University of Reading Library Review 2015-16

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LIBRARY REVIEW 2015/2016 LIMITLESS POTENTIAL | LIMITLESS AMBITION | LIMITLESS IMPACT

Library review 2015/16

Contents

Cooking up a storm

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Helping and teaching

8

Improving Library space

Supporting research

10

People

14

Systems and services Collections Statistics

Our year in review Compiled by: Julia Munro, Paul Johnson, Rachel Redrup and Amy Rippon.

This and previous editions of Library Review can be viewed online at www.issuu.com.uorlibrary Front cover illustration: Architect’s impression of refurbished Library front

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Library review 2015/2016

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COOKING UP A STORM Library review 2015/16

The dominant theme of this session was planning for the future, whilst continually improving our present.

We basked in the fair weather of Library users happy with projects completed. In August 2015 we were delighted to receive a score of 91% for satisfaction with the Library in the National Student Survey. This topped our previous record score of 87% and is tangible appreciation from final year undergraduates of both the previous refurbishments of the Library’s upper floors and of the introduction of 24 hour opening during term time.

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However, this could be the eye of a greater storm we are cooking up!

The Feasibility Group on the Library Refurbishment continued planning for transformative improvements to the Library’s Ground and 1st Floors, as well as other internal, external and infrastructure work.

Happily this culminated in the University’s approval to invest around £40 million, to move from Feasibility to full Project status, and

to appoint ISG as main contractors for the refurbishment. Planning and preparations for this ambitious and complex project carried on, and ‘early’ works commenced in July to establish external and internal hoardings, and move some staff based on the Ground Floor to temporary offices elsewhere in the Library.

As usual thanks are due to Richard Messer, Chief Strategy Officer and University Secretary, for his understanding and encouragement of the Library’s aims and objectives.

I am also grateful to all the members

Library review 2015/2016

of the Feasibility Group on Library Refurbishment, and the subsequent Project Committee, for their dedicated interest in, and support of, this crucial but complicated project.

Whilst exciting to make future plans, and motivating to be recognised for past achievements, the present can’t be ignored. Improvement must be continuous. The pages of this review record, again, the development and delivery of better services, systems and collections for Library users. The efforts and commitment of Library staff to make improvements are amply demonstrated by the ongoing implementation of the Talis Aspire online reading lists and digital content management system, through our noise alert texting service and campaign to prevent study spaces being ‘reserved’ at busy times, to

our ever-increasing e-collections.

A new section in this year’s review, ‘Supporting research’ shows the step change in this important area that Library staff have made in line with the University’s new research strategy.

My thanks, of course, also go to each and every member of Library staff for their contribution to our continuous improvement. I have no doubt in their ability to rise to any stormy weather coming their way.

Architect’s impressions of the refurbished University Library’s Ground Floor 5

IMPROVING LIBRARY SPACE Alongside Estates & Facilities and Project staff, Library staff spent much of this session developing plans to invest around £40 million in further refurbishing our Library building over the next few years.

The refurbishment is a key project in the University’s capital project programme. The aim is to refurbish the Library’s Ground and 1st Floors, (adding 200 study spaces, improving security, upgrading IT facilities, training rooms and Study Advice & Maths Support

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accommodation, and enlarging the cafe). The building’s environmental performance will also be improved through external cladding, replacement windows, and new heating and ventilation systems.

By January preliminary surveys were completed, planning permission was agreed, and the University had approved that the ‘Feasibility Group’ become the ‘Project Committee on the Refurbishment of the University Library’. Senior

staff visited other new libraries to inform decisions and in April Paul Johnson, Head of Collections and Space, visited the Bodleian Libraries storage facility at Swindon to discuss the potential storage of our print journals during the project.

