Library Hours may be adjusted in Response to Student Usage

In light of the problems faced during UCC’s first semesterised winter exam period, Registrar and Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs, Professor Paul Giller admitted that changes have had to be made in preparation for the upcoming summer exams.The most glaring problem during the winter period was the struggle around library opening hours, which led to sustained protest action from the Students’ Union for longer opening hours. Giller believes the problem originated from disagreements between unions involved in the library’s operation and the university.“With the library, it was simply around opening hours and they’d been long standing challenges in terms of how the library opening hours are managed with lot of interactions between unions and the university. It was brought to a head and sufficient pressure was applied by the work of the SU that helped resolve a long standing problem.”However Giller described the resolution as a “temporary” one and, when asked if problems were likely to come up again, responded: “I hope not. They should be [resolved] now. We’ll see if that’s true in the summer.”He also noted the possibility of library-hour adjustments to student usage:

"A lot will depend on how students use the library. There’s monitoring going on and if it’s found that for periods of time on a regular basis there’s no usage at all, it makes no sense to keep the library open. It could be adjusted in either direction depending how students are using it."

When asked about the number of individual issues that arose in exam-time mix-ups and other more departmental issues, Giller admitted that; “There have been a few cases like that. When you think there are some 100,000 exam events – while it’s not acceptable that there are problems – I won’t say it’s not inevitable when there are so many things happening, so many individual exam events taking place. It’s not easy to schedule exams when students have so many choices of modules.”This first year of semesterisation marks Giller’s final year as college Registrar as he’s set to depart the position during in the summer. The process to find his successor is ongoing and is “like the process for any senior member of the university; overseen by the governing body but it involves a large panel set up including external experts and advertising, probably involving recruitment agencies.”The next Registrar will be involved in the summer review of semesterisation, set to take place post the May exam period. When asked of possibilities for change in this review, Giller noted one specific problem: “One of the things, without a doubt, is that some academic units have got to look at the distribution of CA [continuous assessment] workload across the year.“There are some which have done a good job and some that hadn’t really looked at the program level. I think individuals were looking more at the module level and not the program level. That will be an important part of the review over the summer.”