The new Autumn GradFest begins today and runs all week.

There are sessions in Undercroft 101, Library 210, Library 308, and The Den.

Presenters come from Library staff (we’re taking 9 sessions), Academic Skills, and academic staff, with the usual range of topics of interest to postgraduate students.

If you see a postgraduate student looking lost, direct them to the Autumn GradFest 2017 page, where they’ll find the programme, registration details, and further information.

So, ResBaz happened on Wednesday and Thursday at Dovedale.

32 postgraduate students, 15 instructors and helpers, 12 classes, 3 keystories, and 100 pizzas later, we’re left with a hugely successful event and a very tired Anton.

Students came from UC (47.1%), Lincoln (32.4%), Otago (5.9%), and ‘other’ – mainly the CRIs – (14.7%). 19 attendees were female and 13 were male.

The most popular classes were Open Refine, Unix Shell, Programming with R, Programming with Python, and Version Control with Git, but there were keen students learning about NVivo, Overleaf and Survey tools as well. The coding classes were run as short, condensed Software Carpentry workshops.

The three keystories were presented by Professor Jennifer Brown, head of the school of Mathematics and Statistics at UC, Lucy-Jane Walsh, Digital Content Analyst at the UC Arts Digital Lab, and Professor Jen Hay, director of the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour (NZILBB). All three were inspirational and showcased the way coding has enabled interesting research.

Anton did an outstanding job organising the event (and instructing a Unix Shell class), and he coordinated the enthusiastic instructors and helpers superbly. One of the exciting outcomes of ResBaz is the community of instructors that Anton pulled together, across many UC departments, LU, and CRIs. Also, students with similar interests and problems made contact with each other and began helping each other.

Sponsors were cloud-storage and IT company Catalyst, and us – the UC Library. Thanks to both.

Kia ora koutou,

I’m very happy to let you know that Nick Scullin has been selected for the role of Subject Librarian – Research. The departments he will work with are Biological Sciences, Geological Sciences and Geography.

Nick will transition over to his new role before Christmas.

Ngā mihi mahana,

Stuart

A reminder – Angus Macfarlane is presenting a seminar for Library staff on Kaupapa Māori Research on Friday 28 November – find details and how to register on the previous post at https://blogs.canterbury.ac.nz/counterculture/2016/10/05/kaupapa-maori-research-seminar/.

Also, the annual Māori Research Colloquium is on 4 November in Whekī 451, beginning at 9am. The Colloquium keynote address will be presented by Professor Emeritus Russell Bishop, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s preeminent scholars of recent times. The whakakapi (concluding statement) will be by UC’s recently appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research & Innovation, Professor Ian Wright.

The Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies has published their policy brief series on the UC Research Repository (at
http://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/12176). Steven Ratuva, the Centre director writes “The UC Library helped to facilitate the online publication. More policy briefs and working papers are still being edited and will also be published online.”

Anton is also working with Steve on other publishing opportunities.

The Academic Liaison Team have decided to change their team name, and Liaison Librarians have decided to change their job title.

• Liaison Librarian becomes Subject Librarian
  • ‘Liaison’ is used elsewhere in the university (there is a UC Liaison Office, with Liaison Staff), and the team thought that could be confusing. Also, we didn’t think students understood what ‘Liaison Librarian’ meant – who are we liaising with?
  • All Liaison Librarians prefer the title Subject Librarian.
• Academic Liaison Team (ALT) becomes Learning, Teaching & Research Support (LTRS)
  • Along with an aversion to the use of ‘liaison’, the team felt the use of ‘academic’ in this context was meaningless. Also, not everyone in the team is a Liaison (or Subject) Librarian, so we thought we would emphasise the Learning & Teaching/Research aspect of our roles in the team name.
  • Note that the Learning and Teaching team and the Research Services team make up the larger Learning, Teaching & Research Support team.

Please amend relevant documentation to reflect these changes.

In light of these changes email groups have been amended:

• _LR Library Academic Liaison is no more. You should use _LR Library Learning Teaching and Research Support

Also, two email groups are about to be added, in case you wish to contact the Leaning and Teaching team, or the Research Services team, only:

• _LR Library Learning Teaching
• _LR Library Research Services

Māori titles are very important to the team, and we are exploring new titles that reflect our new names.

In 2015 UC set aside $10,000 to fund article processing charges (APCs) at Open Access journals. The library administered the submissions and payment process, with a committee of UC academics involved in decision-making.

This year the Library is providing an Open Access fund of $15,000. The process for submissions and decision-making will remain the same as it was in 2015.

Researchers have now been invited to make submissions for funding via the Open Access Fund submission page (http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/ir/apcfundform.php). You can get to this page as follows: Library homepage — Research Support page — Scholarly Publication page — Open Access page.

The submission page contains information about eligibility to apply to the fund. Author eligibility criteria are:

• The applicant is the article’s corresponding author
• The applicant has no access to grants or have insufficient funds which can be used for Article Processing Charges
• Preference will be given to early career researchers (i.e. postgraduate students, and researchers who are within 8 years (at the date of application) of academic employment at UC or elsewhere (this includes postdoctoral research employment).)

If anyone has any questions please contact Anton or me.

Firefox will be upgraded to version 3.5 from next reboot. When you open up Firefox 3.5, you will be asked to download the latest version Firefox 4, please just close that tab. The version 3.5 is what we have got right now for staff and students. Thanks, Lin.