Also in April, ISG was appointed as the main contractor. They began ‘early works’ in July to establish the site, building external hoardings and internal fireproof, safety walls between public and contractors’

Library review 2015/2016

Vice-Chancellor, Sir David Bell visited UoRM LRC Manager, Wong Thiam Ming and CEO Professor Tony Downes.

areas. In anticipation of the Ground Floor refurbishment phase, Senior Management, Administration, Systems, Research, and Preservation Library staff moved to temporary work areas elsewhere in the building. However, much is yet to be finalised with regard to detailed planning, funding and appointing sub-contractors. For further details, see the dedicated Library Refurbishment website we established from January at: www.reading.ac.uk/library/refurb.

Meanwhile our four upper study and stock floors, refurbished in 2013–14, remained very popular and, we believe, contributed (alongside 24 hour opening during term-time) to our highest ever NSS satisfaction score of 91%.

system in autumn but remains temperamental. We shared longterm aims with Library users via our blog but introduced an online report form so that they could report short-term heating and ventilation issues more easily.

However, whilst awaiting refurbishment the Library’s ageing infrastructure has to be nurtured!

In September two of the three lifts underwent costly, major repairs.

Our heating system was joined to a new campus heat distribution

In the University of Reading, Malaysia, the new Learning Resource Centre opened in September (fully operational if not quite fully finished) ready for Welcome Week there in October.

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HELPING AND TEACHING A key Library service is helping and teaching students and staff to use good quality information resources effectively. A ‘mystery shopping’ survey of customer service at information desks in Spring 2016 showed the student ‘shoppers’ employed rated their experiences overall at 82.5% ‘excellent’, 17.5% ‘satisfactory’ and none ‘unsatisfactory’. As Professor Richard Ellis said on stepping down as Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences, when the University disbanded its faculty structure, “Thank you to … our colleagues in the Library for their support. If we appear to take the Library for granted from time to time, it’s only because you do such a great job!”

In Welcome Week the Library again joined other student service teams in the ‘Dome’ to welcome new students to the University. Library and Study Advice staff promoted

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services, chatted with students and gave out over 500 printed guides. Our social media team posted tips on using the Library that were shared on a Twitter Wall in the Dome and in the Library foyer.

We ran ‘Finding Your Way’ sessions in the Library – to help familiarise new users with the Library building, catalogues and online resources – reaching over 700 new students.

During Welcome Week we ran quizzes and competitions that saw several new students win Amazon vouchers for demonstrating their new-found knowledge of the Library. Staff from across the Library ‘roamed’ on the Ground Floor to assist new users and answered more than 1200 enquiries in the first few weeks of the Autumn term.

The Study Advice team met increased demand for their core service individual appointments (over 800 this year). Their online

video tutorials surpassed 100,000 views whilst they continue to develop a suite of masters’ level resources on ‘researching for assignments’. In July, Kim Shahabudin, with Helen Hathaway, relaunched their revised ‘Academic Integrity Toolkit’ as a LibGuide, more accessible than its previous Blackboard iteration.

Our Liaison Librarians deliver many hours of group teaching and individual support, as well as advising and answering queries at staff student liaison committees and school board meetings. This year we upgraded to Version 2 of LibGuides. At the same time, the contents and layouts of existing guides were reviewed and updated to make them more attractive, and easy to use, based on feedback received from students. We also added a number of new guides, such as a general one

Library review 2015/2016

on bibliographic management systems, and a suite of guides from our Study Advice Team. Our online videos were also updated and rebranded to match University branding and colours.

In June, we broadened our sixth Community of Practice (CoP) meeting, originally convened to aid cross-University co-ordination and share good practice between academic Library Representatives, to include other staff leading teaching and learning. It showcased our ‘Investment in the virtual and physical Library’.

We presented our Refurbishment vision and plans to mitigate disruption during construction and also outlined progress on the implementation of new Talis Aspire reading list software.

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SUPPORTING RESEARCH The Library is increasingly involved in supporting research at all levels, including providing resources, managing research support staff and providing expertise on systems.

Following the University’s recent research strategy review, in August the Library arranged access to the bibliographic database Scopus and to SciVal, a research intelligence tool used to analyse the impact of research publications. We also subscribed to Altmetric Explorer, which analyses research publications’ impact and reach through engagement on social media, news sites, Wikipedia and policy documents, and linked it with our institutional repository, CentAUR. In January, we switched on Altmetrics information in our Summon discovery service to supplement the citation counts from Scopus and Web of Science. We also made additional prepaid and other open access deals with journal publishers to assist researchers in making their publications freely available.

