Kia ora koutou,

Facilities management will be conducting their annual generator test on Saturday 21st of January from 7am to 9am. This means that there will be an electrical outage across most of Ilam campus during this time. Among the affected buildings listed are Puaka JH Central Library (including the undercroft), Macmillan Brown Library and the Library Warehouse. EPS is not listed so it may not be affected.

The outage is happening outside of our opening hours, so our systems should not be affected. However, the advice from Digital Services is to log off your computers and shut down IT equipment on Friday night.

Some devices may need to be restarted at the next opening time. Please see the Intranet post here for full details.

Ngā mihi,

Bronwyn

(on behalf of the Library Systems Team)

It’s a fact – we cannot get away from it – Orientation is coming.

We need to get ready. Last year I put out a call for volunteers to help during this period. There were some takers (thanks!) but there is room for more! It would be great to get a cross-section from our teams to help so we can promote and showcase all that we have to offer. All library staff are welcome to take part!

I’ve created a channel for the duration in the Library All-Staff Team and (attempted) to set up a whiteboard in there.  Please go ahead and start putting in ideas onto the board.  Did you miss the invite last year but want to get involved. Just reply into this channel.

The group will take a low-meeting-high-ideas / participation approach … sadly we will need at least one meeting to kick off …

Let’s welcome our community back for the New Year in as fun way as possible so we can build a positive relationship with those arriving on campus for the first time.

Happy to chat / discuss this more if interested.

Next week Monday 23rd January till end of day Thursday 26th, Te Rua makerspace will be closed to users.

This is so we can do much needed planning, reviewing, maintenance, setting up new equipment and preparing cool stuff.

Our usage is lowest this time of year, reducing inconvenience to both staff and students.

Ngā mihi

Jessica

Kia ora koutou

The course code search in the library catalogue (original legacy one not the new VuFind one) is a bit bung at the moment – returning results but with blank details for some items.  I am going to try restarting the catalogue at 5pm to see if that fixes things so it will be down for a few minutes.  This likely won’t fix the issue so we may have to look into reindexing all the keyword indices for the catalogue on Monday (that will mean keyword searches will be a bit unreliable for a few hours while we are doing this – will post again if we need to go down that road).

The new VuFind catalogue course code searches are working if you need to look something up. However, it is possible the indexes there are not up to date especially for newly added/removed HD items.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (one behalf of Library Systems)

Kat Cuttriss will be starting with us on Monday. She’s looking forward to meeting more of the Library whānau and managers will be taking her out and about to meet people as part of her first day.

Tim, Dale, Isabella and I (Helen) will be returning to our usual roles the same day so all back to normality.

Ngā mihi o te tau hou! Happy new year!

The above position has been posted on the UC job board with a closing date of 6 Feb 2023. You can apply on SnapHire here: https://jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/recruiter/?&p=0&r=dbx8pqru3s80&reload=true

Please do tell anyone you know who might be interested in the role.

Ngā mihi, Helen

Tēnā koutou,

For the past few months, the Library Systems team, in conjunction with the VuFind working group, have been developing and enhancing our new OPAC, VuFind. VuFind is essentially a replacement for our current OPAC, Horizon Information Portal (HIP), which is reaching its end-of-life phase and is now considered a legacy system.

Whilst our version of VuFind is still under development, it is now at a point where we can begin using and promoting it as UC Library’s OPAC replacement.

https://libcat.canterbury.ac.nz/

The planned public go-live date is the 8th of February, when all links to HIP in our various systems including links in Summon/Multisearch, will be replaced with links to VuFind by ExLibris. All UC staff and students will then be directed to the new catalogue from that point onwards. We will also be working through updating links on the website, in LibGuides and in LEARN.

From this point onwards, up until the go-live date, ALL library staff should now be using VuFind instead of HIP. This is important for load testing and as a transition phase for staff to familiarise themselves with the new OPAC’s functionality.

Please note that any saved lists in HIP will not be migrated to the new OPAC, therefore if you would like to keep your saved lists, we recommend that you keep a copy of your lists or email them to yourselves from HIP.

For the time-being, HIP will still be working and kept running alongside VuFind during the implementation phase. Therefore, if you do come across any major functionality issues in VuFind, HIP can still be used as a backup. Please let the Systems Team know of any problems you encounter. We have a list of known issues and planned enhancements which we will be working through over the coming months.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch.

Bronwyn
(on behalf of the Library Systems Team)

A big thank you to everyone who has been involved in meeting  Vinny Ahluwalia (Business Analyst) to help us compile a list of requirements for a new library system. Your contributions have been valuable and we very much appreciate the effort and time you have taken to be involved.

We are now doing some fine tuning on the list which includes looking at some of the requirements Massey identified when they were doing a similar exercise. We expect to share this by Tuesday next week.

Our next task is to collect any further feedback or comments and to prioritise the list of over 200 requirements identified, particularly to identify which ones are key (must haves).   We will set aside next Thursday 19th January in the Totara meeting room (PJH 520) to do this.

I will be in touch shortly with the subject matter experts who have participated so far but this is also a general invite to anyone interested.

We will structure the day by category (for example acquisitions, invoicing, catalogue, electronic resources management, circulation, requesting, fines and charges etc) so you can pick and choose which times/areas you are interested in/would like to come along to, and just turn up on the day.

I will be in touch again early next week with more information.

Tim Stedman