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.

Could you benefit from the Kathleen Cooks Bequest?

The legacy of Kathleen Cooks lives on. In 2012 the Kathleen Cooks Fund made awards totalling just over £5,400. Might you benefit from Kathleen's generous bequest in 2013?

In 2012 the Fund provided financial assistance for the following events in Wales:

·         Conversations with Cataloguers

·         Forum for Interlending

and enabled individual CILIP members to attend training events including:

·         Training the trainers

·         DARTS3 conference (blogged about here)

·         University Science & Technology Libraries Meeting

·         Day delegate attendance at CILIP Cymru Wales Conference in 2012 (blogged here)

The Fund also supports the Welsh Books Council in the annual awards of the Tir na n’Og prizes for children’s books published with genuine Welsh background in English and Welsh.

The legacy of Kathleen proudly lives on. Will you join those in benefiting from Kathleen’s generosity in 2013?  Applying for financial support is straight-forward!

Who can apply?

·         Welsh Library Authorities

·         CILIP groups in Wales

·         Individual members of CILIP in Wales

Awards are granted where applications meet at least ONE of the following criteria:

·         Result in a new or improved service to users of library and information services in Wales

·     Add to knowledge in Welsh libraries and information services

·     Improve professional knowledge among members of CILIP Wales

·     Assist in the production or purchase of specific items or collections of permanent value to Wales

Awards are typically in the region of £500 - £1000, but may on occasion be greater.  Decisions are usually made within 10 days and the process is very straight-forward.

What have you got to loose, and think what you could gain!

‘Exploring Spaces’ - understanding the learning spaces that libraries provide



Martin Edwards attended the Experiences of the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association (HETL) conference on ‘Exploring Spaces’ (Orlando, Florida, January 2013) with financial support from the Kathleen Cooks Fund. This is Martin's overview of a project to review learning spaces at the University of Wales Newport and some of his experiences of attending and delivering a paper at the Conference.





The location for HETL’s ‘Exploring Spaces' conference depicting part of the university campus at the University of Central Florida, Orlando



Background

 

Back in May 2012, the Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association (HETL) called for papers on the theme of ‘Exploring Spaces’ for a conference to be held at the University of Central Florida, Orlando. At the University of Wales, Newport, staff in the library service had received a ‘learning and teaching’ grant to try and understand the learning space the libraries provides for its users, with an original remit to:

• To gain a better understanding of space (physical and virtual) and how this meets the learning and research needs of our learners (staff and students)
• To investigate whether teaching can be supported with our learning centre resources
• To investigate whether there is a difference between a learning centre and a library and if so, how this impacts on the learning experience.

The rationale for this came on the back of a university restructuring process which laid more emphasis on learning centres and less so on libraries.  We were also keen to see how much the notion of an information commons had progressed in a decade or so since its inception.

The Conference Experience

The conference itself was hugely different to both the library-specific and non-library conferences I had attended in the UK.  The scale of it (both the size of the campus and the number of delegates and speakers) may at first have appeared overwhelming, but I was impressed with the efficiency of the organisation, the structure of the programme and the pace of the change from keynote speakers to symposia to roundtable presentations and panel discussions.  HETL was a new association to me and I was impressed with its global coverage and the commitment of staff from across the world (who were mostly present at the conference).



UWN Newport City Centre - The Learning Centre including an information point, some of the IT study spaces and (towards the back) a social space.



My presentation focused on the qualitative and quantitative methodologies we had employed at Newport to try and identify a relationship between the learning styles of our students and the study spaces we provide. It is clear that there still needs to be a demarcation between the silent / individualised and the group / blended learning areas.  Strong support was also shown for more IT zones and bookable study rooms.  This has largely been achieved at our new campus in the city centre, but is something we are still working on at our older campus at Caerleon.  Other points raised in the presentation noted the need for social spaces, and this is something I am starting to look at in conjunction with the Newport Riverfront Arts Centre, aiming to deploy techniques from the commercial and non-education sector into higher education libraries.

