I would like to confirm some of the details for how to use our new book vendors.

Guidelines for how to choose a vendor are now available on the ‘Purchasing materials’ page of Libnet:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/procedures/collections/purchase-books

These guidelines are for everyone involved in book buying. Please send any questions about the framework and guidelines to me.  My email address is bill.martin@ucl.ac.uk.

This guide explains how the SUPC framework will make book buying easier.

Science Library – Post Relocation

With effect from Tuesday 3^rd July 2018, the post sacks and pigeonholes, currently in the Security hut, will be relocated to 2^nd floor staff kitchen area, to mirror the Main Library.

Science Library – Replacement Security Gates

With effect from Monday 9^th July 2018 the main entrance to the Science Library will be closed for works to be carried out for the installation of the new gates and dismantling of the Security hut, and refurbishment of the whole space. Plenty of signage will be placed at the front of the Library and around the library redirecting users to enter and exit via the Darwin Walk into room G15 where Security will be based for the duration of the works and to enable access to the 1^st floor via the back staircase.

We will send further updates and details as the projects progress. If you have, any queries please contact phil.watson@ucl.ac.uk and r.estwick@ucl.ac.uk

On 4^th November 1948, the Institute of Ophthalmology was officially opened.  To celebrate the 70^th anniversary two main events are taking place: on 28^th June there is a symposium filled with talks on the progress of research leading to treatments of ocular conditions over the past 70 years and a 1940s themed staff party on June 29^th at the Honourable Artillery Company.  To draw all this together a booklet 70 years of history: The Institute of Ophthalmology has been written by Amanda Vernon, Quality Assurance Manager for Cells For Sight, Debbie Heatlie, Librarian and Victoria Tovell, Postdoctoral Research Associate.

The whole experience of writing the short history has involved speaking to lots of people who have been at the Institute for decades, as well as looking through a number of our library resources including the Institute Annual Reports, biographies, unpublished material, obituaries and so on. Naturally, there has been lots and lots of writing, rewriting and editing. To quote Professor Barrie Jones (pictured examing a patient), an ophthalmic consultant who transformed ophthalmic practice by encouraging ophthalmologists to specialise and who went on to set up the Department of Preventive Ophthalmology, when writing you “have to think until it hurts”.

Much has been learned about the people, the research, the locality and the buildings along the way and not all of it could be incorporated into the booklet. However, Wiki pages are planned to include these nuggets of information, so more writing is on the horizon. The Institute Annual Reports 1948-1990 were an excellent source and summary of information and detail, but these stopped almost 30 years ago and it was difficult to fill the void and left many unanswered questions: what research of note has been done? Who was responsible? When did it happen?  What was the outcome?

I have reflected on this knowledge gap and upon the value and quality of annual reports in general and how they can be used as a tool to record meaningful events, awards, milestones, and interesting facts. Not everything will make it into the history of the future but, providing the information is interesting and is available, it could well do.  Often our day to day work can appear to be routine, but it’s important to reflect each year on what worked, what was outstanding and how this can be recorded in an interesting and informative way, with a view that history is being recorded and could one day be of use.

Please contact me at d.heatlie@ucl.ac.uk if you would like a copy of the booklet.

I am pleased to announce that the new book processing standard for UCL Library Services is ready to go live.

This standard will give us consistent content and branding. It will help us to improve customer service. It will also simplify book processing, making it quicker and cheaper for books to reach the shelf.

The main change will be to reduce the number of proprietary stampings to one per book. We will also remove the various colour coding labels and stickers. Instead, we will have a single sticker on the spine to show the loan status in words.

Data labels will replace date labels. They will show the name, address and contact details of our libraries.

This is in line with the new national standard for academic library book processing.

The standard will go live the beginning of July. There will be a rolling implementation.

The first phase will be via shelf ready processing by our vendor, Coutts-Proquest. Some items will continue to arrive from Dawsons, under the old specification. We will be distributing processing materials to sites and processing teams. Local teams can then begin to use the new specification.

The Acquisitions team will be able to provide templates and materials.  We will be in touch with teams that process materials locally.

We will not be seeking to relabel the material already on the shelves.

I have placed the instructions for this standard on Libnet at:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/procedures/collections/purchase-books

The document is called “Standard book Processing Specification” under the toolkit section.

You can contact me at bill.martin@ucl.ac.uk.

