Current initiatives

Collaboration and partnership

An Information Literacy Framework for Wales?
Our first event to investigate a cross-sectoral information literacy framework for Wales took place at Gregynog on 30 November and 1 December 2009. Delegates came from HE, FE, public and school library services, and included other interested stakeholders such as DCELLS and CyMAL.The conference was a great success - thanks to the excellent speakers and hard work from all the delegates. For more information visit the WHELF blog

WHELF e-book service
WHELF coordinates a collaborative e-books scheme with OCLC. NetLibrary provides 85,000 Welsh students and National Library users with access to over 600 e-book titles in a broad range of subjects including law, political science, art, business, economics and management and history. An article by Jeremy Atkinson and Paul Riley in the latest edition of SCONUL Focus gives the background to the project and its development to date: Building on collaboration: the WHELF e-book deal

Joint procurement
Wales is the first country in the UK to jointly procure online news services for public and academic libraries. This joint procurement is co-ordinated by the National Library of Wales on behalf of Welsh libraries and helps reduce costs and deliver value for money. Libraries for Life: Delivering a Modern Library Service for Wales 2008-11 represents a major investment by the Welsh Assembly Government in a strategic development programme to improve library and information services in Wales. WHELF is represented on the advisory group for Libraries for Life, together with associated project boards.

Videoconferences with Welsh authors
WHELF worked with the Welsh Video Network to put on a series of events with authors across Wales.. Using videoconferencing we were able to link schools with FE and HE for an audience with Bethan Gwanas on 4 November, Mererid Hopwood on 18 November and Rachel Trezise on 9 December 2008. One of our events had the honour of being the 2008th event during the 2008 National Year of Reading in Wales. Alison Walker (WVN) and Sue Mace (WHELF) were invited to the Assembly to meet Jane Hutt, Minister for Children, Education, Lifelong Learning and Skills. Photos on Flickr

CROESO is a scheme which permits any of the 85,000 students on a higher education course in Wales (including those in franchised course in FE Colleges) to use any other HE library for reference purposes. Many libraries are also open to the public for consultation.

The WALIA co-operative scheme was developed by WHELF to offer researchers in HE institutions in Wales the chance to use and borrow from the library collections of other Wales HE institutions. It has now been supersed by the SCONUL Access scheme. SCONUL Access is a co-operative venture between most of the higher education libraries of the UK and Ireland. It enables staff, research students, full time postgraduates and part-time, distance learning and placement students to borrow material from other libraries.

The HELP (Higher Education in Libraries Partnership) project in 2004 confirmed the need for WHELF to take a leadership role in driving forward the collaboration agenda. Links to the detailed reports and summary can be found here.

Welsh Repository Network

With the advent of the Welsh Repository Network, Wales becomes the first country in the UK where all higher education institutions have established online repositories. The formal launch took place at the National Library of Wales on 19 February 2009. Developed under the auspices of WHELF, the Welsh Repository Network is made up of 12 individual university research repositories. Dr Michael Hopkins, Director of Information Services at Aberystwyth University, said: “The repositories allow universities to archive and protect the intellectual output of their institutions, but also make available cutting-edge research to the world.”

Information Services at Aberystwyth University has now been awarded £260k by the JISC to support the Welsh Repository Network Enhancement Project as part of their national Repositories Programme. Aberystwyth University will act as the lead partner in the newly funded scheme which will involve collaboration with all other Welsh Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the National Library of Wales. The project will run from 1 April 2009 to 31 March 2011.

The project team will investigate the potential of a collaborative, centrally managed model to accelerate the development and uptake of repository services by Welsh HEIs and will investigate the potential for a mediated deposit bureau to facilitate the increased population of newly established repositories with appropriate academic research outputs. Another project strand will work on the creation of a Welsh Thesis Harvesting Service in collaboration with the National Library of Wales, developing an earlier pilot programme known as Repository Bridge.

WRN ran a repositories strand at the 2009 Gregynog Colloquium, and once more it proved a useful forum for the exchange of ideas and inspiration. All of the Gregynog Repository Stream presentations are now available to view via the Aberystwyth institutional repository CADAIR. A post linking to each individual presentation is now available via the WRN blog

Digitisation

WHELF Digitisation Strategy
WHELF's Action Plan for 2009-11 includes the aim 'support further digitisation projects'. This aim's first objective is to 'agree a digitisation strategy for WHELF'. In October 2008, WHELF members considered a preparatory paper by Jeremy Atkinson and Andrew Green on the creation of a strategy . This draft strategy has been written on the basis of that paper and the subsequent discussion. It carries forward some assumptions already made, for example that a WHELF strategy on digitisation is more appropriate, for the time being at least, than a more comprehensive, all-Wales strategy.

