Achievements

The Library has organized 9 international symposia and conferences in tits first ten years. In 2001, it was Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) Annual Conference co-hosted with City University of Hong Kong, Academia Sinica in Taipei, and the California Digital Library of University of California at Berkeley.

PNC is an international body formed by institutions of higher education on the Pacific Rim to explore issues of information and technology exchange and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Library completed installing a transparent mechanism for authenticated remote access to the Library’s subscription resources: EZ-Proxy.

For over ten years it has allowed HKUST students, faculty, and staff to use the Library’s subscribed e-resources from any computer connected to the internet, anywhere in the world. This service is one of the most significant parts of creating a true “Library without Walls”. More information available at: http://library.hkust.edu.hk/collections-resources/databases/ezproxy/.

The Library launched the HKUST Institutional Repository (http://repository.ust.hk/), the first institutional repository in Hong Kong and Asia. Created to allow faculty to self-archive their publications, it digitally preserves HKUST’s scholarly research and makes it more accessible.

Using DSpace software, developed at MIT, it complies with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).  This makes it easier for articles to be discovered by Web search engines, and raises HKUST’s faculty members’ visibility.

The Open Access Initiative (OAI) attempts to regain lost access to academic publications caused by skyrocketing journal prices. One OAI is for academic institutions to collect, disseminate and preserve their scholarly output in digital format: create Institutional Repositories (IR)

On December 9-10, 2004, HKUST Library held the “International Conference on Developing Digital Institutional Repositories: Experiences and Challenges”. Jointly organized with the California Institute of Technology Libraries, the conference attracted 130 local and overseas participants.

HKALL (Hong Kong Academic Library Link) allows faculty, students and staff to borrow books directly from any of the other JULAC Libraries. Starting in 2005-06 with less than 7,000 loans and borrowing; by 2009-10 HKUST was lending over 15,000 a year to patrons at other libraries and borrowing over 16,000 per year.

This service gives HKUST students, faculty, and staff access to ~ 8,000,000 volumes from universities across Hong Kong, arriving within 3 working days of request.

22 September 2006 saw the official opening of the Information Commons, a library service facility for the University community that combined information services and technologies to support learning beyond classroom lessons.

It is a dynamic space where students and other library users inquire, research, and learn while being able to collaborate with each other and receive support from expert staff. It pioneered this type of information and learning space at HKUST Library.

From 15 October to 8 December 2007, HKUST Library users responded to LibQual, a  web-based survey used by academic libraries across the world, designed to define and measure user perceptions of library services.

1,887 HKUST respondents filled-out the questionnaire, rating their perceptions of service quality. In this survey, HKUST Library received better average scores than the average JULAC group scores. But, the Library is not complacent. It used the LibQual data to improve services and facilities even more.

On 29 October, 2008, Library celebrated the donation of Professor Ta-Kuang Lin’s (林達光) personal collection of 5,500+ items (manuscripts, books, photos, etc.). This collection illuminates the study of contemporary China, especially the Cultural Revolution.

More information is available: http://library.hkust.edu.hk/collections-resources/special-collections/lin/.

This year also saw the donation of John Dolfin III’s collection of works on ethnic minorities in China.

In Spring 2009 the Postgraduate Studies Secretariat of the VPAA Office conducted a Research Postgraduate (RPG) Alumni Career Tracking Survey. 800+ alumni of RPG programs responded. One of the questions asked the respondents to rate their experience at HKUST with various support services.

On a 4-point scale (1 being poor and 4 being excellent), the Library scored 3.6 overall. This was the highest among all academic supporting services.

HKUST’s Library Catalog became searchable via the m.HKUST application http://mobileguide.ust.hk/.

A joint project of the Library and the Publishing Technology Center, this free mobile app was developed based on the RSS syndication features offered by SmartCAT http://catalog.ust.hk/

With this app you can search for library materials, see if it’s available, find out which book shelf it is on, and more. This was the first of many enhanced e-services for mobile users