As announced in TheWeek@UCL, this year’s Professional Services Conference will be held on Tuesday 5 June at Logan Hall, UCL Institute of Education. The theme of the conference is ‘Working in Partnership’ and the organisers have planned an exciting, interactive programme. Registration is open so book your place now. Library Services staff are eligible to register, subject to line manager approval. Although we are part of the Office of the Vice-Provost (Research), you can register with a “Library Services” ticket (in the list): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-professional-services-conference-2018-tickets-45721610568

Professional Services Awards

Nominations for the Professional Services Awards opens today (Friday 4 May) and closes at midday on Friday 18 May. ‘Working in partnership’ happens across all areas of Library Services, so please consider putting forwards your team(s) or initiatives which you have been involved in. Library Services has been successful in previous conferences, with awards granted to the Main and Science Library Daytime and Evening/Weekend teams in 2016 (https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/2016/02/04/library-services-teams-win-excellent-service-award/) and UCL Press in 2017 (https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/2017/02/16/ucl-press-wins-ucl-brand-ambassador-award/).

The Professional Services Conference is a real opportunity to showcase the work of Library Services in partnership with academic colleagues and other professional services teams, and how we contribute to making UCL one of the world’s best universities for study, research and sharing knowledge.

The categories for awards this year are:

• Working in Partnership
• Sharing good practice
• Process review/system improvement
• Improving efficiency
• Improving service user satisfaction 

If you are interested in nominating your team for one of these awards, please email professionalservices@ucl.ac.uk and they will send you a nomination form and guidance notes. Details and templates for nominations will be available from the Professional Services webpage shortly, and nominations open from today until the deadline for submissions on Friday 18th May at 12 pm: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/professional-services/prof-services-awards

I would like to share some important updates about our book procurement processes.

The Acquisitions Teams run competitions to choose our main book suppliers. This helps the library’s Key Performance Area: Value for Money.

We team up with other universities to increase the strength of our bargaining hand. This also reduces administration. That is why we have joined the SUPC (Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium) Joint National Tender for book supply.

This also assists with our Key Performance Area: Systems and Processes. It sets out the standards of speed of supply and technical ability we expect from our suppliers. It also helps us follow laws to stop modern slavery and money laundering. We also use it to communicate our expectations for suppliers to have green policies.

To get the best out of this framework, we took the decision to run a local mini-competition between the book suppliers. We were working with Procurement Services to reduce the number of suppliers that we use. This will help save UCL money on administration costs, as well as deliver economies of scale.

A firm called ProQuest won the contract for our English language book supply. Some of you may remember them as Coutts. This will mean a significant change for many of us, as we stop working with Dawson Books for that material.

Dawson will continue to be to be our main supplier for most of Western Europe and Scandinavia. A new vendor in the form of EBSCO GmbH will be providing us with books from Central and Eastern Europe. Harrasowitz and Casalini also won some country work packages on the contract. I will be sending detailed guidance to selection teams later.

Titilola Ogunsowon will be our key contact for ProQuest. Ann Smith will be the contact for Dawsons and EBSCO. We have awarded contracts for one year in the first instance with an option to extend for a further two years.

A key part of the Acquisition Teams’ work over the past couple of years has been the introduction of shelf ready ordering (where the books arrive marked up ready to go directly onto the shelves with spine labels and loan status indicators, etc.). This is the first time we have had to move our main vendor under shelf ready. It means that we will have to set up our processing profiles with ProQuest before we can start ordering.

Suppliers have asked libraries to simplify their book processing. This is so they can control costs and rationalise workflows. SUPC have included this as part of the contract. I am pleased to announce that we have committed to getting as close to the new national industry standard for academic library book processing as we can.

The changes will be mostly cosmetic. We will be reducing the number of proprietary stampings from up to eight to only one. We will use the same stamp text across the whole service. We will only have one colour of date label. This will now include the name and address of the library the book belongs to. We will be placing loan status stickers on the spine of the book. This will allow us to have consistent branding across the services. It has also helped lower the cost our suppliers will charge for shelf ready servicing.

My teams will be contacting selectors about any training they will need.

Once we bed the new systems in, we will look to how we handle our smaller and specialist suppliers.

