Swinburne Library News

Swinburne Library at the end of Semester 1, 2007

The library has not previously provided a newsletter to Swinburne staff, but it seems that everyone else is. So we are marking the fast-approaching beginning of second semester to let you know how it all went.

Living Library Launched on 28 May

The Swinburne Living Library was launched at Wantirna campus library on 28 May by Joan Cashion, who has fostered the concept at Swinburne.

A Living Library functions like a normal library but instead of borrowing a book you borrow a person. The “Books” in the Living Library are people who represent groups or professions, people who have chosen unusual career paths or lifestyles, or groups that may experience negative stereotyping. For example some books that are available for loan include a person with a disability, a Hindu, and a Teen mum. The “borrower” of a “Book” has the unique opportunity to have a thirty minute conversation with a person they would not normally meet. It was great to have Shauna McIntyre from Australia’s first Living Library, at Lismore Public Library, at the launch. See how it works at Lismore on the jtv website.

The Living Library initiative is a simple yet effective way to create a stronger Swinburne community, a community that celebrates diversity and fosters tolerance and understanding. It was successfully launched at Wantirna campus library, and will move on to other campuses during 2007.

Watch out for these dates

• August 9 - Lilydale be holding a Living Library starting at 11:30 for 12:00 until 2pm
• September 4 - Croydon Library will be holding their first Living Library combined with the Croydon Campus Fair held by the VCAL students to raise money for the Deb Ball
• Spring - Prahran is planning a Living Library function (date to be confirmed)
• October 20 & 21 - Stringy Bark Festival in Knox
• International Student Day planned for Hawthorn Campus (date to be confirmed)

For more information contact Clare Carlsson on 9210 1135.

New Prahran campus manager

We welcomed Kim Tairi to Swinburne as the Prahran Campus Librarian on 12 June. She succeeds Rose Humphries who many of you would know. Kim comes to Swinburne after fourteen years at Victoria University in a number of different roles including Newport Campus Librarian. Most recently she was the Marketing and Information Literacy Librarian. In 2005, Kim also completed a Masters of Education.

As a member of the five-person library management team, Kim will be responsible for coordinating marketing of the library to its Swinburne customers. She has spent the last few weeks meeting and greeting members of Faculty, school and senior staff at Prahran. Robyn Jackson and Dr Carolyn Barnes kindly served on the interview panel which appointed her.

Library refurbishment at Hawthorn

Students and staff have been very patient with the library refurbishment which has taken place over the past 14 months. The upgrade of the building has made a significant improvement to the space and facilities available for library users. Improvements include the addition of large group study spaces on level 3, extra group study rooms and computer pods, a new computer training room and Conference area, refurbished collection on levels 1 & 3, and upgraded toilets and lighting.

See more before and after photos.

Late Lab at Hawthorn – later, larger

The Hawthorn Late Lab has been a striking success, with up to 50,000 entries a month in 2006. On 9 May we opened a second stage, extending the 24x7 component of the library to take in the western end of level 1 and the eastern end of level 2. This means that the Late Lab now includes 230 PCs available for student use 24 hours, every day, and a lot of space. Due to its success, we are having to re-visit issues such as the frequency of cleaning – there are just more people there – and providing extra non-computer study spaces.

Art at Prahran

Prahran campus library has a new artwork, which sits above the consultation desk on level 1. This is Perfume, and the artist is Colin Duncan, who also works at Swinburne. The work was launched on 31 May at the Prahran campus library. You can find out more about Colin at his web site and you can see Perfume by going to the library.

The new OUA and Distance Liaison Librarian

Swinburne library now has an OUA and Distance Liaison Librarian (Lilydale). Susan Roberts was appointed to the position in April, with the role of providing a service to Swinburne’s Open Universities Australia students, but also looking more widely at the needs of distance students. The position is based at Lilydale, since all of our OUA students are taught out of that campus. OUA operates on a different basis to other programs – there are four study periods in a year, and the library provides its services almost entirely by distance mode.

The Library introduces blogs, podcasts, a wiki, RSS feeds and more

The library blog was introduced just before Semester 1, and we use it for a wide variety of purposes – in particular, to post news about new online resources. See the library blog in action.

Erica Cooper and Jane O’Donnell have also developed short podcasts – informational audioclips – about various aspects of library services. See the web page with the audio and transcripts. Annette Steere and Fiona O’Donnell have developed more using Captivate software. They're all available from Research Help on the Library website.

