Achievements

In 2017, the HKUST community downloaded over 1 million book chapters from our e-book collection. At the same time, e-journal article use remained strong (less than in 2016, but still more than in 2015).

This increase in the e-book chapter downloads is a logical result of the Library’s efforts to continue to increase the e-book collection, which has risen from ~259,000 titles in 2014 to 574,000 in 2018.

Pleased with how the Library used her previous donation to renovate the 1/F Special Collections Gallery and digitize our map & rare book collection, in 2017 Dr. Ko Pui Shuen donated $HK 4 million to develop the Library’s Special Collections further.  The money will be used over the next 3 years to create and deliver:

• A reference book on the western maps of China
• An interactive website to explore the antique maps
• Two international workshops for academic exchange on the cartography of China
• Purchasing additional Chinese and western maps of China for  the Special Collections
• Exhibitions, featuring the items acquired with these new funds

The Library is extremely grateful to Dr. Ko and appreciates the efforts that HKUST’s DAO also contributed in facilitating this generous donation.

In 2017-18, the Library instruction and general education efforts reached the largest number of students ever, surpassing our previous high with the double-cohort in 2012.

• Information Literacy workshops: 262 sessions for 8,426 attendees
• Library Talks: 15, with 875 participants
• Library Exhibitions: 6, with 823 tour participants

The Library held six new exhibitions, with  over 700 people attending different associated activities like talks, demos, and guided tours.

1. From Canton Trade to Colonial Hong Kong: The Pearl River Delta before and after the Opium War (8 June 2017 – 31 August 2018)
2. IELM 4320 – Design Thinking (6 July – 13 August, 2017)
3. Building a University Through the Lens of Lee Ka-Sing: A Photographic Exhibition (16 August -10 Setember 2017)
4. Picturing Hong Kong: Ink Paintings by Contemporary Hong Kong Artists (14 September 2017 – 31 January 2018)
5. Happiness in the Making – An Exhibition of Works by Rosanna Li Wei Han (7 February – 2 April 2018)
6. Crossing Boundaries: The Calligraphic Art of Manny Ling (12 April -18 June 2018)

Responding to the administration’s feedback on the Library 2016-17 Teaching and Learning Annual Report, the Library studied print book and ebook usage and academic reading format preferences. It found

Since 2010, there has been a marked shift from print to ebook use.

• In 2010, usage per FTE: 30 print vs 31 electronic
• In 2017 usage per FTE shifted to 11 print vs 87 electronic

The Library launched the Academic Reading Format International Study (ARFIS) in September 2017, and found 

• Print is not dead, most HKUST students like and use it and find it better for their learning.
•  Students value format flexibility & it’s important  to provide e-copies and print

The Library held its first photo competition in spring 2018, open to HKUST students, alumni, and staff.

Prof David Cheng CHANG (Humanities), Prof Agnes KU (Social Science) and Mr Spiro KWOK (Photographer, Publishing Technology Center) served as the adjudication panel.

The theme of the contest was “Day & Night @ the Library”.

The Library designed and installed a more attractive and interesting physical display to allow users to browse and choose newly arrived books. At the same time, staff developed a new program to make it easier for users to browse new books 24/7 from whatever device they choose from the New Arrivals web-page.

To take advantage new efficiencies made possible by the new Shared ILS, HKUST Library staff worked with the JULAC Change Manager in  2017-18 to do process re-engineering in three areas: Electronic Records Management; Thesis and E-Thesis submission; and Weeding.

Electronic Records Management  – (ERM) involves the ordering, acquisition, organization, and usage maintenance of the Library’s electronic resources (e-journals, databases, etc.).

Over several sessions, staff mapped out 11 different “as is” ERM work processes and then developed “should be” process maps and responsibility matrices, which improved workflow and communication for ERM.

Thesis Submission – Processing MPhil and PhD theses involves many departments and units within the Library, as well as outside the Library. The JULAC Change Manager helped the different library units work to streamline & and speed up the process of handling thesis submission.

To give an idea of the scope of the complexity, here are the stakeholders involved:

• Within the Library 6 units: Acquisitions, Adminstration, Cataloging, Circulation, Reference, & Systems.
• Within HKUST: Academic departments,  PGSO, ARO, & individual students
• Outside HKUST: ProQuest, and commercial binders

As part of the greater collaborations resulting from the new Shared ILS, HKUST Library joined the  other JULAC Libraries in the HKCAN (Hong Kong Chinese Authority (Name)) work-group, and took a leading role in data cleanup. During the migration process, the Library developed programs to synchronize the HKCAN content with data from Library of Congress, merged HKUST’s 58,827 Chinese authority records to it, and automated data clean up.

Why is name authority important? Many people use variants of their names (Nick names, professional names, nom de plume, etc.). Libraries want their users to be able to search one name, and find all the things that person wrote, performed, etc. Hong Kong Chinese names can be even more complex, with various romanizations, traditional and simplified versions, using nick-names, “English” names, initials, etc. HKCAN is a major resource on author names in Chinese languages.

The Library again received very positive feedback from CTLQ on its 2016-17 Annual Report on Teaching and Learning.  Among the positive comments, were:

• “Exemplary for thorough analysis of areas of concern through self-reflection and CTQL feedback, with corresponding action plans”
• “Conscientious efforts in supporting teaching and learning”
• “Proactive mechanisms to solicit user feedback”

InfoLit for U MOOC is an information literacy course-ware developed by 8 JULAC libraries that was released in January 2018. It is available for individual use across all UGC-supported universities, and beyond, as a self-paced non-credit-brearing asynchronous class.

To explore linked data discovery, the Library implemented a Knowledge Card in PowerSearch to provide users with enriched information about people, organizations and subjects mentioned in the work.

This is made possible by harvesting Linked Open Data from WikiData; and  is a part of a bigger project of our Bibliographic Linked Data Learning Platform.

In the past year, we enhanced the platform by piloting the transformation of bibliographic records in Alma to various linked data schemas, including BIBFRAME 2.0, RDA/RDF and JSON-LD. The Knowledge Card was a by-product of this development