Achievements

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of HKUST, the Library prepared and staged a commemorative exhibition, “Our Miracle Continues – A Visual Presentation“.

By strolling through the Library Gallery, members of the University community and visitors were able to walk through the past 20 years of the University’s accomplishments, enjoying photos, images and memorabilia. The exhibition, held from 12 May to end of December 2011, was very well attended. Due to its high popularity, the exhibition panels were reproduced and shown in the Lobby of the new Shenzhen IER building during its opening ceremony.

To further enhance research and to support general education, the Library acquired a few notable collections in the year. Filmakers Library Online streams 800 award-winning multidisciplinary documentaries for students and instructors for use in classrooms, or in private study and learning. World History in Video contains 1,000 hours of streaming video from 1,750 critically acclaimed documentaries, providing a global survey of human history from the earliest civilizations to the 21st century.

The number of e-books available on the MyiLibrary platform has grown from 4,500 titles to 12,500 titles in different subject areas. Two more citation indices were added, Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Science and Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Social Science & Humanities. These citation databases provide bibliographic information and abstracts to papers in over 110,000 conference proceedings worldwide.

Several of the Library’s collections moved in the past year, some more than once. To prepare space for the Learning Commons ,the Library moved 83,000 volumes of less-used books and bound journals from the LG1, LG3, and LG4 to temporary storage in January 2011. This formed the new “On Call Collection” (available on the request of users within one working day).

In April 2011, the Media and Microforms section and its collections moved to the newly opened Library extension. The newspapers and magazine moved to LG1 to join the current periodicals in a beautiful setting for current reading.

Over the summer of 2011, the empty shelves were moved to new areas of LG3 and the entire book collection and bound periodical collection was redistributed across LG3 and LG4. As a result, every volume in the Library was moved at least twice over the past year.

In November and December 2011, the On Call Collection was moved to its new semi-permanent home, where it will remain until the proposed Joint University Research Archive (JURA) is up and running.

This year, the Library began a systematic replacement project of Laser Discs and VHS. In 2011-12, the Library withdrew 658 titles on VHS format and 198 titles in LD format and replaced them with the same titles (or more recent material) on DVD or streaming video. The DVDs and two new streaming video collections Filmakers Library Online and World History in Video, will make using AV for learning and teaching even more convenient.

As part of our efforts to provide service excellence to the HKUST community, the Library conducted a service quality survey among current students, faculty, and staff (November 1 to December 8, 2011).

This was the second time HKUST and other JULAC libraries conducted the LibQual-based survey. In addition to collecting user opinions, LibQual is useful in allowing Hong Kong university libraries to compare with each other.

Over 4,400 library users responded to the survey, a response rate of 31.85%. The overall scores we received were significantly better than the average scores of participating JULAC libraries. After we analyzed the results and comments, we took action to further enhance our services (see http://library.hkust.edu.hk/libqual/Services-Survey-2011.html).

HKUST students gave good grades to the Library in the HKUST Students Union (SU) online survey rating services provided by various University units (December 1-16, 2011).

Students were asked to rate services provided by nine units (ARR, CSO, FMO, HSEO, ITSC, ISO, LANG, Library and SAO). They could choose “Very Satisfied & Satisfied”, “Neutral”, or “Very Dissatisfied & Dissatisfied” for each question.

Of the 19 questions covering different service areas, the Library’s score was significantly above the mean score for “Very Satisfied & Satisfied” and well below the mean score for “Very Dissatisfied & Dissatisfied”. These results show that students value Library services and facilities highly. While Library staff members are very pleased with the results, we will not “rest on our laurels”, but continue to seek new and better ways to serve the University community.

On February 1, 2012, after two years of planning and construction, we soft-opened the new Learning Commons; with the Grand Opening Ceremony held on March 26, 2012.

This state-of-the-art facility provides welcoming learning spaces, including group study rooms, two e-learning classrooms, tutorial spaces. It also includes a Creative Media Zone, managed by our partner the Publishing Technology Center (PTC), which has a graphics workshop, a fully equipped video production studio, and 4 smaller AV editing suites.

The Library made considerable efforts to introduce this new facility to departments and service units on campus, to promote effective use of Learning Commons in support of students’ learning activities.

The Learning Commons quickly became a popular study and meeting place. In the examination period of Spring 2012, the Learning Commons operated 22 hours per day, which was very well received by students to help them in their study and learning.

In Fall 2011, in collaboration with CELT, the Library administered a web-based standardized test to assess the information literacy (IL) skills of our First Year undergraduates.

Developed collaboratively by the James Madison University (JMU) Center for Assessment & Research Studies and JMU Libraries in the USA, the test is designed to assess how students have achieved the Association of College and Research Libraries Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.

