ICTS are looking at the problems, but can’t yet tell us how long before it is fixed.

Peter at 10.30

ICTS are making a number of changes to services on Saturday which will affect students and staff. It is unlikely that you will be asked about them (none directly affect library services) but if you are, they include UCStudentPortal and CISWeb (i.e. Course Information). The ChemWatch program and access to the RecCentre pages will also be out.

There will be a more signifcant disruption to students who will not be able to login for a few minutes around 9 am. This should be sorted well before the Library opens.

Full details are available on the Scheduled Outages page – just click the links on the entry for the 13th.

Peter Kennedy

message from UCTL follows:

The Blackboard system will be shut down between 9am and 2pm on Saturday 13th December, as servers are being moved to the University’s new Data Centre. Please pass this message on to any summer school students. A pop-up message has also been added to the Blackboard announcements on the My Blackboard page.

——————————————-
Gregor Ronald
Educational Technology Consultant
University Centre for Teaching and Learning (UCTL)

We will be away between 11.45 am and 2 pm. Our phone will be answered and somebody will know how to get hold of us. Thanks to Catherine for organizing our lunch despite us not making a decision until late last week – surpassed even own previous record for leaving this to the last minute.

Peter

The 2008 final exam papers are now available on the library web pages. I have been advised the Academic Committee has allowed ony 5 applications for exemption from being held in the library, and the papers exempted are: MGMT 101, 102; AFIS 123, 203, 233. Please let me know about any problems.

Jack Arron

As part of the move of University Servers to the new Data Centre, and the consequential pending retirement of two of the Library’s older Servers, our printers will soon be controlled by a different server to the one now used.

As a consequence we all need to add new printer entries to our Login, and delete the old ones. There are some instructions on how to do this, but if you are not comfortable with these, please let Library IT know and we can give you a hand. Note this applies only to the large networked printers – not to receipt or label printers.

Ideally this should be done this week as we are not too certain of the ICTS timetable in this.

The instructions are here

Thanks, Peter

I’ve rung cleaning services and left a message for it to be emptied

Theresa L.

Over the next 2 or 3 days, all PCs will automatically download a large number of software patches that have been released by ICTS.

When this happens to your PC, you may find that when you shut down your PC, it does not immediately close but starts to install updates. It will display a message on screen and will shutdown when finished – a process that may take 15 minutes or so.

You may also find that after this has happened, the next login takes longer than usual. But from then on it should be business as usual.

Now that the silly season is over, and our academics are finally free of those pesky students, it’s a great time to market the Repository, once again.

I’m setting up meetings with academics from around the University, initially concentrating on the School of Law but also working in a few other corners of the campus. In addition to meeting people myself, I’m also available to support any Information Librarians planning trips over the summer break. I am happy to attend meetings, or to provide refresher training, documentation or tips.

Up until the end of January, I’ll be working full-time on the Repository, based in Library IT. If you have any questions or ideas, feel free to badger me at any time.

In terms of recent work, the biggest innovation this year is the addition of our in-house developed statistics package. The new stats package now enables researchers to find their own work in the Repository, with a breakdown of views and downloads for each paper. Everyone can also see the top 100 authors or items in their department, as well as the top 100 items and authors for the University as a whole. It’s such a simple thing, but the stats module has already proven itself to be a powerful motivator. Make sure you’re familiar with it, as it’s a great aid to getting academics to cough up their research. Links can be found on the Repository itself or on the Intranet page below:

https://intranet.canterbury.ac.nz/library/repository/statistics.shtml

We are currently sitting on 950+ research papers, (1800 in total, counting theses) and it would be excellent to bump that figure up considerably over the next few months, before the hoards descend upon us, once more. In addition to contacting new faces, it is well worth contacting people you’ve already seen, as we’re keen to get people into the habit of submitting their work on an ongoing basis.

Don’t forget that you can also add a Repository RSS feed to a LibGuide page too. See the posting on Counterculture for more details, if that strikes your fancy.

Talk to you all soon –

Grant.