Librarian’s Report REPORT BY SUZANNE TONKIN
T
his really has been a year like no other, but the academic year did at least start as it usually does with the welcome extended to our new students. The Library participated in the College’s pioneering Bridging Week for new undergraduates, which allowed us to deliver our tours and introduce our new students to the Library’s services earlier than usual, helping them to get off to a flying start. The Library organises the College’s Academic Skills programme in collaboration with the Tutorial Office, and this year the programme expanded to include an increased number and wider range of events. The timetable was tied much more closely to the academic year and one benefit of this was that sessions on presentation skills, poster design and data presentation could be timed to support the College Research Day in Lent. We now have a solid foundation on which to base the skills offering for the coming year and although many of the sessions will be delivered online, this will have the advantage of allowing more students to access the resources at a time that suits them. Work with Libraries@Cambridge to further develop our i-Discover catalogue continued this year and our students now benefit from the automatic renewal of their Lucy Library books – remembering due dates and manually logging on to renew are, happily, now a thing of the past. Of course, the unprecedented effects of the pandemic have been this year’s overriding concern and In common with the rest of College, we have worked to support our students in the continuation of their studies, wherever they may be in the world. We collaborated with Library colleagues across Cambridge to deal with the books that students had to return quickly at the point of lockdown, in many cases to the “wrong” library. As a result, over the summer we crated up and redistributed almost 500 books to their home libraries, thus saving students the stress of having to visit multiple sites before their journeys home. Our book retrieval service also helped to support students when e-books of particular titles were not available. We were ably helped with this by the President
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ANNUAL REVIEW 2019/2020
who acted on our calls for help when Library staff were not on site, for which we are extremely grateful. We also offered a remote enquiry service and liaised with our E-books@Cambridge colleagues at the UL to request and recommend new electronic titles on behalf of our students. Planning for the new academic year has seen much of our start of year support moving online, but as I write, we are at the advanced stages of planning for our re-opening to readers in September. It will be a welcome sight to have our students working in the Library again and our aim is for Library space to be as welcoming as it always has been. As ever, thanks should go to our Assistant Librarian Amanda Hawkes and Library Assistant Gill Saxon for their hard work over the course of the year and thanks too to all our donors – we are incredibly grateful for your support and good wishes.
