We are delighted to publish our second annual report for Libraries, Museums and Galleries at the University of Liverpool. This document provides an overview of how we have worked across 2023-2024 to support the ambitions of the University’s strategy, Liverpool 2031.
This past year has seen significant developments in our work. We have created and published our departmental strategic plan, Reimagining Libraries, Museums and Galleries, outlining our vision, mission and objectives as a department.
We have attracted investment in our spaces to enhance the experience of our users and visitors. We are building our capacity and capabilities as research partners and leaders within and beyond the University. We have strengthened and developed our existing services, and we have launched new ones, to meet the changing expectations and needs of our users.
Our collections are being transformed to underpin our learning, teaching and research excellence as a university, and we have deepened our relationships with communities and cultural organisations across the Liverpool City Region, nationally, and globally. This has been a collective effort and thank you to everyone who has worked with us over the last year to achieve these things.
There’s plenty more to do and we look forward to working with our users, visitors and communities as we continue to reimagine our services, collections, spaces and partnerships in the year ahead.
Dr Matt Greenhall, Director of Libraries, Museums and Galleries
This report is available in an alternative format that provides a visual overview of our work during 2023-2024.
For further information about our activities, follow us on social media - @LivUniLibrary, @VictoriaGallery and @GarstangMuseumofArchaeology on Instagram.
Libraries, Museums and Galleries are central to the student experience. With 1.5m student visits to our libraries in the academic year 2023-24, our services, collections and spaces are here to inform, support and inspire.
We’ve supported our students to become imaginative, creative and culturally rich graduates. That’s why 92% of Liverpool’s respondents to the National Student Survey (2024) answered positively to: ‘How well have the library resources supported your learning?’
In the NSS, students describe our libraries as ‘great with many seats and books to access, with the staff super helpful’ also, having ‘access to a plethora of reading materials’ and the ‘number of physical and digital resources available via the library is invaluable’.
Our libraries play a vital role in supporting student wellbeing by providing a rich and extensive leisure reading collection. Students can now explore their interests and relax with 23,715 titles within our wellbeing libraries.
As a modern learning resource, our libraries offer a vast collection of 23,348 streaming titles including films and documentaries accessed through free streaming app Kanopy, reflecting our dedication to supporting diverse content formats and meeting the evolving needs of our users.
Digital is the main form of supplying content to our users. On average, each of our students accesses more than 200 electronic articles and 115 e-books chapters annually.
Although usage of our collection is changing, 58,479 physical items were borrowed from our libraries during the 2023-24 academic year demonstrating the continued value of physical collections as learning resources.
Our GIFM (Get It For Me) service received 18,206 requests for new content increasing by 9.7% from the previous year, demonstrating active engagement with our libraries’ acquisition and interlibrary loan services.
The new Reading Lists @ Liverpool support pages now provide a more intuitive and helpful experience for our users, making it easier to discover and access library resources.
We launched our first Student Partner programme in 2023, providing paid, part-time, student roles across the department. Our team of student colleagues provided key support and insight on a range of exciting projects across Heritage, Open Research, Collections, Marketing and User Experience and Supporting Teaching and Learning.
The Student Partner team provided 1,232 hours of additional face-to-face support to library users, visibly representing the student voice at the centre of our service. They also contributed 2,240 hours to the LMG Team, enabling the delivery of co-created, value-added projects.
Throughout the year we surveyed our Student Partners to understand how their experience working with the team contributed to their student success. One said: “Being a Student Partner has built my confidence and allowed me to develop crucial interpersonal skills such as signposting and teamwork.
“These skills will help me flourish in a professional environment where I will be expected to work with others on projects. I've also substantially built my professional network through being a Student Partner, which will really help me once I start looking for jobs.
“The experience has given me the opportunity to consider less traditional career paths for Physics graduates. Working in the Garstang has made me seriously think about working in museums as the work was incredibly rewarding.”
Over the 2023-24 academic year, our KnowHow team, a partnership of services delivering academic skills support, has continued to make an impact.
Nearly 600 workshops and webinars were delivered across the KnowHow programme with more than 15,900 attendees plus 1,434 one-to-one appointments were held providing individual help to students with writing, statistics and finding and using information. More than 29,000 students accessed KnowHow Canvas courses over 2023-2024 with online KnowHow tutorial content accessed more than 25,450 times.
