Friday 17 November 2017

Moving into Research Support: What Librarians Really Need to Know

I've been doing a lot of work in the past year or so on educating the library community beyond Cambridge about scholarly communication and research support from blog posts and surveys to speaking at events. In 2018 I'm aiming to formalize this by offering a course on Moving into Research Support in collaboration with CILIP and CILIP East.

It's quite hard work to condense everything a librarian might need to know about research support into one three hour workshop but I'm enjoying the challenge. What I'm really hoping to cover is what library staff really need to know to get started, whether they are new to the world of research support, have had these duties added to their current post or are just interested in exploring the sector and its various roles. Hopefully this will be enough to get people started and help them to grasp the basics of scholarly communication.

In the course I'll be covering: 
  • An introduction to scholarly communication in the 21st century
    • What do we mean by scholarly communication?
    • What does it mean to be a researcher in the 21st century?
    • Where the library fits into the research lifecycle
    • The different roles available for librarians in library and information support
  • Research Data Management
    • What do we mean when we talk about 'data'?
    • Why should researchers learn how to manage their data?
    • How can libraries support researchers across disciplines with their data?
  • Open Access
    • What is Open Access?
    • What are the implications of research funder policies for researchers?
    • How can librarians keep up with the changes? 
  • Disseminating research
    • How can researchers share their research once it's completed?
    • How can they take advantage of new and innovative methods of dissemination?
    • How can librarians support researchers with sharing their work with the wider world?
  • Metrics and measuring impact
    • Why are metrics and why are they important?
    • Why do researchers need to measure impact?
    • How can libraries support researchers with understanding and applying metrics?

I hope this will be a valuable introduction and there will of course be signposting towards further information on different areas so people can explore further if they want to. If this course turns out to be a success who knows what might be next? I'm really enjoying pulling the content together and it's giving me lots of ideas about the skills that librarians really need in this area which is something I hope to do more investigation on in 2018.  

If you are interested in the workshop the course takes place on February 1st and details and booking information can be found via the CILIP website here

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