I’m delighted to be able to report that LCCOS has been reaccredited for the Customer Service Excellence Standard for another three years.

The first part of the reaccreditation process consists of a submission document which is used to provide evidence for each of the 57 criteria. Our submission document this year was substantial with 182 pieces of evidence submitted, and it was over 20,000 words in length.

The second part of the reaccreditation process is a two-day onsite visit by the CSE Assessor and this includes staff presentations, site visits and meetings with key stakeholders. The first day of the onsite visit was spent at UCL East. We were based in the cool Culture Lab on a very hot day. Igho Wekpe gave an overview of the refurbishment at UCL East Library which included a tour. The main focus of the day was on Special Collections with presentations from Vicky Price on Outreach and Sarah Aitchison on Academic Liaison. After lunch, Sarah also gave a presentation on ‘Prejudice in Power – the Eugenics Legacy Cultural Programme’ and the day finished with a presentation by Josh Henning on ‘Visitor experience and public engagement at UCL Museums’.

The second day of the onsite visit was based in the Student Centre. Bryan Johnson and Miriam Hornsby from the IOE Library started the day with a presentation explaining how UX has been used to inform the IOE Library refurbishment. We had a tour of the refurbished School of Pharmacy Library by Vicky Robertson which included a presentation by Abi Heath on customer-centric refurbishment strategies. The Assessor had lunch with John Maisey from the Bloomsbury Theatre and three students from the Stage Crew Society. This was followed with a tour of the Petrie Museum by Josh Henning, and the day finished with presentations from Bethan Smith on LCCOS Intranet developments, and Lindsay Ure on enhancing cross-team support for ReadingLists@UCL.

As well as being fully reaccredited for another three years, we also gained 25 ‘compliance pluses’. Compliance plus is awarded when you have exceeded the requirements for a particular element and demonstrated exceptional practice in this area. We gained 20 compliance pluses at our last reaccreditation in 2022.

Thank you to all of the CSE Champions who submitted evidence from their own sections, which really helped to bring our submission to life. Particular thanks go to Jonathan Fowles for compiling most of the written submission and to Kate Cheney for her editing skills and for supporting the onsite visit. 

UCL Undergraduate Open Days are taking place on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 June 2025. Campus will be buzzing with activity, and we will be welcoming prospective students and their families into the Main Library, Cruciform Hub, Student Centre, UCL East Library, Petrie Museum and Grant Museum. We will have welcome points at Main Library, Cruciform Hub, and our museums, with staff available to give a warm welcome, give information about LCCOS and answer questions. It’s a great opportunity for us to showcase what LCCOS is all about, and inspire prospective students to come and study at UCL.

All LCCOS staff are invited to contribute to staffing the welcome points. Full briefing will be provided. If you do not normally work on the days of the Open Days, you may claim time in lieu (any Grade of staff) or overtime (Grades 1-6), so if you don’t quite have enough annual leave left for that summer holiday you are dreaming about, this could be just the opportunity for you to earn extra time off!

Staffing of the welcome points will be in 1 hour shifts from 10.00-16.00 on both days. We invite you to contribute to between 1 and 3 non-consecutive shifts on either or both days, depending on your availability and the number of volunteers.

Last year we welcomed over 5600 Open Day visitors into our libraries, with over 1200 interactions at our welcome points. Feedback from LCCOS colleagues included:

• “It was a delight to be a part of it and to meet and offer guidance to prospective students.”
• “THIS WAS BRILLIANT. Very motivating for future students and for ourselves.”

This is an opportunity to meet and work with other colleagues from across LCCOS, to broaden your experience of providing customer service, and develop or enhance your professional skills.

To get involved, with consent from your line manager, please sign up by Friday 13 June and we’ll come back to you to finalise your contribution.

Sign up to contribute to the UCL Open Day LCCOS welcome stand

If you have any questions, please contact Angela Young angela.young@ucl.ac.uk

Earlier this year we piloted enhanced support for UCL Undergraduate Open Days, with staffed stands to meet, greet and welcome visitors into selected libraries to find out about LCCOS services, collections and resources. Campus was buzzing with excited prospective students and their families, and our libraries saw more than 5600 visitors.

Colleagues involved in staffing our welcome stands interacted with over 1200 visitors across the two days, and reflected on the positive impact on the visitor experience as well as how much they enjoyed being involved. Feedback from LCCOS colleagues included:

• “It was a delight to be a part of it and to meet and offer guidance to prospective students.”
• “THIS WAS BRILLIANT. Very motivating for future students and for ourselves.”

