Hacer Ozen, librarian at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, visited City in April through the Erasmus scheme. Here are Hacer’s reflections on their week at City.
I spent a very useful and efficient week in terms of my professional experience at City, University of London Library, where I went as part of the Erasmus Staff Training Mobility Program in 24-28 April 2023. We started the weekly program with general information and a library tour. It was a nice experience for me to see working environments and physical features There are diffreent type of working areas for different purposes. These are group study rooms, tutorial rooms, computer labs and teaching rooms It was important to have working areas for specific needs in order to meet the needs for each subject area and user type.
The program was great opportunity to share information with my colleagues who have similar responsibilities (e-resources management) with me at my home university (METU-Middle East Technical University). There are also similarities for tools used (summon, sierra). I am responsible for e-resources management in my home library. It was important to have common issues related to the work from the processes to the problems that can be encountered.
As open access services have developed through the world in recent years, the open access system in the Ciy, University of London Library is very developed in parallel with this development. The relevant departments about open access, like digitisation and copyrights, have also explained their activities at City University of London.
Subject librarianship and the needs of the subject areas were explained in the session we held with the subject librarians who are experts in each subject heading. The LibGuides that we prepared in my own university library were also mentioned. As City, University of London provides education in a large number of different subject areas, it is very important to have subject librarians according to the differences in each subject area.for the effective use of the library
The facilities and services available for disabled users to use the library effectively were also introduced to me. Also the circulation department services were explained that there are similarities with METU library.
I think that City, University of London, was an ideal university for my Erasmus program I had an idea about advanced services, reference and open access systems at the end of the program for the library. I would like to thank Michael Stringer, who helped me with my admission to the program, and all the staff who spent time for my short training programme during the week.