Consisting of 60 multiple-choice questions and requiring about 75 minutes to complete, a total of HKUST 266 students took the test. The results have already provided us with useful information for future IL assessment and teaching, to help us assist students widen and deepen their ability to search, find, assess, and use information wisely and ethically.

In fall 2011 and spring 2012, The Library and the Language Center collaborated to pilot a multi-year, multi-session program for First and Second Year students of all the four Schools. These sessions were designed to build up students’ information literacy competencies.

700⁺ First Year School of Science and School of Engineering students studying LANG 1001 attended 52 library instruction sessions in fall 2011. In the next term, spring 2012, ~1,200 students in the School specific courses LANG 2030, LANG 2049, LANG 2070, and LABU 2052 attended the workshops.

Library instructors introduced students to subject-related literature and databases and taught them how to use them effectively to find relevant information. Students also learned about proper citation how to avoid plagiarism. After collecting feedback from students and Language Center instructors, we have reviewed and made plans for further improvement in the coming year. We are confident that what we learned from these pilot sessions will be invaluable in teaching the incoming double-cohort of students in September 2012.

With the increasing ubiquity and power of mobile technologies, the Library has actively embraced projects to provide convenient mobile access to information about library collections, facilities, and services.

In the past year, the Library rolled out a mobile version of the Library website.

In addition, we also rolled out a special interface to book Library Group study rooms on mobile devices and a mobile version for Library class registration. There is now even a mobile version of the ‘My Account’ feature of the Library Catalog. We have also created links and information on which Library databases are mobile-capable.

The Library will continue to strive to make using its services and materials on mobile devices simple and convenient.

Since 2010, the Library has worked with the VPRG Office on a knowledge harvesting project in order to create an HKUST Scholarly Publications Database. This database now indexes 47,000⁺ publications produced by the HKUST researchers. After the release of the publications’ search interface in early 2011, we started the process of having HKUST researchers review and finalize their author profiles on a school by school basis.

Author profiles bring researchers’ list of publications, their bibliometrics (e.g.,latest citation counts and h-index), and their research interests together in a single interface. By the end of June 2012, over 450 author profiles of the current faculty members had been reviewed, updated, and released to the public.

With financial support from the Provost’s Office, we digitized a large number of images from slides and negatives transferred to the Library from various university offices and rolled out the HKUST Digital Images database in November 2011.

The images cover a wide range of activities held on the campus from 1988 to 1999, including ceremonies, congregations, distinguished lectures, outreach days, exhibitions, as well as student and staff activities. This reformatting project not only preserves the images but also allows convenient access to the contents, and also allows HKUST students, faculty, and staff to tag photos for identification. We hope that all university community members will enjoy and use this resource preserve our memories.

During the year, the Library home page was upgraded and given a crucial facelift. Some features were added to help the Library website’s visitors access information more quickly and easily. These changes were in direct response to users’ comments in the LibQual survey, where they asked for less of a text focus, more graphics, larger pictures, among other things.

In addition, an interactive digital signage system was introduced in the year to assist library users to locate library services, rooms, and facilities more easily.

Over the years, the Library has developed different learning initiatives. In 2011, the Library introduced LibGuides, a Web 2.0 content management tool, designed specifically to enhance knowledge and information sharing. Since then, the Library has published more than 130 subject, course, and database guides on this platform, available to the University community.

Every year since 2008, HKUST Library has hosted an occasional series of Book Talks. These talks are designed to promote interest in reading among HKUST community members, and often showcase HKUST authors.

In 2012, the Library hosted two talks by HKUST authors during spring semester. The first one was given by Chandran Nair, adjunct HKUST MBA faculty and founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, on “Consumptionomics: Asia’s role in reshaping capitalism and saving the planet” on 22 February 2012.

The second talk was given on 26 April 2012 by Prof Liu Tik-sang, Associate Professor in the Division of the Humanities, who spoke on Intangible cultural heritage and local communities in East Asia. Both book talks were very well received.

As part of the ongoing efforts to build cohesive and friendly relationships with its users, the Library launched its Facebook Page in summer 2011. This page provides an engaging and participatory medium to communicate with many of our users. Since launching the page, we have already picked up over 1,150 “Likes”.

Upon Dr. Samson Soong’ retirement, Ms. Diana Chan, Associate University Librarian, became the University Librarian at HKUST, effective 1 July 2012. On that same date, Mr. KT Lam, Head of Systems and Digital Services, became the Associate University Librarian.

In light of these changes, the Library considered various options for an internal re-organization and agreed on a new structure which will be implemented in 2012-13.

It will divide Collection and User Services into two smaller departments and there will be some other reporting re-alignments. The new structure will have four departments: Access Services, Reference and Collection Services, Technical Services, and Systems and Digital Services.