I am pleased to share that Helen Townsend has been appointed to the fixed term Research Assistant (UC150) role.

Helen is a UC graduate, with experience in digitising herbarium plant specimens held at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The research assistant role reports to Canterbury University Press, with a dotted line to the Macmillan Brown Library. Helen will spend a lot of time in Macmillan Brown, sourcing images for the UC150 history and associated website.

Helen will start on 28 February. When you’re next over at MB, do make sure to say hello.

Fiona T

The ELS team (including casual staff) will no longer be working in bubbles from today, Monday 14 March.

The reasons for this include:

• The split roster caused a number of significant workflow issues for the ELS team.
• Moving back to the normal roster allows flexibility for some members of the ELS to work some hours from home
• The change in governmental definitions of close and casuals contacts has reduced the potential impact of isolation on keeping the libraries open (thereby reducing the need to split staffing across bubbles).

Other library teams can stay working in bubbles if that best suits them. Note that it is helpful for staff to work from home, if they can, to reduce staff numbers on site. Each manager will discuss with their team any potential changes to current working bubbles.

One of the features of this Omicron outbreak has been a lot of change as we adapt our approach to the situation, changes in government approach and so on. This change to bubble arrangements has been made in response to staff feedback.  Nonetheless, this may be unsettling as there are a wide range of perspectives across the library team.  If you have concerns, please don’t hesitate to discuss with your manager.

The library intends to retire Counterculture eventually, in favour of the Library All Staff Team on Microsoft Teams. Some reasons for this include:

• Reducing the number of platforms we are using for communications
• All staff, including casuals, can be added to a Teams channels whereas currently casual staff are only able to access Counterculture on shared PCs.
• Instant communication for urgent messages (depending on people’s notification settings)
• The expected retirement of Counterculture’s WordPress platform at UC

However, the formal replacement of Counterculture with Teams is going to be delayed until after the Omicron surge. The reasons for this include:

• Continuity in communication channels during this period of uncertainty and change
• To give us all more time to get used to using Teams

Some staff have already started posting content to the General channel on the Team. This is a great channel for casual communications but will not be the replacement for Counterculture.

The plan is to use the Bulletin app on the Library All Staff Team and work is underway to ensure that posts will be archived/searchable, as well as develop some posting guidelines for staff who have not used this app before.

In the meantime, please keep posting to and regularly checking Counterculture for content that all library staff need to see. Casual content can continue to be shared on the Team’s general channel as this is a good opportunity to experiment with Teams. The ‘go live’ date for Teams and ‘retirement’ date for Counterculture will be announced on Counterculture in a few weeks. At that point, the expectation is all staff will post to and regularly check the All Library Staff Team.

Finally – we need a better name than “All Library Staff”! Please send your suggestions to Jenny Owens or myself by March 17. Following a staff poll, the person who suggests the winning name receives a chocolate fish and bragging rights.

Fiona

We are gradually doing more and more of our work via Teams, and with that comes more notifications. If you’re finding the notifications overwhelming, read on for how to adjust your notifications to best suit your needs.

If you like getting this kind of information via video, try this resource

If you’re a words and pictures persons, read on:

Click on the 3 dots in the right hand corner and select Settings:

Select Notifications, and then make the changes you would like for email notification, appearance and sound, channel notifications and chat.

You’ll notice I’ve turned all email notifications off, but you can tailor to your preferences.

When you adjust the Teams and Channels notifications, you might wonder what the difference is between banner and feed notifications.

• A banner notification will pop up in the right hand corner of your desktop, whether you’re in the Teams app or not.
• A feed notification will only be visible in the Activity section when you go into Teams (top left hand corner).

Hope this is helpful for stemming the notification tide.

Nā Fiona

Yesterday I attended a workshop exploring the experience of postgraduate students at UC and looking at how we can better support them. The workshop organisers reported on initial discussions with postgraduate students and I’m pleased to share the library was mentioned twice in ‘Things that are working”:

• “Advertising from library (e.g. events)”
• “Library resources are amazing – like the online workshops”.

This is great feedback and testament to the hard work of everyone, across the library,  in supporting our students.  Ka mau te wehi!

Library managers have developed the following service framework for the red traffic light phases. This post clarifies principles and how to prioritize our services during the Omicron outbreak. 

Note that these phases are those determined by the University, not the Government phases. As of writing, UC is in phase one and SMT have not communicated an intention to move phases. While we are officially still in Phase 1, from Monday 28 February library teams will officially be working in two teams (aka bubbles) to cover the week.

Service Framework in the 3 Phases

Principles for Prioritisation of Services

1. The library’s priority is to maintain the services that have the most impact on students: study spaces, teaching, learning support (AskLIVE, 1-1 support, information resource accessibility).
2. The situation is fluid so it is not possible to priority rank each library service, as it depends on the reason the service is being requested.
3. We all need to be flexible, prioritising our work tasks by what will have the most impact on students.

