It's been a busy few months at work as I've spent the summer organizing and delivering a programme of training for library staff. As I'm based in the Office of Scholarly Communication naturally this training revolves around developing skills to help support the research community. Cambridge library staff are in the fortunate situation of having this training available to them but it has got me thinking about how people in other institutions develop their knowledge of this area. Together with my manager Danny Kingsley we have decided to conduct some research into the suitability of traditional training routes for academic librarians. Our survey has just closed and my blog post from the Office of Scholarly Communication blog -
Unlocking Research - is reposted below and I'll be sharing outcomes and developments as we move forward with the research. As always, comments and feedback are welcomed!
Are academic librarians getting the training they need?
The problem
Few people would deny that the world of
the academic library is changing. Users are becoming more and more
sophisticated in their information gathering techniques and the role of the
academic librarian needs to adapt accordingly or risk being left behind. Librarians
are changing from the traditional gatekeeper role to one which helps their
research community to disseminate the outputs of their work.
This shift offers academic library staff
new opportunities to move into research support roles. An increasing number of
libraries are establishing scholarly communication departments and
advertising for associated roles such as Repository Managers and Data
Specialists. It’s also becoming common to see more traditional academic
library roles advertised asking for at least a working knowledge of areas such
as Open Access and Research
Data Management.
This is an issue that we have been
considering in the Office of Scholarly Communication for a while. My role as
Research Skills Coordinator involves up-skilling Cambridge library staff in
these areas so I’m more aware than most that it is a full time job. But what
happens to those who don’t have this type of opportunity through their work? How
do they find out about these areas which will be so relevant to their future
careers?
For many new professionals studying is
their main chance to get a solid grounding in the information world but with
the profession undergoing such rapid change is the education received via these
degrees suitable for working in 21st century academic
libraries? This is a question that has been raised many times
in the profession in recent years so it’s time to dig a bit deeper.
Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is simple: there
is a systematic lack of education on scholarly communication issues available
to those entering the library profession. This is creating a time bomb
skills gap in the academic library profession and unless action is taken we may
well end up with a workforce not suited to work in the 21st century
research library.
In order to test this hypothesis we have
designed a survey aimed at those currently working in scholarly communication
and associated areas. We hope that asking questions about the educational
background of these workers we can work to determine the suitability of the
library and information science qualification for these types of role into the
future and how problems might be best addressed.
After a process of testing and reworking, our survey was launched to the scholarly
communication community on October 11th 2016. In less
than 24 hours there were over 300 responses, clearly indicating that the
subject had touched a nerve for people working in the sector. (And thank you to
those who have taken the time to respond).
Preliminary findings
We were pleased to see that even without
prompting from the survey, respondents were picking up on many of the issues we
wanted to address. For example, the original focus of the survey was the
library and information science qualification and its impact on those working
in scholarly communication.
When we piloted the survey with members
of our own team we realised how diverse their backgrounds were and so widened
the survey to target those who didn’t hold an LIS qualification but worked in
this area. This has already given us valuable information about the impact that
different educational backgrounds have on scholarly communication departments
and has gained positive feedback from survey respondents.
Many of the respondents talk of
developing the skills they use daily ‘on the job’. Whilst library and
information professionals are heavily involved in lifelong learning and it’s
natural for skills to develop as new areas emerge, the formal education new
professionals receive also needs to keep pace. If even recent graduates
have to develop the majority of skills needed for these roles whilst they work
this paints a worrying picture of the education they are undertaking.
The survey responses have also raised the
issue of which skills employers are really looking for in library course
graduates and how these are provided. Respondents highlighted a range of skills
that they needed in their roles – far more than were included in the original
survey questions. This opens up discussions about the vastly differing
nature of jobs within scholarly communication and how best to develop the skill
set needed.
A final issue highlighted in the
responses received so far is that a significant number of people
working in scholarly communication roles come from outside the library sector.
Of course this has benefits as they bring with them very valuable skills but
importing knowledge in this way may also be contributing to a widening skills
gap for information professionals that needs to be addressed.
Next steps
The first task at the end of the
collection period (you have until 5pm BST Monday 31 October) will be to analyse
the results and share them with the wider scholarly communication community.
There are plans for a blog post, journal article and conference presentations.
We will also be sharing the anonymised data via the Cambridge repository.
Following that our next steps depend
largely on the responses we receive from the survey. We have begun the process
of reaching out to other groups who may be interested in similar issues around
professional education to see if we can work together to address some of the
problems. None of this will happen overnight but we hope that by taking these
initial steps we can work to create academic libraries geared towards serving
the researchers of the 21st century.
One thing that the survey has done
already is raise a lot of interesting questions which could form the basis of
further research. It shows that there is scope to keep exploring this topic and
help to make sure that library and information science graduates are well
equipped to work in the 21st century academic library.