There is yet to be an official announcement, so more information will follow, but we have just heard from Kylee Erickson that the staff Christmas function will be on 22 December, 2-4.

Staff have requested access to the presentation that was running during the Library luncheon.
Here it is.

Library Slide Show

From Monday 15 November the Central Library will again be closed. All lending from the Central collection will be via the Law library or whichever library a hold has been sent to.

The Library has been required to close again so that the seismic joints on level 2 and 4 can be repaired and a number of other repairs such as replacing the lighting on the south side where there is none currently as it was removed along with the damaged shelving. Carpet will be replaced on level 3 and I am expecting new carpet on level 4. However no timeframe for the carpet has been given. The shelving for part of level 4 has been ordered however it will not be ready to be installed until late January early February. So the 100,000 items have been packed and will be moved offsite. The items in these boxes will be retrievable. If giving advice to customers I recommend you advise them that a request for items in from level 4 J- Ps, S-Z may take up to 2 weeks. Any item retrieved from temporary storage will not be returned to storage it will be kept at Central.

Books in the LC range A-D which are at Law and Education could be returned to Central. If you are processing returned books they could start coming back to Central rather than increasing the numbers being kept at Law.

It is also planned that with the implementation of RFID the customer service desks on level 2 will be changed. The preliminary plans for this will be seen at the end of next week.

I will update you all further this week when a timeframe for the RFID project is likely to have been confirmed.

Joan

I’ve reported it to ICTS and they’ll let us know when it’s available again.

Donna

Library IT staff are now back in their usual place, and most of us can be contacted on our usual phone numbers. Currently Anne’s and Margaret’s phone numbers are still not working.

Please ring 8602 for general enquiries, and not 8717 any more.

Catherine

The RFID demonstration sessions begin tomorrow morning – please don’t forget to enrol in the session you wish to attend. All sessions will be held on Level 5 of the Central Library in the currently vacant Collection Services and Library IT offices as follows:

Tuesday – FE Technologies, Collection Services
Wednesday – 3M, Library IT
Thursday – Datacom, Collection Services

We have some evaluation forms that we would like each attendee to fill out during the demonstrations. Please try to remember to bring a pen and something firm that you can use as a support to write against.

Thanks,
Donna

LibGuides have released a mobile version for LibGuides pages, which most “Smart” phones should pick up automatically, or, if not, users can go to http://canterbury.libguides.com/mobile.php. There is also a link to the mobile devices view on the bottom of every LibGuides screen. This is a very simplified and cut down version of the content, which is intended to make it much easier for users to see on their mobile devices.

However, the mobile version relies on some LibGuides features that we have chosen not to use to the full extent, so we may have to change some practices so that the mobile version works better. For example, the first link is Featured Guides, followed by Popular and Recent, and Subject and Author are put down to the fourth and fifth options, while we have chosen to list all subject guides by name on the usual homepage. See the image below, taken from an iPhone emulator http://iphonetester.com/

There are a number of problems for us with this layout, some of which are listed below. SpringShare says we cannot change this version of the mobile interface, but can create one of our own, which I am investigating. In the meantime we need to be aware of what our mobile users are seeing, and maybe make some changes.

Current issues that require your input
1) The link to subjects goes to the subject categories, which we have chosen not to use much, but will probably have to now. LibGuides assumes all guides will go into “subject” area, and we initially set up 6 subject areas; Arts, Business and Economics, Education, Engineering, Law and Science. However, we haven’t really used these categories recently, as they put in unnecessary double clicking to navigate to subject pages, and we have preferred to use an alphabetical listing. This means that not all current guides will be in their correct subject areas. For this reason, it is important that all authors go to the list of guides by subject (go to the Subject Guides homepage, click on Browse All 65 Guides, then choose the By Subject tab) to check to see that their guides are appearing in the right subject category or categories. It is possible to assign a guide to more than one category eg Psychology in both Arts and Science, Mathematics in both Science and Engineering. Let Library IT know where your guides should be as it is done in the Admin module.

2) We have actually taken the Featured Guides option off the Subject Guides home page as it has never been used, so if you go to that link there are no featured guides. It was originally the intention that this be updated every week, but no-one has asked for their guide to be featured for the last 2 years, so on the website, we’ve disabled this link. Because this is the first link for the mobile page we may have to think about featuring one or two guides each week. So I need people to nominate a guide to feature regularly, as if it is going to be used, it should be changed frequently.

A UC version of the mobile page

I will work on a mobile version of the page that will work in better with our practices. If anyone has any ideas about what this should look like, please forward them to Library IT.

Catherine (Library IT)

We’re currently experiencing network problems, and some computers are freezing. ICTS are working on the problem.

Recently ICTS have recreated our student printer queues on a new print server.
These new print queues are named as follows:

UC-LibraryLawLevel3
UC-LibraryLawLevel2-P3
UC-LibraryLawLevel2 – currently a shared queue going to two printers
UC-LibraryEPSLevel1
UC-LibraryEducationLevel2
UC-LibraryEducationLevel1-A4Col
UC-LibraryEducationLevel1-A3Col
UC-LibraryCentralLevel2Den
UC-LibraryCentralLevel2Alcove – temporary queue
UC-LibraryCentralLevel2 – currently a shared queue going to three printers
UC-LibraryMacmillanBrown

Some of these queues are temporary to meet current needs due to our re-arranged library access since the Earthquake.
One of the major changes at the moment is the lack of single sided print queues. We are in the process of negotiating on that point. To print single sided currently, students will need to change the duplex setting in the printer properties when they print.
As yet, the Lvl 2 printer at EPS has not had its new queue created due to it being unavailable to students for the last few weeks. This is currently in progress.

It is possible that students will still be able to see the old printer queues when they log in. A script is supposed to remove them from their profile, but it doesnt always work as advertised. They will dissappear eventually though, and the new queue will be their default printer even if the old queue is still present.

Also please let us know if any student pc’s are having difficulty printing. There is a bug in Service Pack 3 which can stop the local print services on a pc. There is a hotfix for it which has been rolled out to our pc’s, but if for some reason this hasn’t successfully been delivered to individual pc’s, they will need to be re-installed.

Shane