Author: bronwynb

The annual Research Week of the Library and Information Service of Stellenbosch University (SU) kicked off later than usual this year due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The original date of 27–31 July coinciding with the 2020 Olympic Games. But with Covid-19 everything changed, and we had to move Research Week to the new date of 24–28 August. Since plenty of time had been spent on planning and preparation, we decided to stick with the original theme of “Going for research gold in 2020”, even though the Olympics had been postponed.

This year’s Research Week was presented in an online format for the first time and we were excited to see what the reception of this format would be. We reached a wider audience, including participants from Medicine and Health Sciences, the USB and postgraduate students from all over the country. Registrations and participation far exceeded our expectations.

Research Week was launched on Monday 24 August, where Ms Ellen Tise welcomed everybody, with a special welcome to Professor Cloete and guest speaker Dr Balindiwe Sishi. Ms Tise reminded all that the aim of a research week is to inspire and equip Masters, PhD and emerging researchers  with practical knowledge of research essentials. Professor Cloete commended the library for still managing to hold the event online. He pointed out that this is a reflection of a “world class library and information service with world class facilities for researchers”.

Dr Sishi’s presentation, titled The journey through my eyes, started off by reminding all that Research Week falls within Women’s month. She then relayed her journey towards attaining a PhD, which included the challenges of finishing her first degree on time, death of close family members, struggling to fund her postgraduate studies and numerous rejections to study for her favourite area, medicine. Dr Sishi stated that her struggles taught her the importance of having a plan B in life. It is always important to “do the best you can with what you have. Do not focus on the door that is closed but the one that is open”, she stated. Later, as a promising emerging researcher, Dr Sishi told of how she was honoured to be selected for a conference attended by a number of Nobel Laureates. Among her take home messages was that emerging researchers should always find themselves good mentors, collaborate, choose important and fascinating topics, and focus on achieving their goals. True to her promise, Dr Sishi offered some pointers to a “recipe for a Nobel Prize”. The recipe included the importance of collaboration, publishing, and producing many PhD’s as some of the ingredients for attaining a potential Nobel Prize.

Presentations during the rest of Research Week skilled participants in conducting efficient literature and systematic reviews, and in making optimal use of some of our subscription databases. Practical sessions included how to use Mendeley, gaining and keeping momentum in academic writing, the use of Turnitin and SUNScholarData, as well as how to manage stress and time during the postgraduate journey.

Presenters from the library, as well as other SU support divisions had the opportunity to showcase the support services on offer and provided useful guidance to the participants.

Kirchner van Deventer and Siviwe Bangani

Exciting new developments are on their way at the Library. They include a refurbishment of the Stellenbosch University (SU) Library, the opening of a makerspace and a new data visualisation service.

When the SU Library (previously known as the JS Gericke Library) opened its doors in 1984, it was a state-of-the-art library. Visitors were greeted by rows of card catalogues and the circulation desk was a hive of activity involving the issuing and returning of books, all supported by manual systems. Since then, libraries have undergone vast changes: our processes have been automated, most of our resources are now available in electronic format and electronic access systems have become the norm. Since that time, incremental changes have been made to meet the needs of a new generation of students and to accommodate developing technologies. The building soon became more than a traditional library and a masterplan was developed for its redesign and refurbishment. For example, in recent years some library spaces were transformed into a learning commons, a research commons and new staff spaces. We are delighted to announce that we are now entering the next phase of our refurbishment plan and that users of the SU Library can look forward to the renovation of the upper level of the Library. The entrance, circulation and computer areas, areas for collaborative learning, the security area and the ablution facilities will receive a face-lift befitting a modern academic library. Planning for the refurbishment will be finalised in the second semester of 2020. Here is what you can look forward to:

Architect’s drawings of some of the refurbished areas in the SU Library

Students’ learning will be further enhanced with the opening of a makerspace and the provision of a data visualisation service. The makerspace service will open in the SU Library in the second semester. Designed to support research creativity and innovation, it will draw together students who have ideas and those with the technical skills to turn those ideas into reality. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the context for providing this service. The appealing space will enable students to unlock their creative potential along with that of new technologies. Three-D printing and scanning, electronics and 3D design software will be some of the latest technology available.

The data visualisation service will support research analysis and visualisation. Students and researchers across all disciplines will be introduced to aspects of data visualisation. Visual data literacy training will be provided. The service will be in a dedicated environment, with expert consultancy services and specialist equipment on hand.

