UK Serials Group Conference

Rebecca Mogg from Cardiff University Libraries attended this year's UK Serials Group (UKSG) Conference in Bournemouth with financial support from the Kathleen Cooks Bequest Fund. With Rebecca's help we can all update our knowledge on open access publishing, supporting researchers, the fascinating realities of the world of the digital student, altmetrics [a new one for this blog] and  developments in library technology.  Rebecca clearly returns to her workplace with a number of innovations to experiment with. Always the sign of an excellent conference!

Bournemouth International Centre - the venue for
UKSG in 2013
Image credit: Lewis Clarke [CC-BY-SA-2.0],
 via Wikimedia Commons

I was fortunate to receive a grant from the CILIP Wales Kathleen Cooks fund to attend this year’s UKSG Conference in Bournemouth from 8-10 April.  This was my first time at UKSG and I was impressed by the size of the conference and the breadth of the representation of delegates from across academic librarianship, publishing and other professional bodies supporting the sector.  Not to mention the conference dinner and funfair which had the real ‘wow factor’!

The programme was tightly packed and I got lots of ideas and good practice to report back to my institution.  There was also plenty of opportunity to chat to suppliers and see product demos, helping to bring me up to speed with recent developments in areas such as eBooks and digital archives.

The key themes of the conference looked at the evolution of open access, research evaluation and researcher identity, digital students – new learning and information habits and really useful library technology. I have provide much more detail about the sessions I attended below together with my reflections.  Videos of the plenary sessions are available on the YouTube UKSG Channel and the full presentations can be viewed on Slideshare.

Evolution of Open Access

The conference opened with presentations from Phil Sykes, Liverpool University and member of the Finch Committee, and Fred Dylla outlining the progress of the open access movements in Britain and America. 

Sykes provided the background to the Finch outcomes and argued that politically we have never been in a better position to move forward with open access as there is full support in both RCUK (Research Councils UK) and in Government.  This may change in the future and so it’s important that we seize the initiative.  He encouraged us not to ignore the defects in the current policy but to take a positive attitude.  We must provide strong support nationally through our professional bodies and skilled advocacy on campus.  It’s important we make the Gold route work properly to avoid double dipping. 

The focus of Dylla’s presentation was on open access to research data.  Progress in the US is not as advanced as the UK. However, a recent initiative from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to increase access to the results of publicly funded research where projects exceed $100m in R&D expenditure, makes important steps to tackle this deficit. There are also a number of partnership projects between publishers and research funders including the FundRef scheme which aims to make it easier to determine which public body has funded research. 

The final presentation on this theme was from Jill Emery of Portland State University who suggested a toolkit for librarians to respond to open access.  Emery argued that responsibility for supporting open access should lie within Library and that we should engage others in OA provision to ensure that the gold route works effectively and libraries are not double charged.  Emery also advocated that libraries should re-structure their budgets to fund open access publication.  I felt that this was currently less applicable to the UK where the majority of funding is currently coming from RCUK.  Also, we are yet to receive any savings in terms of subscriptions to free up funds in the library budget for article processing charge (APC) payments. These talks gave us plenty to chat about over lunch! 

Researcher Evaluation and Researcher Identity

 Jenny Delaselle from Warwick University outlined a range of publication and citation metrics and encouraged us to make our researchers aware of them.  She also highlighted the current developments in article level metrics (altmetrics) – more on this later.  Laurel Haak from ORCID followed with a talk aimed at raising awareness of the importance and value of encouraging researchers to set themselves up with ORCID IDs.  ORCID is:

 “an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers”.  

This is certainly something I intend to pick up with researchers in my subject area.

On Tuesday a workshop presentation from Mike Talyor, Elsevier Labs and Paul Groth, VU University Amsterdam usefully continued the theme of altmetrics - a topic about which I knew very little.  Taylor provided the definition:

altmetrics are article-level metrics – counting and interpretation of non-formal citation of scholarly documents.  Non-formal citation could be when a work is saved in Mendeley / Zotero / Figshare, bookmarked in Delicious or shared on Twitter or Facebook. 

The two presenters highlighted the benefits of altmetrics to the individual researcher.  They can tell a story to potential funders about the impact of previous research, and do this much faster than citations. Altmetrics services such as ImpactStory or Altmetric.com can help a researcher aggregate all the places where their research is being discussed. Both presenters stressed that altmetrics is in the early stages of development and so the figures should not be compared and used for ranking.  There is much more to come in this area, so watch this space.

