Sessions held in 2012

1. Retrodigitization Project (27 March 2012)
2. Data and account management (18 April 2012)
3. Google (15 May 2012)
4. Web-usability (25 September 2012)
5. METIS (31 October 2012)
6. Google-2 (18 December 2012)

The following topics will be considered in 2013: E-books, the new way of working and flexible workspace, Open Access, PhD regulations, Apps, making digital collections available.

Members of the workgroup:
Gretha Landman, Dorien van Rheenen, Jitka Vavra, Hilda Schram, Gert-Jan Bokdam

• Absenteeism rate (after adjustment for long-term illness): 3.6% (which is consistent with the ‘Verbaan norm’, the average absenteeism rate for similar professions)
• Absenteeism frequency: 1.73

Size of the organization on 1 January 2013

• 123.3 FTE (including University Museum)
• 116.7 FTE (excluding University Museum)
• All employees are in permanent employment or with the prospect of a permanent contract.
• Room supervisors are not included in the figures.

Mobility

One of the ways in which the Library shapes its mobility policy is by participating in the University of Groningen Talent Travel programme, a programme for the sustainable employability of the Support and Management Staff.

• Two managers participated in the Ja-maar show (‘Yes-but show’, awareness for managers).
• Two library staff members participated in the Talent Event (awareness and workshops for staff members).
• Sixteen staff members completed the Talent Scan (about discovering their talents and deployability). If they wanted, they could discuss the scan results with a careers advisor.
• Talent On Tour: the Library has employed one staff member on a temporary basis for this project.

Training courses

Collaboration on projects takes place more and more within the Library.

• In 2012, six staff members followed the Prince 2 Foundation course.
• Over the summer, a large number of employees were given the opportunity to participate in two English proficiency workshops (for desk staff and public services staff).

Alex Klugkist studied Theology and Semitic Languages at the University of Groningen. This was followed by a short academic career in Groningen and Göttingen. He was director of the Central Applications and Placement Office (Centraal Bureau voor Aanmelding en Plaatsing; CBAP) for prospective first-year students from 1973 to 1976. This office had the task of implementing the numerus fixus act. He then held the post of head of administration of the Faculty of Arts in Groningen from 1976 to 1982.

Klugkist was awarded his PhD in 1982 for his dissertation on the development of the Aramaic script, and in the same year became deputy librarian at the University of Groningen Library. He joined the library management at a time in which information was increasingly appearing in electronic format, but in which the printed collection also continued to grow by about 50,000 volumes per year.

Alex Klugkist succeeded librarian Wim Koops on 1 October 1990. As librarian he continued the process of the automation of various library processes. The pace of developments in the library world began to accelerate: digitization of magazines and reference works, the rise of e-books, and in parallel the development of personal websites upon which academics could place their publications. The library tried to support this by setting up repositories to which a registration system for academic publications was linked. These were all global developments that the University of Groningen Library could not simply ignore despite its modest human and financial resources.

Caring
Alex Klugkist was above all a sociable and caring person, both at work and in his private life. A good example of this was his work for the university library in Ouagadougou, the capital of poverty-stricken Burkina Faso, which he visited several times to follow progress. The years before his retirement were dominated by a large reorganization, and he was at the inception of a plan for a new integrated library organization. The corresponding staffing plan was realized by the end of December 2009. The completion of the reorganization was a good moment for him to retire early. He left the implementation of the new organizational structure to his successor Marjolein Nieboer, and retired as librarian in January 2010.

Unfortunately, Klugkist did not have much time to enjoy his retirement: he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2011. After an operation the disease initially appeared to be in remission, but complications arose this spring, which eventually proved fatal.

In recent years Alex Klugkist and his former colleague Sybren Sybrandy wrote the book Van knekelhuis tot kloppend hard, Geschiedenis van de Bibliotheek van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1615 – 2010, a history of the University of Groningen Library. Unfortunately, he was unable to witness the publication of this momentous book: it was published in November 2012.

Alex Klugkist worked for the University of Groningen Library for over 25 years. The management and staff of the Library have much respect and appreciation for everything that he meant for them personally as well as for the Library and University of Groningen.
Alex Klugkist was 67 years old.

