Final news update for 2016

The year is drawing to a close and we thankfully look back on a few highlights we accomplished since our last update in May:

Veterinary Science research support LibGuide

We published our Veterinary Science research support “LibGuide” during May and plan to expand it in the near future to add more valuable information for postgraduate students. We also provided a LibGuide for Veterinary Science legislation and training material.

ORCiD membership

The University of Pretoria recently signed an ORCiD membership agreement in its endeavour to improve the university’s research visibility. Researchers are encouraged to register for a unique ORCiD ID, to populate their ORCiD record with publications and professional information and widely use it during their scholarly life. Information specialists at the different Faculties were tasked to train and assist researchers in obtaining and using ORCiD ID’s. We found it very appropriate to market ORCiD during and beyond this year’s Open Access celebrations during October.

Conferences and Workshops

Staff members were fortunate to attend the following:

SARIMA (Southern African Research and Innovation Management Association): Creating an enabling environment for postgraduate research

LIASA Interlending Workshop, National Library of South Africa

Southern African Online User Group – 13th International Southern African Online Information Meeting

University of Johannesburg Library Conference: Reinventing African libraries

During September Amelia Breytenbach presented a “Dublin Core Metadata Workshop” to staff members of the University of Pretoria’s Department of Library Services.

Hybrid Fair participation

A Hybrid fair was recently held at the University of Pretoria to celebrate its hybrid model of teaching and learning. Our colleague Marguerite Nel was involved in preparing material for the exhibition and representing us at the fair.

Experiential training of final year Information Science students

A group of 58 students from the University of Pretoria’s Department of Information Science completed their Experiential Learning Project at the library. The library’s Open Scholarship Office and Digitisation section hosted them for the period.

The Veterinary Science library was fortunate to have a group of them working on digitising and uploading part of the “Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research” to UPSpace.

This gave our collection quite a boost. You can read more about this student project in the Dept of Library Services’ July/August/September 2016 newsletter.

With this we would like to wish our clients a blessed Festive Season and a well-deserved period of rest. May we all return in 2017 with renewed energy and innovative plans for the New Year.

2016 update

Many things have been happening since the start of this year that is worth reporting about!

We started the New Year off with a brand new printing, photocopying and scanning system for staff and students. The TuksPrint system was implemented during the end of 2015 and was in full operation at the start of 2016.

Several library training and orientation sessions have been offered since the beginning of the year and until now we have had approximately 450 students attending approximately ten sessions.

The new OCLC WorldShare Management System replaced our Millenium Integrated Library System and went live on 4 April. The system was officially launched on 18 April. A lot of training and preparation preceded these dates and by now we feel comfortable to say that we’ve passed the biggest hurdle and are now getting to know the finer detail of the new system. You can read more about the launch of the system in a news post of the University of Pretoria.

During May we participated in celebrating the 10 year existence of the library’s repository UPSpace. UPSpace, which was once again ranked as the number 1 repository in Africa and amongst the first 100 repositories worldwide, was upgraded to a new version and also received a brand new landing page. The latest ranking web of repositories for Africa can be viewed here.

With the implementation of a new library management system, we had to start thinking about changing our library web pages to accommodate the new system. With the help of the library’s web master, Christelle Steyn, the new Jotello F Soga library landing page was finalised by Antoinette Lourens during April.

A less delightful task that we have to embark on during the year, is evaluating our current database, paper and e-journal and e-book subscriptions in order to recommend a sufficient number of cancellations to meet future unavoidable budget cuts. This will have to be done with great caution to cause the minimum inconvenience for our clients.