It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you all to the PolyU. Having just joined the University in April this year myself, I am very excited to have become a member of the PolyU family. I look forward to the opportunities to get acquainted with some of you, to understand your information needs and how the Library can best work with you in your research, teaching or learning. Your education and experience as a student will enable you to learn so many new ways of finding information through the Library. For those that I am unable to meet on a one-to-one basis, we will be soliciting your views and comments via a LibQUAL+TM Survey, developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), towards year end. All the university libraries in Hong Kong will participate in this survey. The survey data will help the participating libraries to solicit, track, understand, and act upon users’ opinions of service quality. Another important aspect of the survey is that the data will help us to benchmark our service quality against participating members.

The next important piece of news that I would like to share with you is the Library’s SCENARIO PLANNING exercise. To prepare for the future, the Library will be engaging the University community vigorously in the coming months through its scenario planning process. We will be inviting expert groups of leading researchers, academic development, students and library staff to participate in focus groups meetings and the scenario construction workshop. The process will help us to develop different models of the library’s future. The Preferred Future for the Library will lead us in our planning to meet future changes and challenges. The Future is exciting and we look forward to hearing your views and to making it happen.

Last but not least, on behalf of all library staff, I wish you all an enjoyable and successful year. For new students, please visit the Section “New Students’ Corner” in this Newsletter. You will find useful information to help you to make a head start to use the Library effectively for your assignments and research. Also, don’t miss out on your Library Orientation held throughout the first 2 weeks of the academic year, September 3 to 14, 2007 inclusive. Getting yourself familiarized with the Library will save you much time and effort in your information searching.

Steve O’Connor