DLS statistical overview: Academic support during the pandemic

The Department of Library Services (DLS), like all the departments in the university, had to adapt to the digital way of providing support to the university community during the national lockdown. Though many of the services that are offered physically were disrupted, the DLS saw a rise in the use of its digital services such as e-books, subject guides and digitisation services.

While the physical book loans came to a standstill during the national lockdown, the library invested more in the e-books and the use increased by 55% in 2020 compared to 2019, from January to September. Book loans via interlending also decreased but the articles received by the DLS from other libraries increased by 12% during this period.

The digitisation office, which normally provides services to external clients, focused on providing academic support to the university by scanning material that students and lecturers needed. Though this excluded the external services, digitisation saw an increase of 8% in the number of pages scanned. The MakerSpace was involved in printing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as a contribution towards the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. A total of 3 299 PPEs have been printed by this unit. In addition to this, the MakerSpace has been involved in several research-intensive projects at the university.

To support Research Data Management (RDM), the library continued to provide training to postgraduate and academic staff members on how to upload data to the Figshare data repository. The repository, which was launched in November 2019, has a total of 48 items to date with 1 279 downloads and 20 798 views.

The information specialists continue to provide academic support remotely via consultations, training, creating online training material, updating subject guides and creating and adding references on ClickUP pages. Academic staff members made more enquiries to the information specialists during the national lockdown (the number of enquiries and consultations from the academic staff members more than doubled) and there was a 12% increase in postgraduate consultations. Furthermore, the library added more postgraduate online training sessions which resulted in a 1% increase in attendance.