Examples of Prioritisation

• Responding to student queries and maintaining study spaces is a higher priority than marketing activities.
• Document delivery requests for teaching and learning by UC staff/students are a higher priority than supplying interloans to other institutions.
• Supporting ELS in keeping libraries and AskLIVE open is a higher priority than supplying research services.
• Keeping the libraries open and responding to enquiries is a higher priority than collection and project work.
• Resolving access issues is a higher priority than long-term accessibility improvement work.
• Digitisation requests for LEARN are a higher priority than book ordering and long-term digitisation work.

With Gabrielle Faith’s resignation last year and Caroline Syddall moving to the Pacific Library Liaison role , there were two vacant positions at MB. Following feedback from the MB tīma, research into consultation/teaching statistics, discussion with library managers, and consultation with the TEU, the Research Services Librarian role will reduce to 0.5 (from 0.8) and the Library Assistant role will be reconfigured as a 0.8 Co-ordinator role.

The Research Services Librarian role is decreasing because the Pasifika support and line management components have been removed. The co-ordinator role will pick up the line management aspect.

The Research Services Librarian role has been merged with Damian Cairns’s Special Collections Librarian role, creating a role entitled Research Services Librarian, Macmillan Brown Library. This effectively changes Damian’s subject specialty from Science to New Zealand history. This change allows the Pasifika support component of the original Research Services Librarian role to be reallocated to the Learning, Teaching and Research Team to better support the Library’s and the University’s strategic goals to improve support of Pasifika students and Pasifika research.

Damian’s reporting line changes to reporting solely to the Manager, Cultural Heritage and Macmillan Brown Library and he will be based full time in the Macmillan Brown Library from Monday 16 February.

I am very happy to announce that Sarah Johnston will be covering the Kaitakawaenga Māori role for two days a week while Jemma Wiki is also working on He Kupenga Horopounamu. Sarah’s first day was Tuesday 7 February.

Sarah is tentatively scheduled to cover Monday to Tuesday but this may change with bubbles and so on.  As Sarah and Jemma will work closely together to cover the Kaitakawaenga Māori mahi please in the first instance direct referrals from students to them both.

Kia ora koutou, welcome to Inside Out #14

UC150 Celebrations

UC turns 150 in 2023 and as part of the celebrations a social history of the University of Canterbury is being produced. Currently being written by historian John Wilson, it will be published by Canterbury University Press and include images from Macmillan Brown Library collections. There is a fixed term opportunity for a research assistant to support with the sourcing, selection and showcasing of images of UC past and present in the Macmillan Brown Library collections.

The Macmillan Brown Library tīma is also working on a project to showcase 150 taonga from the UC Library Collections. At the moment we’re brainstorming items from the collections and particular themes that will structure the collection of 150 items. We’re envisaging creating social media content and print collateral to share these taonga.  We’ve in the initial planning stages and will have more to share on this soon. If there are particular collection items that you think would be good to showcase, please share them with me!

CONZUL Strategy

CONZUL (aka The Council of New Zealand University Librarians) has recently released its strategic priorities, which you can find here: https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/sites/default/files/uni-nz/CONZUL%20Strategic%20Priorities.pdf. Many of these goals align with our work here at UC, with a numbers of goals under four stands: Kotahitanga, He Tāngata Rawe, Sustainable Access, and Open Scholarship. If you’re interested to know more about CONZUL, including its membership, you can find more details here: https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/about-universities-new-zealand/unz-committees-and-working-groups/council-new-zealand-university

Open textbooks

UC Puna is starting to gain traction with our open textbook advocacy, and we currently are supporting the creation of two original open textbooks and one adaptation of an open textbook.  We have a budget for supporting open textbooks and to ensure that our funding is perceived as equitable and transparent, we are setting up a process for academics to apply for funding, including criteria on which applications will be judged (similar to the existing open access fund). This will be available online and shared when it is ready. Other exciting news in open textbooks, is that UC Puna has officially joined the CAUL OER Collective (Details about this collective are here: https://www.caul.edu.au/programs-projects/enabling-modern-curriculum/oer-collective). We are expecting that we will be able to publish the three open textbooks we’re supporting on the Pressbooks platforms through this collective, and hopefully many more to come.

Ngā Hau e Whā o Tāwhirimātea

Kia hiwa ra, kia hiwa ra! Our hoamahi Lisa Davies has co-edited a book with a number of our esteemed academic colleagues in the College of Education on culturally responsive teaching practice in the tertiary sector. Edited by Matiu Tai Rātima, Jennifer Pearl Smith, Angus Hikairo Macfarlane, Nathan Mahikai Riki, Kay-Lee Jones, and Lisa, Ngā Hau e Whā o Tāwhirimātea: Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning for the Tertiary Sector is a guide for adopting a Kaupapa Māori approach to teacher/learner relationships. is published by Canterbury University Press, available for purchase in print and will be available open access online in the next few days. Ngā mihi nui Lisa!

Macmillan Brown Library is changing its daily opening hours slightly for the duration of the Red Traffic Light setting from Tuesday 8 February.

Old hours: 8:30am-5pm

New hours: 9am-5pm

This change is to make rostering easier with bubbles. MB will return to the old hours when we leave the red traffic light setting.