Well, the fellows of the basement work team have done their job and the shelves await the brilliant logistic mind of Barb Bodnarchuk before we can have our books back. And Engineering’s books. And some of Murray’s books, and anyone else want to send us some books? Space apparently awaits.
Shannon and Rufus, her first big dog.
Darryl Friesen, circa 1982, grade 5ish.
On March 6th and 15th the LDC hosted a New Website Q & A for employees to come ask questions, make comments, and learn about the new website. Shannon Lucky and Darryl Friesen from LS&IT were on hand to provide answers and information, but to also gather feedback from participants.
The sessions were filled with rich conversation, valuable information, and even some laughter. Below are questions, answers, and comments from these sessions. Notice that there have been a number of changes to the website resulting from the constructive exchange that took place.
Questions:
Comments and various tid-bits of information:
Please click on image for bigger and clearer picture.
If anyone at these sessions feels that something is missing from this post, PLEASE contact Jennifer Murray (jennifer.murray@usask.ca, 966-2710).
Progress is being made down below in the Science Library. Steven sneaks down (with permission) to take photos of how things are coming along with our new compact stacks and these are today’s shots.
We have a ‘loud construction’ sign at the front, but it isn’t really. There has been some drilling, but it isn’t much more than a dental nightmare, and we can’t hear the music the workers play while they assemble the stacks. So, still quiet at Science.
The former QEs
The main portion of the library lower level.
Where the computers used to sit.
Our first edition of Take a Break at the Library without Brett around to purchase the snacks and distribute them to all of the branches has been an interesting and challenging adventure!
First, Adele from Education & Music had to order the snacks. Then she had to reorder different snacks when the store didn’t have what we wanted in stock. Then she had to recalculate the amounts when it was discovered that the Saskatchewan government now charges PST on snack foods. Many, many emails and phone calls were made.
Next, Cheyenne from the Dean’s Office had to book and coordinate two separate deliveries from two different stores, and get everything brought to Murray in a timely manner.
Last week, the first order came in. A small delivery van arrived at Murray to give us 210 lbs of popcorn kernels, 50 lbs of white coconut oil, and 2 litres of popcorn salt. It only took two book trucks to bring it upstairs to room 122.
On Tuesday morning, the second order arrived. A giant delivery truck came to the Murray loading dock, loaded with a pallet filled with 6,760 granola bars, 3,312 bags of fruit snacks, 800 juice boxes (for the food-free Science Library), and 7,000 paper bags for the popcorn. It is truly a mystery that Brett used to be able to fit this amount of stuff into the back of his van.
After the delivery driver hit the garbage bin while backing up and triggered the fire alarm by opening the wrong door (causing Protective Services to stop by and ask what was going on), he unceremoniously dropped the pallet into the loading dock and drove away. It was up to Lara (with some help from a few unlucky coworkers like Rachel and Duane, who happened to be walking by at the wrong time) to disassemble the pallet and bring all of the supplies up to be stored in room 122. It only took about an hour and six fully-loaded book trucks to get everything moved. Lara’s scratched finger was deemed a serious-enough injury for a band-aid to be deployed, but not serious enough to send her home for the rest of the day.
Now it was time to deliver the snacks to the rest of the libraries scattered across campus. Why not just put the snacks in the transit bins that already visit each branch daily, you may ask? The answer is quite simple. They wouldn’t fit. There’s just too much stuff. So it was up to Lara (who volunteered for the job) and Kelly (who didn’t) to bring everything over to all of the other library branches. The one nice thing was that since Murray is the biggest library, approximately half of the supplies would be staying in Murray to be used there.
On Tuesday afternoon, Lara and Kelly carefully maneuvered a very heavy book cart filled with juice boxes across the Bowl, to the Science Library. They only got stuck once, but a friendly student who was passing by helped them lift the cart over a big bump in the sidewalk, and they were able to successfully deliver the juice boxes to Beth, who was very happy to see them, since she had been working all by herself that afternoon.
On Wednesday morning, Kelly and Lara were able to take the indoor route to the Law Library (using the AES elevator key to get the cart down from Murray to the Arts tunnel), and drop off some snacks to Robin at Law, who was surprised to have visitors, since she hadn’t received the email letting her know that they were on their way. Once the Law snacks were delivered, Lara and Kelly carefully crossed the slushy road and climbed the bumpy ramp to bring the rest of the snacks to the Education & Music Library. The Education staff were also happy to receive their snacks, but let the girls from Murray know that they hadn’t brought enough popcorn kernels, so another trip back to Education would need to be planned for the near future. It was a beautiful warm sunny day, and Lara and Kelly enjoy the exercise and the outdoor walk back to Murray.
That same afternoon, Lara loaded up another cart full of snacks to take to the Health Sciences Library. It was a very winding path, down the Murray elevator, through the Arts tunnel, past the Gordon Oakes Red Bear Student Centre, up another elevator, and then through a maze of construction detours to finally end up at the Leslie and Irene Dubé Health Sciences Library. Fortunately, Gwen gave Lara some chocolate Easter eggs, which provided her with enough energy to make the long trek back to Murray with her empty cart.
Now it is Thursday. There are only two libraries left to visit, and of course Lara (not-so-smartly) left the furthest two for last. The windchill is a brisk -27 degrees today, and the overpass between Biology and Agriculture still hasn’t been rebuilt (or has it???), which means that there is no easy indoor route to the Engineering Building. Will Lara’s toes freeze? (hopefully not) Will the cart get stuck in the snow? (probably) Will Lara forget how to find the Vet Med Library? (definitely)
One does dread the thought that this will need to be done all over again in December, with the addition of winter weather and ORANGES ORANGES ORANGES AAAHHH ORANGES. In December 2017, to ensure freshness, Brett made 4 separate deliveries over two weeks of many cases of oranges to the branches, above and beyond the delivery of the other snacks. In December 2018, prepare for that to… probably not happen.