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The Library now manages the Research Councils UK (RCUK) fund for open access publications and from April implemented a new University Open Access fund which helps researchers without other financial support to publish work in ‘gold’ Open Access journals. Alison Sutton, Institutional Repository Manager (with Robert Darby, Research Data Manager) now offers training for doctoral students in receipt of RCUK funding on open access and research data accessibility requirements.

‘research postgraduates’ and ‘research staff’ webpages which improve support for each group.

In 2015, the University created a new role of Research Publications Adviser. Karen Rowlett was appointed to the post and joined us in January.

She now runs workshops and one-to-one sessions on ORCID identifiers, SciVal, Altmetrics, plus ‘curating your digital researcher identity’ for the University’s People Development programme that supports staff and students working in research. Karen collaborated with other Library staff to create separate

Karen Rowlett took up our new Research Publications Adviser role

Library staff have participated in various national and local projects.

Reading became a partner institution in developing ‘JISC Monitor’, a new product which helps to track payments for article processing charges for Open Access articles.

CentAUR was an early adopter of the JISC Publications Router, a system to deliver content directly

Library review 2015/2016

from publishers to institutional repositories. The CentAUR Team developed a Research Outputs Support System (ROSS) tool by July for use in the University’s internal research outputs review process.

The Library also promoted collections-based research by hosting the Collections Research Fair in April. Championed by Dr Paddy Bullard, Associate Professor in Literature and Book History, the event encouraged researchers of all disciplines to seek potential research interest matches with unique holdings from the University’s archives, museums and special collections.

Dr David Sutton, Director of Research Projects continued to edit the Location Register of literary manuscripts website (www.locationregister.com) and to co-edit, with the University of Texas, the WATCH copyright website (www.watch-file.com). He remains the chair of the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts

(glam-archives.org.uk) and of the Section for Literary and Artistic Archives within the International Council on Archives, (editing its blog literaryartisticarchives-ica. org). This year he also: managed the Diasporic Literary Archives Network (www.diasporicarchives.com); worked with the National Archives of Namibia to develop policies on the collecting of Namibian literary archives; produced, with the Society of Authors, a guidance paper for literary authors, Authors and their papers; spoke at the International Comparative Literature Association conference in Vienna on the UNESCO Memory of the World programme; and wrote a report on literary manuscripts in Namibia, Nigeria, Trinidad & Tobago and Brazil, now freely available on the web (www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.

1080/13614576.2016.1234830).

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SYSTEMS AND SERVICES During August and September, the Systems Team worked closely with colleagues at the Learning Resource Centre (LRC), University of Reading Malaysia (UoRM) to prepare their services for the academic year. UoRM LRC has its own version of the Symphony Library Management System that our Systems team helped UoRM staff to configure. Alongside this, we worked to provide both an LRC website and a Library Catalogue tailored specifically for UoRM Library materials.

A systems development in Reading from early 2016 was to configure certain Self-Service Points to offer stand-alone circulation so users can continue to borrow and return in the (rare) event of the Library management system being offline.

From August we rolled out our first 2015/16 Talis Aspire online reading lists via Blackboard to students in the Phase 1 participating departments (Archaeology, Classics, Construction Management and Engineering, English Literature, History, Modern Languages, Politics and Psychology) 12

and where individual tutors wished to act as ‘early adopters’. This system provides students with instant access to many e-resources, gives real-time availability of physical Library items and allows them to add private study notes on readings.

We also implemented the additional Talis Aspire Digitised Content element, which allows tutors to easily request, and Library staff easily process, chapters or article digitisations of print resources.

Students appreciate the enhanced experience, staff can rest assured that compliance with CLA licences is ensured.

We introduced a number of initiatives to improve our users’ study environment experience.

After listening to student feedback, we ran a campaign to prevent study spaces being reserved during the exam period to ensure Library space was used fairly.

