Digital Gems opens the gateway to rare, historical, and unique materials on Southeast Asia in the form of a virtual library. Containing rare books, manuscripts, private collections, journals, newspapers, drawings, pamphlets, photographs, maps, and audio-visual materials from the 17th century to the present, it reflects the diverse and inclusive nature of our special collection. Officially launched in October 2019, our digital preservation effort aims to meet demand for data sources on Southeast Asia, and make knowledge of the past discoverable by future generations.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely available educational materials in any medium that can be used for teaching and learning purposes. To provide better knowledge and facilitate adoption of OER, a library guide was created to equip faculty with the essentials on creating, incorporating and adapting OER into their teaching modules. Our librarians also highlighted a list of useful OERs by disciplines in more than 25 subject guides. They worked closely with faculty to source for and incorporate highly relevant OER for their courses. This has enabled the library substantial cost savings on the purchase of streaming licenses.

The library plays a key role in facilitating NUS community’s academic needs. To help faculty and student find what they need, a teaching and learning portal was built, offering information to the various services and resources we provide to support them in their academic pursuits.

Over 3000 theses from NUS alumni were deposited into our institutional repository, ScholarBank@NUS.

The number more than doubled the previous year’s, increasing the availability and discoverability of a greater pool of theses from 1970s through 2000s.

To offer a streamlined approach to the preservation and discovery of research output, ScholarBank@NUS was integrated with the research information management system (NUS Elements). This enables researchers to deposit their scholarly works into ScholarBank@NUS with just a few button clicks, easy peasy.

The library license agreements to over a million e-resources and restrict use to only current NUS students and staff.

To engage and advance NUS alumni in lifelong learning, a selected list of e-resources was negotiated for their use. NUS Alumni now enjoys access to more than 250,000 e-books, e-journals and databases combined, either remotely or on-site at the Central Library.

Librarians play an important role in equipping students with the knowledge of where to access the relevant tools and resources for their research.

Through close partnerships with academics, we provide information literacy and research skills programmes to the community. Almost 80% of these programmes are course-integrated, ensuring greater content alignment with the course subjects.

In support of the national lifelong learning movement and to benefit a larger community, we availed the alumni and public of learning opportunities throughout the year. This includes selected skills-based talks for alumni such as how to spot fake news and how to tailor news to one’s needs. Our year-long series of Singapore Bicentennial events were also opened to the public to promote conversations about Singapore’s rich heritage and history.

Collaboratively with our faculty partners, programmes such as systematic review training workshops and media literacy workshops were offered to a wider audience this year. The former, in particular, required librarians to impart their expertise in systematic review to clinicians and researchers that went beyond the NUS community.

To ensure students get a good grasp of how to conduct research, a full module on research methodology was made compulsory for all Engineering PhD students this year.

Designed, delivered and assessed by our librarians, the module focused entirely on information literacy and research skills. Over a course of 6 weeks, students had to undergo rigourous training and demonstrate the ability to apply their learning before they can complete the module.

In every academic institution that drives research, the knowledge of how to manage researchers’ data is a pertinent concern with widespread implications.

In collaboration with the Research Compliance Integrity Office and NUS Information Technology, we organised a one-day event --- Research Data Day --- to shed light on the topic.

Various speakers from the NUS community came together to share their experiences, techniques, trends and best practices on research data management.

To answer the call for increased support in digital and data-intensive scholarly activities, the Digital Scholarship team in NUS Libraries plays a highly collaborative role to enhance research, teaching and learning through the use of digital tools and methods. To this end, they collaborate with researchers and departments to showcase the faculty’s research and projects by creating interactive web exhibits through the Digital Scholarship Portal. Projects in 2019 include:

With increasing interest in digital humanities and digital scholarship, scholars are trending on new digital tools and methods for their research.

In September 2019, a half-day event was held to advance knowledge of digital scholarship within the NUS community. More than 100 participants turned up, contributing to a successful exchange where like-minded researchers and practitioners meet, to explore the varied ways in which digital scholarship can power their research narratives.

Through the introduction of OneAccess, users can now gain entry into the library through a self-service registration kiosk.

The elimination of human intervention helps reduce processing time and manpower, translating to greater ease of access for users.

Users often rack up huge fines whenever they forget to return their books on time.

With the introduction of Auto Loan Renewal Service, eligible main-shelf books borrowed are automatically renewed 2 days before the due date to save borrowers from renewing them online or at the libraries.

Additionally, an eligible item can be renewed up to 11 times, instead of the current 5. This effectively allows users to borrow a book, which is not requested by others, for almost one year.

Since May 2019, users enjoy unrestricted 24-hr access to selected spaces over the weekend. This includes the Reading Area at Central Library Level 6 and Medical Library’s 24-hr Reading Area. Furthermore, users no longer need to vacate and re-enter the library as part of security measures.

As added convenience, network printing is installed at the Medical Library’s 24-hr Reading Area. Users can now print their material 24/7 over the weekend, even when the library is not open.

The Technology Enhanced Learning Imaginarium was launched in 2018 to showcase immersive tech tools that facilitate experiential learning. Since its launch, the space has become a hotbed for creative learning. To date, 99% of our immersive tech tools are available for loan to support teaching, learning and research.

To further demonstrate what the AR/VR devices can do, librarians worked with faculty to develop 5 apps for the teaching of forensic science. Each app features a simulated environment for students to practice skills learnt, using play to deepen learning. Librarians assisted in some of these classes to induct students to the tools.

A series of 4 bite-sized workshops was also conducted to share tips on how to use these tools to create interactive experiences.