Kia ora koutou

I’ll keep this brief, in acknowledgement of your time, and how much you are all juggling with incredible composure just now.  My week has reflected everyone else’s to a greater or lesser extent, I’m sure, with so much on, and so much coming at us (sometimes completely from left field)!

Amongst other initiatives, I note that Macmillan Brown staff are involved with our valuation project, that many of us are immersed in evaluation of vendor proposals for our new Library Management System (including attending the vendor demos on two afternoons this week), and that a number of PJH-based staff swung into magnificent action with short (well, really, it was “no”) notice when fire egress compliance issues on Level 9 were brought to our attention on Thursday.  All this while heaps of our ongoing mahi continues, all the name of incredible service for our community.

May is here now, so NZ Music Month has commenced, May the Fourth took place with its usual hilarity, Open ChCh is underway this weekend (special mention to library staff who are hosting these tours!) and next week is Rotuman Language Week!

For now, have a lovely weekend.  The forecast tomorrow is beautiful.  Do enjoy, especially if you are out and about exploring local architectural delights as part of Open ChCh!
Kat

Kia ora team,
We had some concerns about the ‘squeeziness’ of shelving and seating layouts on Levels 6, 7 and 9 in PJH, and asked FM to work with fire engineering consultants and undertake a fire egress compliance assessment of these floors.  The last assessment was undertaken in 2011.

Initial findings:
Library managers were briefed earlier today on initial findings, which show we have some issues:

• We need to reduce the number of seats on Level 9 down to 60 seats in total.
• We don’t have the required 1m clearance around the shelving/seating in certain places on each of these floors.  This is exacerbated by library users spreading out their bags and gear, thereby blocking fire exit routes.

Now:
First thing tomorrow morning (before the library opens and students arrive) we are removing enough seats on Level 9 to bring the overall floor quantum down to 60.  We are prioritising the removal of seats that abut onto range ends (i.e. those seats that create most obstacle where they are currently). Those excess seats from Level 9 will be relocated to our Level 5 staff workroom area for temporary storage, so they don’t take footprint elsewhere that can be used for students/study spaces.

Today we are also deploying signage throughout the building to ask users to put their bags/packs under desks, to keep fire exits clear.

Next:
We are still awaiting confirmed findings and receipt of the report.  In the meantime, we have asked the fire engineering consultants to:

• assess every floor in PJH. This is so we can understand how best we can configure each floor, to ensure compliance across the whole building
• provide floor plans of shelving/furniture layouts on each floor, which ensure we are compliant.  Note, we may need to reconfigure shelving layouts and move some sections of collection off some floors to create the 1m clearance around range ends, but this is to be confirmed.

Communications and questions:
There will be communications with the wider university, particularly Library Committee and our UCSA reps.  In the meantime, I’m keeping Ian (our DVC-Research) in the loop, who is liaising with other senior leadership team (SLT) colleagues.

This represents an opportunity to get things right and make things better, but I appreciate it is a big body of work, in the mix of other big pieces of mahi on our plate!

Please don’t hesitate to ask me or your manager if you have any questions or concerns.
Kat

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