Cruciform Building Electrical System Testing

Some of you may already be aware, as this has taken place on some of our LCCOS sites already, we are currently working with Estates colleagues to carry out essential electrical testing across the UCL community. These tests are to ensure that all distribution boards, data facilities, electric circuits, power, and lighting are working correctly and meet legal requirements.

There are plans to carry out essential works on the Cruciform Buildings electrical systems on Saturday 2^nd September 2023. This is to allow us to undertake these works, the building will be closed to isolate power to areas of the Cruciform.

 Please be aware that the Cruciform Building will be closed for the duration of the full building shut down on Saturday 2^nd September 2023, and reopening, as usual, on Sunday 3^rd September 2023.

We apologies for any inconvenience caused by these works and we appreciate your continued support and patience. If you have any issues or queries regarding this, please contact the Library Facilities & Projects Team.

Dear colleagues,

The countdown begins until we launch our wonderful new library in the Marshgate building. Ahead of our opening, there is key information we would like to share with you.

We will stop running our library services from the Learning Hub in One Pool Street at 5pm on Friday 25^th August. This is to enable us to get our new Library at Marshgate ready for opening on Monday 4^th September, 9am.

The last day for new Click and Collect requests is Friday 18^th August. Between Monday 21^st to Friday 25^th August, students will be able to collect and return items, as well as having the usual access and support in the Learning Hub.

From Saturday 26^th August to Sunday 3^rd September, the Learning Hub will be closed while we relocate. There will be a book bin available outside the Learning Hub, so if students want to return books during that period, they will still be able to do so and we will be checking that regularly. Arrangements for interim study space and IT provision for students are currently being clarified and further details will be communicated.

From Monday 4^th September our usual services will resume. Our opening hours will be Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, until the start of the new term.

Following on from this message, comms are scheduled to be sent out via the several channels available to us, including the UCL East Community Teams site, Student Union newsletter, UCLE Library webpage, and social media. Regular comms updates are also planned during the run up to opening at Marshgate. There will be further updates throughout the first term as more aspects of our provision become available.

And finally, I would like to end this message as a request to you for a donation to us. If you have any plants you are willing to let go, we can arrange to get them sent to us. It will very much be appreciated and will help enhance our new spaces. I can assure you that they will be very well maintained and happy here with us!

The recently launched Copyright Anxiety Study is a collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, City, University of London and the University of Alberta. 

The study seeks to gauge copyright anxiety levels among higher education professionals in the UK and Canada, with a view to recommend solutions to alleviate this anxiety.

This is an important study, with the potential to help professionals in various higher education roles (library, teaching and research) deal with copyright more confidently.

Copyright anxiety is not without important consequences. Because many people are unsure what is and what isn’t legal online under copyright, they self-censor, and choose not to post or create things for fear it might land them in serious legal trouble. Ironically, increasingly strong copyright is casting a “chill” that discourages, rather than encourages, creativity. Given the billions of people who are now online, the scale of that creative loss is likely to be massive.   Glyn Moody, Walled Culture website 

The survey is open until 18 August 2023. Please complete and share further with colleagues if possible. 

 For more information on the project, see  the copyrightliteracy.org website. Please contact chris.morrison@bodleian.ox.ac.uk  if you have any questions about the research.

Following on from our stall at the LCCOS Conference on Thursday 29th June, we would like to remind colleagues of the existence of the LCCOS Strategy feedback form.  

At the stall, we valued the opportunity to share the strategy’s newly updated themes and goals, and hear thoughts from colleagues on the progress of the LCCOS Strategy so far. It was also a useful opportunity to find out more about which values staff feel should underpin the strategy as a whole. 

We would like to inform colleagues that the online feedback form is still live, and that we would be grateful for any feedback you would like to provide on our updated themes and goals. We would also be interested to hear any thoughts you may have on potential activities and projects we could undertake in each area to deliver on these goals.  

Colleagues can find out more about the strategy themes and goals on the LCCOS Strategy SharePoint, where they can also find the strategy feedback form.  

If you have any questions about the LCCOS Strategy, please do email Bethan Smith.  

One of the key aims of the LCCOS copyright service is to strengthen understanding of copyright across different UCL communities, including students.

Copyright literacy is defined as “acquiring and demonstrating the appropriate knowledge, skills and behaviours to enable the ethical creation and use of copyright material” (Secker and Morrison, 2016, p. 211). Equipping our students with essential copyright knowledge and with the skills and behaviours to apply this knowledge in different contexts, now and in the future, is an essential part of their information literacy education.

When developing copyright-literate students, academic staff can be important allies. Including or signposting copyright resources and encouraging best practice as part of existing modules helps students understand copyright in the context of their studies. It also helps avoid infringement of lecturers’ own materials by students. Importantly, partnerships between professional services and teaching staff help develop a more integrated approach to information literacy.

To this end, Chris Holland and I developed a micro-CPD encouraging lecturers to embed copyright in their teaching. The 90-sec video is part of the UCL Arena series, aiming to provide best practice advice for teaching staff, in a concise format.

On a personal level, I am delighted that the CPD-leaders at UCL Arena were able to prioritise this work, so that Chris Holland could be part of it before he retired. The enthusiastic response from Arena and the staff and student quotes in support of copyright literacy are a nod to Chris’s legacy at UCL.

Some of you may already be aware, as this has taken place on many of our LCCOS sites already, we are currently working with Estates colleagues to carry out essential fixed wire testing across the UCL community. These tests are to ensure that all distribution boards, data facilities, electrical circuits, power, and lighting are working correctly and meet legal requirements.

