Issue 19
Mar 2024
Editor’s note
How the current academic year has flown by! Already we’re in the middle of Sem 2 and it’s time for the first Library newsletter for 2024.
First up, we are very grateful to the staff and students who supported the Library by sending us their feedback on our resources and services through our survey in late 2023. The survey results will allow us to benchmark our performance against other JULAC libraries to seek continuous improvement.
Once again, the survey tells us that the space in the Library is really important for our users. In the update on the renovation of Levels 6 and 7 of AML, we have pictures showing the contemporary design of the space and the improvements made. Hope you like them!
E-resources are essential tools for study and research, which is why the E-resources Discovery Week held every year is useful for students to brush up their database skills. Read the report to see how it went in January.
Reports of two digital projects round up this issue, one on the digitisation of TV and Film pamphlets, the other on archiving HKBU websites. Be assured that whether face-to-face or behind-the-scenes, Library staff work hard to create interesting and engaging resources for you.
Wan Yu Wong
Special Collections and Archives Librarian
Spotlight on LibQUAL+® Survey 2023 results
We are excited to share the insights and outcomes of the recent HKBU LibQUAL+® Survey conducted between 10 November and 1 December 2023. Our continuous commitment to improving library services has been bolstered by your valuable feedback through the international survey instrument developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).
Survey Participation and Appreciation
A heartfelt thank you to all 1,013 participants who completed the survey. Your input is instrumental in shaping the future of the HKBU Library services.
Survey Highlights and Performance
The survey focused on three key dimensions of service quality:
- Affect of Service: Measuring courtesy and competency of library staff.
- Information Control: Evaluating access to and sufficiency of library resources.
- Library as Place: Assessing the environment of the library as a space for study and creativity.
The 22 core survey questions, designed to measure the Minimum, Perceived, and Desired service levels on a scale from 1 (Low) to 9 (High), revealed the following mean scores:
Commendable Areas and Users’ Top Expectations
We take pride in our courteous and knowledgeable staff, as well as the Library’s supportive role as a haven for learning, which were highly rated in the survey.
The survey also highlighted top user expectations, emphasizing the desire for quiet study spaces, a comfortable and inviting location, and improved access to electronic resources from outside the library.
HKBU & JULAC Libraries: A Collaborative Effort
HKBU Library, alongside the seven other JULAC (UGC-funded) libraries, participated in this collaborative effort to benchmark service quality across the consortium.
User Feedback
We are grateful for the constructive comments, with many praising our collection, environment, and digital resources. Here’s a snapshot of what you said:
The library is the best environment for studies and research with its many resources.
Library frequently introduces relevant academic search tools and workshops which are useful for my study.
Congratulations to Our Lucky Draw Winners!
Last but not least, a big congratulations to the winners of the LibQUAL+® Survey lucky draw. Prizes ranged from an Apple Watch SE to Book Coupons. Thank you for your participation!
Looking Ahead
Thank you for your continued support. We want to make HKBU Library your favourite place to study, learn, and do research. Remember, we’re with you every step of your study journey.
See you at the Library!
For more details, visit the survey result website.
Wallace Wong
User Experience & Assessment Librarian
Information Services Librarian
Library Renovation Updates
It has been 11 months since Levels 6&7 were closed for renovation. If you joined the University in AY23/24, you may not know what the floors were like before; and for those who witnessed the closure of the floors, you might be eager to see the space again. No matter which category you are in, we know you will find the new space refreshing!
Bear with us, the wait is almost over!
Last month, we worked with the Estates Office to confirm the colours and materials of the bookshelves, chairs, stools, tables and benches, etc. The contractors are now working on producing the furniture and we expect them to arrive at the Library in the coming months.
Let’s take a look at some of the latest photos we have:
By the time of the next Library Newsletter, if the schedule is on track, we will be working on moving the books back from off-site storage. Stay tuned with the latest news and updates about the renovation here:
Maggie Wong
User Services Librarian
E-Resources Discovery Week 2024 Recap
The HKBU Library hosted its annual E-Resources Discovery Week from 22-26 January 2024. This event aimed to help students and faculty get familiar with the various e-resources available through the library to support research and learning.
Workshops Series
A series of eight engaging workshops were organized, attracting 134 eager participants. The sessions allowed attendees to enhance their knowledge of the extensive digital content accessible via the library, such as e-books, e-journals, and databases.
Vendor Booths
Booths providing hands-on experience and guidance on effectively using partnering vendors’ e-resources were set up in the Main Library and Shek Mun Campus Library. Representatives from database vendors were on hand to share insights into their products.
Grand Prize Draw – Winners Announced!
Workshop participants were entered to win great prizes, including iPads, a tablet, and other handy items. The lucky winners are listed on the prize draw page.