 

Brexit negotiations will probably return to the news agenda next week, as British and EU negotiators seek to make an agreement on the transition period at the European Council on 22-24 March. As part of our ongoing support for staff from the EU, UCL has recently updated the FAQs on the UCL Brexit Hub: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-and-europe/immigration-clinics/immigration-clinic-faqs

UCL held a series of Immigration Clinics with presentations and information provided by an immigration specialist from the law firm, Eversheds LLP. The FAQs are based on these Immigration Clinics. A video of one of the clinics (from 2016) is also available to view from the link above.

For further advice, you can refer to the EU referendum portal: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-and-europe/. If you require any support, do not hesitate to contact your line manager or myself. You may also access personal support from the University’s Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) on a confidential basis. Support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year for staff.

The Staff Survey results are in! What happens next?

The Provost and Nigel Titchener-Hooker, the SMT Staff Survey Champion, hosted a Town Hall meeting for UCL staff on 13 February, where the high-level results of the Staff Survey were presented for UCL as a whole. The Provost identified 5 UCL priorities based on the survey:

• Improve the physical environment
• Performance Management
• Workplace stress and Wellbeing
• Aligning UCL 2034
• Bullying / Sexual Harassment

Within Library Services, we had a 63% response rate, which is slightly higher than the UCL average, so I would like to thank all of you who took the time to complete the questionnaire. Only 31% of respondents believe that action will be taken on the survey (-12% compared with UCL as a whole), so there is work to do to ensure that we respond to the issues which emerge from this survey’s results… You can view the full set of scores for Library Services in the “How we’re doing” section on LibNet.

What happens next?

In order to make change happen, we have our Staff Survey Action Group, whose first meeting immediately followed the Town Hall. In our meeting, we tried to identify the main areas for improvement in Library Services, which will form the core of our Action Plan. We are also looking at areas to investigate and also areas of good practice to celebrate.

These are the key areas which we will be exploring as a group, to identify specific actions we can take to improve Library Services:

Areas for improvement

• Leadership and Staff Engagement
• Bullying and Harassment
• Communication
• Working environment
• Management / Appraisals
• Career development

 Areas for further investigation:

• Low sense of work objectives being aligned to those of UCL
• Low levels of being encouraged to show initiative and being proactive
• Pay levels in comparison with similar roles in other organisations
• Stress and impact on wellbeing

Areas identified for celebration:

• Understanding how work contributes to the success of the department and of UCL
• Sharing ideas to improve things
• Freedom to work in a way that suits, and not needing to work excessive hours
• Constructive feedback received between appraisals
• Awareness of UCL’s benefits for staff and support for wellbeing issues / stress

The Action Plan is a formal document, which will need to be signed off by the Library SMT and will then be sent to UCL HR in late March, so that departments’ progress in implementing action plans can be monitored centrally. If you would like to share suggestions for actions, or have any queries about the Staff Survey results, please contact me or one of the members of the Library Services Staff Survey Action Group. Once they are approved, we will also share the Action Plan and the minutes of the Staff Survey Action Group meetings on LibNet (see links above).

For more information, and to watch a video recording of the Staff Survey Town Hall meeting, you can visit the UCL Staff Survey 2017 webpage.

New Student Centre

Friday 16 February 2018 saw the topping out ceremony for the new Student Centre. This tremendous building development is a pivotal objective of the UCL 2034 strategy and of the Library Strategy, which are designed to enhance the Student Experience and to provide an environment fit for education, research and outreach in the 21st century.

The photograph to the left shows the current state of the interior of the building. Topping out marks the fact that the building has reached its full height in terms of construction. No fitting out has yet been undertaken in the interior of the building. That comes next.

A large group of UCL staff, including members from the Library, joined the construction teams to celebrate the topping out ceremony. There were a number of speeches to mark the occasion led by the Provost and President of UCL, Professor Michael Arthur. The Provost spoke of the importance of the UCL 2034 strategy to deliver a first class student and research experience. The delivery of the vision contained in UCL 2034 is of fundamental importance for the future health and vitality of the institution as one of the great research universities of the world.

The topping out ceremony itself took the form of the Provost inscribing a concrete block with his name and title, which will now be secured into the structure of the building.

The Student Centre, when fully open this time next year, will mark a transformation for the service which the Library can provide to UCL students. The building will be operated by the Library and contain 1000 digitally-enabled learning spaces. There will be no paper provision in the building. Library collections will remain in the existing UCL family of libraries. If borrowed by the student they can, of course, be brought to the new Student Centre for personal use. The type of learning spaces the Library will provide is being closely modelled on the learning spaces which we already provide in the Cruciform Hub and in the UCL Institute of Child Health. These are in fact the model we aspire to for all UCL’s libraries.

