Check out the amazing entries to the 2021 Visualise Your Thesis competition (https://bit.ly/3w870hi)!

UC thesis students have created one minute presentations that explain their research project to a general audience. There are generous cash prizes on offer (more details on our website: https://bit.ly/3hlwDGe) and the first prize winner’s entry will also go into the international Visualise Your Thesis competition run by the University of Melbourne.

This year we are having a People’s Choice award and Stuart has made the excellent suggestion that we could have a viewing and voting afternoon tea!  So bring a cup of tea/coffee/milo to Poutama on Thursday 8 July at 2pm to check out the amazing research happening around campus and vote for your favourite:)

Sara Roberts, Lisa Davies and I have been working on a project over the last nine months on research into academic textbook practices.

I’m pleased to be able to share the final report for this project:

K:\Projects\Academics-Textbook-Research\AcademicPerspectivesTextbooksReport-2021.pdf

Our findings informed work being undertaken by the Subject Librarian team, including:

• Communicating to academics the issues the library is facing in textbook provision
• Promoting the adoption of open textbooks
• Supporting academics in adapting/creating open textbooks.

Visualise Your Thesis is back for 2021!

Important details:

• The competition officially opened yesterday and closes on the 13 June 2021.
• This year we’ve added a People’s Choice Award ($250).
• We’re offering drop-in sessions with tea/coffee & snacks so students can meet each other as well as get help
• All entries will be vetted before proceeding to judging panel, with contestants given the opportunity to fix technical errors (referencing, copyright breaches etc) that would otherwise lead to disqualification.

Kiera, Brian and I are looking forward to seeing the amazing entries students create this year.

If you would be interested in hearing the results of our survey of UC academics’ regarding their perspectives of textbooks, please come along to this presentation.

Thursday 14 January, 2-3pm, Poutama

You can book online so it’s goes in your calendar and everything:  https://canterbury.libcal.com/event/5295298

(Btw, the guide associated with the workshop was developed by Lisa Davies, Sue Thompson and myself. LibGuides has thus far thwarted my attempts to dilute my responsibility)

Sara Roberts, Lisa Davies and I are working on a research project with Dr Cheryl Brown  (Associate Professor in the CoEHHD) and Richard White (Copyright Manager at the University of Otago) to investigate academic perspectives of textbooks.

This project responds to earlier studies led by Cheryl (2019) and Richard (2017) which found that students struggle with the costs of textbooks and often make do without, with subsequent impact on their grades. It has also been precipitated by the dramatic rise in the cost for the library of purchasing e-textbooks, particularly evident during the COVID-19 lockdown, which is fast approaching a cost that we cannot sustain.

The goal of this research is twofold:

1. provide the UC Library with data that will enable us to plan and to make informed decisions about the provision of textbooks
2. to investigate the use of textbooks and open educational resources in New Zealand tertiary institutions

We invited academics from all New Zealand tertiary institutions to complete our survey and were very happy to have 210 complete responses. You can see the breakdown of these responses in terms of institution, discipline and teaching experience in the document for the last LLO meeting on the 13 October. (https://intranet.canterbury.ac.nz/library/LLOs/documents_llos.shtml)

We have also conducted a preliminary analysis of UC-specific data, the graphs of which were shared with IRWG and can be viewed on Sharepoint (https://ucshare.canterbury.ac.nz/kno/pum/pum002/Lists/Meeting%20agenda%20items/Short%20view.aspx) [Nb. These graphs will form the basis for an upcoming report but are very much draft versions with little explanation. I’m happy to discuss the data with anyone who is interested and we’ll be improving the graphs for the final report!]

‘Tis the month when we start counting down to the summer holidays, but still the marketing group is busy pushing out content and promoting the library.

An important piece of work is making sure our customers know about the shift to summer hours and closures over the Xmas/New Year period. This involves ensuring our website hours are up to date, social media posts, and posters.

We’ve also been reviewing 2020, and you can see the fruits of our review here: K:\Operations\Marketing\Reporting\Annual Marketing Report 2020.docx

In the report you can see the amazing new posters designed by Zina, learn which was the most clicked on Library News post, discover the top 10 search terms used in Google to find our website, and see some tops stats for our social media platforms.

Finally, a recent post from our Facebook page:)

If not, you should watch it now. You’ll be increasing the views of Jane Alexander’s video, which could help her win the the People’s Choice award in the international competition.

Also, it’s awesome.

https://visualiseyourthesis.figshare.com/articles/presentation/Pipe_Diagnostics_Just_Add_Pressure_Waves/13012889

A joint 3 Minute Thesis / Visualise Your Thesis prizegiving was held online last night. We had hoped to have an in-person prizegiving, but Level 2 necessitated to shifting it online. A recording of the presentation is on YouTube, with the VYT section starting at about 38:30.

We showcased the top 5 entries, and announced the prize winners:

1st prize: Jane Alexander for Pipe diagnostics: Just add pressure waves

2nd prize: Daniel Boczniewicz for Modelling stem properties for eucalyptus in New Zealand’s dryland environments

3rd prize: Mareike Babuder for Living through the haze – Effects of sedimentation on seaweed forests

Jane Alexander will now enter the international competition and we got to give her a giant cheque this morning!

A big shout out to Kiera and Brian for all their hard work in getting this competition off the ground this year!

We had 19 entries into our inaugural Visualise Your Thesis competition, with 12 meeting the technical and copyright requirements to go on to the judging panel.

You can view the awesome entries here

(The page takes a minute or so to load due to the number of videos on one page).

The winner will be announced at a joint 3MT/VYT prizegiving on the 8 September, with the first prize winner going into the international competition hosted by the University of Melbourne.

It is increasingly common for government departments and organisations to have both English and te reo Māori names.

APA Style is ‘cite what you see’, so the general principle is that citations & references should

• include both names separated by an en dash (–)
• follow the order of the names as they appear on the source document or work

If the citation is repeated often, corporate authors can be abbreviated to save on word count!

John has included this advice on the APA pages: https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/library/support/citations-and-referencing/apa-american-psychological-association-style/author-variations/#d.en.194606