Digital Badge Awarded
Participants who engaged in the workshops were also awarded Digital Badges, recognizing their proactive approach to mastering the library’s e-resources. This badge symbolizes their commitment to ongoing learning and information literacy.
A Heartfelt Thank You
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to everyone involved in making E-Resources Discovery Week 2024 a success. A special thanks goes to our sponsors, event collaborators, and the enthusiastic attendees who made this event both possible and remarkable.
Stay Connected
For more details, visit the event website.
We look forward to seeing you at future library events!
Wallace Wong
User Experience & Assessment Librarian
Information Services Librarian
Digitisation Project Behind-the-scenes
Have you ever wondered what work it takes to make a physical publication appear on your screens? Let us take you on a tour of our office and explain the steps involved in digitising our collections!
TV and Film Publications
One of the Library’s ongoing digitization projects is the TV and Film Publication Database. The Resource Management Cluster has collected thousands of TV and film publications from colonial Hong Kong, providing valuable information on the golden era of Hong Kong popular culture.
Digitisation Process
After copyright clearance, these materials are delivered to the Digital Initiatives and Research Cluster, where staff will scan into high-resolution TIFF files for archiving and lower-resolution JPG files for presentation. Optical character recognition (OCR) is then performed to extract the text from the image files. This automated process is not 100% accurate, partly because the texts are often small and blurry, and older publications contain handwritten text, making them difficult for the software to read. The extracted texts are checked and corrected in two rounds by our colleagues. This meticulous work enables functions such as full text search, text analysis and enlarged reading, which the image files cannot offer.
Each article in a publication is also indexed by our colleagues, meaning that the content is analysed and tagged with relevant subject terms. The metadata enables searching by titles, proper names, and keywords, as well as filtering by article category.
See it Online
The digitised materials are eventually published on the project website designed and developed by us, where users can browse and read the publications in full text. Keyword searches can be performed at the article level, and search results are visualised in graphs that show the number of mentions by year and issue. The top 10 keywords most frequently mentioned together in an article are also displayed to give insight into the relationship between the terms.
Thanks to the hard work by our dedicated colleagues, these materials are used constantly being used by students, scholars and enthusiasts – at least 300,000 times in the past three years, contributing to the study of the local popular culture. We invite you to visit the project and explore these valuable resources yourself!
Annie Sit
Assistant Library Officer
Digital Initiatives and Research Cluster
Preserving HKBU’s Web Presence for Posterity
To fulfil one of its strategic priorities, the Library has been active in building up digital resources. One type of digital resources we use every day without even thinking is websites. It is now inconceivable that an organisation, or indeed individuals as well, will not have its own website for information dissemination. But websites are subject to changes all the time. Some may have “old” content removed and replaced by the latest updates, or just disappear overnight.
Internet Archive and Archive-It
To avoid having a digital blackhole, web archiving as a tool to preserve websites and online publications has become a routine activity undertaken by many heritage organisations including libraries and archives. The Internet Archive, set up in 1996, has been the leading force in creating tools for capturing web content on a mass scale. Put in simple terms, a ‘crawler’ software is used to take a copy of all the content of a website and collate the pages into a specific archival file format called WARC. This WARC file will contain enough information to render and display the website as it should look on the day of capture.
In 2006 the Internet Archive launched the “Archive-It” service so that non-technical people, like librarians, can start creating focused web archives that are of interest to them. The captured content can then be displayed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
HKBU Library’s Archive-It site
Last year HKBU Library took up a subscription to the Archive-It service to try and capture all the websites in the ‘hkbu.edu.hk’ domain. After less than a year’s effort, 384 websites (at the time of writing) have been captured and can be viewed at https://archive-it.org/collections/20263. They represent every faculty, school, department, centre, office, as well as major projects and courses.
The captured websites let us see past events, such as the President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in 2000/01:
In a way this exercise has been timely, as the websites from different parts of the University last year began to migrate to the current platform. As an example, here is the current website of the Department of Communications:
and here is the one captured in early May 2023:
In the image above, you may notice the top bar explaining an archived version instead of a live website is being displayed.
What’s more, there are also websites that have since disappeared after the capture in March 2023, like the Office of the Provost:
Along this journey we have encountered a number of challenges, mostly due to website designs but also with particularly tricky content such as those on social media. The web archiving effort will continue on a regular basis with most websites to be captured once a year and others, like the HKBU homepage, every quarter. You can imagine in a few decades’ time, this archive will be extremely interesting and useful to find information that is no longer there. In fact by then, AI tools may well have been invented to capture websites created by other AI tools!
Wan Yu Wong
Special Collections and Archives Librarian
Last updated: 25 March 2024