In late 2012, Information and Collection specialists started assigning subject indexing (basic classification and possibly keywords) and location numbers during the selection phase instead of nearer the end of the process (i.e. after the cataloguing phase). The New Acquisitions team has started to add subject indexing and location numbers that were already available to the title description or the copy section.

In addition, preparatory work has been carried out in order to be able to assign serial numbers (as part of the location number) and generate labels, so that books and other material can be delivered shelf-ready (secured and labelled) to reading rooms and faculty libraries as of 2013.

These new procedures have also been adopted by the Periodicals Group.

Furthermore, all ongoing projects took up quite some time and the departure of Willy Palmen meant that several of his tasks had to be taken over by someone else, including the General Literature Budget and the European tender of printed books.

In September, Edzes’ announcement that they were closing down as of 1 January 2013 caused quite a stir. Alongside the mainly emotional fact that our oldest supplier was stopping, this brought a great deal of extra work for the Acquisition group and the Periodicals Administration. Ongoing orders on monographs had to be checked and often placed with other suppliers. Subscriptions purchased through Edzes had to be cancelled and purchased anew somewhere else. As this was a perfect opportunity to check the periodicals for relevance to the collection, this was done straight away. This ultimately led to the cancellation of approximately 300 periodicals, thus saving a considerable sum of money.

The group has spent a significant amount of time on the relocation process alongside their regular activities. Since August in particular, when the libraries of FEB, FRW and FWN were merged, the relocation has taken up most of the capacity. Karla Westra and Erik Eefting spent their days at the Bernouilliborg between September and November, where they first prepared the monographs and then the periodicals for relocation to the UB stacks. Although the deadline for the monographs was met, this was not the case for the periodicals; that job has been rounded off in the meantime, however.

In November, preparations for the relocation of the Arts Library in 2013 began.

• the merger of two specialist libraries into the Zernike Library
• the expansion of the collection and facilities
• the renewal of the Information Skills Teaching Programme

Merger of libraries

The most notable project in 2012 has been the merger of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences library and the Economics and Business and Spatial Sciences library into the Zernike Library. Since mid-October, there is one joint library for these three University faculties at Zernike.

In a short period of time, a 2.2 km selection of the original 5.5 kilometres of books was made in consultation with faculty staff and in cooperation with several colleagues. This collection is on open shelves in the Duisenberg Building under the new name ‘Zernike Library’.

Library staff have done a tremendous amount of work to make this merger a success – a merger that, besides a revision of the open collection, also involved changes to procedures, task distribution and new partnerships.

Expansion of the collection and facilities

Apart from just cuts, the collection has undergone some expansions as well:

• The order-suggestion profiles have been expanded and improved for the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (FWN). Life Sciences has acquired a digital magazine archive.
• The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) has been given access to an increased range of financial and economic data.
• The Faculty of Spatial Sciences (FRW) can now consult an increased range of relevant e-books.
• A Data Room for researchers at the University of Groningen was set up in the Zernike Library in 2012. Here researchers can, by appointment, consult specific databases via remote access, such as historical documents from databases from Bureau van Dijk and microdata from Statistics Netherlands (CBS).

However, we were soon overtaken by the plans to combine several libraries into one City Centre Library, with the Arts Library the first to take the plunge (in 2014) and the Law Library following later. Cooperation in the practical sense was pursued more modestly by the two libraries, but wherever necessary and possible they initiated activities together (e.g. working visits, theme meetings, house rules enforcement week, drinking coffee together) and helped each other out (e.g. with desk staffing problems).

Central to the activities of both teams are, of course, the standard services: desk work, collection building, instruction workshops for various target groups, creating and improving Libguides, expanding and maintaining the network of faculty and other contacts, etc. In addition, several staff members participated in projects and working groups.

In September 2012, a large part of the modern languages degree programmes at the Faculty of Arts were clustered into the new European Languages and Cultures degree programme. The degree programmes in Finnish, Hungarian, Norwegian and Danish will be discontinued, which will of course have implications for collection building in these subject fields.

The Arts Library has started preparations for the upcoming relocation to the University Library building. It requires a great deal of attention and creates an extra workload for the staff, because they have to deal with the relocation alongside their regular work activities.

The Law and Arts teams jointly and voluntarily participated in the R&O interview pilot.

The room has been redesigned in the University colours. NEXT also makes grateful use of various other rooms in the UB for their workshops.