Staying number 1

We're delighted that the University of Sheffield Library came out top in the recent Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey but we’re not going to sit back and relax. We want to stay at the top of the list, and I want to make sure that the library develops its collections and services so that we’re offering the best support possible to students in the Faculty of Social Science.

We want to increase our online collections as much we can, and we’ve been buying a lot of e-books recently. However, we can’t make everything available online (yet!) so we also want to make it easier for you to find your way round our print collections. Following the recent redevelopment of Western Bank Library we’re working to reduce the number of different sequences in the library, and rearrange them in a more logical way. We’ll also be putting in new signs and guiding ready for September 2010. If you haven’t been in Western Bank library for a while, come and see what a difference the refurbishment has made

We’ll continue to work with your departments to make sure that you can get access to the materials you need for your modules. We do this by adding links from myResource Lists to e-journals, e-books, e-offprints and Star. You can access these through the library tab in MUSE. We also want to help you develop the information literacy skills required of a Sheffield Graduate, and have created an Information Skills Resource in partnership with academic departments.

We need feedback from students and departments so that we know what we’re doing right, and where we can improve. Members of the Faculty Liaison Team already go to student staff committee meetings in many Social Science Departments, and I’ve attended Faculty Student Forum meetings in the past year. We’ve recently had a strategic meeting with senior members of the Social Sciences Faculty, including Carys Swanwick the Director of Learning & Teaching, and Rob Sykes the Director of Operations, and we hope to repeat these on a regular basis to help with our planning.

If you’ve got any views on what the library should be doing, leave a comment, or email me: Maria Mawson, Faculty Librarian for Social Sciences, m.b.mawson@sheffield.ac.uk.