One of the most striking things, which I noticed when I joined the UCL group for the topping out ceremony, is that the views from the top of the building are stunning. Pictured here is the view of Wilkins’ Dome in UCL and UCLH across the road in Gower Street. And the Student Centre will offer a new thoroughfare through UCL, helping to unite the campus and to bring a greater sense of community to staff and students on the site.

The opening of the Student Centre marks a very important development for the Library. It will transform the Student Experience and the way students use libraries and learning spaces across UCL. This will give us the opportunity to continue to re-think our existing library spaces and how they are used.

The topping out ceremony marks the start of a year of communication in and from the Library as UCL fits out the interior of the building and we plan for the full operation of the Centre. Ben Meunier this week gave an interview to CILIP, and there will be other interviews and national Newsletter articles to announce the birth of what is a major development in academic libraries throughout the whole country. It augurs well for a bright future for UCL students working in a cutting-edge building.

Paul Ayris

Pro-Vice-Provost

UCL Library Services

This post was originally published on this site.

UCL Visitor Terence Etherton, who as the master of the rolls is one of the most senior judges in the UK, has asked a QC to advise him on a petition lodged with him by a member of staff.

The petition has asked the Visitor to arbitrate on a number of issues regarding the way that UCL is governed and operates. UCL’s senior management has prepared a statement which was issued to the Financial Times, which first reported the story.

A visitor is a role that dates back to medieval times and has responsibility for overseeing an autonomous institution.

“UCL will fully co-operate with any investigations and requests for information by the Visitor or anyone acting on his behalf.  As a mark of respect to the Visitor and the investigation that will occur,  we don’t consider it appropriate for specific detail to be aired in the press by responding to all the claims made by the petitioner in advance of that more formal process.

“Most of the issues raised in the letter to the Visitor have already been considered by internal investigations or by HEFCE and have been determined to be unfounded or mistaken. UCL is fully committed to being as transparent as it can be in all financial and governance issues, and to complying with all internal and external rules and regulations regarding its activities.

“As evidence of this, we would point to last year’s HEFCE review of similar issues over governance which considered all relevant documents and interviewed council members and senior staff. Its November 2017 report stated: ‘Our overall conclusion relating to the core Assurance Review is that we are able to place reliance on UCL’s accountability information.

“‘We also conclude that no further actions are needed as a direct response to the 2016 public interest disclosure. Relevant actions proposed in UCL Council’s effectiveness review have been taken.’”

“Academic quality: It should be noted that mergers (with the School of Pharmacy and with the Institute of Education (IOE)) have been a significant factor in UCL’s expansion. Despite this expansion, UCL’s staff student ratio in the complete university guide 2018 is the second best in Britain at 10.4:1. UCL was seventh in the world in the most recent QS rankings of research performance. Our mean rank in international research league tables puts us at sixth in the world.

“In the government’s most recent research ranking UCL was the top-rated university in the UK for research strength by a measure of average research score multiplied by staff numbers submitted. UCL researchers received a ‘grade point average’ of 3.22 (out of 4) and submitted over 2,500 staff to be assessed in REF2014, giving UCL an overall research power greater than both the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.

“Financial position: UCL is in good financial health and has plans for investment in people and infrastructure in order to continue to deliver world class teaching and research.  This investment has been made possible by astute and careful management to ensure UCL’s financial sustainability.

“In 2016/17, UCL generated a surplus of £80m on a turnover of £1.3bn, one of the healthiest in the university sector. The average performance for research-intensive universities in the UK last year was 3.6%. We have a surplus target for the current year of 5.4% of our total income, increasing to 6.1% by 2019-20. Together with the loan from the European Investment Bank and with our philanthropic campaign which has already raised £370m towards its target of £600m, this level of surplus will enable us to make the investment in our estate and digital infrastructure.

“Consultation and approval: UCL’s strategy (UCL2034), which sets out a 20-year plan to secure UCL’s continued position as one of the top universities in the world was approved by both academic board and council in July 2014 and has been discussed in depth at two of the annual Council away days. The plans for UCL East have also been approved in recent months by both the academic board and council.

Links

UCL 2034 strategy

UCL East

 

As members of Library Services staff, if you receive any enquiries about the above, please refer these to Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (Library Services): p.ayris@ucl.ac.uk.