Reminder that the SciVal demo is on tomorrow – see https://blogs.canterbury.ac.nz/counterculture/2020/10/09/scival-demo/

There are several interesting webinars being held as part of the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group’s Open Access Week 2020 programme. Open Access Week is 19-23 October. You can view available sessions and register on the programme page.

A couple of highlights are:

• Communicating a pandemic, with Siouxsie Wiles
• Indigenous voices, indigenous research and open access, with Sereana Naepi (Fiji), Hēmi Whaanga (New Zealand), Hinematau McNeill (New Zealand), and Kirsten Thorpe (Australia)

Also, remember you can catch up with the latest news and trends in open access by visiting the Library’s Open Access research guide.

The Library is running a SciVal trial in October. Kiera and others, in conjunction with Pip (R&I) have been running some reports for heads of schools, and have been testing SciVal’s capability around field-weighted citation impacts and other citation and ranking measures.

Kiera still regards herself as a beginner with SciVal, but has generously agreed to demonstrate how she is using the product. She is also keen to discuss some issues using SciVal brings up, such as duplicate Scopus IDs.

This session will involve Kiera ‘showing and telling’ how she has been running reports in SciVal. Discussion about related topics may ensue.

Register here for the session – https://canterbury.libcal.com/calendar/staff-development/SciVal

Recently Anton Angelo helped deliver an international on-line Library Carpentry course over two weeks. Library Carpentry is aligned with Software and Data Carpentry, organisations dedicated to raising digital literacy and skills for beginning researchers. Anton taught basic data handling and Open Refine, a sophisticated tool for managing messy data.

The course was organised out of Malaysia, but had participants from Yale University’s Beijing campus, Pakistan and Israel, as well as Malaysia and Singapore. Anton’s aim was to consolidate on the in-person teaching he did at Nanyang Technological University (the highest ranked university outside of Europe, the UK and the US) and encourage more local instructors to take part. That course was the first of its kind in Asia. Since then a number of instructors have qualified to be Carpentry leaders, and the most recent course was successful in raising their confidence to a point that they can independently run the courses themselves.

Anton has also been training New Zealand GLAM professionals in Carpentry skills, most recently in Wellington for an in-person session organised by the Wikidata community, and attended by people from Te Papa, the National Library, Auckland Museum and Victoria University of Wellington.

“What do you call a person who is happy on a Monday? Retired.” – Unknown

Janette is retiring from UC, with Wednesday 18 November being her final day of work.

This is wonderful and terrible news.

She didn’t want me to say much here, but I must note that Janette will be missed. A lot. She is a consummate librarian and is such a lovely person to have around! Let’s enjoy her company in the next few months.

Details of opportunities to formally wish her well will be forthcoming.

Please note that some of these issues and decisions may have to be revisited because of decisions being made at a university-level

Notes

• Teams are busier now that Term 2 has begun. AskLive is busy.
• Getting work equipment for staff at home is proving to be difficult

Level 3

• There is a process, and forms, for requesting staff work on campus at Level 3. There is also a Health & Safety plan
• Students are asking for access to the library for study space, and for access to printers
• Balancing learning, teaching and research requirements with safety guidelines and staff and student wellbeing is difficult
• Requests and advice from UC, the Tertiary Education Commission, CONZUL, and the government can vary, and in some cases are changing and developing daily
• The library wants to be constructive in its response
• At this stage providing study space is not possible due to the health and safety requirements at Level 3
• Priority is supporting online learning including scanning material for Learn
• We will also provide a ‘click and deliver’ or ‘click and collect’ service for staff and postgraduate research students for physical items
• We may provide some other restricted services on a case-by-case basis
• Our priorities are to provide access to physical material (either by scanning it or by making the physical copy available) for teaching purposes, and for staff and postgraduate student research
• We will look at two shifts – one morning and one afternoon – for a small team to collect and scan material, and release it to staff and students by the most appropriate means
• Managers will work on how a wider service, either later in L3 or in L2, will work

Notes

• Teams are preparing for term 2
• AskLive was busiest since lockdown on 15 April: 56 enquiries, including 7 after 5pm
• There was positive feedback about the library at Academic Board last Friday, with academic staff saying they are grateful for our work
• There was a discussion about how our services might look under Level 3:
  • Learning will be online for term 2, including all exams and assessment
  • We will continue to support our online services as a priority
  • There may be some scope for a small number of staff to be on campus, primarily to scan physical material for teaching
  • This may widen out to support researchers retrieve physical material
  • If this was to happen there would be strict physical distancing and cleaning plans
  • Managers will do more work on this
• We are not extending AskLive hours over term 2, including exams
• We should continue to direct people to our website, which should contain up to date information about our services

LTR have been keeping busy with a mix of home set-up, covid-19 response, BAU, and projects. We’ve been keeping in touch through formal and informal Skypes and Zooms, emails and Slack posts. We’re set up in a range of spaces, from lounge rooms and personal offices to cupboards and bedrooms, and have a variety of technologies, from 3 screens to single laptops.

Specifically, we’ve been working on:

• AskLive, extending hours into the evenings for some
• Enquiries generally
• Consultations with students and staff – lots of tricky referencing enquiries
• Preparing for term 2
• Marking assignments
• Creating and updating subject guides
• Maintaining the Repository
• Doing literature reviews for academics
• Keeping up to date with information resources, passing on new offers, and being calm in the face of publisher idiocy and greediness
• Liaising with academics to make sure they have the resources they need to teach
• Starting the ball rolling with Open Education Resources at UC
• Running professional development sessions
• Feeding out cheerful and helpful messages through our social media accounts
• Attending College Zoom meetings/morning teas
• Planning and making online information literacy modules
• The Arts Researchers implementation project

The last week has been challenging, but the team have made it feel like a relatively seamless transition from on to off-campus. It’s easy to take their professionalism, enthusiasm, maturity and friendliness for granted, but in testing times like these those qualities really shine out.

Tomorrow morning (9.15-12.15 Tuesday 17 March) the LTR team will be in a meeting, receiving our TMP results.

We won’t be available for consultations, AskLive, advice, soothsaying, or summarising interesting things.

Apologies for the inconvenience. Normal transmission [perhaps a bad choice of phrase] will resume in the afternoon.

The Project Board met on 3 December. Notes from that meeting are available in a document called ‘Report on Project Board meeting 3 December 2019-Counterculture’ in the _Project-Administration folder in Projects in the K drive.

The Board next meets on 3 March. Reports and Charters should be submitted to Stuart by 26 February.