Similarly, presenters from Proquest and Goldleaf discussed ways of measuring the impact of online humanities information resources.  This is an important topic as in these disciplines usage statistics often do not give the full picture of the value of a product.  They have conducted a large-scale study into researcher’s use of online resources and will be publishing an article about their findings in the next issue of UKSG journal - Insights.  They also intend to put together a toolkit for librarians.  A couple of practical suggestions which I found useful included:

• setting up quick polls when users access a certain resource to find out their views about it,and 
• requesting inbound and outbound linking stats from your link resolver and finding out from providers how many users are making use of the personalisation features of the resource.

Joanna Ball at the University of Sussex provided a workshop session on their approach to supporting Research Data Management.  I was particularly impressed by their idea of running one of their regular researcher seminars on the topic of “Why share your research data?”  Rather than the library leading, they invited a representative from the UK Data Archive and a researcher from their own University with expertise in ethics to lead the discussion. 

Digital Students 

Tuesday morning’s plenary sessions focused on  Digital Students: new learning and information habits.  The first presenter, Lynn Silipigni Connaway from OCLC, gave a synopsis of a number of recent studies which have looked into researcher and student behaviour around information resources access and use.  Some of the research studies quoted had been reported on previously but the presenter brought them altogether to draw some useful conclusions, including:

• the increased need for seamless online discovery to delivery (including mobile). Users expect their online search experience to lead them to the end product. This is generally what is experienced in other aspects of the web!
•  provide search help at the time of need (chat and instant messaging (IM) - embedded in search interfaces, mobile technology)
• design all of our systems with users in mind Model our services on popular services.And finally 
• focus on relationship building instead of service excellence – identify needs and be in a stronger position to make an impact.

The talk which followed from Joshua Harding, a postgraduate medical student at Warwick Medical School, was the highlight of the conference for me.  He offered a glimpse into the world of the student in the not so distance future, and gave a strong message to both librarians and publishers to act.  I recommend watching the full presentation. Joshua outlined how he has taken the step to being a ‘paperless student’, by using his iPad for his entire study needs.  He uses apps to enable him to take handwritten notes, read and annotate key textbooks, carry out patient consultations, look up and revise key facts (e.g. drug information at the point of need and revise anatomy).  Joshua argued that tablets will become the norm for students in the next 18 months and that our services need to be ready.  He called upon publishers to improve e-textbook provision and to provide ‘smart books’ which will act as a personal study buddy through the use of learning analytics which show him, for example, the areas he may need to revise. A number of current barriers to becoming a paperless student were highlighted, including: 

• lack of connectivity to cloud services such as Dropbox
• cost – at the moment he pays for all his textbooks - with the advent of fees, students will expect this provision
• the ePub format which prevents him from being able to copy and annotate sections of text, and 
• the array of places to look to find relevant books.  

Joshua called for a universal store where they can be located and purchased.

Really useful library technology

Given the current interest in a shared LMS in Wales, I opted to attend a session from Adjoa Boateng and Dave Pattern about Alma and Intota.  Boateng gave a very candid presentation about the implementation of Alma at the University of East London.  As early adopters of this new product, they experienced a number of quite major sounding teething problems, particularly with the reader service, or ‘ fulfillment’ aspect of the product, including issues with self-service, fines, email notifications and reservations.  However, there were a number of aspects which went well including the ExLibris SFX integration, data load and configuration and overall they were pleased with the changes. 

Dave Pattern presented on the progress of their current JISC funded HIKE (Huddersfield, InTota, Knowledge Base+) project which is due to report soon and will include an evaluation of the new InTota LMS.  Both these presentations had a common theme which emphasized the importance of taking the opportunity to re-consider current workflows.  UEL responded to the requirements of the new platform during the implementation whereas Huddersfield’s approach was to map their ideal workflows first.  These workflows can be viewed on the project web site.

The final breakout session of the conference was another highlight for me.  It was presented by Ronán Kennedy and Monica Crump from GUI Galway and was a very candid account of their implementation of Primo and their users’ response.  It highlighted the importance of user-observation studies to truly understand how students and staff make use of our library resources and where they experiencing stumbling blocks.  We are just starting to make use of this methodology here at Cardiff University and I think that one-year-on from our implementation of Primo we should consider running a similar exercise.