The library established the first corporate wiki at Swinburne in mid-2006, and we also launched a new-look website with enhanced functionality at the same time as the blog – Semester 1 this year. The library produced a three-year, 40-point ICT Strategic Framework in December 2006, and circulated it around the University. It guides our development of new online services over the next three years and we will follow it absolutely, unless we can think of better approaches along the way. Which we certainly will.

ARROW

Swinburne is a member, along with Monash, UNSW and the National Library, of the DEST-funded ARROW project. In mid-2006 the ARROW project was awarded an additional $4.6 million. Swinburne is currently running four software development and related projects which will contribute to the usability and customer value of the ARROW project. Running the four projects has clear spin-off benefits for Swinburne, too, and will assist in development of web accessibility, e-research, and other elements.

SMS holds

At the beginning of semester the library introduced an SMS holds service. This means that if you place a hold on a book, we will send you an SMS when the book is ready to collect. Previously, email was the only messaging we used. In April and May we surveyed library users and 2200 of them answered.

• 25% have registered for the SMS service
• 43% didn’t know about it
• 9% don’t have a mobile phone
• 23% weren’t interested in using the service

At the end of May, almost 1000 students had registered to receive holds notices by SMS. See more information and a registration form.

Enhanced Supersearch

The Library is continuing to put the super into Supersearch. Enhanced Supersearch features include:

• Improved phrase searching - now if you want to search for a phrase you can enclose the phrase in "quotation marks"
• Facet searching - Supersearch now shows facets to the right of search results

Facet searching is a powerful discovery pathway as it lets you see at a glance the structure of information in your topic area:

• which authors are writing multiple articles on the topic
• which journals and what subject areas they publishing in
• dates of publication

These pathways can lead you to more useful searches. Check out the enhanced features on the Library website.

New Hang

Swinburne, like most universities, has its own collection of artworks which have been acquired over the 10 decades since Swinburne’s establishment. In the main, the works are by our alumni artists, many of them successful and well-known, who have either taught at Swinburne or were students here, some as far back as the early years from 1908.

The library, in the person of its Coordinator, History and Artefacts, Sara Jervis, has been implementing a plan to hang many of our small collection of artworks around the University. You may notice them appear on walls.

The works have been placed in prominent areas to ensure maximum display potential for the Swinburne community. In some areas, there are works by our oldest alumnus artist alongside works by young artists who are creating works specifically for Swinburne today.

Experimenting with opening hours

A recent survey at Hawthorn campus library showed that we were ejecting large numbers of library users at 6pm on Fridays. For example, a recent 5.30pm headcount showed that there were 422 people in house, 199 of them not using PCs. So we decided that for the exam period, Hawthorn would open up to 8.30 pm on Fridays, matching the extended weekend hours.

New services

Scopus

Scopus is one of the world’s largest bibliographic databases covering over 15,000 peer-reviewed titles from more than 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 Open Access journals, 500 conference proceedings, and over 600 trade publications. It contains records going back to the mid 1960s and you can browse the cited references of articles published from 1996 onwards and make connections across subject areas. Scopus is strong in its coverage of science, technology and medicine, but also includes coverage of economics and social sciences.

Although Scopus is a bibliographic database and doesn't contain full text content, it does link to full text in other databases and collections using SFX - look for the "Full Text" buttons in your Scopus search results.

Access Scopus at the Library website.

EBL

EBL is a publishing platform for over 40,000 ebooks covering a wide range of subjects from a range of publishers. New titles are constantly added to EBL with around 1000 new titles added to EBL every few weeks. Many libraries purchase selected individual ebooks from EBL and make these available to their patrons but at Swinburne we've taken a different approach and made available the entire collection of EBL ebook titles. The EBL ebooks are listed in the library catalogue so you can search for specific titles and link directly to those ebooks in EBL. You can also go to the EBL Ebook Library and search or browse for titles.

Access EBL at the Library website.

Vice President of the Australian Library and Information Association

In April I was elected Vice President of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), the professional association for librarians and library technicians. This means I will automatically become president in May 2008, and will be a member of the Board of the Association for 2007-2009.

My campaign blog, whose readers were recently described hyperbolically by my New Zealand colleague Ainslie Dewe as a "happy throng", is still there and has now become a vice presidential blog.

Derek Whitehead
Director, Information Resources