Previous Library Projects

Library Photography Competition 2011

Click here for information on the Library Photography Competition 2011

Library Ambassadors Project

The Library undertook an exciting pilot project in 2010-11.  Four undergraduate student Library Ambassadors were appointed to liaise with the Faculties and provide the Library with a students'-eye view on the services we provide.  The aim was that their activities resulted in genuinely student-centred library services.  The Ambassadors worked for a few hours per week to gain feedback from fellow students.  They were then set the task of marketing the Library back to those students in creative and innovative ways.  The Ambassadors were given pretty much a free reign as to which library services and 'market segments' to work on, although reaching non-users was a particular focus.

For further information, please contact Elizabeth Gadd, Project Manager e.a.gadd@lboro.ac.uk .

People's Record and the Cultural Olympiad project

Loughborough University Library is one of only two academic libraries to have taken part in the People's Record, an archival project to mark the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics Games (http://www.mla.gov.uk/programmes/settingthepace).

The People's Record is a national community project to capture the impact of the UK of hosting the 2012 games. It will be a permanent record of the journey to 2012, the Cultural Olympiad and the experience of hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012, told by the people in their own words. It is the first time a host country has created such a comprehensive record, which will inform, entertain and inspire future generations and host nations.

At the end of September 2008, Loughborough University students asked a number of people to record their thoughts about past Olympics as well as the Beijing and the London 2012 Olympics. These questions were intended to capture the 'Olympic' mood of the University's students and staff, as well as the wider local community. If people have given permission, responses to questions have been displayed on the BBC's Memoryshare website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/memoryshare/). The project is being funded by MLA which is the government's agency for museums, galleries, libraries and archives.

SirLearnaLot

With support from the HEA Information & Computing Sciences Subject Centre and the CILIP CSG Information Literacy Group a project has been initiated to create an online programme, which will help librarians develop their teaching skills and pedagogic knowledge. The programme is called SirlearnaLot and builds on the work of EduLib, a JISC funded project under the eLib programme . EduLIb aimed to enhance librarians teaching skills and produced both a print guide and a series of workshops that were disseminated throughout HE institutions.

The course is being written in html but delivered via Moodle. Project partners are: Moira Bent (Newcastle University), Debbi Boden (University or Worcester), Ginny Franklin (Loughborough University), Chris Powis (University of Northampton), Ruth Stubbings (Loughborough University) and Marcus Woolley (University of Bedfordshire).

It is hoped that SirLearnaLot will be piloted in Spring 2009 and then made available through the Creative Commons Licence.

National Year Of Reading

National Year Of Reading

During 2008, Loughborough University Library was involved in various activities to support the National Year of Reading (NYR). This was a year-long celebration of reading, in all its forms and aimed to increase awareness of the many values of reading - anything, anytime, anyplace - for children, families and adult learners alike. The various activities undertaken by the University Library around the National Year of Reading are archived on the Library's web pages.

Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories

Project Logo - Rights and Rewards

This was a 2 year JISC project, commencing July 2005, funded under the ' Digital Repositories Programme '. It brought together the Department of Information Science , the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching Learning (engCETL) and the University Library to address the motivational issues facing depositors, namely support, rights and rewards, in a blended institutional repository.

Further details are available on the project website.

LolliPop

LolliPop is an online tutorial designed to assist enquiry desk staff in enhancing their own information literacy skills so that they can then assist readers in becoming independent information seekers. It has been adapted from POP-i, which was an online tutorial developed by Ronan O'Beirne (Bradford Public Libraries) and Debb Boden (Imperial College London) for Bradford Public Library staff. Ronan and Debbi provided Loughborough University and Bedfordshire University Libraries with guidance and advice, so that the tutorial could be re-purposed for use in both institutions. Feedback from the pilot has lead to a problem based version of the tutorial to be developed. It is hoped that it will be piloted in Spring 2009. A showcase of POP-I and LolliPop is available, you can log-in with the username = student, password = student .

Clearing the way: copyright clearance in UK Libraries

A research project supported by the LIRG/Elsevier Research Award

Introduction

Libraries are in the business of making information ever more accessible to their users. Higher Education Libraries for example are developing Short Loan Collections, Electronic Reserves, Study-packs, Computer Aided Learning packages, Online Teaching & Learning Environments, and Distance Learning packages to make essential course-related information more widely available to a large variety of traditional and non-traditional students. There is but one hindrance common to all these initiatives: copyright clearance.

