Thanks very much for all your good wishes for my next round of chemotherapy. It is a preventative treatment in tablet form that I can take at home so I’m hopeful that I’ll keep well with not too many side effects.

I wish everyone well for your holidays and for the busy time in term one. I will be staying in touch from time to time and will see you all again on 24 April after Easter.

Ngā mihi nui and hei konā mai,

Lyndsay.

Kia ora koutou,

on Monday morning UC Library Managers will be attending a meeting with Library Managers of Christchurch City Libraries. Earlier in the year, the City Libraries people came to a meeting hosted here, so on Monday we have the reciprocal visit, organised by Helen and by Dyane Hosler.

items on the agenda include Tūranga itself, Children’s University initiative and other services with schools and a future scanning activity using the PEST model.

This is a good opportunity for us to get to know our colleagues better, and to move forward on matters of mutual interest and benefit to the users of our services.

Kia ora koutou,

there will be a 2019 Week of the Geek to be held in week 4 of Semester One (11-15 March). Would you like to be involved with planning and delivering this fun week where we get to know the students, helping them get to know each other and the libraries in the process? If so, we need you!

Because of the timing of WotG during that very busy time for us all, do check with your team(s) to be sure you can be spared and supported.  If we have enough people on the team, the time commitment will be less intense 🙂

Please let Lyndsay know by Monday 5 November if you’d like to be part of this initiative.

FYI The UC 2019 transition to university for students (i.e. the period up until Easter break) is themed around Well-being, Involvement and Academic – the Library is involved in all of these and some of our events will cover off all three!

The Library had a single (shared) registration for this conference, held at beautiful Christ’s College. (Morning tea in the Dining Hall!)

Conference theme: Transforming our landscape – reflecting shifting perspective on  the diversity of language use in society, language learning, teaching and teacher training, and social and educational policy decisions that affect us.

Relevance to UC – our Library objectives. E.g. 2018 objectives: to investigate to understand academic practices to inform service development, provide caring integrated services and spaces that facilitate learning and success. It was good to hear from experts outside our disciplines and get ideas for improving our work with students whose first language is not English.

Attendees  over the 3 days were Mushtak, Fiona, Pinelopi, Susan and Lyndsay. Please read our report with takeaway thoughts for application at our Library at K-LIBR-Library-Presentations-Report-CLESOL2018.

I took a few photos – this is Level 4 – Rob demonstrating their 3D printer. The music studio was impressive too.  Level 2 of Tūranga – Rebecca quickly showed me the backroom Archives area, not open due to how many people were around.

The rest of my photos are too large to add here but I can definitely recommend a visit and allow plenty of time as there is so much to see!

Kia ora koutou,

this project team of Margaret, Dave C, Swee Hoon, Saharu, Rebecca F., Donna T, Alison Mc (until April) and Lyndsay worked to design and deliver targeted Library inductions for all international students and all students new to UC.

Induction is a process and refers to experiences to develop “know how” and assisting students as they get started with doing their work and achieving their purpose for being here. As the team only began its work in January, we quickly realised that this objective needed a restricted scope for 2018, and we acknowledged that there was crossover with other Library groups. However, the achievements were considerable, and we made new relationships in other parts of UC in the process.

Read more at K:\LIBR-Library\Projects\Induction to the Library\Induction to the Library closure report 2018-09. This report will be tabled at a Library Managers’ Operational meeting in November.

Next steps: the team is in the process of reforming to address Phase Two and embed this year’s work into the 2019 year. There is space to accept a couple more team members if this is an area of the Library’s work that interests you.

FYI this objective was part of  2018 operational plan objective 2.3 Actively support students and staff to achieve the UC Graduate Attributes.

Kia ora koutou,

it is the grand opening of Tūranga in 9 days time on Friday 12 October. In the interests of collegiality, we may like to visit Tūranga during that weekend and give the City Libraries staff plenty of support. The hours of opening are Friday 1pm – 8pm, Saturday and Sunday 10am – 5pm.

There are various resources with more information about the new library – including a handy guide.

https://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/uncover-huraina/

https://ccc.govt.nz/the-council/future-projects/libraries-service/central-library

https://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/blogs/post/whats-on-at-turanga/

Kia ora koutou,

a reminder that if, as part of your commitment to Ngā Awa e Rua or in your ‘Bob’ conversations, you indicated an intent to learn and use more reo in your worklife, one way to do this would be to study TREO110 (Conversational Māori for Absolute Beginners) in its Summer School version – 6 contact hours per week for 5 weeks. The course begins in November, so please discuss with your manager whether this might be an option for you.

Kia ora koutou,

a while back some us had a constructive style meeting with Andy, John Todd and Shona from IT around how we could be more thoughtful with each other around sharing things that each area could do to help the other.  One area that we thought would benefit both Library and IT is for us to put in the critical date for service and the reasons for that when logging an Assyst job. Sometimes the IT staff picking up the job had difficulty working out the significance of the work and the consequences to our users if critical dates weren’t met. So we can all help a more effective Assyst service if we enter a little more of this type of detail at the start.

As we try this over the next weeks, we also need to feed back whether it was successful, and what the results were.