Cards were

placed on unattended belongings giving the owner one hour to return before others should feel free to take that place, and belongings were removed overnight. Our announcing blogpost was our most-read item ever!

Library review 2015/2016

Matthew Holtby, Disability Co-ordinator, and Nick Hollis, Library User Services Manager, set up a room booking system enabling students with disabilities to meet their Academic Mentors in a small study room.

We now allow covered (nonalcoholic) drinks in the Library.

We produced celebratory, branded travel mugs, giving the first 50 away free. Successful sales through Café Libro encouraged us to order a second batch in an even better spillproof design. Our pilot noise text alert service allowed Library users to make private requests to staff to investigate if they felt other users were being too noisy.

Sam Tyler, our ‘green champion’, co-ordinated initiatives which, in May, won us an ‘Excellence’ level Green Impact Award from Reading University Students’ Union, a higher grade than our ‘gold’ last year.

These included a display encouraging students to recycle more effectively in revision time (when Library recycling levels drop because more food or drink-contaminated containers in recycling bins mean that whole batches of recycling are rejected.)

In April, we introduced an online binding service in partnership with Hollingworth and Moss, based in Leeds. For some time there had been no cost-effective service for students to bind their theses locally, so we now promote a fast, convenient online service with many individual customisable elements.

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Green champion Sam Tyler encouraged users to be more environmentally aware, including buying our branded, lidded travel mug.

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Our new cards help empower students and Library staff to foil ‘desk hoggers’!

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Library review 2015/16

PEOPLE Our staff structure continues to evolve to meet new service needs and developments. From August we further restructured our Collections Services team posts to reflect the need to procure, maintain and monitor access to ever more e-resources for the University. Dan Bailyes, Eoin Davies and Lucy Ardill took up new, re-defined posts around Christmas, with existing staff taking on reallocated roles. Following a University-wide administrative staff review, we restructured our Library Office Team.

In April, Rachel Kirkhope was promoted to become Library Office & Operations Supervisor and in July Katie Wise joined us as Executive Support Administrator.

Ian Chilvers is our Systems Administrator / Liaison Librarian for Computer Science, and Mathematics and Statistics.

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In September Ian Chilvers became our Systems Administrator/Liaison Librarian, following his predecessor’s promotion. In November, Rehana Bari replaced Carlos Fresneda Portillo as Mathematics & Statistics Tutor for Maths Support.

Demonstrating flexibility for working parents, we appointed Caroline Treeves and Claudia Ricci as job share partners in the post of Collection Management & Liaison Support Librarian, and our Document Delivery Co-ordinator, Natalie Guest returned after maternity leave to work compressed hours over four days.

We believe our high standard of service stems from dedication to staff training and development. Besides taking part in our own weekly Staff Development Hour programme, staff continue to seek external qualifications.

UK librarianship qualifications are regulated by CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). Our Content Manager,

Content Manager, Rachael Scott (standing) and Senior Library Assistant, Lucy Ardill, from our restructured Collections Services team, orchestrated a trial of ProQuest’s Academic Complete e-book package.

Rachael Scott qualified as a chartered member in summer 2015. During the session several experienced staff revalidated their chartership: Sue Egleton (Head of Systems and Services); Kerry Webb (Arts & Humanities Liaison Team Manager); Charlie Carpenter (Humanities Liaison Team Leader); Ruth Ng (Liaison Librarian). In October and May

Library review 2015/2016

Kerry Web, Arts and Humanities Liaison Team Manager (centre) oversaw our Phase 1 Talis Aspire online reading list project, ably assisted by library assistants Ethan Scott (left) and Luisa Ostacchini

respectively, Louise Cowan and Amy Rippon became our newest trainee liaison librarians (three-year posts for new professionals seeking chartership).

Our liaison staff are encouraged to pursue Higher Education Academy (HEA) status. In September Study Adviser, Kim Shahabudin achieved Senior Fellowship, Liaison Librarian, Rachel Redrup gained Fellowship and Trainee Liaison Librarians, Rosie Higman and YiWen Hon, gained Associate Fellowship via the taught route.