95% of students agreed that they had more confidence in using library and information resources for their studies after sessions with Learning Development & Academic Liaison (LDAL) and Special Collections & Archives (SCA).
One feedback comment regarding our Liaison Librarian one-to-one appointments was:
“I felt very supported throughout the session. It is so valuable to have librarians…and it makes the experience of commencing research much less daunting. The explanations were clear and easy to follow. It has definitely helped me with my assignment.”
Over the last academic year, we have actively participated in and supported external funding applications, enhancing our reputation as valuable research partners and leaders.
Working with Liverpool University Press, Lancaster University and the University of Salford, we launched the Trailblazers open access book initiative to provide early career researchers at each institution with an in-depth introduction to the world of open-access publishing, supporting them to publish their first monograph on an open access basis.
LMG, in partnership with Liverpool University Press, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Research Libraries UK, and UKRI convened the first Opening the Monograph symposium, a major event bringing together speakers and attendees from the library, publisher and research communities to help map out future developments in open access books.
Our services ensured the immediate open access of over 1,000 version-of-record journal articles from Liverpool researchers, representing a 10% increase on the previous year, increasing the visibility and reach of Liverpool research.
There was a threefold increase over the previous year in the number of PhD theses available from our repository thanks to work to incorporate content previously only available from the British Library’s Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS).
We've made it easier for Liverpool academics to use ORCID, a platform that gives each researcher a unique ID to track their work. We've linked ORCID to Liverpool Elements, our research database, to automatically update information and reduce administration. This makes it easier for researchers to manage their profiles and ensure their work is properly recognised.
The Garstang Museum of Archaeology successfully secured £585,000 from the Art and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) RICHeS programme for a two-year project in partnership with National
Museums Liverpool (NML) to digitally reunite archaeological material dispersed in collections around the world.
We worked with colleagues at the National History Museum to successfully identify a zoological specimen from our Victoria Gallery & Museum as one of the earliest known collected examples of 'Lollipop Coral', or Nephtheis fascicularis, gathered on the famous Challenger Expedition (1872-1876).
Our collections are truly global, spanning the world and highlighting our place within it. We are part of an international collective collection, which brings both opportunities and responsibilities.
Over the last year, we have been working to make our University heritage collections and archives more accessible to a wider audience. This has culminated in the launch of the Digital Heritage Lab, a groundbreaking online resource that provides access to a wealth of digitised materials from across Libraries Museums and Galleries, supported by our chancellor Wendy Beetlestone.
We have worked to support and drive elements of the University’s international partnerships with the University of Georgia Athens (USA), McMaster University (Canada), Sumy State University (Ukraine), and the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome partnership (Malawi) through online staff workshops, personal visits and through advice and guidance.
We have continued to develop our relationship with our US colleagues at the University of Georgia libraries through joint meetings, in person visits, and our first joint UoL-UGA library staff symposium scheduled in December 2024.
We have also been creating new international partnerships. Liverpool has rejoined the European Association of Research Libraries (LIBER) and we’re creating new relationships with library and museum colleagues at The National University of Lesotho.
Our museums and galleries offer a welcoming window into the University for members of local communities, our neighbours and stakeholders.
From September 2023 to August 2024, the Victoria Gallery & Museum (VG&M) has hosted five successful exhibitions attracting 55,000 visitors.
Partnering with the Lee Miller Archives for their 75th anniversary celebrations, the VG&M curated Friends at Farleys, an exhibition of warm and witty photos from the 1950s taken by the revered war photographer. Lee Miller was one of the leading photographers of the 20th century and subject of a recent film starring Kate Winslet.
Over 10,000 visitors came to see Creatures of the Nile at the VG&M, an exhibition jointly curated by the Garstang Museum and the Leverhulme-funded BEAST project, featuring over 200 ancient Egyptian and Sudanese artefacts. The exhibition’s narrative around climate change made people think differently, with one visitor saying we must “be more mindful of our consumption choices and opt for sustainably sourced products to help protect wild animals and our planet”.
The VG&M collaborated with the Liverpool-based art organisation BADA (the British Art and Design Association) on Abstract Thinking: Fanchon Fröhlich & Her Contemporaries. Another successful collaboration with the Writing on the Wall (WoW) saw the VG&M host events within the city-wide WoW Fest 2024 programme.
The VG&M also worked closely with Widening Participation (WP) and the Human Anatomy Resource Centre (HARC) to create a ‘History of Medicine’ Day for Key Stage 3 students, highlighting the long history of teaching medicine at the university.
