Library Action Plan 2022-23 - Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences
Library Actions - What we've done and what we're planning to do over the next academic year
Healthcare Education resources - To support our new Healthcare Education courses in 22/23, we appointed a new Subject Librarian and spent over £56,580.65 on physical and digital resources.
Our Subject Librarian has created a new Healthcare Education LibGuide for students.
New ways to discover online library resources - We have introduced two new tools to help you search and find online library resources:
LibKey Nomad is a downloadable browser extension providing one-click access to articles. Read more
Browzine allows you to browse and save scholarly journals available from the library or from open
sources. Read more
Primo LibGuide - Primo is Aberystwyth University's library catalogue and discovery tool that gives you access to library resources. We have published a new Primo LibGuide to help you make the most of it.
Library Floormap - We are launching an interactive online Floormap of the Hugh Owen Library to help people find their way around and familiarise themselves with the library's facilities. The Library Floormap is integrated with Primo, the library catalogue, to help you locate your books. Visit the library online here
Customer Service Excellence - IS achieved the Customer Service Excellence standard in 2015 and has maintained this standard and gained areas of Compliance Plus, areas which go above standard service provision, every year since.
At the last full review in 2021, IS was recertified and awarded 11 areas of Compliance Plus. These were all maintained in 2022 and 2023. Find out more here
Teaching Staff LibGuide - Our Subject Librarians have published a LibGuide for new teaching staff containing everything new staff need to know about the library and resourcing modules
International Students and the Library - This academic year we have been carrying out user experience (UX) research with various user groups to assess their experiences with Library and IT services. In February 2023, we held a week of sampling activities to assess the ways international students interact with our services. The activities were based on UX methods and consisted of a user-led tour of the library and a semi-structured interview to assess their experiences before and since coming to Aberystwyth. See our findings here
Welsh Library Team of the Year Award - Our Academic Engagement team was awarded second place in the CILIP Cymru Wales Welsh Library Team of the Year Award for their work on the Referencing and Plagiarism Awareness LibGuide.
The awarding judges commented “The team designed a new training resource on referencing. The resource is interactive and fully bilingual, is integrated into student learning systems and can be tailored to different student needs. The success of the development of these new training resources was the recognition that successful delivery relied on getting the users involved. It was clear that the team had a real understanding how students would relate to the content and what would reduce referencing anxiety."
NSS 2023 Results - Our Library and IT Services also continue to outperform the UK sector average for student satisfaction
-
Library Services - 93 up 6 points since 2022 Top in Wales
-
IT Services - 89 up 3 points since 2022 Top in Wales
- Overall Student Satisfaction with Learning Resources - 2023 National Benchmark - 86 Aberystwyth's Score - 90
IS User Survey 2022 - We have asked students and staff to take the IS User Survey every November.
We asked what we're doing well and what we need to improve. We use the results to plan and develop our services.
We had 534 responses to our User Survey in 2022.
Read more about the feedback we received from the survey and our actions as a result
| Department | Number of respondents |
| Geography & Earth Sciences | 35 |
| Healthcare Education | 10 |
| Life Sciences | 87 |
| Psychology | 40 |
| School of Veterinary Science | 7 |
Spend - The majority of the Library Resource Budget is spent on resources requested by academic staff to support learning, teaching and research.
85 % is available for recurrent expenditure such as journals and databases. 15% goes towards non-recurrent expenditure such as reading material for research, and materials on reading lists including books, digitized book chapters & articles
- Journals / eJournals & Databases £1,364,947 since Aug 2022
- Books and eBooks £158,769 since Aug 2022
- Healthcare Education resources £56,580 since Aug 2022
Use - Since August 2022 we have:
- Loaned 37,165 books
- Loaned 212 journals
- Digitised 25 items for FELS and 550 overall
- Borrowed 470 Interlibrary loans and loaned 964
- Given 461 new and returning students guided tours of the Library
There were 361 visits to the Iris de Freitas Room over the Easter Holidays which was open 24/7 when the rest of the Hugh Owen Library was closed. We're working on increasing library opening hours outside of traditional term times to accommodate the needs of all students across increasingly diverse study schemes.
