Yumma Darruwa Ngunnawal

Welcome from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.

The National Centre of Biography hosts Indigenous Australia. The site brings together all entries on Indigenous Australians found in the NCB's biographical websites–Australian Dictionary of Biography, Obituaries Australia and People Australia.

The site also supports special projects such as the Australian Indigenous Autobiography Archive.

Do take some time and have a look at the site!

ANU COVID-19

COVID inspections are no longer required. If you see supplies are running low of hand sanitiser or masks do let the relevant people know in your building.

Please read all the messages from the university about COVID 19.

All COVID updates will be communicated to staff and students via the weekly On Campus email newsletter. You can find previous staff On Campus and student On Campus editions here.

Margaret Prescott’s news

Margaret has made an enormous contribution to the Division over the last 6 years. She has been amazing working through floods, hailstorms, WHS, staff changes, and many, many challenges with enthusiasm and passion. She will be retiring on 28 September 2023 – but she will still be a part of our community. I will miss her enormously.

A farewell party is being planned – watch this space for an announcement.

Farewell Peter Shaw

Please help us wish Peter a fond farewell and happy retirement at a Pot Luck lunch, Menzies McDonald room from 12:30pm onwards 29th August. Please bring a contribution of food to share.

Peter has been part of the library furniture you could say for a few years now and we have all grown to know him well. He has decided to bid the working life goodbye and looks forward to days spent with his family and his growing number of grandchildren.

Cheers,

SIS Facilities Team.

Library Staff Consultative Committee

We met on 8^th August and discussed the great work occurring across the Division, changes occurring in other universities and the enterprise bargaining agreement. Thanks to all members for their contribution to making sure we talk about important issues affecting staff in the division.

SIS response to the staff survey

Thank you to everyone for their contribution through meetings and discussions to form a plan to address both the ANU survey and the fantastic feedback we have had from many people. The plan is online here and HRD have incorporated it within the University Plan.

SIS staff meeting

The next staff meeting is scheduled for Thursday 21 September – speakers and topic are:

• How does ANU make decisions and govern itself? ANU Secretary Belinda Farrelly on Governance
  Megan Easton policy guru on ANU policies

Please note the meeting will commence at 1.30pm.

WHS

The University’s Pulse training solution offers a wealth of WHS training courses. The ANU WHS Risk Management Training module aims to introduce all staff and HDR students to the University's Hazard Management Process and provides practical guidance on its application.

It includes an overview of the University's Hazard Management Process; detailed guidance on how to conduct a Hazard and Risk Assessment; in-depth information on what control measures should be used; guidance on the approval and review process of a Hazard and Risk Assessment; and an explanation of the Safe Work Procedure.

This module is compulsory for staff and HDR students who conduct risk assessments during their work.

Library Advisory Committee

The Committee will meet in September.

Rain and remediation

The regular updates on the work at the Menzies Library show all is on track. Thanks to everyone for their good work.

No rain came in with the storm this week but Art & Music Library had minor water damage from some water that came into the building. Thanks to all involved for their prompt work.

Academic Board

A very important range of issues were discussed including:

·       Institutional Benchmarking and External Referencing Framework

·       ANU Rankings Update

·       Research Strategy Progress Report 1/2023

·       University Accord – Interim Report

·       Admission of international students under the age of 18 Procedure and Underage Student management

·       Recording of Teaching Activities Policy and Procedure – Review of Working Group

University Research Committee

The Committee reviewed many issues including:

·       Supporting Multi-Disciplinary Research Priorities

·       Research Infrastructure Strategy

·       Confirmation of Candidature - Milestone Proposal

·       Intellectual Property Framework

·       Research Strategy Report 

·       Audit of Register of Centres and Institutes

·       Mathematical Data Science Research Centre Proposal

·       ANU Philippines Institute Proposal.

Liaisons networking session

After attending the CLT “College liaisons networking session & morning tea” Wan and a few staff from CLT and Careers & Employability have been contacting each other and have discussed ChatGPT, Transdisciplinary Problem solving library guide and some useful relevant training/sessions etc.

Wan organised a morning tea discussion session with library staff, Careers & Employability Team and the Centre for Learning and Teaching

Well done everyone, particularly Wan.

Children’s Book week

Jacky and the team have put up a fabulous display in the Menzies Library for Children’s Book week. “We are celebrating children’s fiction with an exhibit from our Mortlake rare books collection in the Menzies Library. The Mortlake Collection contains a wonderful selection of Victorian era children’s books, including some well-known titles like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women and Robin Hood and some lesser known works, which we are very lucky to have in our collection. The exhibit is a must see for lovers of rare books, literature and art. You can also see a selection of children’s books in languages other than English, including Arabic, Vietnamese and even Ancient Greek! Find out more in our news story. The exhibit is running in the foyer of the RG Menzies Library until 1 September”.