However, overall, organizing and delivering the snacks has been a nice excuse to get out from behind a computer screen, get some exercise, and visit some coworkers from far-off branches. And if you can’t find Lara at her desk at the end of day Thursday, know that it is because she is lost somewhere in the Western College of Veterinary Medicine building, eating granola bars and fruit snacks to survive.
169 boxes of granola bars (40 bars per box)
210 lbs of popcorn kernels, 50 lbs of coconut oil, and 7,000 paper bags to put the popcorn in
92 boxes of fruit snacks (36 per box) – the store didn’t have enough Rice Krispies in stock for us this year, so we’re trying something new!
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away….
Well, not quite. This story starts about a year ago in the Administration Building. Kate and I were at the beginning of a project to update the copyright website, and our first challenge was to figure out how to start. I found a “goals interview” to do with Kate, which included questions such as:
One key goal for the new website was to make it more user friendly. After determining our goals, it became possible for us to lay out the tasks we needed to do to transition from the old site to the new site. For example, we thought a lot about how to decrease wordiness, which meant deleting “click here” from every other sentence.
My only knowledge of the workings of the internet came from watching The Matrix trilogy, Hackers (not sure if that even counts) and Halt and Catch Fire, but I’m no Cameron (Cameron is a rad tech genius from Halt and Catch Fire). I knew I had to do some further investigation on the subject.
We devised a plan, and slowly but surely tackled our project, page by page, section by section. We printed, cut out and reorganized the existing copyright website pages, and added new content as we went. It was especially fun to predict what we thought the new homepage should look like (Ms. Cleo has the answers).
We reviewed external sites and U of S sites for inspiration. Shout out to the UBC Copyright site and the U of S Teaching and Learning site, from which we got many good ideas.
I learned about content management, content inventory, and gap analysis via Lynda.com. We used the white board, created excel spreadsheets, and became intimately familiar with Cascade. I pushed my creative limits to the edge and opened Photoshop. We ran the gamut of every tool and person in our arsenal.
And here we are today, just a little bit over a year later, with a new site that we are both very proud of – https://library.usask.ca/copyright/. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed reimagining it. But, by no means is our adventure over. We hope to add more images, instructional videos, Prezi presentations and infographics in the near future.
Thanks again to anyone and everyone who helped us to launch this new-and-improved copyright website!
by Kate Langrell, Copyright Coordinator
This week is Fair Dealing Week 2018. Fair Dealing Week is an annual event to educate and raise awareness about the many benefits of the fair dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act. This exception helps to balance the rights of copyright owners with the needs of those who use copyright-protected materials for certain purposes, including research, private study and education.
Some common, practical activities that fair dealing may cover include:
Fair Dealing Week is also key opportunity for fair dealing advocacy. The Copyright Act is being reviewed by the federal government this year, and the loss of fair dealing for educational purposes would be a considerable blow to all Canadian educational institutions.
I think that anyone who has done advocacy work is likely to tell you that advocacy is, by no means, a “quick” activity overall. With the busyness of day-to-day library work, it can easily fall by the wayside. However – if you have 10 minutes this week that can be spent offering your support for Fair Dealing, here are few quick opportunities for you:
The Murray Library is ready to start the new transit procedures on Monday. The new pockets & new colourful labels have been affixed to the bins.
And in case we forget which bin goes where, the whiteboard has been colour-coded too. 🙂
See you on Monday!
The following link is a list of some of the most recent collections to be processed at the University of Saskatchewan’s Archives and Special Collections. Note that this list is not comprehensive, but is meant to give a taste of some of the materials we are currently collecting, and which provide new research opportunities for our patrons. Subjects of interest are: Printed media personalities and literary figures; University history; John Diefenbaker; women’s histories; the Fabian Society; Northern studies (in co-operation with Russia); the performing and visual arts; AIDS, same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ+ issues; Indigenous justice; early rural life in Saskatchewan (particularly the Borden area); World War II; plant sciences. Also a fascinating array of rare signatures from historical figures have turned up this year, well worth checking out. E-mail ua.sc@usask.ca if you would like to explore any of these collections!
The books are boxed, the trucks are gone, the warning and informative signage is everywhere – and mostly observed, staff explain multiple times daily why and where the books have gone and how they can be retrieved.
Is it forever? It can look like it.
The library’s holiday bowling party was a success! A small group of approximately 15 people met at Eastview Bowl for an evening of sport and fun. We played 3 rounds. The first was normal 5 pin bowling, where each person worked to knock down the most pins and get the highest score. The second round was Bingo Bowling – each team had to work cooperatively to knock down the pins in a variety of different combinations to black out their bingo cards. The last round was party rules – participants needed to knock down pins using a variety of silly maneuvers, such as throwing the ball while standing on one foot, throwing the ball with their eyes closed, or throwing the ball with their non-dominant hand.
Big thanks to Amy S-J and Robin for organizing this fun event!
One of the options for the party rules was to bowl backwards. (L-R) Lara’s husband, Racheal, Laura, and Amy P. are in various backwards-bowling poses. Lady Gaga watches them thoughtfully from above, while Amy S-J and Rachel H. watch from behind.
Library staff members Beth and Robin making merry