Tour attendees by department in FELS
| Department | |
| Department of Life Sciences | 107 |
| Geography and Earth Sciences | 24 |
| Psychology | 29 |
- Had 124,031 visits to Hugh Owen Library
- 15,258 visits to the Physical Sciences Library
Reading Lists - Since June 2022, the following have been added:
-
224 resources to Life Sciences & BVSc lists
-
880 resources to Department of Geography and Earth Sciences lists
-
61 resources to Psychology lists
-
38 resources to Healthcare Education lists
A total of 1165 resources have been added to FELS lists since June 2022 *Resources include books, ebooks, e-resources and digitised chapters and articles
Material types on Reading Lists
3022 print books
1228 ebooks
Reading List Coverage
95.3% of Aberystwyth University's modules are covered by an Aspire Reading List
1762 modules need a list. 1679 modules have a list
Faculty Reading List Coverage
| Department | Percentage of complete lists |
| AU Average | 95.3% |
| Geography & Earth Sciences | 82.8% |
| Healthcare Education | 100% |
| Life Sciences & BVSc | 99.6% |
| Psychology | 100% |
Aberystwyth Research Portal - makes the very best of Aberystwyth University's staff and postgraduate research
openly available online, free of charge.
- 303 FELS Research outputs since the start of 2022
- 19 FELS Research theses since the start of 2022
LibGuides - Our Subject Librarians maintain a range of LibGuides as a one stop source of library help and support. LibGuides contain information, resources and links relevant to specific subjects or general topics.
Our Referencing and Plagiarism guide has been viewed more than 44,053 times in one academic year, which is 6212 more views than the previous academic year
Subject Guides
Life Sciences & BVSc viewed 1294 times in 22/23
Geography and Earth Sciences viewed 314 times in 22/23
Healthcare Education viewed 1558 times in 22/23
Psychology and Counselling viewed 1188 times in 22/23
Information Services Teaching and library support - Information Services offers a number of training opportunities for staff and students to develop their skills and make effective use of its services. We offer training in the following topic areas:
Academic Skills for Students
Administrative Systems
Digital Skills
Learning and Teaching
Personal Development
Research
In 22/23 our Subject Librarians ran sessions on Metrics and Altmetrics, Finding Quality Resources, Referencing and referencing software including EndNote and Mendeley
We are working to revamp the AberSkills pages to make them more comprehensive and useful for students. The all-new AberSkills will be launching early in the next academic year.
Librarians' teaching activities by department
| Department | Teaching hours | Attendees |
| Life Sciences (agriculture) | 4 | 221 |
| Life Sciences (biology) | 3 | 11 |
| Geography & Earth Sciences | 4 | 92 |
| Healthcare Education | 37 | 67 |
| Psychology | 24 | 789 |
| Veterinary Science | 4 | 96 |
Digital Skills - Meet the team
- Sioned Llywelyn - Digital Skills Lead
- Shân Saunders - Digital Capabilities and Skills Development Coordinators
- Laurie Stevenson, Jeffrey Clark - Student Digital Champions
Digital skills are the skills, knowledge and practices that equip us to live, learn and work safely and effectively in a digital society. We are supporting students and staff at the University to assess and develop their own digital skills.
Key highlights
|
September ’22 |
Digital Discovery Tool available to all Foundation Year and Year 1 students |
|
2022/23 |
Year 2 and Final-year student pilot of the DDT |
|
April ’23 |
Launch of the new Digital Skills Library and LinkedIn Learning Digital Skills Collections |
|
September ’23 |
DDT available to all students (UG and PG) |
|
November ’23 |
Digital Skills Festival |
Jisc Digital Discovery Tool - Online bilingual resource that enables students and staff to self-assess their digital skills, allowing you to identify your confidence and capability within real-world practices.
Since September 2022, over 800 foundation and first-year students completed the Digital Discovery Tool:
- Geography and Earth Sciences – 1
- Healthcare Education (Life Sciences) - 46
- Life Sciences - 38
- Psychology – 152
- Veterinary Science (Life Sciences) - 24
Digital Skills Library - A new library of resources to help you develop your digital skills, ranging from supporting you to develop healthy digital habits to learning how to code.
Digital Skills Festival - Next year: We have an exciting event planned in November 2023, the Digital Skills Festival! A week filled with workshops, training sessions and activities, all designed to help you develop your digital skills.
LinkedIn Learning - Online learning platform which has an extensive library of expert led online courses and short videos to help you develop your digital capabilities, in addition to several other skills. Activate your free LinkedIn Learning account
Since September 2022, 4,535 courses and 31,246 videos have been watched in LinkedIn Learning.
New: We’ve launched 15 new collections this year, containing LinkedIn Learning courses and short videos that will specifically help you to develop your digital skills.
New: Our Student Digital Champions have also created a range of collections to support students in:
Top LinkedIn Learning courses for FELS students in ‘22/23:
- Learning Excel: Data Analysis (3h 16m)
- Academic Research Foundations: Quantitative (1h 41m)
- Team Collaboration in Microsoft 365 (1h 28m)
- 20 Rules of Visual Communication (1h 47m)
- Overcome Overthinking (36m)
- Beating Procrastination (23m)