Closure Report

Project Summary

The University of Edinburgh hosts start of term open days for new students joining the University twice a year; September and January.  This project manages the delivery of the September activities as well as assuring IT Service readiness across ISG. This project has now been running for several years and is delivered in two strands.  IT Readiness and Welcome Week. Following on from the success of last year, the project hired a student dedicated to working solely on the project. Portia Brugger joined the project as project assistant in June and played a significant role in designing the social media campaign and working on elements of the experiential activities and guiding the Principal through the Library when he visited during Welcome Week.  A second student, an intern from Project Services, Rachel Hogg also worked on content creation and experiential activities. Rachel was responsible for a virtual 360-degree tour that students could view using the cardboard headset which was given away by the uCreate Studio.

IT Readiness Strand

This strand of the project uses a well-established framework to ensure that all projects, services, and operational activities which are required to deliver a successful experience for new and returning students. All areas of ISG are represented along with colleagues from Student Systems and Estates. This group meets every fortnight starting in early May, moving to a weekly meeting in August, leading up to the start of term. For the first time on 2022 the project used a SharePoint solution which allowed Each project, service, or operational activity, to be added at the start of the project, then updated on a fortnightly and then on a weekly basis until the start of term. The Readiness Tracker Dashboard used last year was updated with additional filter possibilities and a refreshed look and feel. The solution offered live information on RAG status, RAG commentary, and escalation status as well as various other views, e.g. RAG by priority or category. 

The key to the success of this strand is the engagement across ISG, representatives need to proactively follow up with colleagues in their area, to ensure that reporting is up-to-date and accurate. Again this year, this was very successful and our thanks go to colleagues from all directorates of ISG for working so closely with the core project team. 

As in previous years, at the start of Welcome Week, USD picked up the monitoring of services, projects, and operational activities. Daily meetings are held well into the start of teaching, with a daily update sent out to ISG SLT. 

Welcome Week Strand 

This strand of the project covers all aspects of delivering a successful Welcome Week and extends to the end of the first week of teaching. This strand manages the delivery of a wide variety of different activities including

• Card production for new students
• Queue Management
• IT connectivity
• All non-library activity in the main library
• Welcome Week specific signage
• Experiential activities and giveaways
• Recruitment and management of student helpers
• Library Tours

Over the last few years, this strand of the project has had to deal with the pandemic and the passing of Her Majesty which impacted in different ways what we could offer our new and returning students. In a welcome change, this year we did not have anything to deal with and were able to put on probably the best welcome week activities to date.

Use of Social Media

The project, led by our student intern, created a comprehensive social media plan using all the available social media channels. This was accompanied by a detailed set of social media assets. We engaged with EUSA, the Student Induction team and used Instagram, Twitter/X and TikTok to inform and engage with new students. Most of the activity was scheduled for welcome week itself, promoting our experiential offerings and encouraging new students to get involved with our social media channels. One of our experiential activities offered students the opportunity to post a selfie with our I Heart Ed letters and post this on Instagram, tagging the Library and using our WW hashtags. When posted the student received a confirmation DM and could come to the main Library and pick up a much-coveted prize of plushy Highland Coo, aptly named Rory. 

Below, one of our happy students collecting their prize.

Kings Buildings

For the first time this year, we had two stalls in the Nucleus Building at KB. On these two stalls, we promoted IT Equipment Funding, Library Tours and some giveaways. As noted above Instagram challenge was also based in the Nucleus, see below.

Card Production

Overall the card event was very successful again this year. This year card production and the collection event led for the first time by Pam Wells.  reported that over 17,600 cards were produced as part of the card event. 12,873 cards were produced before Welcome Week. of these 6,400 were delivered to UoE Halls. Approximately, 4770 cards were printed on demand during the card event. The number of cards printed on demand is a small reduction from 2021 but we still aim to reduce this number further next year, by promoting the How-To video created in 2021.  

IT Connectivity

One of the most important aspects of making the experience for new students as best as possible is to ensure that they can connect all their devices as seamlessly as possible to our secure network. With our eduraom connection app, this experience has greatly improved over the last few years, however, we still aim to improve this experience. After the success of last year's trial, there is now an easy-to-join SSID available throughout the campus. The eduraom connection app continues to be a great tool to allow students to easily prepare their devices to connect to eduroam, whether on or off campus. In total, we had 17, 360 downloads over the start of term. The use of this tool greatly reduces the number of helpdesk calls during the first two weeks of term.

This year we did not offer additional onboarding support in person at Pollock and O’Shae as the number of queries last year did not justify using resources for this. 

Queue Management

The use of MS Bookings to manage the numbers coming into the Main Library on the busiest days is now well established during welcome week. This ensures that students picking up their cards have only a maximum wait of a few minutes. The increased giveaways this year, in particular, the very popular lanyards did result in longer queues than in previous years. This is one of the lessons learned that we will address next year. 

Unfortunately this year we are unable to include statistics from the gates as they were not available due to a technical issue.  

Stands

The number of stands in and about the Main Library continues to grow. Our aim is that students get the most out of their visit to the Main Library and this is also a factor in our additional offerings such as dance performances. 