More than 1 760 visitors explored the Stellenbosch University Library on SU Open Day, Saturday 29 February 2020. Future students and their parents had the opportunity to experience the Library first-hand. They were welcomed by library staff and most visitors explored the Library unaccompanied, but some groups and families were, however, keen to be given a brief tour. Many alumni had brought their children to see “their Library”. Visitors were impressed with the Library and the staff.

The more than 217 visitors to the Special Collections Division showed enthusiasm to see and learn from the staff about the material the Division takes care of.

On the Tygerberg campus, visitors and future medical students were welcomed to the Medicine and Health Sciences Library.

The Library has purchased two online resources that will provide valuable information on topics such as the Atlantic slave trade, life in Africa under colonial rule, the emergence of Black journalism, the Zulu Wars and the rejection of Western imperialism. African newspapers, Series 1: 1800 – 1922 and African newspapers, Series 2: 1835 – 1925 chronicle the evolution of Africa through eyewitness reporting, editorials, legislative information, letters, poetry, advertisements, obituaries and other items. Featuring English and foreign-language titles from Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe, they offer deep and unique coverage of the issues and events that shaped the continent and its peoples.

African newspapers is available via the Databases A-Z list on the Library website.

For more information, please contact Naomi Visser at nrv@sun.ac.za or 021 808 4433.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Afrikaans.

A particularly valuable, rich and unique manuscript collection has recently been donated to the Stellenbosch University (SU) Library and Information Service. The Maguire San Ethnobotanical Collection consists of data collected by Mr Brian Maguire between 1954 and 1972 in close collaboration with Ju|’hoan (previously known as !Kung or !Khu) and ǃXoõ (previously known as !Kõ) communities in the Kalahari.

According to Dr Judy Maguire, her husband, Brian Maguire, became the field assistant to Prof Raymond Dart of “Australopithecus” fame in the 1960s and was researching the potential food plants of early hominids. “During this time he undertook comparative studies of the !Kõ hunter-gatherers in Central Western Botswana, especially as they were a group who had no annual, storable plant food staple to rely on such as the Manketti nuts of the !Kung (!Khu), and no permanent source of water either.

“Many hundreds of photographs were taken at this time, in the context of food gathering, the plant communities of economically important food and medicinal plants, the plants themselves as well as the parts that are eaten. Food preparation was also photographed. It was already apparent at this time that acculturation was taking its toll.

“Prior to this time, Maguire had gained experience as ethnobotanist to the Brock-Harvard-Peabody medical and the Marshall ethnological excursions to the !Kung of SWA during the 1950s, at a time when almost nothing had been recorded concerning the food and medicinal plants of indigenous populations.

“Subsequently, Brian Maguire (1978) completed an MSc (cum laude) entitled The Food Plants of the !Khu Bushmen of North Eastern South West Africa (Namibia). The work was undertaken at a time when little if anything was known about the subsistence ecology of the !Kung, and observations were made at a time when acculturation and impacts on their food-gathering practices were minimal. He died prematurely whilst busy with a Ph.D. on the !Kõ subsistence ecology and finalising the work on the potential vegetable dietary of early hominids in the then Transvaal.”

The collection, consisting of manuscripts, typescripts, sketches, diagrams, photographic prints, black and white negatives, colour slides, field notebooks and plant collection registers, is of great scientific, research, national and heritage importance. It was the wish of the late Mr Maguire and is still the wish of Dr Judy Maguire that the collection becomes a usable resource which can be shared with younger generations. It offers the opportunity to learn from our forefathers about the sustainable use our indigenous plants in an African context.

A significant portion of the physical collection has been digitised and these digital records will be made openly available for research purposes on the Library’s Digital Heritage Repository, SUNDigital Collections. The addition of the collection will ideally complement other digital heritage and natural heritage collections currently on the repository such as the Rudolf Marloth botanical illustrations collection and the James Walton vernacular architecture collection, which includes information and images of various artefacts of Southern African indigenous people.

The physical collection will be hosted in the Manuscript Section of the Special Collections division in the Library in due course. Once again, the collection will enrich current holdings and complement collections such as the Robert Broom, John Muir, BIC van Eeden and Jan Anthonie Engelbrecht collections, all of which relate to indigenous botany, zoology, languages and early customs.

Dr Maguire believes that the knowledge locked in the collection can be used to “assess the attrition of indigenous knowledge systems, and to achieve a better understanding of the context of knowledge transmission – its connection to language loss for example (plant names) and to understand what factors could help to preserve the transmission of knowledge before it disappears with increasing modernisation and acculturation of communities”.