Amy Rippon, Trainee Liaison Librarian for Education and Modern Languages.

They will benefit from a range of liaison, functional and supervisory experience, plus mentoring and a training budget.

The Library also supported one Graduate Trainee Library Assistant for a year before undertaking librarianship/ information science studies: this year, Lucy Whitehead.

Retiring this session were Judy Ellis, Arts and Humanities Team shelver; Della Semple, Library User Services Supervisor, after 27 years’ dedicated service at both Bulmershe Library and Whiteknights; and Colin Howard, CentAUR online repository assistant.

We were saddened to hear of the deaths of retired staff members: in November Paul Byrne, our former attendant and very first Library technician; and in January Brian Ryder, a retired Archives staff member and subsequently a long-serving and valuable volunteer in University Museums, Archives and Special Collections Services.

Louise Cowan, Trainee Liaison Librarian for Classics and Philosophy.

In June, Louise Cowan participated in an EU Erasmus Staff Mobility scheme, visiting Cyprus University of Technology.

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COLLECTIONS In January we signed up to the JISC agreement for the SpringerCompact Journals Collection which provides access to the content of approximately 2,000 Springer journals including content back to 1997. SpringerCompact is a new pilot agreement between JISC Collections and Springer, which aims to facilitate a transition to gold open access for UK research outputs and maintain access to Springer’s subscription content in a way that is cost-effective and administratively efficient.

This is a model where the funds that previously paid for subscriptions are instead used to fund Open Access publication in Springer journals, whilst an additional transition fee funds access to all of Springer’s journals. This means that all Reading authors can make their articles in Springer journals Open Access without incurring any additional charge. This subscription means that we now have access to all the journal content from the biggest publishers, and we will be less reliant on print copies of journals in the future.

Now that we have so many online journals, we are also seeking ways to ensure that our users can easily find and browse them too. With this in mind the Library subscribed to the BrowZine service, which provides an attractive and easy-to-use way of keeping up to date with the latest 16

published articles in the Library’s journals. Available on the web, or to download as an app for Apple or Android devices, it can be used to create a personalised list of key journals. With alerts, compatibility with referencing software, and the ability to download PDFs of articles for offline reading, this new tool provides an improved service to our researchers.

Over the autumn term we trialled ProQuest’s Academic Complete e-book package, which gives us access to over 120,000 e-books.

High usage (4,069 e-books accessed in 7,065 sessions and 885 e-books downloaded) indicated that a permanent subscription was indeed worthwhile, so we now have access to a much larger number of e-books to support our users.

We used additional funds available at the end of the year to purchase more full-text resources for our users, among them the Mass Observation Archive, the Punch historical archive and Proquest Dissertations and Theses Global. We continue to expand our journal backfiles, and notable additions this year include the Nature Archive 1950–1996, Springer Earth and Environmental Sciences archive and several Wiley-Blackwell archives. We also continue to show support for Open Access initiatives by participating as member institutions for various Open Access initiatives, including Knowledge Unlatched, Open Book Publishers and Open Library of the Humanities.

STATISTICS

Library review 2015/2016

2013/14

2014/15

2015/16

Students

20,237

18,595

19,315

Staff

3,643

3,753

External users

551

503

494

22,851

22,519

77.6

78.7

80.38

Total gross floor area managed by the Library (sq m)

9,905

9,905

9,905

Total number of study spaces

1,436

1,319

Number of open access workstations (PCs)

208

191

191

Total catalogued print stock

1,080,505

1,081,985

1,082,461

Number of print books added to stock in the year

8,077

7,994

Number of e-books for which the Library has paid

324,722

374,345

Total number of periodical titles purchased

17,964

23,364

Number of full-text items held in the institutional repository available externally

2,847

3,999

5,248

Total number of unique loans (not including renewals)