Welsh Newspapers and Magazines Online
In April the Welsh Assembly Government announced its SCIF grant of £2m to the National Library for a project entitled ‘Welsh Newspapers and Magazines Online’. This is a three-year project to digitise a high proportion of all out-of-copyright Welsh newspapers and publish the resulting text online for all to search, browse and reuse for free. WHELF supported the bid to SCIF (the Strategic Capital Investment Fund).

Welsh Journals Online
Working in partnership with members of WHELF, the National Library of Wales is currently undertaking a project funded by JISC, the Library, and the Welsh Assembly Government, to digitise a substantial part of its holdings of 20th-century journals relating to Wales. Due for completion in June 2009, this is the Library's first venture in the mass digitisation of printed material. The material ranges from academic and scholarly journals to current affairs and popular magazines, reflecting all aspects of Welsh life. Welsh language publications make up 40% of the content. The project is the first stage of what the Library hopes will be a major programme to digitise its entire print holdings relating to Wales, and will provide an invaluable resource to anyone interested in an aspect of Welsh life. Digitisation is one of WHELF's current strategic priorities, and work is underway to develop a digitisation strategy for Wales.

Welsh Ballads - completing the British Ballads Network
The Welsh Ballads project will fill the final gap in the network of digitised collections of printed ballads around Britain. Cardiff University with the National Library of Wales and Bangor and Lampeter University libraries hold the main Welsh printed ballads collections (in both Welsh and English). A total of 5,000 ballads will be digitised, from the earliest 18th Century ballads to the final few published in the 20th Century. In total this will produce around 20,000 pages of digitised text images (all out of copyright). A website portal will be developed from a pilot which already exists at Cardiff. This will provide a gateway and an academic resource for access and study of the ballad in Wales, Britain, and in its international context, and will link to the catalogue and ballad images.

Continuing Professional Development

Gregynog Colloquium 2009
Every year WHELF and HEWIT organise a residential colloquium at Gregynog Hall, the University of Wales conference centre, for library and IT staff to discuss recent developments and to exchange experiences. A successful feature of the Colloquium is the opportunity for new (and not-so-new) professionals to give a presentation based on their own experience. Other themes in this year's excellent conference included special collections, library education, finance and staffing, collaboration, changing roles, innovative service provision and planning for the future.

The Colloquium included an extended two day Repositories Stream as part of the programme. This was well attended and comprised practical workshops and presentations on a diversity of topics including copyright and repositories, multimedia deposits, repository management, the Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) and the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Welsh Collaboration in Action: A Joint Event for Librarians Supporting HE in FE
Libraries have an important role to play in supporting higher education in further education, so each year WHELF organises an event for staff to enable participants to share experiences, get up to date on recent developments and develop individual and shared programmes of action for the future. This year's event was held in June at the University of Wales, Newport. Topics included social learning spaces, dedicated HE learning spaces and personal learning environments and e-portfolios for students.

Welsh Libraries Conference 2009
WHELF organised a very successful half-day seminar at the annual Welsh Libraries Conference in May 2009 which explored the theme of Space for All. The speakers were Martin Lewis, Director of Library Services & University Librarian, University of Sheffield on Information Commons: the ultimate workspace for students; Patrick Cox,
Learning Centre Manager, Deeside College on Learning Zone: winning awards, supporting learners; and Andrew Prescott, Manager of Library Services, University of Wales Lampeter on Diffusion and Concentration: the Library Spaces of Web 2.0.

WHELF Study Tour to Dublin - 12 to 14 November 2008
With sponsorship from CyMAL: Museums Archives and Libraries Wales, 16 WHELF members were able to travel to Ireland to visit a number of higher education libraries in Dublin. This was a very useful and worthwhile trip. It was particularly productive to visit some very different HEIs and their libraries in such a short space of time. For those planning new library buildings, it was also invaluable to see iconic buildings like the Berkeley Library in Trinity College Dublin and more recent new buildings like Dublin City University. The photos of the various libraries we visited are now available on Flickr

Journal articles from WHELF

Links to journal articles from WHELF