USTLG November Meeting: Supporting Research

On the 26th November 2014 I attended and spoke at the University Science & Technology Librarians (USTLG) winter meeting on supporting research at Aston University. The last time I attended a USTLG meeting was in 2012 when I spoke about our re-structure into a Teaching and Learning team, a Research Support Team and a Special Collections/Digital Humanties team, and I was juts about to start my post as a Research Information Advisor.

This time I updated attendees on what had happened since the restructure and how the Research Services team had developed, and took #OAowl along for company:

#OAowl on the train to Birmingham

The line-up for the day was:
Research Bites – researcher training programme
Georgina Hardy & Clare Langman
Aston University

• Subject librarians with research support as part of their remit.
• Research Bites – every lunchtime in July/August, 15-30mins sessions.
• Record audio & slides to make available.
• Used EventBrite for bookings & to keep stats on attendance.
• Advertsie via lots of methods e.g. new bulletin, direct emails, flyers/posters to Depts, posters in library, in email sigs.
• LibGuides to gather recordings.
• Options to stay after talk to try  things out hands-on (in the lovely library training room where we had the meeting!)

Raising Your Research Profile – training programme
Linda Norbury & Judith Hegenbarth
University of Birmingham

• Research support group to oversee research training within the library, run by subject librarians/group.
• Tried out research support (ideas sessions) on Publication strategies, Open Access, Bibliometrics & Social Media on subject librarians first – helps upskill library staff.
• Good feedback and led to other sessions/contacts, but need to review and expand in future.
• Raising your research profile webpages.

Developing a blended learning approach to literature searching support for PhD students
Jenny Coombs & Liz Martin
De Montfort University

• Compulsory lit searching module for PhD students as part of the Graduate School training programme.
• Moved to an online approach – students can choose online module + face-to-face sessions or online only (depending on if they can visit campus)
• Involves all subject librarians in the feedback part of the module – where students fill in a lit searching form to show what they have understood of the module.

Consultancy, bitesize and training – how Northumbria supports researchers
Suzie Kitchin
Northumbria University

• Provide free advice and help with literature searching for all researchers, but also provide a charged literature searching service for funded projects that wish the library to undertake the literature search for them – charged at research librarian pay rate per hour.
• research development week – feedback that it’s a good brand that is seen as targeted directly at researchers.
• Use an online tutorial that is a pre-requisite to face-to-face teaching to ensure everyone is on the same level.
• Skillsplus – online learning repository – includes all researcher materials – all online tutorials/learning objects are bitesized.

Supporting researchers – then and now
Selina Lock
University of Leicester

• Researcher pages – including links to training and development for online tutorials and Elevenses recordings.
• Social Media – blog, twitter, slideshare, youtube

JISC Open Access Pathfinder project
Linda Kerr
Heriot-Watt University

• Research Support Librarian – remit to run repositories and support open access publishing.
• Offers advice, co-ordination, writes policies, support to staff in schools.
• OA fund devolved to schools who deal with APCs.

 

Applying systematic review methodology from Health to other Science disciplines
Beth Hall
University of  Bangor

• Supports systematic reviews in medicine/health care but found a growing demand for using thouse methods in other subjects such as ecology and software engineering.
• Bangor Evidence Synthesis Hub (BESH) – Application of review methods and processes to different and interdependent contexts such as health, social care, environment, conservation.
• Issues with applying methods to other areas – no one database to model search on (e.g. Medline in medicine), search functionality lacking in databases, no subject terms, no register of systematic reviews in non-medical areas.
• Centre for evidence Based Conservation

 

You can access copies of the presentations on the USTLG website.

Tweets from the day: USTLG November 14 Storify (header seems to feature #OAowl)

cpd25: Support for researchers (7 December 2012)

Senate House
Shared via CC BY-SA 2.0 licence

Towards the end of last term I attended the ‘Support for researchers’ event hosted by the M25 Consortium.

It was very nice to be in Senate House and to meet lots of new colleagues. The discussion sessions clearly showed that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to research support. Longer time in the discussion groups would have been useful but unfortunately it was only a half day event.  I have summarised the three speakers below and included some questions raised in discussion.