Under existing copyright legislation and licences, copyright clearance is usually essential if a Library wishes to make multiple copies, or electronic copies, of copyright material available to its users. Recent changes in licences and the proposed new EU Copyright Directive only promise to make the situation worse. There are a small number of central copyright clearance services both extant and under development, however, because many rights holders won't centrally licence their rights, libraries will always need to undertake many individual negotiations.

Experience, such as that gathered on eLib projects such as Project ACORN, has shown that negotiating copyright clearance is an extremely lengthy and complex undertaking. This is unlikely to improve in the electronic environment where clearance is likely to be required for a wide range of multimedia applications.

Libraries urgently need best practice guidelines on how to best manage and negotiate copyright clearance. Libraries should also be encouraged to maximise on their existing clearance expertise in providing services to their organisation - to take an active role in ensuring that their organisation obtains the appropriate clearance for their activities. Libraries also need to quickly inform copyright legislators and licensors of the difficulties of copyright clearance in order to promote a simpler, fairer legislative environment. This research project, supported by the Elsevier/LIRG Research Award aims to meet all these needs.

Aims

This research aims to:

Objectives

The objectives of the research are:

Methodology

1. Questionnaire survey via appropriate email lists
The main body of the research will be undertaken by a questionnaire survey of UK Libraries Copyright Officers via various mailbase lists. The survey will cover:
  • the types of material being cleared (e.g. print, electronic, video, etc);
  • the purposes for which the clearance is being undertaken (e.g. for short loan, electronic services; library or organisation-wide);
  • the amount of staff time involved in clearing rights;
  • how copyright clearance process is logged and managed.
  • the clearance services used and experiences of them;
  • the average time and cost of gaining permission;
  • the establishment of copyright clearance units;
2. Case studies
Having performed the survey, 3-5 Higher Education case study candidates with experience of setting up Copyright Clearance Units within their institution will be identified. The candidates will be visited and interviewed in depth about the setting up and management of the copyright clearance unit, its benefits, drawbacks, and advice to others anticipating establishing such a unit in their organisation.

Deliverables

InfoTrail@Lboro

The InfoTrail@Lboro project aimed to produce online learning materials in line with good pedagogy to enhance the information literacy skills of students.The project:

It is now available on the University's VLE, Learn and has been divided into modules InfoTrail@Lboro and StudyTrail@Lboro.

Critical evaluation of information literacy questions

The project Critical evaluation of information literacy questions used to support the Department of Politics, International Relations & European Studies (PIRES) aimed to develop methodologies to measure the effectiveness of online testing in the context of enhancing students' information literacy skills within PIRES . The project:

The project report is available at: http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/development-fund/fund_details.php?id=65

Libportal

The Library has successfully completed a project funded by JISC under the call 16/03 Portal studies (Library and Institution wide). We undertook the project with the Department of Information Science and LISU (the Library & Information Statistics Unit).

Part 1 of the project surveyed both HE and FE institutions to discover current practice in relation to library portals.

Part 2 of the project entailed carrying out a case study of portal impelementation by Loughborough University Library.

Informs

The Informs project created online tutorials that allow students' to learn how to search databases quickly and effectively.

The tutorials are designed to offer self-paced interactive learning units which academic staff can embed into their teaching and which students can follow at time of need. Each tutorial takes no more than 20 minutes to complete. They cover the basic elements of searching a specific database.

Students are guided through a series of interactive steps to perform subject-specific searches.Then invited to answer questions during the process, thus mimicking the desired behaviour during the searching process 'for real'.

A series of questions is posed throughout each tutorial and a new set of questions appears at the end giving students the opportunity to test their knowledge either before or after using the tutorial. .

The project was funded by JISC. We worked with the University of Huddersfield Library and the University of Oxford Computing Services and Library to develop the subject based electronic information skills training tutorials. Informs built on work undertaken by the Inhale project carried out by Huddersfield University.

The Library would like to thank the Business School, Department of Civil Engineering and the School of Sport & Exercise Sciences for taking part in the pilot of the tutorials. Their participation and feedback was vital for the success of the project.

Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS)

Loughborough University Library has developed a reading list system and it is available for use by other libraries. The package is mostly web based (with a few back end scripts that can be run from the command line or cron) and allows academics and departmental support staff to maintain their own reading lists via their web browsers. Librarians and library assistants also have access to additional web based management and statistical tools to help them make best use of the reading lists (for example ensuring that adequate books are held in the short loan/course reserve collection).

For more details of LORLS visit http://bookworm.lboro.ac.uk/distribution.html