We had stands from a wide variety of areas and representatives from:

• Information Security
• Campus Security
• Student Counselling
• uCreate
• IT Equipment Funding
• Experiential
• Digital Skills

Experiential Activities

This year we invested considerably in our experiential offerings and giveaways. First of all to the very popular and successful tot bags. The first task was to design a new bag. The Library has implemented a new corporate identity which they were keen to have reflected in the bag design. The new ID  is based on a black background, which presents an environmental challenge in terms of dying natural cotton bags. To overcome this we worked with the suppliers and came up with a bag made of 100% recycled plastic. The cost of this was significantly more than the natural cotton bags but we felt this was more in line with the university's sustainability aims to invest in a recycled product. We ordered 13,000 bags and all were given away at the Main Library and on our stand at Kings Buildings in the Nucleus Building. 

This year we also decided to give away lanyards (and cardholder), we chose three options, the classic university blue, the rainbow lanyards, supporting the LGBTQ  community, and finally a new balc lanyard with the Library identity mentioned above. These proved to be very popular and did indeed cause queues to form at the experiential stall during busy times. 

In addition to the above, we offered a digital map of the campus highlighting the university libraries.

To give our international students a special Scottish welcome ahead of the card collection event opening on Saturday we organised a colleague Charles Gray, dressed in full highland regalia to play the pipes ahead of the card event opening. This proved to be a lovely welcome and we propose to repeat this next year on both the Saturday and Sunday of International Arrivals weekend. 

On the first three days of welcome week, we had a Scottish dance performance by the New Scotland Dance Society. Each short performance consisting of two dances, proved to be very popular. 

Also this year we had the idea to give special stickers, one for each of our Libraries to new students. We engaged with one of our students the very talented Ally McKay who designed a sticker for each library. Students could collect a sticker when they visited a library. Again, this proved to be very popular and we will repeat this next year. Below is a photo of Ally with the collections of stickers. 

Welcome Video

We reused our very successful welcome video made last year. The video was updated to reflect some changes to the Libraries. The video is a light-hearted welcome for all our new students.  The film can be viewed on media Hopper: Welcome Week Film.

Photo Backdrop and Hashtags

Again with sustainability in mind, we reused our Champions League-style photo backdrop and selection of handheld #hashtags. 

Student Survey

An important part of interacting with students during welcome week is getting feedback about their experience and first interactions with the Library and Information Services. This year we had a staggering 3,000 responses to the survey. The results show that we are doing the right thing, for example to the question How would you rate your first experience of Edinburgh University Main Library? 97.1% of students answered very good/good. One other question was How helpful have the stands and services available in the Main Library been for you today? To this question, 96.9% of students answered very helpful/helpful. 

Library Tours

Again this year, expertly led by Marshall Dozier, the uptake of Library Tours was as good as in previous years. We continue to employ several senior tour guides as well as a cohort of guides, all students. The seniors took on more responsibility on the ground of managing the tours. In total 1303 participants took a tour up to 22nd September 2022. A daily breakdown is shown below. A total of 1,277 participants went on tours across both the Main Library and the Murray Library. The breakdown per day is highlighted below. At the end of the Libray Tour in the Main Library participants were invited to take part in a scavenger hunt, the prize for this was one of the much sought-after Rory coos.

Principal's Visit

During Welcome Week, Principal Peter Mathieson was joined by EUSA President Sharan Atwal,  EUSA Vice-President Katie Hardwick, and Director of L&UC Jeremy Upton Such for a tour of the Mian Library. This visit coincided with the final dance performance as noted above. This year our student project assistant, Portia Brugger did a splendid job leading the Principal around the Main Library. The uCreate Team presented Peter Mathieson with a 3D-printed Kidney during the tour. 

The photos below show the Principal engaging with students on one of the stands and the visiting party at the end of the tour.

Outcome

Key Learning Points

As one can read from the report above, this project was again a huge success in 2023. However, despite this success, the project team, in their strive for continuous improvement, have identified some areas that can be improved on in future years. A part of the project post-mortem, the team reviewed three areas, what went well, what didn't go well, and crucially, what to do better next year.

The main lessons learned to be considered next year are:

Library Tours/Scavenger Hunt: The prize for completing the scavenger hunt was a Rory coo. This was a high-value prize and we identified that some students were simply skipping through the questions to get the complete message to pick up a prize. Next year we propose to have a minimum pass mark before receiving a prize. 

Comms during welcome week: It would be beneficial if the welcome team gave a short update, possibly through MS Teams, to HelpDesk staff relating to the activities in the forum e.g. have we run out of plush cows and what do we say to any late winners? This will allow the Helpdesk to advise students who turn up after the day's events are finished at 17:00 hours. 

Giveaways: We should offer giveaways of tote bags and lanyards to students arriving for the card collection event over International Arrivals Weekend.

Queue Management: We found this year that due to the additional giveaways longer queues formed at the experiential desk. We need to find a solution to these queues forming while at the same time not missing the opportunity to question new students about their experience. 

Bank Letters: This year we did not print and distribute bank letters. There was not a large number of calls related to this so we will continue with this next year. It was agreed that we would only have one clear message and instructions regarding bank accounts, on one website (new students website) and that all other websites would direct students to the new students website. In the main this largely worked however, it was very late in the day by the time this was completed and needs to be taken care of by the start of August at the latest.

Welcome eMails: The wording on the ISG Welcome eMail is out of date and needs to be refreshed. This must be addressed early in next year's project as changes require an element of coding. 

Welcome Week Video

A summary video of Welcome Week 2023 has been produced and is available on Media Hopper here: 

Video: Welcome Week 2023 Summary