A reminder that next Thursday 11^th May at 10am we will be gathering in Undercroft 101 to welcome and meet with new library staff.

If you haven’t yet RSVP’ed and would like to come along, please email me jaz.crowther@canterbury.ac.nz

Ngā mihi

Jaz

This afternoon and tomorrow afternoon there will be vendor presentations along with time for Q&A for the new library system contenders.  Details on Teams.  There is the option to join these online or come in person (noting there are room space constraints so please have a conversation with your manager/colleagues if you’d like to come in person).  From 4-4:30pm there will be the opportunity to provide feedback to the evaluation panel who will be doing the scoring regarding your thoughts and observations.  Reference checks are also underway,

Exciting times …

Tim Stedman

This week the MLM demos are on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon so the Library Systems team will be unavailable for those 2 half days.

Further to my earlier post, the Systems team is still under very high pressure and workload with limited staff due to leave, vacancy, and then training for Claire (who starts next week) coupled with some very large projects. This pressure will continue for the next few months.

The focus of the team will be on ensuring all systems and applications are running and fixing any access problems. Please continue to report any outages or problems to eservices@libr.canterbury.ac.nz

Any other queries will need to take a back seat and may take a while to respond to.  We will do the more urgent tasks and will get to others as and when we are able to.

We appreciate your support during this chaotic phase.

Ngā mihi,
Jenny

Happy International Workers’ Day / May Day!

2013 International Workers’ Day demonstration in Austria

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic by SPÖ Presse und Kommunikation

Maypole dancing at Bishopstone Church, East Sussex, in England, UK.

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic by Kevin Gordon

Kia ora koutou

A bit of a stop/start week, with some important time on Tuesday to come together and remember for ANZAC Day.  But lots of mahi is taking place, and students are visibly and emphatically back for more as semester 1 resurges into life!

Helen, Aurelia and I met with our TEU delegates this week (Nick, Dave and Tim O) for our quarterly kōrero, where we discussed the upcoming external peer review, and what this will involve. As mentioned in last week’s update, we’re still finalising full panel membership for the review, but have now had the Terms of Reference (TOR) confirmed by SLT (Senior Leadership Team).  These TOR have now been shared with managers who are happy to on-share and discuss (as am I).  The TOR have also just been sent to two of our three prospective panel members, along with Letters of Invitation.

I’d like to emphasise that the overall aim of the review is to help us (the UC Library team) set a long-term strategic vision, which is fit for purpose now and in the future, Te Tiriti-responsive, places the user experience at its centre and is in direct alignment with the overarching institutional strategies and priorities of the University.

To help us do this, the review is an exploratory analysis of where we are currently, and where we can position ourselves for future opportunities.

In terms of approach, once we have received positive responses from panel members to our Letters of Invitation, the panel will then be sent a pack of relevant documents (e.g. Library Ops Plan 2023, Ngā Awa e Rua, Library Committee Terms of Reference etc.).  They will then be invited to visit us here at UC (we are hoping for this to occur in late June) to undertake interviews with key stakeholders (including library staff) so that they can understand the ‘on the ground’ nature of our service and the experiences we offer. The panel will then draw together their analysis, culminating in a report of findings and recommendations which will go to SLT and Academic Board for their November meetings.

On panel membership, I’m delighted to confirm that one of the panel members is Andy Priestner, of user experience (UX) fame.  Some of you were part of Andy’s UX workshops here last November.  Because we have this opportunity to bring Andy back to UC as a panel member, we’re also looking at running a 2-day UX workshop with him, after the panel site visit and interviews.  Library managers can share more details about this opportunity with you, but please sing out if you have any questions (and if you were part of last November’s UX cohort but are keen for another bite, please feel welcome to put your hand up again! There’s always something new to learn 😊)

I see the external review as a positive opportunity to get a comprehensive, current evidence-base of where we’re at, along with some robust recommendations for where we can go.  But if you have questions or are feeling uncertain about any aspects of the process, please feel most welcome to talk with your manager and/or come talk with me, Helen or Aurelia.  We all have an open door and would be happy to kōrero at any point.  You may like to come along with some colleagues and support people.  I know that your TEU delegates (Nick, Dave and Tim O) are happy to be with you and/or bring questions to managers directly, if you’d like them to support you in this way.

Finally, you’ll have seen that we’ll have a Staff Forum in the last week of May, taking the form of two repeated hui so that as many folks as possible can join in.  Full agenda to follow, but this will be a great chance to Q&A together on a range of matters and hear/share about some recent professional development opportunities some of you have been part of.

For now, safe weekend all,
Kat

There was an incident this week in the ‘new’ Dovedale library store H located in the Otakaro Annex.  Water has leaked into the building in one room and damaged some of the collection that was sitting in boxes on the floor, waiting to be shelved.

I put my Disaster Response Coordinator hat on and sprung into action.  The dry material has now been moved to a safe space (we hope) and the wet material will unfortunately need to be discarded.  We have lost 1000 books that are far too water damaged to be saved.  There was considerable dampness and a lot of very nasty mould growing on almost all the items in the boxes that got wet. The call range of the material affected is PG to PQ which is mainly European languages and literature.

LAC team will create a detailed list of all the items that have been lost, so we can refer back to if needed and circulate to subject librarians. I scanned all the barcodes so we should end up with an accurate list.  The items already had a status of “temporarily unavailable” so they were not able to be requested.

Thanks to those that helped with this recovery task, and to those who still have work to do to complete the list of lost items.

Please feel free to contact me if you want any more information, but we won’t be able to tell you what has been lost until the list is completed.

Jenny Owens

I understand some folk may have missed out on the updates regarding the Horizon replacement project.  Just to confirm I’m putting these in the MLM Project Updates channel.  If anyone can’t access these please let me know.  Today’s update: information about the vendor presentations happening next Wednesday and Thursday.

It’s Friday and it’s been a long-short week so I’m sure you’re in need of a wee pick-me-up, plus an education from John in hyphen-placement—. This issue of Pānui-will-hopefully ful-fill your needs for both of the above. En-joy!

You can find the finished PDF copy here at K:\Management\Communications\LTR-Newsletters\Pānui 2.0\2023\2023-04-LTR-Pānui.pdf

Let us know any questions you would like us to ask Kat, and email us stories and pics you’d like to share in the next issue.

Kathryn, Hugh and Simon

Ngā mihi o te ata koutou ko te whānau

Kia tau te rangimārie i runga i a tātou i te mutunga wiki nei!

You might have noticed that posters and promotional material for participant recruitment for the UC NZLPP Research Project were placed out around campus and across some of the UC social media platforms on the Thursday before Easter break.

We are excited with anticipation that we will start our Wānanga Focus Groups with ākonga Māori in the near future.  With gratitude to Library Staff who agreed to participate in the practice session facilitated last week.  Your presence made it possible to upskill in advance ahead of the real thing.  Āku whakawhētai atu ki a koutou mā!

Any questions, wonderings or thoughts – hit me up!

Kia tika, kia pono, kia aroha!

Ngā mihi nui

Nā Jess

Kia ora koutou

UCGo library tile (MyAccount information and renewals functionality) is not currently working.  We believe this is likely also related to the security change that broke Payment Plus and student data feeds.  Digital Services staff are investigating.

Posting here in case you get queries from UCGo users (there are a few thousand of them!).

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems…in what seems to be a constant stream of news of broken stuff lately :()