Dr. SOEURN Visal
My name is CHIN Chanthy. I am the Manager of the Learning Center (Library) at the University of Puthisastra (UP). The Learning Center is part of the Quality, Learning and Teaching, and Students (QLTS) Department. My role is very broad-ranging and, like university librarians everywhere, has expanded beyond the role of a traditional University Librarian. As always, my role is to lead a team to help people find information and conduct research for personal and professional use. However, in a rapidly changing digital world, my team and I regularly re-assess existing services and look to offer new ones to support the work of our students in their learning activities, but also of lecturers and researchers.
This means we are re-inventing ourselves and looking at different models and ways of working, and new techniques to meet the needs of users. My team and I are refreshing our training to respond to a myriad of new challenges: electronic resource management, data access, and text and data mining, to name a few.
My role at UP was mainly responsible for ensuring smooth management of a traditional library – developing library standard systems, and fostering an attractive library environment that allowed students to access all the relevant learning materials such as books and e-books with ease. We still do that, of course, but alongside the management of physical resources and activities, we have adopted a digital library model, transforming resources and services into digital formats to support teaching, learning, and research. This transition has affected all of our roles and activities due to newly- required skills.
For instance, at the beginning of this year, UP’s Chancellor, H.E. SOK Puthyvuth opened our eLearning Centre, which houses high-speed computers with the latest software and access to a huge repository of online resources. Keeping in mind the different needs of students at different times, the eLearning Centre also has brightly-colored and very comfortable bean-bags for students to relax in while they discuss their studies, do some quiet research, or hold lively discussions.
While UP’s campus has been closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have led the Learning Centre’s team of Digital Facilitators (Sokha and Manith) and joined with my colleagues in QLTS’ Learning and Teaching team (Vibol and Serey) and our colleagues in ITS to train UP’s lecturers on how to use Google Meet, Google Drive, and Email to deliver their teaching to our students online. My Learning Centre colleagues, Sim Chanbuntith and Chhorn Sreysros are also supporting this effort.
More recently, I joined the UPOP team, to learn all about delivering learning and teaching using UP’s Online Learning Management System -Moodle. We are now preparing to train all our lecturers to use UPOP so that lecturers and students can continue with even better teaching and learning experiences while the campus is closed.
As part of the ongoing traditional areas of Learning Centre services, I continue to help students and lecturers find learning and teaching resources they need using our hard-copy textbook and available online databases. I am happy to be engaging with the digital world, but I still very much enjoy the interactions with UP students and staff when we are in the Learning Centre together!