Miggie Pickton & Nick Dimmock (University of Northampton) started the event by talking about collaboration between the Library, Graduate School and the Research Office at Northampton. The Research Support Hub is a joint initiative between the three teams. It is a WordPress hosted blog, designed to be a one-stop shop for researchers needing information about funding and training. Nick described how there had previously been a very scattered presence and no single place for researchers to find information. The site has only been live since October 1^st but has had a good response. There are eight regular contributors and categories/tags are used to maximise discoverability. There is also a section which links to other University blogs and a FAQ page to avoid repetition and aid enquiries.

The repository (NECTAR) is a mutual interest between the Research Office and the Library. The Research Office provides the administrative support; the Library covers the technical issues, metadata and IPR. NECTAR is the main source of data for the REF. In terms of disseminating research, the team are involved in an annual poster competition, annual research conference, and measuring impact.

Benefits of collaboration were increased visibility and increased perceived value of Library services.

Miggie concluded with some tips for making collaboration work:

• Share common goals and common interests.
• Actively look for opportunities to collaborate internally
• Communicate frequently and share knowledge and expertise
• Present a shared point of view at formal committees.

Jenny Evans (Imperial College London) discussed the Research 2.0 programme at Imperial.  A version of this programme has been running since 2008 but it was only in 2011 that it was integrated into the professional development course for students. The six-week programme was delivered face to face and online, covering productivity, networking, developing an online digital identity, and legal & ethical issues. The advantage of the course was that it raised the profile of the Library and allowed researchers and staff to build their network and collaborate. It was regarded as innovative. However, the blogging part didn’t work so well. Because the course was part of mandatory Graduate School training it was hard to get the researchers to finish the course or stick to deadlines.

Jenny was also involved in filming five interviews with academics about their use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies. The interviewees were at various stages of their career and the aim was to show researchers how a ‘real’ academic was using such tools. The video can be found here.

Jenny’s talk raised a number of issues including:

• Should we give students guidelines on what technology to use?
• Should the focus be on the specific tools or the output?
• How do you evaluate success with Web 2.0 workshops?

Tahani Nadim (Goldsmiths) recently completed her PhD and gave a short talk about her experience of research support. Tahani felt that the Library has a role to play in signposting throughout the PhD, not just at the start. Induction week can be overwhelming and information quickly forgotten. The PhD is an incredibly solitary venture and it is hard to imagine how subsequent years will pan out. Tahani suggested that videos of different stages of the student experience would be useful. She also suggested that Library pages need to answer the question “I need help with…”. Too often they can be buried and messy, when they really need to be simple and clean. The difficulty with a PhD is that you often don’t know what help you need until you need it! This means that problems are often figured out amongst colleagues and the PhD cohort; an informal and valuable network for recommendations.

A number of discussion points were raised:

• How can the Library’s expertise and resources be used to support research?
• How can the Library actively participate in the university’s research culture?
• What role can they play in advising on version management?
• What about students who aren’t part of the daily research culture?

Symplecticity itself

Just got out of a presentation on Symplectic Content Management System, a data and knowledge management tool tied into the REF.  Wasn’t something I was expecting to being today, but the big boss asked me to sub for my manager wearing my old repository hat.  The demonstration we were taken through over the two hours is the config they’ve got over at Imperial College, and I was pleased to see it tied directly into their repository (along with various other functions).

In essence it seems to create personal REF pages for academics/researchers with minimal effort on their part; even allowing them to appoint people to sub for them in terms of content addition.  It uses predefined routines to query specific databases (e.g. WoK) to populate it’s records; presenting the information to academics (or their substitutes) to ask “Is this yours?” before adding it to their on-line profile.  It links through to full text or bib rec cords, as well as OA versions.  I was quite impressed with the way it handled multiple name-authorities as well, knowing the great variance there is in published author names for the same individuals.  In my experience this is something the repository community’s struggled with from time to time.

There’s even a module for it that works as a expertise database, allowing anyone who can access it (it could be entirely publicly viewable or gated) to locate personages with (for example) comparable research expertise to collaborate with, or to speak with authority to the media.

I was reasonably impressed with the system in terms of joining up various disparate campus data-driven systems, although perhaps I could have lived with the demo of the system perhaps being half the length.  Various folks from the academic depts, research support and computing were there as well as we librarians, and doubtless we’ll hear more about developments on this front over the coming months.