CAUL & CONZUL

·       CAUL board election – congratulations to Nicole Clark, Hero Macdonald and Kylie Percival on their election to the board

·       The CAUL members meeting will occur in September.

Copyright

·       Generative AI: the US Copyright class action against OpenAI - Gianluca Campus’s posting provides some useful insights into the different approaches in the EU, UK and US with detailed commentary on the plaintiffs’ allegations.

·       Kiwi academic’s thesis put up for sale without his knowledge – outrageous!

Feedback

Fabulous feedback from the Prof Penny King, College of Science on the benefits from Read and Publish Agreements given at the University Research Committee.

Great feedback on the acquisition of Medical Services and Warfare, a collection of digitised primary sources documenting medical history during times of armed conflict dating from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. The database focuses on the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the First World War, and the Second World War among other conflicts. The impact on medicine during peacetime is also charted, notably through documents relating to the influenza epidemic of 1918 and post-war rehabilitation.

Thanks so much, Tom. That’s excellent news.  Much gratitude for identifying this collection and pursuing it for us all.

Many thank from me also, Tom. This will prove a useful resource for both teaching and research.

--

Roxanne Missingham

Director, Scholarly Information Services

From HR

The Professional Staff Scholarship Scheme (PSSS) and Professional Staff Development Endowment Fund (PSDEF) Round 2, 2023 is currently open, with a closing date of Friday 1 September 2023, at 5:00 pm.

Please let your areas and colleagues know that applications are currently open.

The Professional Staff Scholarship Scheme supports a range of career development programs and initiatives to advance the skills and knowledge of professional staff. Priority is given to development initiatives that provide staff a formal qualification.

The Professional Staff Development Endowment Fund seeks to assist the development of professional staff of the University to enable them to contribute to the University beyond the expectations of their current role. It is used to support short courses, conferences and comparable professional development initiatives.

You can find further information for PSSS and the PSDEF and how to apply online.

Please direct any queries about this grant opportunity to HRD.Development@anu.edu.au

The Carers' Career Development Assistance Fund (CCDAF) Round 3, 2023 is currently open, with closing date Friday 8 September 5:00pm 2023.

Please let your areas and colleagues know that applications are currently open.

The CCDAF is for individual academic and professional staff with caring responsibilities who require support to participate in significant national or international conferences, workshops or symposia that contribute to their careers.

Grants of up to $2,000 are available for reasonable costs relating to care of dependants where existing care arrangements are not available.

Types of costs covered may include:

• child care costs
• care costs for dependants other than children
• airfares for the dependant to accompany the staff member

Further information and how to apply can be found on the website.

Direct any queries about this grant opportunity to HRD.Development@anu.edu.au

Kind regards

Kate

Kate Witenden

Chief People Officer

ANU Press and open access

Welcome Nathan Hollier

I am delighted to welcome Nathan to the position of Manager of the ANU Press. He joins us after extensive experience in scholarly publishing including Publisher & CEO, Melbourne University Publishing; Board Member (Scholarly and Journals Committee) Australian Publishers Association; and Director, Monash University Publishing.

Farewell Ben Wilson

Thanks to Ben Wilson for his contribution as Manager of ANU Press over the past year. There have been many challenges including finding a new printer, juggling author expectations and supporting the team in a period of change. We wish you all the best for your future career steps.

Open access is inevitable – only the ‘how’ remains up for discussion

Peter Baldwin in Times Higher Education argues that “The open-access problem would be solved most directly through copyright reform that rolled back the grotesquely lengthened terms of protection to something approximating the 14 years of the original laws.”

Championing Accessibility and Innovation in Scholarly Publishing

Gwen Evans reports on the recent Ithaka S+R U.S. Library Survey that shows that 67 percent of directors indicate strategies that specifically address ensuring the accessibility of the library’s physical and digital collections are a high priority in their DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility) efforts. She discusses unmet needs and well-established strategies libraries have implemented or should implement.

TOME Assessment Highlights Author Satisfaction and Ongoing Commitment to Open-Access Monographs

The Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of University Presses have published a final report assessing the success of their five-year pilot project to encourage sustainable digital publication of and public access to scholarly books.

The associations launched the Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project in 2018 to publish humanities and social science scholarship on the internet, where these peer-reviewed works can be fully integrated into the larger network of scholarly and scientific research. The project engaged a network of more than 60 university presses and ultimately produced more than 150 open-access scholarly works. The books cover a wide range of topics in many disciplines, including philosophy, history, political science, sociology, and gender and ethnic studies.

New titles

A Grammar of Nese by Lana Grelyn Takau

The Compleat Busoni, Volume 1 Busoni and the piano: The works, the writings, and the recordings

The Compleat Busoni, Volume 2
The Compleat Busoni, Volume 3

Authored by: Larry Sitsky

Open repository

Open Access Week 2023

“Community over Commercialization” is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (October 23-29): The website is up now.

