You may have noticed a new face in the Central Library lately. Catherine McCulloch has been appointed on a casual contract in the Academic Liaison Team to support delivery of Library Liaison services to Business and Law in Sue Johnston’s absence. Janette has taken on Liaison for European Union Studies and will work with Sara to support Law. Catherine will be working to support Janette, Sara and Cuiying so that they can carry the increased Liaison work load until Sue gets back.
Catherine is new to Christchurch. She has worked as a lecturer in Primary Education at the University of Chester and more recently as an Assistant Subject Librarian for the Faculty of Education there.
The UC Teaching Week is being run like a mini conference. All sessions will be held in the Undercroft, Room 101, James Hight Building – program details here
The sessions will showcase best practice and innovative practice in teaching at UC.There will be a lot that is relevant to Library staff to inform the continuous development of our services that support teachers and the students they teach.
It would be great to have a strong Library presence at the Teaching Week events. Bookings are not required but as always please check with your manager first.
For staff who enjoyed Herbert Thomas’s presentation in the Easter Development Programme you might like to come along to the Digital Media Group’s Brown Bag Lunch discussions. The next one is tomorrow 12.00 – 1.00 in KA04. the topic for discussion will be Augmented Reality. I would really encourage any interested Library staff to attend.
The discussions are held fortnightly on Thursday’s 12.00 – 1.00 and are attended by a wide range of interested UC staff and sometimes post graduate students. The meetings are informal and if you’d prefer to just listen rather than discuss that’s just fine. In my experience the group is friendly and welcoming and new folk come along each time. From Thursday 13th June the meetings will be held in room 210 in the Central Library.
For those who didn’t hear Herbert’s PD presentation He spoke on developments in e-learning as part of the session on Understanding Learn and how students use the Virtual Learning Environment. Feedback from the session included comments such as – What two things did you enjoy about the session today? – “Info from Herbert around e-Learning developments”, “Herbert’s session was great”, “Very interesting finding out about the way Learning is being developed at UC and the roll the internet plays in this” “Listening to Herbert on the future and learning environment” etc… What would you like to have seen included? – “A whole session on Herbert”.
The Brown Bag Lunch series is a forum for learning about ideas in e-learning and joining the discussion with other support staff, academic staff and students to develop a shared understanding of the e-learning frontier.
Congratulations to Elizabeth and Simon. Baby Daniel was born on Monday morning at Lincoln Maternity Hospital, weighing 8pds 5oz.
Elizabeth says “We came home yesterday and he is settling in well. Melissa and Annabel are very excited to have a baby brother and I have been getting lots of ‘help’ from them both :)”
You are warmly invited to morning tea and a baby shower for Elizabeth and Simon this Friday from 10.30am in the Central Library tearoom. Elizabeth will be on leave for 12 months beginning next week. Please bring a plate and if you’d like to a baby gift. All welcome.
The Library’s High Demand request will be included in the new service management tool Assyst when it goes live on Monday 19th November.
For Library staff involved in delivering High Demand service this will mean some changes in procedure such as checking Assyst for incoming requests and adding notes for information for requestors or other Library staff. This week and next week members of the Library’s Service Management Tool Working Group are working to finalise these procedures which will then be documented on Camelot
The next step will be training for staff which will take place between 8th and 15th of November. In the first instance only staff immediately involved in High Demand will be offered training. Outlook meeting requests will be sent to these folk. John Arnold, Rosie Sykes, Lisa Matthews and Jenny Owens have been trained in Assyst. They will design the training and John, Rosie and Lisa will deliver it. Our trainers are our go to people for Assyst support along with Fiona Wilson for the Library Support Services team.
For academic staff this change will provide a single point of contact with the Library for High Demand requests. It will appear in the self service portal and will enable requestors and Library staff to seamlessly share information and track the progress of requests. It will also make it possible for support staff such as teaching assistants or administrators to place High Demand requests on behalf of academic staff.
Please see the message below from Jess Hollis, Electronic Learning Media.
“We’re going to be making a change to how Learn manages session data tomorrow morning between 8 and 9.
When we make this change, any users logged into Learn will be logged off.
We have put a notice onto the Learn home page to advise users of this issue and to also advise them to save their data prior to 8am and then often during the change window.”
There may be questions via AskLive or at Information Desks from affected users. Please pass on this message and/ or refer them to the ICT HelpDesk.
