👀 This Month’s Image…

🔦 Highlights

Farewell Jean!

After 10 years at QUT Library in a variety of roles, Jean Hing Fay has jumped ship in favour of a new life aboard ‘Georgie Girl’. We wish Jean calm seas in her new role as 1st mate.

Recruitment for a new RTL sees the commencement of Kendall Kousek on August 1st. Kendall returns to Queensland from Macquarie University. Before that, she worked at Bond University, the London Business School, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Kendall is an Alma and Primo certified expert, so the LRS-end of the Library system will continue to be in good hands.

Farewell Kathryn!

We also celebrated Kathryn Cameron’s 32 years, 10 months and 25 days with QUT, at her retirement lunch on June 29th (last day, 1/7). Since the 7th of August 1989, Kathryn has worked with great dedication in teams across Carseldine, Gardens Point and Kelvin Grove. We will sorely miss her friendly face, humour, compassion… and vigorous cries of “EXERCISES” at around 11:30 each morning!

Left: Nat’s amazing handiwork, gifted to Kathryn. Right: Last UNO (card game) showdown! Donna won – note the thumbs 🙂

🔎 Issues (from last month and emerging)

• Service delivery with staff gaps continues from 2021 (1 less RL, and 2 less RAs) – hoping to recruit to one of the RA roles very soon
• LRS’ two mice were relocated early in the month; then towards the end, we started hearing the pitter patter of rat feet in the roof above Majella, Mary and Steve.  Aaah, fauna!

⛷️ Major Future Activities

EBSCO renewals – major piece of work lasting several months, spearheaded by three team members (Mary, Susan and Adam).

👐 Indigenous Strategy

Project to enhance discovery of Indigenous content via a Library Search Primo View continues. Includes validation that Dreamtime Stories are sensitively catalogued (DDC, and LCSH) using the AITSIS Subject Thesaurus

Owned Services

📈  Information Resources:

• Great collaborative teamwork between the IA team and LRS around the introduction of Rapido (goes live on 11/7). LRS worked with licences and internal description labels to ensure QUT remains compliant in its supply of resources
• The removal of community walk-in access to selected databases has seen a flurry of rethinking around LRS procedures. Thanks to Maryann for ensuring our licence templates are suitably refreshed
• Meeting held between LRS and QUT Bookshop staff. Commonalities were shared, and a Teams channel has been established to keep the conversation going
• IRC Meeting #2 (16/6):
  • Database Usage Trends Report 2021 tabled
  • LRA expenditure: on-track
  • Cancellations and new subscription bids discussed: 6 bids endorsed (to commence 1/2023); plus 2 one-off bids endorsed (were determined not to be subscriptions)
  • Presentation on CAUL Read and Publish Agreements: stats, thus far
  • Trial endorsed to purchase selected Doc Del loan requests via Rialto, as some loans are difficult to source due to the impact of COVID on libraries
  • Report on the RFID Stocktake at GP (first in 8 years).
  • VALA presentation of interest:
    • Alison Macrina, from the Library Freedom Project (links also posted on the Information Security – Guardians’ Teams channel): Pandemic privacy: preserving and protecting our digital rights when we’re all trapped on the internet (Wed 15/6, 11am).

📷  QUT Digital Collections:

Total number of items in QDC, June 2022 – 6,702

Total number of accesses, June 2022 – 28,952 (new record for QDC)

June 2022: Specific Collection Use

• Internal engagement: QUT News 6/6, for Queensland Day
• External engagement: ABC News picked up the QUT News article and posted on 11/6: ABC.net.au “Treasure Trove of photographs of Brisbane’s early years donated to QUT by local family” . The complementary post on ABC Brisbane Facebook  “Brisbane before and after: Amateur photographers capture early years of Queensland’s capital”  saw 997 Likes, 109 comments and 122 shares. Also posted on QUT’s LinkedIn account. Lyndal O’Gorman, the donor of the Bain/O’Gorman collection, did an ABC Brisbane breakfast radio interview on the 8th June. Gavin Winter Manager of the Cube Data Wall / Sphere, has requested a meeting re Bain/O’Gorman items for a digital display on these QUT screens
  With the Bain/O’Gorman collection featured, QDC’s June statistics were fantastic, considering there are only 591 individual records in the collection!
• External engagement: Ongoing supply of  images / ideas to QUT Social Media for their Throwback Thursday (Twitter) and ideas for stories re QDC materials – June example:
  • “Did you know we’ve been training teachers at Kelvin Grove since 1942? This photo from the QUT Digital Collections shows how A Block looked in 1953 when it was the Queensland Teachers College, compared to now”. 3 retweets, 14 likes.
• External engagement: on 2/6, Jill was one of three panelists with the JSTOR AUS/NZ Open Community Collections webinar. The primary goal of the webinar was to reach contacts from the AUS/NZ region, to communicate benefits of participating in Open Community Collections. This was done by featuring stories from panelists from institutions in the region that already participate and have contributed collections. Jill shared her JSTOR experience, and attendees had the opportunity to get questions answered in a Q&A format.
• Ongoing liaison with QUT Records, Marketing and Comms, Alumni, and Chancellery staff on queries they receive
• Continuing to work with Google Arts and Culture for the launch in Jan 2023 of selected QUT images, and writing exhibitions in readiness for the launch. Getting closer with ingest of Asia Pacific collection metadata – now just have to add images. Many thanks to Greg wrangling the spreadsheet!
• Zach Dominello has commenced a STEP program with QDC. One hour per week in person and when he can, does other tasks from his desk
• Great help always from CA staff at GP and KG with digitisation of items.

📖  QUT Readings:

List checking

The link checking of semester 1 and full year Reading lists was completed early in June, as part of our ongoing partnership with Collection Access. 118 units and 3,746 links were checked by CA; 320 broken links were fixed (~9% of total checked), benefitting 10,638 enrolled students. In total, there were 827 lists for Semester 1 or full year 2022.

CA then started assisting with Semester 2’s lists… Greg reports: 515 rollovers scheduled for completion by mid July – 206 lists rolled over, 224 lists without digitisations; 91 lists remain.

QUT Readings also manages 72 lists for the Graduate School of Business, 113 lists for OES, and 39 Summer School lists.

To quote Bryn: “All up, that is a whopping total of 1,566 lists where we need to check links and rollover the digitisations.

The trend is for more links, less digitisations as we increase our collections of eBooks and eJournals.”

Thanks Collection Access and Readings teams!

Talis integration: transition from Blackboard to Canvas

Greg has been working with Talis, the LMS+ Project team, Jai, and Craig in DBS to ensure a seamless LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) integration between QUT Readings’ platform (Talis) and the new QUT LMS, by Semester 1 2023. Sarah reported from a Project meeting that all was on track. Thanks Greg!

Other Readings news

• Readings Team now have MediaHub access to “Library administrators” group. Access is needed for link checking – media assets in “Library administrators” group that are not also in the “public media” group can be accessed for checking
• Access to CourseLoop App approved – now using app when checking units. Thanks for the tip, Sarah!

💐Bouquets