The comprehensive, meticulously documented collection was brought to the attention of the Library by Dr Kerry Jones, Research Associate at SU and Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistics at Rhodes University. Dr Jones was instrumental in the sorting and digitisation of the collection in collaboration with Dr Maguire and will continue to work on the collection in collaboration with mother tongue speakers in the future.

Liaise with Mimi Seyffert-Wirth, Deputy Director: Digital Scholarship (Library and Information Service) at mseyf@sun.ac.za for more information.

Mimi Seyffert-Wirth

The Library’s agility during the COVID-19 lockdown has been remarkable, considering that only a limited number of staff have been able to work from home. Working from home has only been possible for staff with the infrastructure to do so, or where the nature of their work has allowed it. A week prior to the lockdown, a decision was already taken to close all library buildings to clients and arrangements were made for 50% of staff to either stay at home, or work from home, as a precautionary measure. Consequently, when lockdown started, it was relatively easy for the Library to shift to an online service environment. Some 90% of the most recent information resources are available in digital format and most of our processes are performed electronically.

The Library and Information Service of SU has functioned as a hybrid library (i.e. both virtual and physical) for more than 20 years. The Library’s involvement in e-learning for a number of years has meant that many of our guides have been online and integrated into SUNLearn, and that a substantial proportion of training has been done online. Our 24-hour reference service, Ask a Librarian, has been functioning for more than ten years, the system to submit theses and dissertations electronically has been operational since 2008, and electronic books and training sessions on YouTube are available. As with all academic libraries, the Library is adaptable, agile and at the forefront of technological change, and therefore was ready and well-positioned to serve the online learning environment that SU has embarked on. Services during lockdown are being promoted and continually updated on the Library website, social media and other platforms.

Many of the Library’s training workshops for postgraduate students went online from 30 March. They have been well attended and have received excellent client feedback from as far afield as Japan. The workshops have included Overview of software for effective data analysis and data visualisation, Tips on how to format your thesis (MS Word), Copyright issues in theses and dissertation writing and Introduction to data visualisation with Tableau Public and RAWGraphs.

The Library’s online offering will be further enhanced through a new project to merge its physical heritage collections with the digital space by embedding the description of its data collections into the linked-data web for better discoverability and access. In doing so the Library is investigating current and potential approaches to build, or design access to, digital cultural heritage collections with the aim of supporting their computational use, augmentation and reuse for the purpose of scientific research.

Twelve staff from the Parliamentary Information Centre (PIC) visited the Stellenbosch University Library on Thursday 10 October 2019. The purpose of their visit was to benchmark their reference and information service and the implementation of an institutional repository against SU’s services. PIC librarians met with faculty librarians, our SUNScholar experts, and our E-resources Librarian. Thereafter, the guests were given a tour of the SU Library, focusing on our Special Collections.

Pictured above are ten of the PIC visitors with four SU Library staff after enjoying a cup of tea together.

Some eighteen Library staff took part in the SU Annual Sports Day on Friday 1 November 2019 at Coetzenburg. The warm-up session was fun and most staff participated in the fun walk of either four or two kilometres. The walk was scenic with mountains and fynbos to be enjoyed, and even the few hills were manageable. The sunshine, fresh air and company of colleagues from our branch libraries lifted everyone’s spirits. Pictured are some of the staff who took part in Sports Day.

Ms Ellen Tise, Senior Director of the Library and Information Service, was an invited panellist in the Open Science and Library Infrastructures panel discussion at the first United Nations Open Science Conference held on 18-19 November 2019 at the United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York.

The theme of the event was “Towards Global Open Science: Core Enabler of the UN 2030 Agenda”. The conference aimed to elevate discussion about open science and open research to the global level. A further objective was to consider the role open science plays in advancing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Ms Tise’s presentation, entitled Open Science for Sustainable Development: a Library perspective, highlighted the drivers of open science, drew attention to the facets of open science and emphasised the need for advocacy of open access. The other panellists in the Open Science and Library Infrastructures panel were Mr Gerald Beasley (Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, Cornell University), Dr Wolfram Horstmann (LIBER Special Advisor, Göttingen State and University Library), Dr Catriona MacCallum (Director of Open Science, Hindawi Ltd) and Dr Chris Bourg (Director of Libraries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Dr Bourg’s presentation envisioned “a world where enduring, abundant, equitable, and meaningful access to information serves to empower and inspire humanity.”

The UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library organized the conference in collaboration with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Conference participants were representatives of open science initiatives, researchers, library directors and policymakers. The keynote speakers were Dr Natalia Manola (Managing Director, OpenAIRE) and Juan Pablo Alperin (Public Knowledge Project, Simon Fraser University).

Ms Tise is congratulated on being invited to participate at this global level.