Assoc.  Prof. Mike Grimshaw, Chair of the Library Committee, spoke enthusiastically of his pride in UC’s LIbrary at the recent College of Arts departmental meeting.  It’s heartwarming – you can watch it here.

The Library was invited to present to the College of Arts about the “From Physical Collections to Learning Spaces”.  Anne did an amazing job of presenting the strategic direction of the library in support of UC’s Strategic vision.  You can watch it here.

Kia ora,

It was great to see so many of you at the optional all staff meeting today .  Good questions from both F2F and zoom participants.  Sadly, the way we managed the meeting resulted in a dreadful audio quality, so it’s back to old-fashioned notes from the meeting.  They are here.

The intranet page is up – thanks to super service from E-services.  You can read the project summary and the FAQs here.  Coming soon – progress report and a document that specifies the criteria we’re using.

The Project

From Physical Collections to Learning Spaces  project will reduce the physical collection by a third over 5 years.  The majority of disposals will come from the Library Store, with some material from Puaka James Hight and EPS.  That will allow the space gained in PJH to be used for creative adaptive learning.

Our project aligns with global trends in academic research libraries as the trend towards digital access to research materials accelerates.  Our usage data  tells us 95% of usage of information resources is digital.

Impact of Covid 19

During covid 19 alert levels 4 & 3, progress slowed down on this project.  Now that we are at alert level 2, the project has speeded up again.  We’re on track to begin the Print Collection Reduction work in June.

Covid 19 meant we had to change some things.   These include:

• Strong attention to health and safety issues
• Allowing for variation in the staff hours  allocated to the project
• Withdrawing material in 2020 which is low contention so we don’t need to consult with academics

NZ and Pasifika materials, as well as the Macmillan Brown and special collections are out of scope for this project.

Project team

The Project Manager  is Jenny Owens, with Helen Thomas as Project Sponsor.   Oversight of the project is provided by Anne and Helen.   There are three sub-projects, the biggest one is  the Print Collection Reduction sub-project.  We’re delighted that Sue Thompson has been seconded to this role.  Her knowledge of accessing materials from other libraries and publishers is already proving a strong asset.  Te Paea leads the space sub-project and Moira leads the Criteria and Communications sub-project.

Finding out more

If you would like to know more about this project, there’s a couple of documents which are useful.   Key messages  is a short summary for academics.  The project charter is a also useful, outlining how the project will work.  If you want to know more about this project or have questions, we plan to schedule a Q&A meeting for anyone interested.

This article gives excellent and practical advice about how to manage working from home.  The author has been doing it for nearly 30 years.

Anne asked for a literature review of trends in academic libraries around the world.  The intention was to inform our Operational Plan as well as Anne discussing it with Ian Wright.

So I spent several happy days  delving into the thinking of library leaders.  The focus was  the future for universities and their libraries.

You can find the resulting report here. I hope you find it interesting.  Happy to chat about it in the tea room or at your desk – whatever suits…..

The Project Management team is making excellent progress.  We are ready  to establish a small group of people  with skills in project management or who want to develop them.  This group will be  ongoing group.  Ideally, it will include some  of those from the current project team for continuity and some new perspectives.   We welcome responses from all levels of staff.

We are looking for 3-4 people who :

• are Interested in working more with projects
• like sharing knowledge
• are interested in learning more about project management methodologies

If this sounds like you, please either email/talk to Moira  or one of the project team (Te Paea, Brian, Sara, Nick by 30 May.   If you are interested but it’s not the right time for you, there will be other opportunities.

My role

I’m here until mid-August in a Project role helping to move 3 key projects along.  The  projects are related to Open Access and improving the way we manage projects. There are two Open Access projects; the first one is focused on what actions CONZUL (Council of NZ University Librarians) can take.  It includes writing a paper  on Open Access issues for the Vice-Chancellor’s meeting in June. The second major deliverable is a workshop to  plan  actions on Open Access initiatives scheduled for the June/July term break.  The second project is closely related and will be focused upon actions for CU to publish 80% of research using open access by 2023.

The third project on Project Management is the furthest along.  The project team is Te Paea Paringatai, Sara Roberts, Brian McElwaine, Nick Ford and Nerissa Octavio.  There will be a workshop with a general invitation for Library staff who want to share their experiences of being involved with projects.   The project goals include reviewing and categorising all the projects under way or completed within the 2016-2020 Library Strategic Plan.

My work experience

I’ve been a Library Manager for most of my working life, mostly in special libraries, including 12 years at Parliament.  I then fulfilled a life-long dream of working overseas when I worked in Myanmar’s Parliament for 3 years and in a number of other developing countries for short term assignments.  It was a great experience to work in such a different culture and I learnt a lot about leadership there.

Celebrating International Day of Democracy	Yes, I did meet Aung San Suu Kyi!	Presenting to the Speaker of the Parliament

Working at Unitec

When I returned to NZ in 2016, I worked as Library Director at Unitec because I wanted to learn more about biculturalism and multiculturalism.   More than half of Unitec’s students speak English as their second language.  The Library staff were the most diverse group I’ve led.  This group of Unitec Library staff includes Kiwis who were born in Fiji, Malaysia, Samoa, China, India, USA, Christchurch and Auckland.