Engaging the disengaged indefinitely, and with no budget: creating a sustainable model for student library ambassadors

University Libraries offer a wide range of services and facilities to help enhance the student learning experience and to aid the transition into learning at University. Often, too few Science and Engineering students fully engage with the services and facilities on offer and therefore do not benefit from the opportunities available to them. Drawing on research highlighting the value of peer support, and the fact that students are far more likely to use their peers as an information source than ‘experts’, Loughborough University Library obtained small project funding in 2010 to employ four Student Ambassadors in a pilot project to improve student engagement with the Library. The successful project demonstrated the potency of the idea in engaging with students, particularly non-users, a large proportion of which are based in the Science and Engineering Faculties. In the absence of continued funding, the challenge, addressed here, is how to make such posts sustainable. Past experience at both Nottingham and Loughborough Universities has proven how difficult it is to recruit students on a voluntary basis to engage with University Libraries. In this paper, an innovative and creative method of recruiting and supporting “Learning Resource Leaders” (LRLs) at Nottingham and Loughborough Universities is discussed. The strategies employed have resulted in the recruitment of four LRLs – two at each institution – supported by an industrial sponsor who provides a package of non-monetary incentives. The paper also describes the techniques used by the LRLs to disseminate information about the resources offered by the University Libraries and to engage with the student cohort

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead