Rhodes University Library Annual Report 2010: Library Director’s Review
- Authors: Thomas, G M E
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:7943 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1011890
- Description: [From the Introduction] 2010 was a momentous year for the Library, and for the University, with the new section of the Library being opened to users on 29 January and culminating in the official opening of the building on 4 November. This brought to conclusion the Library Building Project, an extension and refurbishment of the existing building, with building work beginning on 8 September 2008.
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- Date Issued: 2011
Rhodes University Library Annual Report 2009: Library Director’s Review
- Authors: Thomas, G M E
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/59941 , vital:27713
- Description: [From the Introduction] As you read through this annual overview of the work carried out by the staff of the Rhodes University Library Services Division, I am sure you will be impressed by their achievements during a year marked by major building construction and a demanding institutional review of our services and staffing structures.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Evaluating the impact of the Institutional Repository, or positioning innovation between a rock and a hard place
- Authors: Thomas, G M E
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6988 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012411
- Description: Repositories remain an innovative but marginalized technology largely because there is no consensus about an agreed set of Performance Indicators (PIs) that demonstrate their overall impact on the research enterprise of our universities. A successful Institutional Repository should be evaluated in terms of the extent to which the open access repository builds a critical mass of scholarly content which is sustained and available through active university community engagement and ongoing scholarly contributions (faculty, researchers & students) that, when managed efficiently and effectively, ultimately strengthen, promote and give visibility to the research enterprise of the institution, and bring benefit to broader society. However, librarians are grappling with what and how best to demonstrate ‘institutional good’ but without clear evidence, assessment is fed by perception based on limited information which leads to diminished impact and value of the facility, a tyranny described as being caught between a rock and a hard place. Using Illuminative Evaluation to design a series of quantitative and qualitative metrics, it is proposed that a distinction be made between significant and secondary Performance Indicators where the former gather evidence to demonstrate the overall effect or impact of the IR on the individual and collective research community.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Academic Library Consortia in South Africa : where we come from and where we are heading
- Authors: Thomas, G M E , Fourie, I
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6987 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012410
- Description: The purpose of this article is to give an overview of the establishment of the five academic library consortia in South Africa, their status quo, and a summary of their successes and plans for the future. Although useful information can be found from the consortia Web sites, much of it is no longer current. Similarly, there is limited published literature on the academic library consortia in South Africa. Apart from the sources referenced, the authors therefore relied heavily on an unpublished conference paper by Thomas[reference 1], which included findings gathered during a short survey among the five academic library consortia. In addition, Rowley and Slack[reference 2] and Sekabembe[reference 3] provide useful overviews of the library consortia in South Africa at the time of publication. Further information is available in published and unpublished sources.
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- Date Issued: 2006