221,142

201,105

155,170

Full text article requests

1,178,882

1,725,152

Section requests for e-books

552,178

1,020.909

Total number of users entering the Library during the year

1,096,065

1,279,614

Number of library staff hours spent delivering information literacy training

1,003

992

958

£2,647,993

£2,912,100

£3,132,541

NUMBER OF REGISTERED LIBRARY USERS

Total

24,431

LIBRARY STAFF Full-time equivalent LIBRARY SPACE

INFORMATION RESOURCE PROVISION

LIBRARY USE

ANNUAL LIBRARY EXPENDITURE Total information resource provision expenditure

2,710

1,319

8,827 418,358 45,329

1,800,210 1,665,247 1,298,371

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Library review 2015/16

OUR YEAR IN REV AUGUST 15

• Library’s highest ever NSS satisfaction score, 91%.

• Covered drinks allowed in Library – celebratory travel mugs on sale.

• Colin Howard, CentAUR team assistant retires.

• Claire Dennard becomes Senior Library Assistant (CentAUR).

• Academic Complete e-book trial.

• Trainee Liaison Librarian, Louise Cowan arrives.

• Claire Collins, part-time Senior Library Assistant (Institutional Repository) arrives.

DECEMBER 15 • Text NOISE pilot service starts.

• Ruth Ng revalidates CILIP Chartership.

SEPTEMBER 15

NOVEMBER 15

JANUARY 16

• Ian Chilvers, Systems Administrator/Liaison Librarian arrives.

• Room bookings system for students with disabilities to meet their Academic Mentors introduced.

• Karen Rowlett takes up new Research Publications Adviser post.

• First Talis Aspire reading lists live to students via Blackboard.

• Kim Shahabudin, Study Adviser achieves Senior Fellowship of the HEA; Liaison Librarian, Rachel Redrup and Trainee Liaison Librarians, Rosie Higman and YiWen Hon, Associate Fellowship.

• Learning Resource Centre at University of Reading Malaysia opens.

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OCTOBER 15

• Christmas and Easter Vacation Loans abolished.

• Rehana Bari appointed Mathematics & Statistics Tutor, Maths Support.

• Library Refurbishment Feasibility Group becomes Project Committee.

• Kerry Webb revalidates CILIP Chartership.

• New Springer agreement allows Open Access article publishing and extends journal access.

Library review 2015/2016

VIEW JUNE 16 APRIL 16 FEBRUARY 16

• Basement moves completed and Off-site Store now full (for Refurbishment Project).

• Sue Egleton revalidates CILIP Chartership.

MARCH 16

• Reading becomes partner institution developing ‘JISC Monitor’ of Open Access article processing charges product.

• Julia Munro and Paul Johnson address University Leadership Group on refurbishment project.

• Trainee Liaison Librarian, Louise Cowan receives Harry Galloway Award for highest result on University of the West of England Information Management MSc course.

• ISG appointed contractor for Refurbishment Project.

• Online binding service introduced in partnership with Hollingworth and Moss.

• New carding system dissuades study space ‘desk hogging’.

• Library showcases ‘Investment in our virtual and physical Library’ to teaching and learning staff and Library Representatives.

• Library website rebranded in red, including upgraded LibGuides.

• Talis conference participants visit.

MAY 16

JULY 16

• Charlie Carpenter revalidates CILIP Chartership.

• Library Refurbishment Project site set-up begins, Ground Floor staff relocate.

• Amy Rippon, Trainee Liaison Librarian arrives.

• Judy Ellis, Arts and Humanities Team shelver and Della Semple, Library User Services Supervisor retire.

• Library awarded Green Impact Award ‘Excellence’

by Reading University Students’ Union.

• CentAUR’s millionth download recorded.

• Claudia Ricci (Collections Management & Liaison Support Librarian) gains CILIP Chartership.

• Claudia and Caroline Treeves begin job-share as Collection Management & Liaison Support Librarian.

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LIBRARY REVIEW 2015/2016

For more information, please contact:

Julia Munro, University Librarian University of Reading Library Whiteknights Reading RG6 6AE library@reading.ac.uk Tel 0118 378 8770 Fax 0118 378 6636

www.reading.ac.uk/library

B17810 03.17

@UniRdg_Library

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