Many thanks go to all the colleagues who were involved, for making it such a success.

Open days in 2025 are taking place on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 June 2025, so block out the days in your diary now if you might like to be involved. Any LCCOS staff are welcome to contribute, with line manager approval, and full briefing is provided. It’s an opportunity to meet and work with other colleagues from across LCCOS, to broaden your experience of providing customer service and develop or enhance your professional skills, while showcasing what LCCOS is all about and inspiring prospective students to come and study at UCL.

If you do not normally work on the days of the open days, you may claim time in lieu (any Grade of staff) or overtime (Grades 1-6), so it’s a great way to top up your annual leave in time for the summer!

More information will be posted on the LCCOS blog closer to the time.

All LCCOS colleagues are now invited to sign up to contribute to student welcome and induction events as part of the LCCOS Induction Taskforce. To join the Taskforce simply claim your slot(s) now for the activities of your choice by adding your name to our Induction Taskforce Scheduling 2024 spreadsheet. You can contribute as much or as little as you wish, with your line manager’s agreement.

We need your help to deliver the following activities:

• International Student Library Seminars: 12.15-13.00 every day w/c 16th September in the North-West Wing.
• Support Services Fair: 10.00–15.30 every day Mon 23 – Wed 25 Sep in the North Cloisters.
• Explore demonstrations: 12.00-12.30 and 12.30-13.00 every day w/c 23 September in the Science Library G15 Teaching Cluster room.
• Getting Started spaces in Main and Science libraries: 10.00-16.00 every day w/c 23 September, and wraparound at Main Library towards the end of w/c 16th Sep and w/c 30th Sep.

Full briefing will be provided in an online briefing on Thursday 12 September 11.00-11.50am, which will be recorded for any Taskforce members unable to attend. Briefing information will also be provided in a document.

Find out more about about all our welcome activities on our Getting Started: Events and activities website.

Contributing to the Induction Taskforce is a great opportunity for anyone across LCCOS to get involved in meeting and greeting new students, to work with colleagues from across LCCOS, and to develop your experience and skills.

Here’s what some Taskforce members said when reflecting on their involvement last year:

“It’s always good to meet the new students and welcome them. It was good to work with other library team members. It was a very good opportunity to learn from them as well.”

“I learned from this experience and really appreciated the opportunity to contribute.”

“I really liked helping with the Explore session, and engaging with the users in a class setting and on a one to one basis in something specific like searching Explore.”

If you have any questions, please contact Angela Young.

 

Help us shape UCL’s Copyright Literacy Strategy 

We seek your views and feedback on a UCL Copyright Literacy Strategy.  The strategy outlines a vision for the UCL community to increase their skills and confidence applying copyright knowledge in their research, teaching and other professional activities. It supports the LCCOS Strategy 2024 – 2027.

The draft Copyright Literacy Strategy sets out the vision, values and activities with which to achieve this.  A form at the end of the document invites feedback: do the strategy’s aims and proposed implementation speak to your needs?  Are there gaps in understanding or support that could be addressed?

 

Why a Copyright Literacy Strategy for UCL? 

Copyright literacy helps us understand the contexts within which creative works are produced and used, and to apply this understanding in research, teaching and other activities. 

More on copyright skills as a critical part of information literacy can be found on the Arena MicroCPD ‘Embedding copyright literacy into your teaching’ [90 seconds] and on the UCL Education Conference post ‘Getting comfortable with uncertainty’: developing students’ critical copyright literacy in the age of GenAI.

The consultation closes on 13^th December 2024.  A final version of the strategy will be made live in January 2025.  Any interim questions can be emailed to copyright@ucl.ac.uk  

 

The Olympian Ophthalmologist

The Olympic Games 2024 or Games of the XXXIII Olympiad are in full swing this summer in Paris. The same city hosted the VIII Olympiad a century ago. This year we mark and celebrate Henry Stallard’s determination and achievement in winning a Bronze Medal for Great Britain in 1924.

Henry Stallard became an ophthalmologist at Moorfields. He competed in the 1500 metres, coming third, despite a stress fracture of his foot. As he crossed the finishing line he collapsed in agony and lost consciousness for a quarter of an hour. On coming round his first words were “Sorry, Philip, for the very bad show”. The race was won by Paavo Nurmi, known as ‘The Flying Finn’ in a World Record time.

