Hi all, if you know what particular fund code any of your orders should be charged to, please include this in your email when you send the orders to acquisitions@libr.canterbury.ac.nz. This would help speed up things at our end. Many thanks, Tim Stedman

This month Library Support Services will be hosting a number of vendor visits. August 9th 2pm – Sarah-may Vaealiki from LexisNexis; August 16th 9am – Erin Pryor from Serials Solutions; August 22nd 2.30pm – Danya Urlich from CCH; August 23rd 10am – Glenda Rowsell from YBP; August 31st 9am – Linda Dunne from Elsevier. If anyone has anything that would like to raise or discuss in relation to these products, please let me know. Thanks, Tim Stedman

Hi all, I have re-scheduled these sessions for Monday 1 August 9am and Wednesday 3 August 2.30pm. No need to book, just show up on the day. Venue: L207 Education Library. Thanks, Tim Stedman

Library Support Services are organizing a couple of sessions in using Serials Solutions for Liaison Librarians on Monday 25th July (9am) and Tuesday 26th July (2.30pm) both in L207, Education Library seminar room. I am still working on the content but I expect we will cover things like overlap analysis, database and journal use, cost per use plus any questions that you may have. Please book online to attend a session.

Thanks, Tim Stedman

We are going to try some changes to the way in which we handle patron-driven e-book purchases. In particular, we are going to trial moving from mediated patron-driven requests to non-mediated.

The outcome of this would be that when a customer discovers a patron-driven catalogue record and requests access, the step of a librarian (Library Support Services staff) approving the recommendation for purchase (and access subsequently granted 24-48 hours later) would be removed. Instead, the purchase would happen straightaway (and theoretically full access to the book would be available as well).

The reasons we want to give this a try are as follows. We are hearing from a number of our customers that they are frustrated by the delay between recommending a patron-driven title and getting access. Since implementing patron-driven requesting in March, we have placed nearly 300 patron-driven orders. All of these recommendations have been suitable for the collection. The patron-driven records that are in our catalogue have already been subjected to a basic profile to weed out publishers and titles that are less likely to be of relevance to UC. Because customers have to authenticate through EZProxy in order to recommend a patron-driven title for purchase, we are already assured they are affiliated to the University of Canterbury. We will put a price cap in so the budget can be controlled.

We will set this up over the next few days and see how it goes. If it turns out there are undesirable consequences we didn’t anticipate, we will revisit this decision.

Tim Stedman

Just to add to Deirdre’s posting regarding the Taylor and Francis e-books, a number of gratis earthquake resources expire today. We are organizing for these to be removed from Summon and the Library Catalogue. This will happen over the next few working days. There will be some broken links until these are removed. Following the events of the 13 June and the ongoing closures of libraries, I am approaching vendors who have supported us in the past and asked them if they would continue this generous support. If and when access to these resources is re-established, I will advise accordingly. Oxford University Press, Alexander St Press, Gale Cengage and Informit have agreed to extend so far. Tim Stedman

Please find a workflow on the wiki detailing the steps to follow. This is linked to from the Lost Books Procedures page. Tim Stedman

Hi all

LSS has relocated to Otakaro Room 117 in Education. We currently only have 10 PCs available for staff to use which is marginally better than our situation in NZi3. This means we are still under capacity for doing things like placing interloans and urgent orders, which is understandably so very dear to the hearts of many desperate souls at this time. Please under-promise on our ability to place orders and interloans at this time. I know this coupled with the lack of access is very frustrating but the reality is we can only target the really high priority items at this time. I am hoping for a better situation later in the week. Tim Stedman

Hi all

I thought it would be of interest to summarize some of the things LSS has achieved over the past month. I also appreciate and recognize colleagues in other library teams are achieving great things as well and have a lot to do with the list below. So please understand that I do not want in any way to belittle the achievements of everyone else. LSS is traditionally seen as a “backroom” service but I think the following just goes to show how important LSS staff are, and I think their achievements in these extraordinary times deserve mention.

– Over $US32,000 worth of e-books ordered thus far since 28 Feb (over 80% of our total book ordering), many of which are accessible within 24-48 hours of ordering
– 50,000 patron-driven records loaded into the Library Catalogue which are being routinely ordered when customers request them. again these are usually accessible within 24-48 hours of ordering
– Interloan request service up and running, dealing with an increase of requests following the earthquake and achieving great things, under pressure, for the many customers who are desperate to get access to resources and some of whom are very demanding
– the Datasets group has the approved purchase of several e-book collections. These include several Springer e-book collections (in the following priority: Biomedicine and life sciences 2008-2010, Business and economics 2009-2010, Behavioural Sciences 2010, Earth and environmental sciences 2010), the Chemistry CRCnetbase collection, and top titles from Taylor and Francis and Cambridge University Press. Peter H is currently following up on these. Other e-book collections are also being considered and/or investigated for possible purchase
– The ASTM standards online are now available
– We expect to have a subscription to the Fire Code Standards online very shortly
– We have set up a trial of ARTstor which is now underway and being managed by Max
– Set up reports of requested material in inaccessible locations so that decisions can be made about what to retrieve where possible, interloan or order (thanks due to Margaret Adam in particular)
– We have started interloaning or sending files to YBP for re-purchase of titles requested by postgraduates and staff in inaccessible locations which are likely to be out for some time, starting with Law/Commerce. Liaison Librarians will follow up on requests by undergraduates in the first instance and LSS will order/interloan anything that needs to be acquired there. Depending on the availability of other libraries (e.g. EPS, Central) we will then interloan/re-purchase requested material in those locations depending on the timeframe/likelihood of availability of those locations. The situation is being monitored on a daily basis.
– Serials staff have started checking 2011 serials subscriptions to make sure electronic access has been activated. Their proactive approach will help to ensure problems are discovered and corrected before customers discover them
– Through the generosity of many vendors, extensive access to electronic content is available through a number of publishers. E-services and Resource Discovery staff have been working on making these accessible through the Library Web, Catalogue and Summon. For more see http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/earthquake/eresources.shtml
– We are routinely re-purchasing or ordering high demand material in print where electronic is not available. In many cases we can get these straightaway by buying from UBS. The turnaround time from receiving the request to making the item accessible in Restricted Loans can be as little as within a few hours
– We have started processing invoices again as well as sorting through the mail for urgent items
– Deirdre and E-Services have been working on the Serials Solutions records for March and loading these
– Serials, Resource Discovery and E-Service staff are responding to and resolving various access problems to electronic resources
– E-services have been keeping up with the collection changes to make sure Horizon is updated with the correct information
– Planning is going into restarting the RFID project
– Contributing to PRST and the progressive restart of libraries on campus

There are a number of other things I could mention, but all of this is particularly remarkable given LSS has been operating below normal capacity given the current space constraints. I would like to publicly extend my thanks to all LSS staff for the huge effort they are putting in.

Tim Stedman

Hi all

An update from us:

– Firstly a plea to please remember to send general queries, problems, requests, orders etc to our generic email address Library Support Services. I know it is very tempting to email helpful individuals directly but it is far more efficient from our point of view if you send the request to our generic account and then whoever is rostered can deal with it according to the priority
– Please also note there are lots of requests coming through and LSS staff are working extremely hard to deal with these as quickly as possible so please be nice to them :-). Please also do not fret if you do not hear from us immediately. We are limited to the number of people we can roster onsite at any one time so we are not operating with a full quota of staff (much as we would love to be able to).

More later
Many thanks
Tim Stedman