Macquarie University Library

I toured the new Macquarie University Library in mid-September 2011 finding it bright, porous, welcoming, comfortable looking, spacious and not over-signed. It is already proving to be very popular with the students. I really liked the new areas devoted to post-graduates and higher degree researchers. Many of the internal design features look to be very clever and effective.

Farewell to Dr Alex Byrne (Part 2, the film)

This very clever animation was produced by Belinda Tiffen and Sharlene Scobie from UTS Library and it was the final item presented in the UTS farewell last night. It can also be found on the UTS Library YouTube Channel.

Farewell to Dr Alex Byrne (Part 1)

Photo credit: Dianne Garvan, UTS Library.

Last night UTS formally farewelled Alex Byrne as outgoing University Librarian. It was a wonderful function held in the University Chancellery with attendees including former Chancellor Sir Gerard Brennan, Emeritus Professor Brian Low, former Deputy Vice Chancellor (Administration) Robyn Kemmis, Alex's partner Sue Hearn and daughter Kate Byrne.

The function was hosted by Professor Shirley Alexander, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Teaching, Learning & Equity) and Vice President and speeches thanking Alex for his contribution to UTS were delivered by Professor Ross Milbourne, Vice-Chancellor and President of UTS and Professor Jill McKeogh, Dean of the Law Faculty. Professor Theo Van Leeuwen, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences sang an Adieu for Alex to the tune of My Favorite Things.

Given Alex's long and strong commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture it was fitting that the evening was kicked off with an acknowledgement of the traditional owners of the land on which the UTS campus sits by Joan Tranter (Equity and Diversity Coordinator & Manager: Indigenous/Cultural Diversity at UTS).

I spoke on behalf of all staff of the Library and here it is, I think a fitting final post for #blogjune:

All of us in the UTS Library will miss Alex’s integrity, consultative leadership, forward thinking, his commitment to scholarship at UTS and his focus on excellence in library service.

His vision and leadership leaves behind a lasting legacy that has taken UTS Library from mediocrity to extraordinary. We are now recognised as a clear leader in service design, digital library services and e-Scholarship. His inspirational future vision will be realised by the new Library that is now being planned for the centre of the UTS campus, driven by new technologies that open up the library spaces for people and deliver fast and relevant services in both the physical and virtual worlds.

Beyond UTS, Alex is widely respected as one of the most accomplished senior librarians internationally and he has contributed much as both a Board Member and President of the International Federation of Library Associations. Alex has also had strategic leadership with a number of significant national projects such as his role in shaping the direction of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive and earlier work on developing protocols for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resource Network. He has also contributed substantially to the growth of cooperative/collaborative arrangements to share collections between different universities like Bonus+.

Alex is also recognised by those who have been fortunate enough to work closely with him as a man of multiple talents and wisdom in so many fields, from literature and the arts to politics, history and languages. He is into everything. He makes his own bookends and he is sketching and print-making at the moment. He meets up with someone he studied French with once a month to practice his French conversation skills. He made ‘from Russia with Love’ for our edible books day. He regularly attends plays, operas, and musical performances. He has friends from all walks of life from countries all around the world, including a best friend who is Polish. He is an intellectual who understands deep conversations about philosophy, politics, literature, religion, history, as well as someone you can sit down and have a beer with.

He is a particularly generous leader who genuinely trusts his staff and is not afraid of having some fun at work. He often told us to push our initiatives even further than we had suggested to him: he encouraged us to “push it over the edge”, unlocking our imagination and giving us the freedom to experiment and truly innovate.

His has been a very humane and consultative style of leadership and he is respected as a sound decision maker, but a fair, honest and open judge. Alex is passionately committed to equity, accessibility, fairness for all and an open form of management.

We will miss his intellect, wit and wisdom in so many fields but all of his colleagues in the Library wish him the very best as State Librarian for NSW.

UTS Library Planning Day 2 / 2011

Wordle from tweets - UTS Library Planning Day #1 2011

A quick Wordle from the tweets in the previous post looks like this:

UTS Library Planning Day 2011

Knit In @ UTS Library

Yesterday we had our first Knit In at our Library. It was very well attended and enjoyed by all participants.

Why did we do it?

Well it resulted from our Earth Hour competition. The winner, Ben Schuman, suggested that we could turn down our heating by asking people to wear their outside gear inside the library. (And you can see Ben knitting towards the rear of the image, just to the right of centre.)

So what?

It is a small step, but it signals more "greening" of our Library and our intent for the future. It also brought new people to the Library and we welcomed them well enough that some asked for us to make this a more regular venue for knitters at UTS.