The event, piloted at Kings Leadership Academy in June, aimed to highlight the university’s medical heritage and inspire future generations. Students engaged in hands-on activities using historical medical models from the Heritage Collections. They also experienced modern medical education, visiting the state-of-the-art Florence Nightingale suite and interacting with robotic patient simulators.
The much-anticipated launch of the new Cunard cruise ship, the Queen Anne, marked a continuation of Cunard’s partnership with our Special Collections & Archives (SCA), which houses The Cunard Archive. Documents and designs from the archive served as a source of inspiration for the new ship's interior design, reflecting its heritage and timeless elegance.
Special Collections and Archives also launched two new online exhibitions - Greatest Hits: Institute of Popular Music Archive and University Places and Spaces which was curated by one of our Students Partners.
Working with colleagues across the University, Libraries Museums and Galleries secured a significant investment in improving its spaces and accessible facilities. Major work began in June on an ongoing improvement project.
This included new accessible access gates within the Sydney Jones Library, and redesigning, replacing and expanding the library’s toilet facilities with new accessible toilets and a hygiene room. The completed work was met with approval and enthusiasm from our students and users.
Improvements have also been made to the Harold Cohen Library postgraduate room over the summer, supporting the needs of our growing postgraduate community.
People are at the centre of Libraries Museums and Galleries, our services, spaces and collections.
Working with the Tung Auditorium, we took a leading role in the University’s signing of the Liverpool Arts and Culture Race Equality Manifesto. Both Libraries, Museums and Galleries and the Tung are working with cultural-sector colleagues across the city to improve the diversity of our workforce, programming, and activities.
We are making our collections more accessible with the expansion and promotion of RNIB Bookshare, providing accessible books for learners with sight loss, dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism and qualifying physical disabilities.
During 2023-24, work has taken place to decolonise our Science Fiction collection, with help from our student partners, and we have worked to reveal previously hidden voices in our other collections. The Harold Cohen Library has hosted a series of student-curated exhibits featuring heritage and cultural items from the University collections, National Museums Liverpool and other cultural partners.
The exhibits, supported by Libraries, Museums and Galleries and the Health and Life Sciences Equality, Diversity Inclusion and Wellbeing Fund, showcase the overlooked and marginalised contributions of women and persons of colour to the history of medicine, biology, and the sciences.
Led by student advocates from the School of Biosciences Decolonisation Group and overseen by Dr Carl Larsen, Senior Lecturer in Biosciences, the exhibits reveal previously hidden and neglected voices, placing these at the heart of the library.
Our Garstang Museum volunteering and student placement programmes have provided valuable hands-on experience to 17 University of Liverpool students, equipping them with essential museum skills and giving them valuable insights into the field.
The Victoria Gallery & Museum has provided 10 University of Liverpool students valuable opportunities including event photography, film screening invigilation and front of house duties. A further five volunteers from the Merseyside area have conducted guided tours and many online digital opportunities have been undertaken.
We have been delighted to work with Transform Lives Company to provide volunteer opportunities within our Transforming the Collection Programme, with two volunteers working with us across the summer to help us rationalise some of our library stock in the Sydney Jones Library, freeing up space and ensuring that the collections on our shelves meet the changing needs and expectations of our users
We provide essential services in some of the busiest campus areas. We're committed to sustainability and are working to enhance our services, collections, and use of space to meet our evolving needs.
We are embedding sustainable practices within our existing activities, whilst highlighting opportunities and challenges within emerging programmes, infrastructures and user behaviours.
In Summer 2023, our outdoor study area Brett Gardens at the Sydney Jones Library opened, offering 65 outdoor study spaces. The design was highly commended in the Inspiring Learning Spaces category at the Education Estates Awards 2024.
Over the last academic year, the Learning Development and Academic Liaison (LDAL) team has been working sustainably to create a Maker Space, actively working to integrate sustainable practices into the design, operation, and use of the redeveloped space and services.
Some of these practices include stocking materials that are either recycled or recyclable and encouraging students to make reusable items such as tote bags rather than single use items.
These are just a selection of the work that has occurred across 2023-2024. Looking ahead, our work will focus on delivering the strategic objectives outlined in our departmental strategic plan, Reimagining Libraries, Museums and Galleries.
Further details of our plan are available and we will use future annual reports to report on our progress against its ambitions.
