The end of October and beginning of November continued with Library Management Platform supplier demonstrations and scoring and subsequent consensus scoring. The process has now completed and we are just waiting to get some technicalities finalised before proceeding with the successful supplier. There will also be work to do on the SCURL framework and the dissemination of this to other interested parties.
A lot of time has been spent on staffing issues and developments over the last couple of months and this will continue into the new year. We have some vacant evening/weekend library assistant posts so there has been some juggling of people to provide effective cover. It always becomes more difficult into the winter months with sickness and travel.
As far as students are concerned we are now into our busiest time of the year especially with study spaces in the library. The last day of teaching was 4th December and now we have 2 weeks of exams. This means the library is full for at least 4 hours of the day and very busy for a further 8 hours a day and in use for the other 12. It creates problems, the same ones experienced by a lot of other university libraries, of noise, shortage of space, food and drink, unattended items etc. However despite this we do provide a good learning and study space and for the thousands of students using the library each day, it works. We are averaging a footfall of 3000+ per day with a peak occupancy of nearly 600.
We do have a programme of monitoring the study space in the library on a regular basis and this helps to keep a balance between all the different users and the demands on the space.
We've had a few ups and downs with services including an unscheduled installation of applications and systems, a Microsoft downtime of O365 and then today problems with jisc JANET service. This means that communications have to be carefully managed in order to get the correct information out in the correct format and try to keep everyone in the loop.
Our social media accounts accounts are developing and I'm trying to train up more staff to use them and take responsibility for posting to them. It's difficult to fit training into the busy schedule during November and December but we'll pick this up in January.
I have managed to get out to a few events including SALCTG, CSGUK and ELISA.
The CSGUK conference went well in November at Kings College and I enjoyed organising and facilitating the workshop sessions. Still writing up the data and feedback that we received.
The ELISA winter networking event is Wednesday 9th December at the National Library of Scotland so looking forward to that.
View from my office window
