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).

Engaging science and technology students - report of a study day

Susan Glen, Deputy Subject Librarian at Swansea University, received financial support from the Kathleen Cooks Fund to attend the Universities Science & Technology Librarians Group meeting at the University of Portsmouth on the 4th December. The day focused on engaging students and provided Susan with some great ideas for livening up teaching sessions and developing social media presence. Susan has kindly allowed CILIP Cymru Wales to disseminate her report of the day.

Universities Science & Technology Librarians Group 4th Dec 2012

A meeting for science and technology librarians held at the University of Portsmouth on the topic of engaging students

Linda Humphreys, Bath: Engaging chemistry students: finding data and drawing compounds

Linda had had some problems getting teaching sessions with chemistry students at appropriate times until two teaching fellows were appointed who introduced a key skills module and saw the benefit of library input. She now teaches them plagiarism and referencing, finding chemical and physical data and using Reaxys. She talked about some useful tools she uses for finding chemical and physical data. Although we don’t have a chemistry department is useful to be reminded of them for chemical  engineers and biochemists.(Details at http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/subjects/chem/). Students have problems in deciding which tools to use when they may give different data – she has to teach them ways of deciding the reliability of the source and how to cross-correlate to check results. Students were engaged with the sessions because they were directly related to course work.

She had also introduced voluntary sessions in the second year to teach ChemBioDraw, a software package for drawing chemical structures. This was mainly because students struggled with it but nobody on campus taught it. This led to an interesting discussion about what subject librarians should teach. Others had been asked to teach things like book reviewing and mind mapping which are outside our usual role. Most felt that it is worth teaching things outside our traditional role if we are able to as it helps to make academics take notice of us, although many have colleagues with different views. One librarian will only teach a mind mapping session if students have had a proper literature searching session so uses it as a hook. Lynda.com was mentioned – an online site which has material to teach many different software packages. The discussion also touched on which referencing software people teach. Many teach EndNote but some felt the balance would tip towards free sites like Mendeley and one university had introduced training sessions on different tools to allow their researchers to choose.

Timothy Collinson / Emily White, Portsmouth: “Engaging students using social networking”

Portsmouth had built up good student engagement by encouraging staff to be creative. Emily had been on the loans team and is now a senior library assistant on the enquiry team. She has done a lot to build up their Facebook presence, including using historical shots of the building to build up a timeline. Emily told us that building up a history and telling a story can help to create an emotional connection. It is important to remember that students will probably only go to your Facebook page once and thereafter will just see your posts in their own news feed. Posts with photos receive 2 or 3 times more clicks than those without. They get lots of people viewing their Facebook page apart from those who “follow” it.

The library also has a Thing of the Day blog which mixes quirky material such as bizarre web sites with informational posts,Youtube and Pinterest sites, a Google Plus site and Twitter feed. The Google Plus site is not used well but others are. They try to keep a friendly, conversational style and as a result the number of enquiries they receive via social media have built up as they are seen as approachable. Timothy emphasised that you need to think about listening to what students are saying and consider it as a conversation rather than sending out lots of information.

There was discussion about how much time all this takes. Portsmouth have several people who are interested and it doesn’t usually take a huge amount of time though they don’t monitor it exactly. The enquiry team monitor incoming enquiries as they would for anything else. There is some cross posting but they don’t automatically feed all material to all channels as they feel that different social media sites have different purposes and identity. Management had been dubious initially and they had had to struggle to be allowed time to do things but they can now see the benefit.

Timothy and Emily were very enthusiastic and I picked up some useful ideas and intend to read their paper in Aliss Quarterly at http://eprints.port.ac.uk/1508/ (Exterminating

boredom: synergy and creativity in an academic library). In the discussion a librarian from Southampton mentioned that they have involved students in posting on their facebook page which has been popular.

Adam Edwards, Middlesex: “It’s a library knockout! engagement activity”

Adam talked about ways he tries to engage students in his teaching sessions. He is currently working for a teaching in HE qualification. He tried out a good, simple idea on us – handing out cards with book, journal, trade journal, web page etc which we had to match with a definition and what they are good for – a good ice breaker type activity for literature searching sessions. He also gave us an evaluation form and some photocopies of material which we had to judge using the form – none of them were actually suitable for academic work so it would be a good way to get students thinking about this. He advised putting people in groups of 3 as that is the optimum number to get them discussing properly. This session was a timely reminder that you can use quite simple games / activities as a good learning tool and I would like to work something similar into some of our own literature searching sessions to make them more lively.

Library Tour

We had a tour of Portsmouth University Library. They are clearly dealing with some of the same issues as ourselves – for example, they have tried some 24 hour opening and have had issues with students having pizza delivered as well as cleaning issues, they are moving some staff to make group study rooms for students, as are we and they have constant requests for more plugs. They are intending to dispose of some scientific journals to make room for student study space – around 50% have only been borrowed once in the last ten years so these will probably go. A lot of the issues are probably due to the challenge of trying to make 60s and 70s buildings fit the changing needs of modern students.

I felt that this was a useful day. I picked up some information about chemistry information which will be useful to me and also some ideas about how to liven up teaching sessions and develop our social media presence. As the speakers were all enthusiastic I felt this gave me an injection of enthusiasm to try some things out for myself and it is always useful to hear what other subject librarians are doing as we face many of the same issues. Thanks to the Kathleen Cooks Bequest fund for this opportunity.