It’s been another busy period at UEL, with a number of exciting projects reaching their conclusions, while others are just beginning.

Archives
Work on the JISC funded East London Theatre Archive digitisation project, led by UEL, has now begun. Our partners include the V&A, the Theatre Royal Stratford and Wilton’s Music Hall. By the end of November we will have completed the last collection survey – so far we have discovered some wonderful material, including a speech by Liza Minnelli! The project team is expecting to start image checking and cataloguing by mid January.

Research Open Access Repository (ROAR)
Our bid for JISC funding to set up an institutional repository for research publications and other digital material was successful. We expect to recruit a project manager by December and we plan to be running the pilot phase of the project in the summer of 2008.

Black History Month
Once again the Library organised some very successful events for Black History Month. The exhibition My roots, our heritage, on loan to us from Eastside Community Heritage, was the inspiration behind this year’s  poetry and art workshops held for children from a local primary school.  Our Library Assistants, poet Michelle Clarke-Campbell and artist Carol Hughes, inspired the children to produce some wonderful work which we hope to exhibit in Docklands Library before Christmas.

The University also hosted an exhibition illustrating the work of Gandhi, King, and Ikeda,  men who have based their actions on non-violent means. Both exhibitions fuelled the main event of the month. Keeping the peace? Gangs, culture and identity was an evening of poetry and debate asking the question “Is it possible to keep a philosophy of peace while identifying with gang culture? The evening was so successful that people are still contacting us for further information about the topic. We hope eventually to put a film of the event onto our website.

Learning and Teaching
Our new Sports Law portal is now live. The portal was developed in collaboration with colleagues from the School of Law to support a new sports law module, but it is also intended to offer a really useful resource for anyone interested in the Olympics and its impact on the local community.

Another Learning and Teaching development project is nearing completion. The Library Game features an alien who needs help to find his way around the library. The idea is to use gaming technology to introduce library skills to students in an enjoyable, self- guided way. A prototype has already been produced and we expect to have the final product ready for use from December.

Our Learning and Teaching team of Subject Librarians has recently received training in the new UEL peer observation initiative. Two members of the team have already participated and found the experience very helpful in reflecting on their practice and developing their teaching skills.

We are about to conduct a survey of academic staff to ascertain their views of our service and their requirements for the future. We also hope that this will help us to promote some recent developments. Team members will conduct a series of one-to-one interviews with selected members of staff from each academic School as well as circulating the survey to all members of teaching and research staff.

Collections
This year we have targeted funding to develop an e-books collection of critical texts. We have been able to purchase key texts for all subject areas as part of our strategy to promote e-access for the growing number of students who are studying part time or who spend long periods off campus on work placements. We have also been able to take advantage of the JISC initiative to offer a wide range of e-books free of charge. The initiative has so far been very well received by academic colleagues and students alike.

Catherine Walsh
Associate Director (Services)
Library and Learning Services