Lightening Talks

A new format for UKSG, these sessions each consisted of 3 x 10 minute talks covering new services and innovations.  Of particular interest to me was Caroline Alderson’s presentation on the JISC Open Access fees pilot and Gill and Gravely’s presentation about their work to integrate mobile technologies into library services at Surrey.

Dodgems! (c) Rebecca Mogg, 2013

With quite few bleary eyed delegates in the room following Tuesday night’s funfair, dinner and disco Wednesday  morning kicked off with a brief presentation from Ed Penz at CrossRef who reported on some research UKSG will be undertaking into usage statistics and web analytics for discovery tools.  Liam Earney then talked about JISC’s new service, Knowledge Base+, which is currently available on free trial to the user community.  It aims to create a knowledge base of licence and subscription information which will enable institutions to improve their decision-making and management of resources.  Liam also mentioned a sister project in the US called GoKB which has an international scope and will be made available outside of the US in future.  Finally Simon Inger from Renew Training provided some highlight results from a large-scale study into reader navigation conducted in 2012.  The research compares readers from different sectors and subject areas and looks extremely useful.  Certainly a report to take a closer look at - How Readers Discover Content in ScholarlyJournals! 

Concluding sessions

The very last plenary sessions of the day came from the two Americans with fabulous headgear: Jason Scott from the Archive Team and T Scott Plutchak from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  Scott’s entertaining presentation highlighted the transient nature of the web and how we are at the mercy of the whims of the internet’s major players who can suddenly decide to close down a site at short notice.  The closure of the GeoCities site in 2009 with only 30 days notice to users, prompted Scott to set up the Archive Team, who are identifying and downloading material from “at risk” web sites and saving it for posterity.  

Plutchak rounded off the conference with a plea for librarians and publishers to work more closely together and to learn more about the work that we each do.  He encouraged us to move away from stereotypical views of each other and avoid giving each other unhelpful badges.  Essentially we both want the same thing! 

We are very grateful to Rebecca Mogg for this report. If you have attended an event, or have undertaken a project which deserves wider dissemination, please do contact wales@cilip.org.uk to see if we can publish your report here.

Kathleen Cooks, a conference and a cat: the Third Discover Academic Research Training and Support Conference 28-29 June 2012

This posting is enabled through the kind permission of Jess Emerton who received financial assistance from the Kathleen Cooks Bequest Fund to attend the DARTS3 conference in June 2012. This is Jess' report from the Conference.

 

Attending conferences is expensive, so I’m grateful to Kathleen Cooks, a librarian in Llandudno, who bequeathed a sum of money for the benefit of libraries and librarians in the country because one of the ways the money is used by CILIP Wales is funding librarians to attend conferences.  My recent application was successful and I was delighted to receive the award, mainly because the costs would be greatly reduced for my institution but also because it recognised the value of my attendance and the strength of my application.  If anyone else is thinking of applying for the Kathleen Cooks funding, I would recommend doing so.  The application process was straightforward and CILIP Wales were very helpful throughout.

The conference was the Third Discover Academic Research Training and Support Conference (DARTS 3) on the subject of library support for research in Higher Education.  It was held on the 28^th and 29^th of June 2012 in Dartington Hall, Devon.  The conference was organised by CILIP University, College and Research Group, South West (now part of the new Academic and Research Libraries Group).

 And the cat of the title?  Well, it was a resident moggy who wandered amiably in and out of the conference room during the sessions and was a symbol, for a cat lover like myself, of the engaging nature of the conference.  Those who organised the conference managed to combine a friendly, relaxed atmosphere with an interesting programme and a beautiful venue (see photos!)  It was a place where conversations about research support and wider aspects of librarianship could, and did, prosper and for a fairly inexperienced conference attendee like myself, the discussions I had and the connections I made alongside the formal sessions meant it was an ideal example of the benefits of taking time out to attend such an event.

I identified three main themes within the conference: librarians in new roles, research data management and supporting researchers:

Librarians in new roles

The Research Libraries UK (RLUK) recent major report ‘Re-skilling for Research’ looked at the changing needs of researchers and what we as librarians can do to better support researchers within our institutions.  Some of this may involve new roles for librarians and three of the sessions explored ideas around this.

