On Wednesday, Venkatesh B Dharmaraj, will be joining us and working until Christmas. He asks that we call him Babu.

Reporting to Joan, Babu will be looking at the way we file our documents, especially in the K: drive, and coming up with a new structure, and mechanisms for getting to that structure. Babu’s work will be guided by the requirements of the University’s Information and Records Management section and he is likely to have contact with many of you during this project.

Babu will also provide some project support for the ORCID project being carried out by Peter Lund and Anton Angelo.

Physically Babu will be in the eServices area.

2 new subjects — Anthropology and Chinese Studies — are just added to our existing Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) collections. They are purchased with perpetual access, moreover any forthcoming articles to these modules will also be included.

So far UC has access to 9 subject areas in OBO: Anthropology, Chinese Studies, Classics, Criminology, Education, Islamic Studies, Management, Philosophy, Renaissance and Reformation.

Links to access:
Anthropology
Chinese Studies

Wendy Wu

On Wednesday and Thursday we migrated the rather large RFID management database from its original software, to a new much faster database structure provided by ICTS.

While the underlying hope is that this fixes our problems with gate statistics, I am hoping it will also give faster response times with the other RFID equipment – especially Sort Assists, and SelfCheck machines. I don’t expect it to make much of a difference to Circ Assist because the delay there is more to do with the Horizon processing than with RFID.

If you come across any new problems, let me know.

Thanks, Peter K

At the moment there seem to be problems emailing AskLive transcripts to ourselves at work. I can send them fine to my home address.

Before I report this, I wanted to check whether others of you have experienced this also? Isabel first reported it yesterday. If you have, and you have some idea when this stopped working, I’d like to know that also.

In addition, if anybody still has an older transcript in their email, could you forward it so me? I just want to see what the ‘header’ information is to make it easier for me to give ICTS information.

Thanks, Peter K

After we all enjoyed the frisson of anticipation for slightly longer than usual, the 2014 midyear exams are now available on the web. Go berserk.

Jack

Hi Everyone

In the Outlook global address book there are two addresses:

_LR Library Research and Information Services
and
_LR Library Support Services

Associated with these was a departmental split – we were either ‘libr’ or ‘libs’.

Now the Library is one again, we are all ‘libr’. The first of these addresses now goes to the whole library, the second goes to nobody.

_LR Library Resource Discovery and _LR Library Resource Acquisitions still go to members of Joan and Tim’s teams respectively.

I suspect we will want to rethink all our global email lists following the restructure.

Regards, Peter K

Sadly we say goodbye to Zuzana today as she finishes her contract and, in a few weeks, heads back to the Czech Republic.

It’s hard to realize that it has been a year – during that time a lot has happened. I am particularly grateful for the work Zuzana did on the re-branding of the website, in her work on chasing up Electronic Resource problems with vendors and Multisearch, and in supporting the daily work of eServices – not to mention the great way she fitted in with us all.

Unfortunately I never quite managed to get her to demonstrate her Salsa dancing for us.

Thank you Zuzana – we will miss you and wish you the best in future.

Peter

You have probably seen the emails about some students finding they only have older LEARN courses available to them.

ICTS now know what caused this, but not yet whether it can be fixed quickly (i.e. just for the students directly affected) or whether they will need to do a full re-load of information which will take several hours.

Some Horizon records will also be affected. Margaret does not think there will be many, but we had a couple on Saturday where the borrower records had just gone! If you come across more, let me know. Margaret is keeping in contact with the Application Support staff who are working on this and will keep me posted.

Thanks, Peter K

Ko tçnei te Wiki o te Reo Mâori

As part of our celebrations for Te Wiki o te Reo Mâori (Mâori Language week) we have been hosting scrabble games in te Reo Mâori in the Education Library. Our interactive display has been enjoyed by staff,students and academics. There has been lots of banter, laughter and kôrero floating around the library as the players contend with each other over kupu (word) choices.

A huge acknowledgement must go out to Denise Kennedy for her handy design and display flair- ngâ mihi ki a koe Denise.

The theme for Mâori language week this year is “Word of the week”. This year the initiative is running for 52 weeks and encourages people to use and learn one new kupu (word) per week. If you would like to learn more, visit the Facebook site where there is plenty of inspiration, fun ideas and downloadable resources.

Hi Everyone

As far as I know we replaced all of our old CRT monitors some years ago. These are the big, very heavy monitors that we used to have. But if by chance you are aware of any of these sitting in a corner somewhere in the Library (e.g. the old IT room in the Education Library) could you please let me know as IT are doing a final disposal round of these.

Thanks, Peter K