Part II

So when we did this, some of the knitting participants suggested that the Library was a better place to do this than their usual venue (a traffic island in Harris St). I indicated to them my tentative support, given my well known belief that knitters in conferences are just terrorists in disguise. And then I went even further than this suggesting that we could certainly allocate them a space of approximately 1.37 sq m on a regular basis as long as we account for the following simple risk factors and corporate governance requirements:

• development of a full risk register (accounting for all OHS hazards - needle injuries, woolen trip wires, people knitting disguises for terrorists, sheep dogs, excess knitting noise, etc.);
• development & printing of new permissions forms (Entry to Library with Needles; Permission to Knit; Intellectual Property; Public Liability; No Fault Disclosure; Damage to Third Party; Personal Insurance Declaration; etc.);
• appointment of a fully certified Quantity Surveyor and independent auditor for the club's budget;
• cleaning of knitting areas (for lost needles, dye stains, stray shearers, wool, fur balls, patterns, wounded knitters, etc.);
• a security plan for the knitting area (I believe these cost at least US$90 million); and
• quality control & assurance (we do not want to ruin our reputation by having people wandering around in garments that do not fit well or are not stylish).

That should be easy enough.

Some observations about VALA 2010

I made a few flippant and some serious observations about VALA 2010 on Twitter over the last week or so. Well, OK then, quite a lot really. I'll try and be less flippant and a little bit deeper in this post. Promise.
Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge the huge effort put in by all of those involved in putting this conference together. It really is an immense task and far too much to arrange for anyone wanting to keep their original hair colour. We should all be grateful to those who volunteered their time and energy to make the conference run so well.
From a content perspective, I think it had something for everyone and I know that the Program Committee made every formal and informal effort to consult with people about who to ask to give keynotes. I was also aware that people like David Feighan (the Program Chair) made an effort to encourage people to take some risks with what they said and to present it in an entertaining way. His opening address and welcome featuring the short video by Abbey the Digiberal Native was a brilliant example for us to follow. (If only David was wearing a tie.)
So, I came away satisfied that the conference pushed the buttons I wanted to have pushed:

• stimulating content and ideas that challenged some of my views or reminded me of reality (from RFID to networked books);
• the opportunity to swap ideas with colleagues from all over Australasia (& beyond!);
• the chance to let others know what we are up to;
• the opportunity to have some fun (away) with some of my colleagues and some new friends;
• stimulus to write a paper and prepare a presentation on a topic of some importance to us;
• connecting with old colleagues;
• watching and listening to some up-and-coming rock stars of the library world who are so passionate and enthusiastic about what they do; and
• sometimes I just needed a laugh (thanks to many of my Twitter friends and especially John Garraway from the University of Auckland who has a real gift for timing and delivery).

I don't think the real value, in terms of connections, content, conversations and encouragement, that such conferences give to their attendees can be discounted.

So, to some brief observations from my perspective:

SUSTAINABILITY: I was pretty surprised that this issue did not come up much apart from our (UTS) presentation. It is a major priority for us and was one of the main conference themes at Educause09.

TWITTER: It provided a very valuable back-channel for this conference and I think that, like Educause09 in Denver, if you didn't at least lurk, you missed a vital and really useful dimension of VALA2010. As @flexnib tweeted: "all of us are smarter than any of us". In a way, it provided a cloud for the crowd.

CLOUD COMPUTING: This issue emerged and was debated in several sessions, but again, I was surprised that it didn't feature on as many agendas as it might have.

ROCK STARS: I am glad that some new young Australian library "rock stars" are starting to emerge. I'm thinking of people like Paul Hagon, Kat Clancy and our own Sophie McDonald to name just a few of them. They need to be encouraged as examples for others to follow. Their essential role in connecting us to our clients or just the broader public cannot be underestimated.

INSPIRATION & LEARNING FROM OUTSIDE THE SECTOR: I really enjoyed two of the keynotes as they made me think . . . about everything. Firstly there was the wonderful Stephanie Orlic from Museum Lab, Musée du Louvre and finally we had McKenzie Wark from the New School for Social Research in New York. Both were brilliant. You could also argue that Paul Hagon's "cataloguing by faces and colours" session on 10 February was along the same lines - thinking outside the box.

FROM LITTLE THINGS . . . : One thing that disappointed me was hearing, I think from a panellist, that what some public and state libraries are doing in digitising their own historical collections and other popular and/or rare collection material is insignificant or really doesn't matter much. Well, I'm sorry, but it does. It matters big time. As Paul Kelly said "From little things, big things grow". It is an important start and if our public institutions don't make a start then someone else will start pulling the rug from under us. We should be encouraging any digitisation of cultural materials, not just endlessly debating which metadata schema to use or how to moderate user-created data, should we ever decide to allow it. What NLA is doing with Trove , what the Australian War Memorial has done with war diaries and more recently C.E.W. Bean's First World war records and what the State libraries and some public libraries are doing to provide online access to and digital preservation of our cultural and historical heritage is very important and a great example for others to follow. If we were really a clever nation, by now we'd have a national cultural digitisation strategy.

That's all!