The RLUK report was used as a basis for an activity in the session run by Neil Smyth from the University of Nottingham which was about engaging with business.  In the activity we highlighted which of the potential new roles were new, challenging or scary and Neil then went on to talk about the opportunities which can be created by taking on new roles.  He gave examples of working with researchers in new ways such as attending meetings to discuss highlight notices (intended to stimulate research proposals under specified themes) and taking on actions such as contacting a commercial partner (Neil brought in a publishing partner for one project).  This was a different slant on librarianship, which highlighted that it is part of the role of an academic to engage with business, so it should also be part of our role in supporting their research.

Another new role could be supporting researchers using social media and Jez Cope talked about the Connected Researcher workshops he runs at the University of Bath (similar to our own Connected Researcher workshops).  I liked the way Jez ran the activities in the workshops.  He gave the researchers a goal he wanted them to achieve and they got there through working things out for themselves and helping each other rather than via instructions.  For example he just asked them to send a tweet (with the workshop hashtag) rather than going through step-by-step how to use twitter.  Other useful interactions then happened naturally.  This approach was something to think about in relation to the teaching I do.

Three extra links from Jez’s session worth sharing: the Diigo bookmarks from his workshops, the RIN report ‘Social media: a Guide for researchers’; a data sharing web site called ‘Figshare’ which could be used to upload data associated with research papers. 

What about librarians as researchers?  Miggie Pickton from the University of Northampton used her session to ask us to consider the benefits of carrying out research ourselves and we came up with a huge number, both to the individual, the organisation and the profession.  During another activity we thought about the barriers to carrying out research, but for each barrier Miggie made us come up with a possible solution which led to a very positive session.  Miggie also talked about the successful Library and Learning Services conference held recently at Northampton.  It was inspiring to hear about the focus on research at Northampton, where it is an objective in appraisals and senior staff are expected to bid for funding, conduct research projects, present at conferences and publish.

There is much to inspire and excite within these challenging new roles.

 

Research data management

The issue of how best to manage and store research data is a hot topic in Higher Education at the moment.  While institutions are getting to grips with managing and storing research outputs in institutional repositories, the data created and used in the research is generally not being managed in an effective way.

Two sessions focused on the role of librarians in research data management.  Judith Stewart from UWE ran a session which asked us to think about who in our institutions is leading on research data management.  Having librarians involved in research data management chimes with many of our professional skills (identifying needs, managing and curating information, training) and fits in with some of the roles highlighted in the RLUK report.  Judith talked about the JISC funded project on research data management they are running at UWE and the benefits the library has found in terms of raising its profile within the institution.

The session by Gareth Cole from the University of Exeter (also running a JISC funded project on research data management) particularly focused on the training required by researchers and by library staff in the area of research data management.  We all completed a questionnaire about training during the session, the results of which have been written up in a couple of blog posts.  I agreed with Gareth’s emphasis on the importance of training PhD supervisors on managing research data as well as students; I certainly find that getting supervisors on board is key to influencing my PhD students.

So, lots to think about - what is currently being done about research data management in our institutions and how should we be involved as librarians?

Supporting researchers

It’s great to hear about ways other Universities are supporting researchers and even better if they share the material they use and make resources reusable.  So a big thank-you to the East Midland Research Support Group eMRSG, represented here by Elizabeth Martin (DMU) and Jennifer Coombs (University of Nottingham),who outlined their online tutorials for researchers.  There is a module on disseminating your research, with one on reference management to come.  A great feature is the short ‘talking heads’ videos, featuring real-life researchers, which come across as relevant, credible and engaging.  The tutorials can be reused in whole or in part and are available via JORUM.

Preparing for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a key priority for universities and Anna Dickinson from the REF team kicked off the conference with a really useful outline of the REF.  I hadn’t been aware before of the range of ways the impact of research could manifest itself or the fact that journal impact factors are not taken into account in the assessment.  Discussion after Anna’s presentation included questions about open access in relation to the REF; open access has been a big news story of late and it surfaced here and throughout the conference.

Find out more

This UC&R South West blog post links to the conference presentations on Slideshare and to various blog posts about the event.  The post also includes some photos of the beautiful venue… but none of the resident cat I’m afraid!

Jess Emerton, Subject Librarian, Cardiff University
(Copyright for the text and photographs remains with Jess Emerton).