Kia ora koutou,

It’s my turn this week to write Inside Out, a fortnightly piece where each manager takes it in turns to write about happenings inside and outside of the Library from their perspective.

2022 packages

This has been a lot of work over the last couple of months for our team and I’m pleased to say we are almost there.  Last week we reached agreements both parties can live with each with LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters.  Apologies to those working in my vicinity in recent days with my sighing and muttering.  We are very grateful to have the assistance of UC Procurement.  The EBSCO database package is almost ready to be renewed and we are about to lock horns with ProQuest over their 2022 renewal proposal which currently does not meet with our approval.  Now all the invoices are coming in so it’s all go.

Read and publish agreements

Tomorrow will feature the first CAUL webinar talking us through the new read and publish agreement with Cambridge.  Details about inclusions, who is participating, information for authors and libraries etc were released by CAUL yesterday for the Cambridge package.

The four read and publish agreements negotiated by CAUL (Wiley, Springer, OUP and CUP) maintain our existing ‘read’ access and include a new benefit of open access publishing in hybrid journals (up to a cap).  All publishers except Cambridge insisted on a cap which range from 75% (Springer) to 101% (Wiley) based on expected publishing output across the consortium.   However this is provided at no extra cost (0% increase on our 2021 spend).  Major negotiations CAUL is targeting in 2022 includes Elsevier, Taylor and Francis and SAGE.

2022 operational planning

Last week the managers did some reflection and environment scanning as we think ahead to our 2022 operational plan.  One of the articles we considered was The higher education environment driving academic library strategy: A political, economic, social and technological (PEST) analysis.  This gave us some helpful pointers for our discussion.

We acknowledged that a lot of what we might call our ‘business as usual’ contributes in many ways to our operational plan goals in support of the UC Strategy.  This was a fresh and useful reminder for me as to how much work you all do that supports this.

On the 17th November we will meet again to create the plan.  Next step will be communicating this to stakeholders and seeking feedback from our teams.  The aim is to have our operational plan finalized by mid December.

Staff development

Within Access and Collections, some reflection for me has been becoming more intentional about moving into new and interesting areas of work as the nature of our work changes.  With that in mind we are creating a staff development series over the summer within LAC to provide a range of sessions that hopefully will facilitate this.  Ideally these would match to individual interest areas so as we look for fresh challenges or more development there are a range of topics to choose from and what areas staff would like to explore.

Microsoft 365 Teams and OneDrive

A number of us have been using Teams for a few weeks now.  From next Monday 15th November Teams and OneDrive will be rolled out to all staff across UC.   Teams is a collaboration space that brings together chat, video calls and documents. It’s likely to replace Skype and Zoom eventually, more instant messaging/chat and fewer emails, especially ones with attachments.  Book into the 2 training sessions on offer which are being delivered online.  More information in Tū ki te tahi.

An example of one of the things we’ll need to get our heads around at some point is what does this all mean from an information management perspective as Teams and OneDrive becomes another player in the file storage space.  I’ll leave that meaty conversation for another day for now ..

Yay for the short week!

Tim

Thank you to all who contributed to the operational planning exercise in the staff forums last week.

If you didn’t attend (or you did come and have had further thoughts), here is a copy of the exercise we did.

We reflected on some of our 2021 operational plan goals (and others) and used the sailboat analogy to discuss:

• What moved us closer to our goals, what’s propelling us forward (Strengths)
• What successes have we had, what made us happy (Successes)
• What risks do we foresee, what do we need to look out for (Obstacles)
• What things held us back, slowed us down or stopped progress (Anchors)

If you do have any ideas on strengths, successes, obstacles and anchors but didn’t get a chance to share those on the day. you can still email your thoughts to Gabrielle who is kindly collating the feedback for us.

By the way – it was mentioned on the day ‘anchors’ can be considered as things that ground us, keep things stable etc, so I’m quite happy for different interpretations of those terms in your reflections.

Library managers will begin operational planning for 2022 this week starting with some environment scanning.  There’ll be opportunities for everyone to participate in our 2022 planning in due course.

Some of you have been asking whether the United States Postal Service suspending deliveries to this part of the world is impacting our book supply.  EBSCO GOBI advise our shipments are unaffected but we’ll keep you updated with any developments or other impacts in regard to supply of physical items in these times.

Further to my post on updates on the 2022 publisher negotiations, CAUL has provided a slide show describing the process and information provided to authors at article acceptance (for the four publishers CAUL is commencing a read and publish agreement with in 2022).

Over coming days and weeks, CAUL Procurement will be working towards further sharing of support information, useful for library staff to share with authors, so that they can be aware of publishing processes related to the new agreements.

On Thursday October 7th 12pm NZDT CAUL Procurement will be providing an overview and discussion of the four new Read & Publish agreements commencing in 2022.  The Zoom meeting is open to all CAUL member institution library staff.

Bob Gerrity (University Librarian, Monash University and Chair: CAUL Content Procurement Committee) and Angus Cook (Director, Content Procurement) will provide context about CAUL’s overall approach to these agreements followed by a brief review of each agreement.

Slido will be used for managing questions for this event.  Please use this link or go to slido.com with #122621, once the event starts.

If you are interested in joining please register in advance for this meeting.

It’s been on my to-do list to share more widely where things are at with the publisher negotiations for the 2022 renewals.  Link to document summarizing the current state of play.  Please treat the information in this document as commercial-in-confidence.  I plan to share this information with LLOs and Library Committee next week.  Questions welcome.

Kia ora koutou,

Well done everyone for making it through another week.  I have been holding off on posting this as long as possible so we have the most up-to-date info and we minimise the amount of emails and updates

1. Link to yesterday’s staff zui recording
2. The Slido for asking questions remains open so feel free to continue to post questions, or ask your manager
3. We have established that rooms in Erskine will be available for student access this weekend (in case there are any AskLIVE questions)
4. Updates to the Q+A on Covid alert levels and working in Delta Level 2

Summary of advice updated for the following questions:

• Do we have to wear face coverings in Delta Level 2?
• Minimum physical distancing – 1m
• Scanning QR codes in the building
• Advice re discussion rooms
• Do we need to be vaccinated to be able to come back to work?

(Apologies the required scrolling – I tried and failed to create anchor links to these questions)

Kia pai tō mutunga wiki

Tim on behalf of the Library managers