share that the Library 2024 budget has been approved in terms of its overall envelope, and shows ongoing commitment to our full suite of services for the UC staff and student community.

And finally, I’d like to pay tribute to the stellar efforts of the team for Rā Tōmene initiatives earlier this month.  I really enjoyed reading the post here on Counterculture and commend the focus on relationship-building which underpinned this year’s engagement with our prospective student cohort for 2024.  Ngā mihi nui!

Mā te wā,
Kat

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