Підсумки року 2024!

There were so many special moments in our 2024! And, most importantly, “special” is not always big and loud.

The event begins during a power outage, but when we sing the Ukrainian anthem, the electricity comes back on and the space around us is brightly lit. “We should have sung earlier,” we laugh.

It’s the fourth or even fifth hour of the air raid alert – missiles have been flying at Kyiv since the night before, and there are many people in our shelter: students who came with their pillows to sleep, residents of neighboring houses with pets, parents with children… and among them a little boy who runs up to the cabinet with children’s books, takes one, returns to his seat, leafs through it, and runs back to the cabinet to change the book. Perhaps in 12-13 years he will become a student of the KPI. After all, anything is possible.

In December, for the first time in a year, we are expecting our colleague Igor, who is serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to visit us. We are eagerly checking our notifications: where is the message in the team chat, when to meet? It was in this chat that we mostly communicated with Ihor throughout the year: we learned news, supported him, and thanked him. In the summer, we were raising funds to buy a thermal imager for him, but we probably could not have done it without the help of the Kyiv Polytechnic Foundation for Support of the Armed Forces, which added another 133,000 UAH to our 42,000 UAH and purchased the necessary equipment.

This is a story about the power of community. This sense of community and the associated confidence and responsibility were among the leitmotifs of 2024 for us.

In January, our educational space CLUST Space, which combines a smart shelter, an event venue, a reading room, and a coworking space, was officially launched. 15 months passed from the start of work on this project to its full implementation. And although we did not directly make repairs or install furniture, our team of librarians was continuously involved in every stage of the space’s creation.

And when CLUST Space was finally ready, we felt tremendous relief – as it happens when some great thing is finally done; but also quite noticeable excitement – because we had an even larger, more responsible task ahead of us. The “long game” had just begun: to organize effective work, to “feel” this space, the first of its kind.

So we arranged books (some of which were specially recommended and donated to CLUST Space by publishers, companies, and opinion leaders) in our first space with free access to books. We developed intuitive navigation. We were looking for a way to make it easy and convenient for our users to book rooms in the space – and eventually developed the best option.

Life is unexpected and constantly presents new challenges – and that’s natural. The main and most important thing for us is to see how the space lives and fulfills its functions. Sometimes, some rather simple thoughts strike us with their wisdom and power: this was the case when we realized that the most important manifestation of service for our users today is safety. Feeling this responsibility, we are happy to have this solution, this answer – the CLUST Space educational space.

Conferences, presentations, chess tournaments, open lectures, roundtables, forums, master classes, workshops – in 2024, about 200 events of various levels and scales took place here. During almost 500 air raids in Kyiv, CLUST Space served as a shelter. In total, over 11 months of operation, the space was visited more than 56,000 times. And it is extremely important for us that CLUST Space, by providing safety and inspiration, has become a source of attraction and a point of support for the KPI community.

In April, we held the Third International Scientific and Practical Conference “Library Development Strategies: From Idea to Implementation”. It was originally scheduled to take place in April 2022, but the full-scale invasion prevented it. It was with a heavy heart that we announced in March 2022-when the Russian occupation forces were still trying to break through to Kyiv-that the conference was postponed. Later, we reformatted it, chose a focus on strategic library management in wartime, and completely changed the program and our approach. It’s hard to tell about it in one paragraph, so we’ll just add a link to a long read that covers our Third International Scientific and Practical Conference “Library Development Strategies: From Idea to Implementation” in detail and, of course, to the collection of materials.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

In September, we won the All-Ukrainian competition “Library of the Year 2024”. The KPI Library received this honorary title for the project “Modern Educational Safe Space CLUST Space”. It is symbolic that it was in this space that we received the winner’s diploma during the regular Reporting and Election Conference of the Ukrainian Library Association.

In November, another very important and joyful event took place, which was preceded by active and coordinated work of various KPI structures: the Library got an autonomous power supply system. Thanks to a solar power plant with a storage system located on the roof of the building, we can ensure the uninterrupted operation of our electronic resources. And the Library itself has a stable Wi-Fi connection and a lighted hall on the 3rd floor with working sockets. Yes, even during power outages. This was made possible thanks to the entire KPI community and, in particular, the assistance in the technical implementation of this project by Yuriy Veremiychuk, PhD, Associate Professor of the Department of Electrical Supply.

2024 was a very busy year.

We continued to support our users:

• We held educational events: such as the course of open lectures for young researchers “Must-have for research activities”, which consisted of 7 lectures, traditional lectures on various issues of academic integrity, and webinars on research data management. And the lecture “Frauds around scientific journals or How to protect your research” (lecturer – Serhii Nazarovets) had to be held twice: first offline and then online, so that everyone could join;
• offered new services: making a list of sources for your work, booking a room in CLUST Space, printing, copying, scanning a document;
• explored artificial intelligence in different dimensions – theoretical (we now have a special page on our website dedicated to the use of AI in academic activities) and practical – working on our Prometheus chatbot. We created it on the basis of the Botpress GPT platform and now it is in test mode on our website answering questions about library navigation, services, and basic features.

The horizons of international activities of the KPI Library have expanded again: in addition to the familiar Warsaw and Perspektywy Women in Tech Summit, which was attended by Svitlana Petrunovska, Anastasia Saltikova, and Vira Shpota, Yevheniia Zuieva represented the country as a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the 112th international conference BiblioCon24 in Hamburg, Germany.

Our work in support of open science also had a serious international dimension: in March, Director of the KPI Library Yevheniia Kulyk took part in training seminars within the Open4UA project in Delft (Netherlands) and Brussels (Belgium), and in December she presented a report Information support for Open Science and Integrity: the role of the library at the international conference Integrity, Open Science and Artificial Intelligence in Academia and Beyond: Meeting at the Crossroads.

In 2024, we had a lot of work to do and a lot of inspiration – for ourselves and for those around us, our community. This year we welcomed freshmen in a special way – by offering them to launch their dreams. Literally: to write down their desires on a paper propeller and let them go so that they would land and find the strength to come true. The victory of Ukraine was the most common dream of KPI students. Our common dream.

On the World Vyshyvanka Day, in addition to an exhibition of books about Ukrainian embroidery and the traditional planting of viburnum, the KPI Library organized and held its first charity fair. The proceeds – UAH 17,000 – helped to cover the cost of a car for the unit in which an IEE student serves.

This was just one of the many examples of support for our defenders. And the ways of this support can be very different – for example, this year we became ambassadors of the Book to the Front initiative to collect books for military personnel.

Do what you can where you are. Do not stop in the face of challenges. Give warmth to those around you. To feel this tremendous power of a community united by common values and shared aspirations. To be a part of this power.

To thank our defenders who make all this possible.

With these thoughts, we are seeing off the year 2024 and preparing to welcome the new year 2025.

We hope it will be a good year.