A decade of surveys on attitudes to data sharing highlights three factors for achieving open science

In this blogpost Josh Borycz, Alison Specht, and Kevin Crowston, explore how attitudes to open data and more broadly open science have shifted and identify three factors that shape uptake of open science practices. Motivations for ‘willingness to share’ were largely individual, such as perceived career benefits, career risk and the effort required to engage in the innovation. Disciplinary differences exist and mandated requirements to share data do work.

New research resources

·       Video-consulting to address mental health needs after traumatic brain injury: evaluation of a training workshop to build capacity among psychologists

·       Realized Volatility, Jump and Beta: evidence from Canadian Stock Market

·       A Chiral Lanthanide Tag for Stable and Rigid Attachment to Single Cysteine Residues in Proteins for NMR, EPR and Time-Resolved Luminescence Studies

·       Bernhard Riemann, the Ear, and an Atom of Consciousness

·       An Analysis of Families' Experiences with Young Children with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDDs) during COVID-19 Lockdown in Pakistan

Keeping up to date

Generative AI for library and information professionals

In January, the IFLA AI SIG published a list of resources to support practitioners get up to speed on AI "23 resources to get up to speed on AI in 2023 - selected by the IFLA Artificial Intelligence SIG". The advent of Chat GPT and other generative AI has rapidly reshaped how we think about AI. This called for the SIG to do more work in collecting resources to reflect the uses and challenges of generative AI. The result is a draft document: "Generative AI for library and information professionals". The SIG website is here.

AI, the new frontier – opportunities and challenges

Darrell Gunter looks at the history of AI and postulates on its potential impact on the scholarly publishing ecosystem. He says: My crystal ball shows the following:

The AI wave is real and gaining momentum every day;

·       Publishers who do not adopt AI in their planning will do so at their peril;

·       The governance of AI is crucial, and all stakeholders must be active participants;

·       Partnership opportunities will provide the publishing community to focus on what they do best – publish the world's best research.

A Generative AI Primer

EDUCAUSE has published this reading list providing sources relevant to the form of generative AI that led to natural language processing (NLP) models such as ChatGPT.

ANZSCO update - a good news story

The latest ALIA Blog begins: The preliminary proposals from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to the review of the classification of occupations sees some very positive recommendations for library and information services.

As outlined in our previous ALIA Blog, ALIA's submission strongly advocated for the occupation of Teacher Librarian to be identified separately, instead of being subsumed under Primary and Secondary School Teachers. We also jointly with others advocated for updates of the outdated descriptions of the roles of Librarians, Library Technicians and Library Assistants.   

The preliminary proposed changes are now up on the ANZSCO website, and it is a good news story.

Disability is Not a Bad Word

The ALA Social Responsibilities Round Table organised this event as part of its Afternoon of Social Justice on August 9. The video of the event is online.

Teaching Data Science and Building Data Literacy—Nationally and Globally

A great presentation on the Northeast Student Data Corps (NSDC), launched by the National Science Foundation Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub in 2020 as a community-developed initiative to teach data science fundamentals to students across the Northeastern U.S., with a special focus on underserved institutions and students. The presentation is online.

Coming events

Women in the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau collection

When? Wednesday 30 August, 9.30–10.30am

Where?  Melbourne

More details. In 1992, the then Pacific Manuscripts Bureau (PMB or Pambu) Executive Officer, Gillian Scott, published Women in the Pacific: A guide to the records on microfilm written by, or about, women in the Pacific copied by the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau. Since 1992, around 500 collections – at least 60 by or about women – have been added to the PMB collection. The creation of a new finding aid will contextualise these collections for present day researchers and apply a contemporary research lens to highlight records of diverse women in the Pacific. Join Kari James, Dr Deborah Lee-Talbot and Annie Kwai to learn about how the new guide is progressing (findings, challenges, limitations) and hear stories about some of the women you can find in the PMB collection. Click here for more information.

Australian Society of Archivists' 2023 National Conference

When? 5 & 6 September 2023

Where?  Melbourne

More details. Rising to our challenges: archives at the ‘G is the theme, drawing inspiration from the ‘G (MCG) as an iconic Melbourne sporting venue and landmark on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Find out more.

ARDC

Introducing the ARDC’s BinderHub Service for Researchers

The new ARDC BinderHub Service, hosted on the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud, is ready to change the way researchers collaborate and achieve reproducibility in their work.

Read more here

Making Coronial Law Accessible: The Australian Coronial Law Library

National coronial findings for the last 20 years are now available for researchers through the Australian Coronial Law Library. 

Read more here

Widespread Use of Cloud Computing Revealed by National Researcher Survey

A recent ARDC survey revealed that cloud computing is widely used across the Australian research community. 

Read more here

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