Firstly thank you to all those who volunteered to take part in these workshops. The response was very heartening.
Thank you to those of you who were volunteered to take part in the workshop and have agreed to do so.

There were six themes agreed to at the Issues, blockages and opportunities workshop held in June and the task groups are going to further explore these issues –
Reengineering the use of physical spaces
Delivering customer centred support
Selling ourselves and our services
Easy access to relevant collections
Embedded academic literacy
Supporting and enabling cultural change

There may be a 7th task group looking at Effective and Efficient Services. Many of these groups will start meeting next week. For those of you who are taking part in this exercise, I hope you enjoy the experience.

The outcomes from these task groups will dovetail into the Customer Value Discovery Workshops that are being scheduled in September.

Heather Jenks
Associate University Librarian

I have been given a ruling from Human Resources that no leave forms need to be completed on PeopleSoft for Monday last week, as the University was officially closed because of the snow.

If you were unable to attend work on Tuesday because of the snow or issues caused by the snow – car snowed in, unable to get to a street where there was a bus service running, looking after children who were unable to go to their usual daycare, left early to get home before the frost made the streets dangerously icy etc., then no leave forms need to be completed on PeopleSoft for Tuesday either.

Heather Jenks
Associate University Librarian

With the re-opening of the Law Library building this week, congratulations to Coral and her team plus the many others that helped out to get this Library to this stage, I thought I would summarise the status of Library buildings. I have compiled this list from the Library Research and Information Services viewpoint, however I thought other Library staff may well be interested in the information.

Central Library
Levels 2,3,6,8,9, and 10 are open for general access.
Levels 4 and 11 are still being remediated and will be granted general access once the work is completed.
Levels 5 and 7 are not accessible to Library staff.
Level 5 is having plans drafted at the moment to house Library, Digital Media and Student Suppot International staff. I do not know the schedule for when these plans will be completed.
Level 7 is being returned to the Library for housing library stock. I do not know at this stage when the planning for this floor will begin.

Education Library
All areas of the Education Library are fully functioning and are open for general access.

EPS Library
Access has been given to Library staff to retreive from this Library.
The EPS Library building has passed the UC 5 step process, however it is the buildings on either side of this structure that are causing an issue.
Until this is resolved, general access to this building will not be granted.

Law Library
All areas of the Law Library are fully functioning and are open for general access.
The Law Basement area is accessible for retreival and shelving purposes as per normal for Library staff.

Library Warehouse
All areas of the Library Warehouse are fully functioning and are open for Library staff for retreival and shelving purposes as per normal .

Macmillan Brown Library
All areas of the Macmillan Brown Library are fully functioning and are open for general access.
Access includes the storage areas in the basement which are Library staff only areas.

Entering library buildings is voluntary. If you are asked to enter a Library building and you do not wish to do so, you are encouraged to talk to your Manager and explain the reason why you are unable to do this. Your Manager may be able to offer you further support and resources e.g. more information about the building, access to the Recovery team or access to EAP which may well help you. This information is also vital for your Manager as they create the daily/weekly rosters for both desk and off-desk tasks and activities and they need to know who is available to undetake various duties.

Library buildings have gone through the 5 step process set up by the University and all buildings are rechecked after each major event over 5.0.

If there are any issues that I have not covered or if you have a specific question about a building please contact me or

Coral Black, Branch Libraries and Learning Hubs (Education, EPS and Law libraries)

Joan Simpson, Central Library and Learning Hub (Central Library)

Heather Jenks
Associate University Librarian

If you are asked to enter a Library building and you do not wish to do so, you are encouraged to talk to your Manager and explain the reason why you are uncomforatable about doing so.
All Library buildings have gone through the 5 step process set up by the University and all buildings are rechecked after each major event over 5.0.

I have found this letter to parents of UC students and am adding in the link

as I think it may answers some of the concerns that staff members also have.

I am contacting the Recovery Manager and will be asking him to arrange for the building information sessions to be recorded to ensure that those who can not make the sessions are able to hear the information shared at these sessions.

Please remember if you do have any concerns about the buildings, please talk to your Manager. If there is an interest in asking an EAP counsellor to join us again for a morning or afternoon session, or both, in order to talk through this issue I will make that request.

Heather Jenks
Associate University Librarian

Peter Molony organised a presentation on the James Hight building on Thursday where Library and other University staff were able to listen to information about the state of the building, what had been done to the building and what is expected of the building in the future. My apologies but I have forgotten the Structural Engineers last name – Jeff, also answered a large number of thoughtful questions that were asked from the audience. Peter Molony finished of the session with a quick round up of other major building on campus, including the Law and EPS Buildings. Peter noted that the Law Building would probably not open on the targeted date of the 25th July as there were a series of warrant of fitness issues (none were specified) that were under investigation. He also noted that EPS Library was a viable building, it is surrounded at one end by the Mushroom which is not considered a viable building and at the other end by the Seimen’s building which has a number of issues and is also not considered a viable building either. There will be another session run next week for those who were unable to attend this session.

I have not had a full briefing session with Sue McKnight today (for a variety of reasons) on the status of library buildings however I understand an option that is being explored is the closure of the EPS Library building as a library. In the light of limited space in this post earthquake environment, the EPS Library building is being considered as a place to house other University staff that will be need to be relocated from the Mushroom and the Seimen’s buildings, and possibly other areas. No final decision has been made, however the decision process will move through various stages in the coming week. I have been told that both the PVC Engineering and the PVC Science have been involed in these discussions and that they have agreed to the closing of the EPS Library.

