The Library is integral to the teaching, learning, and research activities of the Institute. We aim to achieve excellence in providing, promoting, and servicing information resources and services to meet the needs of students and staff. The Library seeks to provide quality services to all our staff and students through relevant collections aligned to our teaching and research areas, flexible learning spaces that give students a choice in how they want to learn and specialised library staff to assist clients with their information needs
Through its resources, services and staff, the Library offers an enriching experience for our students and staff as they pursue education and research. This is achieved by empowering our students and staff to discover and access rich information and by providing quality learning spaces and services that contribute to their experience and time at Angliss.
We aim to provide easy and seamless access to electronic information, strongly supporting our teaching and research specialisations. The facility offers learning support-focused services such as individual, group and quiet study facilities, computers, and wireless networks to support study and research
Our Collection Development Guidelines
Focuses on clarifying the framework and guidelines to inform purchase decisions for the Liaison Librarians. It is a public document that provides information to the broader Institute community on the scope of the collection and future collecting intentions in the specific areas strongly supportive of our teaching specialisations. The guidelines also provides the Institute with a clear statement of the Library’s goals and procedures relating to collection development.
Read the guidelines in full here: Collection Development Guidelines
2023 highlights
Some of our must-haves were: a clean, fresh look with plenty of white space on the pages; intuitive Google-like search functionality; graphical user interface featuring bento-type boxes of similar information and topics; a minimum number of clicks to navigate between pages and a similarity to the corporate website. Library staff input was sought once the number of selected library websites had been reduced to eight and they were asked to rank their top three preferred websites and provide the rationale behind their choices. The e-learning unit (ESU) were tasked with re-building the website from scratch.
An extensive project to completely redesign our LibGuides (subject guides) was started with assistance from ESU. Library staff and Learning Advisors had responsibility for re-designing their specific libguide(s) incorporating principles such as visual appeal, screen space and linked headers and minimal text as guiding design elements. The LibGuides are intrinsically linked to the new Library website and the project will continue throughout 2024.
During late 2023 library staff started familiarising themselves with how LibChat functions as it offers significant functionality improvements over the previous free live chat platform. A couple of substantial improvements worthy of mention are how LibChat works through a series of chat widgets which in turn can be embedded in LibGuides, the library's website, and other webpages. The second noteworthy improvement is the ability to create an extensive database of FAQs, which library staff have created over the latter part of 2023. LibChat, through online chat with a librarian, offline email capability or providing the answer to a question through the FAQ database, offers students and staff a way to connect and have a positive experience with the library whenever they need it and from wherever they are located.
During 2023 a further 896 resources were withdrawn from circulation. The rationale behind this was to remove out-of-date and unused/low-circulating physical items from bookshelves. This in turn enabled redundant shelving to be removed and provide opportunities to redesign some of the learning spaces.
The collaboration between Oxford Brookes University and WAI Special Collections which was reported on in the 2022 annual report resulted in an online display of items from the John Fuller collections of both institutions.