Henry Stallard’s Olympic bronze medal and his numerous other medals are on display in the Moorfields Museum in the Joint Library of Ophthalmology. You are welcome to visit the library between 9am-5pm to view the display. The Royal College of Ophthalmologists documentary film on the Olympian Ophthalmologist can be watched online.

Video: The Olympian Ophthalmologist from RCOphth on Vimeo.

In early 2024, we decided to investigate the challenges that UCL students face when navigating the library resource discovery service, Explore. As part of this project, the LCCOS UX Group conducted research exercises to gain some insight into how our students use this service. This information will be combined with quantitative data from other research methods, such as heat mapping and benchmarking exercises, to influence the direction of future Explore service improvements.

The UX Group invited ten individual participants to take part in the exercises, selected from a group of volunteers to represent a cross-section of our student customer base. The UX methods used were:

• A five second test to establish first impressions of the Explore landing page.
• A simple card sorting exercise focussed on landing page menu options, to help us determine user priorities and their understanding of terminology.
• Usability testing to better understand the needs and priorities of customers when searching for resources.

These exercises were conducted in March 2024. Several areas of interest emerged, such as:

• Relocating the position of features to improve the instinctive user journey.
• Reconsidering menu item terminology to better represent purpose and improve communication with our users.
• Highlighting useful and underused features.
• Investigating how customers navigate to Explore through search engines.

Having reviewed the data collected from the three exercises, including an analysis of automatic transcripts, the research team produced a series of recommendations to take forward as we enhance Explore. These recommendations included:

• An investigation into the search ranking of the Explore landing page, and how this could be improved.
• Removing superfluous menu options.
• Rearranging the order and location of features to make them more user friendly.
• Conducting further reviews into the use of language.
• Improvements to accessibility in Explore, particularly regarding screen reading software.

Additionally, when evaluating the UX exercises conducted for this project, the research team noted some considerations for future UX work. These include:

• Being mindful of designing exercises to better accommodate and consider skill gaps between participants.
• Exploring alternative methods of volunteer recruitment to encourage the participation of non-student customers.
• Evaluating the benefits of hosting sessions online, instead of in person, to improve the quality of automatic transcription.
• Modifying the design and setup of future UX sessions to remove situational bias and encourage more authentic responses and behaviour.

The full report from the UX group can be found at the following link: Enhancing Explore – UX Project Report.

If you are interested in joining the LCCOS UX Group, or if you have any questions about our work, please contact Jonathan Fowles (j.fowles@ucl.ac.uk) or Bethan Smith (bethan.smith@ucl.ac.uk).

The UX Group plans to produce a UX toolkit in the future that will be available to all teams in LCCOS, compiling a list of resources, guidance documentation and reports from previous projects that may be helpful for anybody planning their own UX research project.

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than one billion people in the world with disabilities/impairments.

In LCCOS, we are committed to removing barriers that may prevent students, staff or visitors from making the most of our services. Ensuring all content that you share is accessible with the people who will use it is vital. You should anticipate additional requirements to make content accessible.

There are a few small things you can do. Let us know in the comments if you have any further suggestions, questions or comments.

1. Make your Microsoft documents accessible

It’s relatively easy to make Word and PowerPoint documents accessible by following a few easy steps:

• Use appropriate document headers.
• Add meaningful hyperlink text.
• Give every slide a unique title.
• Make sure slide contents can be read in the correct order.
• Add alt text to images.
• Check font size and colour contrast.
• Ensure videos are accessible.

When finalising a document, you should use the Microsoft Accessibility Checker which reviews documents and offers an easy way to make improvements such as adding alt text to images and checking content order on slides.

This is especially important if you are uploading the document onto Moodle as Blackboard Ally, will automatically create accessible formats from Word and PowerPoints, but the original document must be accessible.

Read more

• Make your Word documents accessible (Microsoft Help Pages)
• Make your PowerPoint presentations (Microsoft Help Pages)
• Blackboard Ally (UCL news article from 2019)
• Blackboard Ally-What it is, why use it

2. Use alt text

Alt text or ‘alternative text’ explains what an image is showing. It is read by screen reader software

You can easily add alt text to images in MS documents, on webpages and on most social media platforms.

VPEE recommend the following for writing alt text:

• Keep it short – just describe the most relevant aspects.
• Mention colour if it’s relevant.
• Include keywords appropriately for improved SEO, if relevant.
• Use proper nouns and names, if relevant.
• Use plain language and spell out acronyms.
• Skip writing ‘photo of’ etc.

