Library Update

Supporting Highly Productive Talent

This year the library trained another 6 rovers to provide Library, IT, and study support to fellow students. Past rovers reported that the skills they learned providing this peer support helped them obtain employment, as roving in the library not only introduced them to technical and critical thinking skills, but also gave them the confidence to interact with others.


Rovers promoting Library services in the Hub during Orientation Week

 

 

Information skills

Dulcie Brake (Academic Literacies) and Dan Wagner (Performing Arts) with Yvonne Sang (Library) at a CoP meeting in April this year.

Library staff created an information literacy toolkit for academic staff to help embed information skills – finding, evaluating and using relevant information - into the curriculum. The Information Literacy Community of Practice meetings this year focused on using new media in the class room: using and embedding e-books into course content and the benefits of using ipads in teaching practice. Penny Dugmore, our eLearning librarian, also presented on eBooks at Unitec’s eLearning mini symposium earlier this year.

Supporting Maori & Pacific Student Success

Donna Salmon, Maori & Pacific liaison librarian,  with students

Librarians visit Maia every fortnight as a way to offer support and assistance to students in their space. We run tailored information skills for Maori courses and provide one on one research support for staff and students

The Library hosted the Samoan History Day organised by the Pacific Centre on the 30th of May with both staff and students attending. We work with course leaders to run tailored library orientation sessions for Pasifika students and made special provision for the “Pacific Return to Nursing (PRTN)” course run during the weekend.

Our Maori and Pacific liaison librarian is a member of the Pacific Information Management Network that helps connect Unitec with other Pacific information professionals in Auckland.

Unshackling the property anchor

Online subject guides use depicted as an infographic

Online inquiries via our chat service, library guides and Research Bank are all online library services that have grown substantially in usage over the last year.

Inquiries received via our online chat service increased from 493 for semester 1 in 2011 to 827 in semester 1 2012 (up 66%). A chat box - giving users instant access to a librarian - is available on every library page and has also been embedded into Moodle courses. Contact your Subject Librarian to have the box added to your Moodle course.

Subject guides were accessed 29% more than the same period last year – a total of 129,048 times. Our APA Referencing guide is the most popular (59,362 hits), followed by Nursing (8262 hits) Animal Studies (5391 hits), Business (5001 hits) and Education (3996 hits). Subject guides informs students of the best resources available on their subject and is regularly updated by subject librarians. These can also be embedded into Moodle courses.

The Research Bank is Unitec’s research repository, making research produced by Unitec staff and students accessible to the world. There were a total of 15,024 visitors to the Unitec Research Bank for the first half of 2012, compared with 11,460 for the same period in 2011, a 31% increase. This represents 39,308 pageviews compared to 27,834 for the same period in 2011.

Reconceptualising our Services

 

Students using the new Wireless Zone

We merged our 2 service points in the main library for an enhanced user experience, added more computers to address student demand and created a new Wireless Zone in the Student Computer Centre (located in The Hub).

A 46 inch screen was installed in study room 1 to facilitate group work, collaboration and innovation.