L&LR staff blog

Ian, Philippa and I visited the Aldham Robarts LRC at LJMU on the 4th Feb.  The LRC has recently benefitted from a major refurbishment which was designed around a new University service model, which brings together all standard student-facing services in a newly converged department -  Library and Student Support.  Students can now visit any of the three campus LRCs to get help, information and advice about any aspect of student life, as well as to access standard library resources. 

The ground floor of each LRC contains a student support zone, which is made up of a Welcome Hub and a Transactions Desk.

Staff at the  Welcome Hub provide a reception service,  answer general circulation and IT enquiries, and book appointments for students needing specialist help (eg. welfare, careers, employabilty, library subject support and specialist computing support).  There are a number of small meetings rooms available for students to meet  support staff.

Welcome Hub

Transaction Desk

Staff at the Transactions desk provide help with all aspects of student administration, including coursework submission, enrolment, timetables, module registration and student finance.

The refurbished ground floor contains flexible group study areas and printing facilities. 

Philippa and Ian in the first floor printing centre

Flexible group study area

The first floor has also been refurbished and contains collections, group and individual study areas, and bookable group rooms.  The upper floors will be refurbished at a future date.

All loans of print materials are self service, including reservations, which students collect from the short-loan area.

Self-service reservations

LJMU customer services staff have offered roving support for the past three years.  The rovers wear a sash or tee-shirt to identify themselves to users.

A Rover in a tee-shirt!

The basement at the Aldham Robarts LRC houses special collections and archives, which in general are based around the theme of popular culture.  The collections include the Ray Coleman Archive, containing taped interviews used by Coleman in his biographies of Brian Epstein and John Lennon; and the John Savage Archive, which is the largest collection of punk-related material in the world.

We are looking forward to returning to LJMU, when the refurbishment of the upper floors has been completed.

Over the past year (and increasingly frantically over the past few weeks), I’ve been working to liberate a small amount of the Library’s recent book-circulation data, as part of a national project (“MOSAIC – Making Our Shared Activity Information Count”) investigating the possibilities around exploiting “user activity data” within university libraries.

I’m immensely relieved that we’ve finally managed to make some of our data public, under a Creative Commons licence, via the Repository at: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2164/

“The University of Lincoln collected one academic year’s worth of its own library book circulation data (“user activity data”) for the JISC-funded MOSAIC project, which set out to investigate the technical feasibility, service value and issues around exploiting user activity data. Data was collected for the period 1 September 2008 – 31 August 2009. Lincoln’s data was processed according to a data schema common to all participants in the MOSAIC project; any data that might be used to identify an individual library user was removed or anonymised.”

"Libraries as Books" by Dave & Bry (flickr)

The MOSAIC project (background: here and here) set out to collate book circulation and other library usage data – all homogenised and appropriately anonymised – from 9 separate universities; in order (in part) to demonstrate how the innovative use of that data could be used to add value to the library user experience.

Thanks are due to the MOSAIC project team (especially Helen Harrop for her patience and Dave Pattern for his guidance!), to colleagues in ICT for their recent invaluable assistance in getting at our data, and finally to everyone in L&LR who’s been involved – particularly to Chris Leach.

So, now the data’s out there… who’s going to make use of it?

Congratulations to Lesley Thompson who becomes Library Officer (job-share) in the evening team as of this evening (3rd February). Recruitment to the post of Library Assistant (job-share) (evening team) that Lesley has vacated will begin shortly.

Joss has beaten me to blogging this, so rather than think for myself I’m just going to quote him in full.

Yesterday, I submitted a proposal to Talis under their Incubator fund. If successful, I would have the pleasure of working with Paul Stainthorp, E-Resources Librarian at the University of Lincoln, and Casey Bisson,  Information Architect at Plymouth State University. The bid is to develop an idea which I’ve posted about before, based on Casey’s work on Scriblio and our adventures with WordPress MU, in particular, JISCPress.

Anyway, rather than re-iterating the bid here. You can read it in full by clicking here.

Comments are very welcome. Thanks.

The 1 to 1 Learning Development sessions are now being held in the meeting room on the ground floor of the Library on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 11-12. The 15 minute sessions are drop-in only and they’re aimed at undergraduates.

We’re advertising the service on its own Portal page (under Library Services); we’ve put copies of the leaflet on the ground floor, second and third floor desks and we have a portable sign which we’ll  keep in the meeting room and put out first thing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Judith and Marishona

There will be no Admin Office cover on Wednesday 27 January due to annual leave.  If you wish to contact the admin team, a voicemail message can be left on Sally’s number (01522) 886427. You can also email libraryadmin@lincoln.ac.uk and we’ll respond as soon as we can.  Thanks.

Check out how to wireless print at our demo for staff  on Friday 5th February @ 9am in GCW UL101.   Tim Ingham from ICT Services will give a short presentation on what to do and how to do it.  All welcome.

On 26 January, the Digimap Classic mapping facility in the OS Collection available via the University Portal in the Library & Learning Resources e-library will be removed and will no longer be available for use.

Digimap Roam (released in October 2009) replaces Classic as the standard mapping facility in Digimap OS Collection.  Key features of Roam include: 12 fixed scale map views, click-and-drag navigation or “slippy maps” and enhanced printing options enabling you to generate printable PDF maps in landscape or portrait and A4 or A3 size.  Digimap Roam is a significant improvement on Classic, providing many enhanced futures and an easier to use, more intuitive user interface.

Roam will therefore provide similar outputs to Classic, but will also offer more advanced features. Access is exactly the same via the Portal as for Classic. Other services available through Digimap are unaffected.

We welcome two new members of the Reader Services evening team.  Imran Mohammad is working on four nights a week and started before Christmas.  Imran has worked with us for a while as security and agency staff.  Rachel Farrow (ex-PAL) will work on Monday and Tuesday nights, starting today.

I spotted this on Twitter and thought it was worth sharing.

Google were worried that 10% of people (using small browser windows) were missing content on the right-hand edge of one of their web pages, so they did some analysis of several weeks of visitors’ browser sizes, and created this:

• http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

It’s a huge generalisation, but interesting to note that for (e.g.) L&LR’s public home page on the Lincoln corporate website…

• 99% of visitors can see our opening paragraph without scrolling
• 98% can search the catalogue and see links to opening hours & contact details without scrolling
• 90%-95% can watch our YouTube video and see our news-blog headlines without scrolling

Try it yourself on any web page.