Read more

• UCL Accessibility on Social Media Guidelines

3. Colour contrast / Avoid using colour alone to convey meaning

Colour is a powerful way to communicate and we’re not saying you should avoid using it, but make sure that colour alone is not used to convey meaning. For example, if you use ‘traffic lights’ or ‘Green and Red’ for stop and go, make sure the words ‘Stop’ and ‘Go’ are also included.

If you are using colours other than black and white, check the colour contrast. UCL provides guidance when using the brand colours. There are several tools for checking contrast freely available online.

Read more

• UCL Colour Palette
• Contrast checker tool from Web Accessibility in Mind.

4. Videos and recordings

When creating videos or recordings, you should consider alternative ways for people to engage with the content. Does it have clear audio and captions so that people can follow along?

This could also help people who aren’t able to play the audio or similarly are listening to a recording while doing something else.

Several programmes now have automatic captions. As anyone with an accent can attest these are not always accurate, but they are definitely getting better all the time. If you are uploading a recording, I would recommend checking over the captions just in case.

Read more

• 5 reasons why you should caption your video content (UCL VPEE)
• Lecturecast and other multimedia (UCL Digital Accessibility)
• Present with real-time, automatic captions or subtitles in PowerPoint (Microsoft Help pages)
• Use live captions in Microsoft Teams meetings (Microsoft Help pages)

5. Avoid PDFs or at least make sure they are accessible

PDFs are not great in terms of accessibility. Screen readers cannot always read them and unlike most webpages they are not responsive, meaning users may struggle to read smaller text. I would encourage you to think carefully about whether you need to create a PDF. Often a web page or Word document will be more suitable for your purposes.

If you do need to create a PDF, then make sure it’s accessible. The easiest way to do this is to turn an accessible MS document into a PDF (making sure to check the ‘Document structure tags for accessibility’ option first).

It can be difficult to make a PDF accessible after this. You can add tags using tools like Adobe Acrobat Pro, but the more visual and complex the design, the harder this is to do. One solution is to share alternative file formats. UCL have done this on their strategy pages, providing a ‘glossy’ PDF and a plain text Word document of the same item.

Read more

• PDF documents (ISD guidance)
• Create accessible PDFs (Microsoft Help Pages)
• Creating accessible PDFs (Adobe Help pages). This is more advanced.
• Why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF. An interesting blog post from the Government Digital Service outlining why PDFs are not great.

What support is available to staff and students at UCL?

• Digital Accessibility Services
• UCL Digital Champions Network
• UCL Library Services – Accessibility

Thanks to Paula Dale and Jonathan Fowles for contributing to this list. Please also check our social media accounts for related posts using #GAAD. 

UCL Undergraduate Open Days are taking place on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 June 2024. Campus will be buzzing, and prospective students and their families are invited to come into the Main Library and Science Library, find out about LCCOS services, collections and resources and undertake our online self-guided library tours. In the Flaxman Gallery in the Main Library, we will have a staffed stand to welcome attendees, give information about LCCOS and answer questions, enabling us to showcase what LCCOS is all about, and inspire prospective students to come and study at UCL.

All LCCOS staff are invited to contribute to staffing the welcome stand. Full briefing will be provided. If you do not normally work on the days of the open days, you may claim time in lieu (any Grade of staff) or overtime (Grades 1-6), so if you don’t quite have enough annual leave left for that summer holiday you are dreaming about, this could be just the opportunity for you to earn extra time off!

Staffing of the stand will be in 1 hour shifts from 10.00-16.00 on both days. We invite you to contribute to between 1 and 3 non-consecutive shifts on either or both days, depending on your availability and the number of volunteers.

This is an opportunity to meet and work with other colleagues from across LCCOS, to broaden your experience of providing customer service and develop or enhance your professional skills.

To get involved, with consent from your line manager, please sign up by Friday 14 June and we’ll come back to you to finalise your contribution.

Sign up to contribute to the UCL Open Day LCCOS welcome stand

If you have any questions, please contact Angela Young angela.young@ucl.ac.uk

Contributed by Peter Dennison, June Hedges, Angela Young

Student Centre Closed for Lift Repairs

On Saturday 9^th September 2023, the Student Centre will be Closed from 7.00am and reopening on Sunday 10^th September 2023 at 7.00am, please be aware of this if you are directing colleagues and students to this space, and if you are within the building.

This closure is to enable noisy works to be carried out  and also allow the flood repairs to Lift 3 and the track guide repairs to be completed at the same time, finally reinstating lift 3 back into service.

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 LCCOS Facilities & Projects Team. Our team information can be found at the following link Facilities & Project Team