The School of Pharmacy Building will experience a full building shut down, on each riser, on the following times and dates:

• Riser A, Friday 16th June 2023, between 09.00-12.00
• Riser D, Wednesday 21st June 2023, between 09.00-12.00
• Riser C, Friday 23^rd June 2023, between 09.00-12.00

The library will be closed for this testing to take place, and only essential staff will be permitted on site, resulting in the library space being closed for the duration of the above times and dates.

We apologies for any inconvenience caused by these works and we appreciate your continued support and patience.

If you have any issues or queries regarding this, please contact the Library Facilities & Projects Team.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly been making headlines in the press since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, and the emergence of numerous other online tools utilising generative AI. Inevitably this is having an impact on education and research processes, and UCL is working to develop policy, guidance and support, whilst considering the related opportunities AI offers now and into the future.

UCL’s ‘AI in Education’ group includes AI experts, academics and representatives from across UCL’s support services and is addressing issues through various workstreams. I am involved in the Academic Skills AI workstream and, together with colleagues from the UCL Academic Communication Centre, UCL Digital Skills and academic staff, we are developing guidance on utilising AI, to complement policy, expand and refine existing guidance, and integrate with guidance on academic integrity and in the remit of individual support services.

One area with implications for LCCOS is AI literacy, which dovetails with several strands of information literacy. Key areas of the LibrarySkills@UCL skills framework which relate to AI include:

• AI tools as a source of information for academic work.
• The importance of critically evaluating information obtained from AI and consideration as to whether and to what extent it should be used to inform academic work.
• The extent to which the use of AI should be acknowledged in a piece of academic work and how to reference it as a source where appropriate.

The academic skills workstream is currently considering approaches to acknowledging and referencing AI, to develop consensus on a UCL recommended approach.

How can I get involved or find out more?

• Express your interest in joining a new LCCOS AI group. This group will identify opportunities and concerns relating to AI in the context of our services and support and help inform relevant LCCOS guidance on AI, including incorporating AI guidance into our existing skills offerings. Through my involvement in the AI Academic Skills workstream, this group can help to inform UCL’s guidance and support. To express an interest in joining the LCCOS AI group, please contact me: Angela Young.
• Sign up to attend our LCCOS Staff Summer School session on ‘AI at UCL: Library support for AI literacy’ on Monday 10 July, 14.00-14.50 on MS Teams.
• Consider the impact of AI on the support you and your team provide and the activities you carry out.

The UCL LCCOS Staff Summer School (formerly UCL Library Services Staff Summer School) is a series of training and development sessions, events and online activities aimed at staff from across UCL LCCOS, to support their ability to answer enquiries and to provide support, training and advocacy to users and stakeholders. Sessions are generally delivered by colleagues, so we can share our expertise.

For full details of the programme and to book your place(s), see the UCL LCCOS Staff Summer School calendar. Presentations, accompanying links and materials and recordings (where applicable) will be made available on the UCL LCCOS Staff Summer School Moodle Course. If you do not already have access, please get the enrolment key. Sessions are open to all UCL Library Services staff, with approval from your line manager.

The current Slade BA / BFA Fine Art degree shows include a work by graduating student Adam Lazarus in the form of a multi-location installation, sited across the Slade studios and various UCL Libraries.

The first part of the work is a library shelf mark screen printed on a studio wall in the Slade building*, indicating the precise location of a permanent installation in the Main Library in the form of an artists’ book which has been catalogued and processed as an ordinary addition to the collections. The publication itself indexes the titles and shelf marks of 84 books in various collections into which Adam has placed small ink drawings – place markers that evoke his interaction with the books during his time at UCL. For the duration of the degree show, visitors can access the Main Library and engage with the artwork within the space; they can choose to follow the trail to any number of the small drawings placed in the indexed titles. Library members will be able to interact with the work on an ongoing basis.

Adam says of Index: ‘The work pays homage to the library as a generative site, a sort of second studio for me, and thus bridges our histories before I depart from UCL. It encourages the nourishing searching and browsing which occurs in library spaces, a process which is becoming increasingly obsolete. The chosen volumes were compiled organically after I came across a list kept by the Library database of nearly every physical book which I checked out during my time here (omitting Covid,) a log of physical and metaphysical travels through the library.’

More by Adam Lazarus:

Adam Lazarus, degree showcase

Purgatories and Potentials: Mike Nelson’s An Invocation: 530 Books from Southend Central Library (dissertation)

* A duplicate screen print of the text “- -Index / Adam Lazarus, UCL Main Library Art Quartos MU 19 LAZ” can be found in the Main Library between ART KF 19 / KI 19 and ART KI 19 / KN 15.

On behalf of the LCCOS Staff Wellbeing Committee I am pleased to share with you the LCCOS Staff Wellbeing Training Opportunities website.

This site details a range of training opportunities for use by individuals or in group sessions, e.g.it includes readings or activities that could be used as an item of discussion in team meetings.

This is very much an ongoing project and the LCCOS Wellbeing Committee is keen to have your input.  Please do get in touch and feedback on the resources and/or how you have incorporated them into your training sessions, via the website’s comments boxes or by emailing me at m.wake@ucl.ac.uk.  Additionally, please feel very free to make suggestions of any other resources or subjects which you recommend being added to this skeleton list.

Michelle Wake

Site Libraries Manager and Senior Librarian, UCL School of Pharmacy,

UCL Library Services

LCCOS-Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science

m.wake@ucl.ac.uk