Mathewson IGT Knowledge Center, UNR

This slide show comes from the Mathewson IGT Knowledge Center, University of Nevada, Reno. I visited on Veteran's Day and even on the national holiday a staff member (Erin Silva) was available to give me a tour, answer my questions and Carolyn Adams (the Head of Library Services) had even prepared a useful briefing paper for me. I have referred to that paper in producing this post, particularly about "MARS" (see below).




UNR's Mathewson Automated Storage and Retrieval System (“MARS”)
(My thanks again to Carolyn Adams for the information below.)

MARS has six cranes, over 25,000 bins and is three stories high. It was completed in 2008 and now has over 600,000 items locatd in about 10,000 bins (about 40% of maximum capacity). The maximum number of "picks" (retrievals) per day from MARS is 323 and the average picks per day is 77 (they are open from 8 am to midnight, so this is around five per hour), including staff and patron use.

Interestingly, they have three levels of picking stations:

1. Used by Teaching & Learning Technologies department for (dedicated rather than random) equipment storage. Two workstations on one aisle.
   
2. Used by Library Services department (the main level). Items stored include books published before 1995 that have been checked out seven of less times in the last 20 years and periodicals older than one year. High use materials are excluded. They took nine months to load 500,000 items initially. Books and periodicals are all stored randomly. A green mask is used over the external barcode label to denote MARS items. There are 11 workstations on nine aisles.
3. Used by Special Collections and University Archives. Items have dedicated bin storage and there is a secured access point or non-circulating collections. Storage includesd manuscript boxes and framed photographs. Four workstations on two aisles.
   

They loaded the (empty) bins in the system first and then loaded the collection items into the bins using the picking stations (which is when the six stations on the main level were busiest). Like UNLV, they have student circulation staff who assisted with this.

They initially marked all books destined for MARS with a blue dot, but these fell off and some were missed, so since then they have used the green mask over the barcode labels to alert retrieval/circulation staff about books to be returned to MARS. Student workers were used to size books for their bins: 8, 10, 12, 14 and 18 inches. They did not report the same physical access issues with the 18 inch bins as reported by UNLV. Maybe their stations were slightly lower? I noted the hazard warning strips and the use of cushioned matting at the stations to make them more comfortable for staff loading books for long time frames. (See the images on Flickr.)

Interestingly, they do not have a sound system to alert staff to requests from MARS (like they do at Lied Library UNLV), so it is dependent on staff looking in on the system (at the rear of their staff area) to see if any bins have been brought up by MARS to the picking stations. The advertised delivery time is 10-15 mins from request, but it is usually in the immediate to 5 mins range.

Monographs in MARS are rarely requested and it seems that journals are the most often requested items. These are not stored in runs. All monographs and periodicals are stored randomly (other than by size), by the system itself. They keep the most recent journal issues on the shelves until bound (in-house), after which they are placed in MARS. They do lend journals (but not from MARS) for up to three days.

They are a recently commissioned library (2008), so did not see the need for a glass window to the system. They have a screen near the circulation desk that runs a loop of a video on the system that is also available on their website. They have now discontinued tours of MARS (which they used to run for anyone) because of safety concerns about access to the machinery itself. Unlike the Australian set up we will have to have under our legislative requirements, there are no protective cages, nor screens preventing people from coming into contact with a crane if they lent over the edge of a station.

Erin said they needed an area to store divider materials (MDF). She did not know whether the MDF stored on carts behind the picking stations was spare or replacement dividers.

Erin said that at first, they did not offer retrievals from MARS over the weekend as circulation staff on weekends were usually just students, but eventually staff were put on to supervise students and now retrievals are available whenever it is open.

Library Building space

The large open atrium was sad to be an important feature that impacts on the student experience when entering the Knowledge Center and therefore impacts on student experience and their behaviour in the library. The openness achieved in the atrium is due to the fact that 50% of the collection is stored in the ASRS, thus leaving more open spaces for library users to use for other purposes. Students can use the spaces as they like, without regulation apart from the fifth floor which is reserved as a quiet space and is glassed in accordingly (unlike the other open floors, which all have a range of group study spaces). The students monitor each others’ behaviour and noise quite well.

The lowest floor (under the ground floor entrance) is perhaps the most unconventional and interesting. Outside the learning commons “@ One” is a 160-seat auditorium with full multi-media capabilities. @ One contains no book shelves at all. It is mostly a computer commons with both PCs and Macs and some large wide screen Macs in the commons area as well as a studio of about 18 Macs in one room for the purposes of using non-text based software to create films, podcasts, etc. They also have two studios, one for sound/film recording and one for editing. They lend out multi-media equipment like video cameras as well.

They have a suite just for data analysis use and a useful and well-used computer instruction lab with tiered and sloped desking.

Probably the most interesting and certainly the most popular feature is their print/production centre, the only such facility on campus. This can produce large posters, art/graphic prints and photographic prints and is very well used by students for all kinds of purposes. They are just charged a cost for the materials (inks, paper, board, etc.) and this works out to be 1/5 of the commercial cost for such services.

http://www.knowledgecenter.unr.edu/