An update on what is happening next week as part of the Physical Collections Project.
Next week 3-7 July, there will be activity happening in both PJH and Law Basement. Some Law journals are being moved from Level 7 into the Law Basement. You will see movers shifting boxes. They will be using the lifts closest to the loading bay, so may be best to use the West lifts for next week.
Later in the week, there are 2 empty stacks being removed from Level 4 of PJH and taken to the Law Basement as well.
This week the MLM demos are on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon so the Library Systems team will be unavailable for those 2 half days.
Further to my earlier post, the Systems team is still under very high pressure and workload with limited staff due to leave, vacancy, and then training for Claire (who starts next week) coupled with some very large projects. This pressure will continue for the next few months.
The focus of the team will be on ensuring all systems and applications are running and fixing any access problems. Please continue to report any outages or problems to eservices@libr.canterbury.ac.nz
Any other queries will need to take a back seat and may take a while to respond to. We will do the more urgent tasks and will get to others as and when we are able to.
We appreciate your support during this chaotic phase.
There was an incident this week in the ‘new’ Dovedale library store H located in the Otakaro Annex. Water has leaked into the building in one room and damaged some of the collection that was sitting in boxes on the floor, waiting to be shelved.
I put my Disaster Response Coordinator hat on and sprung into action. The dry material has now been moved to a safe space (we hope) and the wet material will unfortunately need to be discarded. We have lost 1000 books that are far too water damaged to be saved. There was considerable dampness and a lot of very nasty mould growing on almost all the items in the boxes that got wet. The call range of the material affected is PG to PQ which is mainly European languages and literature.
LAC team will create a detailed list of all the items that have been lost, so we can refer back to if needed and circulate to subject librarians. I scanned all the barcodes so we should end up with an accurate list. The items already had a status of “temporarily unavailable” so they were not able to be requested.
Thanks to those that helped with this recovery task, and to those who still have work to do to complete the list of lost items.
Please feel free to contact me if you want any more information, but we won’t be able to tell you what has been lost until the list is completed.
The CONZUL Store holdings have now been removed from our Library Catalogue after the closure of the Store in September 2022.
If anyone comes across any records that show a location of CONZUL Store then please let me know.
A big thanks to Megan, Sandra, Maria and Chris from the LAC team for all their work in deleting and amending the records. It was about 100 hours of work in total.
The CONZUL Store was a large warehouse store of low use print journals established by the Council of New Zealand Librarians (CONZUL) in 2012. University Libraries sent print journals to the store that had electronic access available.
If you want to know more, then read the closure document at K:\Management\MOU-contracts\CONZUL-Store\Comms-CONZUL-store-closure-2022.docx
Our Library Catalogue (VuFind) now has a Te Reo Māori option available. It can be selected under the Language menu (top right of screen).
We were fortunate to have engaged the services of an approved translator through the Te Ohu Reo system, before the Te Ohu Reo service was paused.
Some things are not able to be translated because the source of the information is from elsewhere and not a field we are able to change in VuFind eg. Library names, suggested topics, genre.
I’m very pleased to share that Claire Brocklehurst has accepted the role of Library Systems Coordinator, to replace Bronwyn.
Claire will start in the role on 8 May 2023. Claire is currently working at Ara Institute of Canterbury as the Systems Support Librarian, and has worked in the Library at Ara for the last 14 years.
We look forward to welcoming Claire to the Systems team in May.
Margaret Adam is retiring from UC and we are having a morning tea to farewell her on her last day of work. Details below.
10am Friday 31 March 2023 in the Level 5 staffroom of PJH.
Please join us if you wish, to say goodbye.
Margaret has worked with the Library Systems team as a computer programmer for many years, and even though her role was officially moved into the Digital Services team, we still think of her as part of the Library team.
The Library Systems team is one staff member down at present and there is also a lot of work still to be done with troubleshooting VuFind and completing changing links in various places. While there is added pressure on the team, there are a couple of things you can all help with to make things a little easier over the next few months.
Please direct all emails to the shared email account (eservices@libr.canterbury.ac.nz) rather than to Romy, Donna or Leah individually.
Please be patient, some requests may take a little longer to respond to.
We will stop doing any enhancement requests to Horizon. We will still fix any troubleshooting issues, but not do any development to the System and how it works, given the process to replace Horizon is now well underway.
We have recently had a few queries about when the items in Store H will become available again that are currently tagged as temporarily unavailable. The availability will depend on the call number of the item.
The good news is that we have now unpacked some of the collection onto the shelves in the new Store H location (Otakaro Annex) and we hope to make the A-HM call number range available for requests again once term begins from 20 Feb 2023. The HN-Z items will remain unavailable until further notice, and some may not be available until possibly May 2023 or later, but I can’t give an exact date at this stage.
Please continue to refer any requests for material to our Interloans team, and any questions about the Henry Field relocation to myself or Helen Thomas.
We are aware that this is a large inconvenience to our researchers to have this collection unavailable for such a long time (since 27/5/2022). It is definitely my priority to get this project finished as soon as possible.
Jenny Owens
**The Education Classroom/historical collections in Store H will remain unavailable