Another option under discussion, as mentioned by Peter Molony, is that the Law Building may not be handed over by the target date of the 25th July. I have no further information on why this is the case, only that the building did not meet the standards set out in the certification process. I do not know the timeline that will be required to get it up to standard. I am sure we will be given that information next week as it becomes clear what must be done to reach the standards and the ProjectOffice people create the work schedule.

Should a decision be made on either or both of these options I will do my best to ensure that the information is relayed to you as quickly as possible. Both options will require a great deal of planning to get underway to ensure that Library services and more importantly Library staff are transferred to the libraries that are open and functioning.

Central Library will expand the levels that are available for general use by opening levels 6, 8,9 and 10 on Monday. Joan and her team have done a tremendous job to get to this stage, not to mention all the contractors plus all the other Learning Resources staff who have been working to meet this deadline.

A big thank you to all the library staff who took part in the organised library activites for both Open Day and Mid Year Orientation.
Both events went off very well and having a a library presence was extremely important.

So if you were involved in these events give yourself a big pat on the back, your efforts were greatly appreciated.

University of Canterbury Open Day is on this Friday 8th July.
There will be bus loads of senior school pupils coming to look at the University and decide if they want to come here and study. The day for the students will begin at 9.00 a.m. and will end at 4.00 p.m.

During the day the Library is offering tours of the library facilities, both Central and Education Libraries are offering tours starting at 11.30 a.m. and 2.30 p.m. Macmillan Brown Library will offer tours on a drop in basis.

I hope you all get a chance to interact with these visitors and share information about the libraries with them.

Heather Jenks

It is understandable that academic staff have concerns about the accessibility and availablitiy of print resources, housed in the Central Library, for their students. However the answer is not to tranfer 100’s of items from the various levels of the Central Library into the High Demand Collection.

One of the changes taking place in the University prior to the September earthquake was the increase in the number of online course avialble through Learn, and the resources that were linked to the courses. After the February earthquake for those students who had internet access, and the 2nd student survey showed that 97% of them did, courses on Learn with associated resources allowed students the opportunity to continue studying.

In 2009 and 2010 Library staff worked through a High Demand Project to shift the focus of this collection. The High Demand collections in all of the libraries are designed to be small, highly utilised and focussed collections. They are created in the weeks prior to the beginning of each semester to support students in their course work. Short loan periods are exercised to give maximum exposure of the resources to the greatest number of users.The physical spaces allocated to these collections can not support massive numbers of items, as well measureable work is required in order for each item to be transferred in and out of the High Demand collection which involves manual intervention and processing by Library staff.

When the physical buildings have been closed by events, library staff have been able to able to gain limited access and move the High Demand items to an accessible library space. If these collections become too large then this flexible action would not be able to happen.

There have been a number of discussions since September 2010 seeking an alternative space for the Central Library collections, to date no solution has been found as such a building would need to have compliant floor loadings, the space to house the collections plus building security for the bookstock. No other building located to date has been able to replicate the size and strength needed.

What Library staff can do in the current environment is to encourage academics to be selective about the resources that they require included into the High Demand collection and to offer alternative suggestions, including but not limited to, e.g. if only a chapter of a book is required seek permission to get the chapter digitised, identifying electronic alternatives that UC Library has access to (e-books, e-journals, open access resources) or recommending the purchase of access to the e-book titles and to e-journals. Access to these digital resources for students will be via Learn through their courses.

Today, Levels 2 & 3 of Central Library were reopened. With the exception of Level 4 (and this status will change soon) all other levels can be retreived from. Encouraging staff and students to place requests for resources housed on these floors will ensure that resources are retreived and onloan. The Law & Business collections are gaining greater access each day. If needs be, I am happy to talk to academic staff members who are do not understand the shift in focus for the High Demand collection.

Heather Jenks

Hello everyone

There was a flurry of activity at the end of May to get the UC Library statistical retun into CAUL. It has been decided by CONZUL that there will no longer be a separate collection of data for the CONZUL statistics, they will be compiled from the data collected for the CAUL statistics. Thank you to all of the staff who supplied me with the data that was required for the statistical return.

I thought I would highlight some of the statistics of interest, and I will do this over the coming weeks.

With the merger of the PSL Library with the Engineering Library this was the first return to reflect the decrease in the number of libraries, which changed from 6 to 5.

Even with the Spetember earthquake, the refurbishment of the EPS Library and the closure of the Central Library the door count still rose slightly from 1,922,836 in 2009 to 1,944,076 in 2010.

The total loans for the whole Library system decreased markedly as a result of the Central Library being closed, 2009 showed a total of 569,687 loans while in 2010 only 488,499 loans were issued.

The reserve collection also recorded a decrease from 90,746 in 2009 to only 69,117 in 2010, again the reason was the closure of the Central Library plus a lesser factor was the move to more digital resources being used within Learn.

Two areas that showed increases were –

Extraordinary expenditure, zero was recorded in 2009 however with the RFID project expenditure for 2010, the amount was $571,165.87

Expenditure on e-resources increased from $5,684,991 in 2009 to reach $6,550,252 in 2010.

I will write a further update next week
Heather