I was also part of a roundtable group identifying the relationship between learning spaces and student experience. This involved attending other presentations on library themes including:

• the design of a bespoke ‘Learning Ground and Sandbox’ at ‘Portland State University’
• non-linear approaches to teaching students information literacy / fluency from ‘To The Point Research/Google, Inc’, and
• managing media technology and services (both on-demand borrowing and service support) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

It was good to gain an insight into what other higher education libraries in other parts of the world are doing and the Q&A session at the end reinforced the notion that we share the same issues and problems, including:

• how to support research in higher education (whether through faculty or a dedicated graduate research centre);
• bridging the digital divide and avoiding disintermediation (both for users and front-line staff), and
• the growing role of marketing and use of social media.



A ‘snapshot’ of some of the findings at Newport, with a demand for improved spaces of all types, replete with improved environmental factors.  This is something we have started to address by laying less emphasis on printed stock and opening up floor space and study rooms.



The role networking plays in such a large conference is invaluable and it was really useful to have informal discussions with academic staff from a wide range of disciplines as well as library people. For instance I had a good dialogue with the Head of Service at Bishop’s University, Quebec and it would be invaluable to continue communications with him to learn about the outcomes of the design and construction of their new library.

The Future

In relation to HETL, I would like to stay informed and become involved with activities in the future.  In relation to the work done at Newport on learning spaces, as mentioned above, I am embarking on a research investigation at the Riverfront Theatre and Arts Centre as part of a Strategic Insight Programme and aim to bring ideas about space from another sector and service back to the library to increase the engagement we have with our learners and researchers.  Part of my presentation will also be delivered at the forthcoming event ‘Learning Spaces and the Student Experience: Do Spaces Matter?’ at the Senedd, National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff on March 11 2013. 

Acknowledgements

It is with sincere gratitude that I acknowledge the funding from the Kathleen Cooks Fund which made my visit to the HETL Conference possible. Thanks to Dr Bela Arora, who also participated at the conference and has been instrumental at setting up a learning spaces forum at the university.  Thanks also to Angharad Evans and Madeleine Rogerson for all the work and research they performed at Newport when we initially received the learning and teaching grant.  As the university mergers with Glamorgan University to become the University of South Wales, then this is an ideal opportunity to re-examine the learning spaces we provide across multi-campuses.

Martin Edwards is Team Leader in User Services, Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) at the University of Wales Newport.

CILIP Cymru Wales is grateful to Martin for providing permission to publish this report.

Could you help administer the Kathleen Cooks Fund?

CILIP Cymru Wales is seeking two independent members of the Kathleen Cooks Bequest Fund Management Committee to help decide the allocation of grant funding. 

The following call was circulated on the LIS-WALES email discussion group today [10/01/13].

Kathleen Cooks was librarian of Llandudno from 1947 to 1973 who bequeathed a sum of money for the benefit of libraries and librarians in Wales. Interest generated by the bequest fund is available annually to support projects and developments. (Further information at http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/regional-branches/wales-cymru/pages/kathleen-cooks-fund.aspx).

The Kathleen Cooks Fund is administered by a management committee consisting of the Officers of CILIP Cymru / Wales together with two independent members who represent public and academic / special libraries in Wales. Independent members are appointed to serve for two years.

This is a call for expressions of interest for two new independent panel members.  Candidates interested in applying will:

• be a CILIP Member living or working in Wales
• not be a member of the CILIP Cymru Wales Executive Committee>
• work in a public, academic or special library. Members who have retired from work in these sectors will also be welcomed
• be willing and able to respond, within 2 working days, to any new Kathleen Cooks Fund submissions

Approximately ten awards are made each year. Submissions to the Fund are received throughout the year and are circulated to Management Committee members by email. Decisions are also made through email discussion and majority decision. There will be an annual meeting of the Management Committee, at which the annual report and accounts of the fund will be approved.

Administrative support for the Fund is provided by the CILIP Policy Officer (Wales).  There is also an independent Treasurer for the Fund. Consequently, burdens generated by taking up this position will be light.

If you would like to apply please email wales@cilip.org.uk providing your:

• CILIP membership number,
• details of your current work position, or if retired, your previous work history, and
• a very brief summary of how you can contribute to the fair and efficient running of the award process.

Please apply by Friday 25th January 2013. If you would like further information about this request please do contact stephen.gregory@cilip.org.uk .

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.