Research Support Training Resources

Over the past few years, both within my role and outside, I have been lucky enough to develop a range of training materials. Most of these are related to scholarly communication and research support although other areas also creep in from time to time! I try my best to upload all of my content  to Apollo - the University of Cambridge repository - but sometimes life gets in the way. All of my content ends up somewhere and as people are often asking for copies of materials I have created a site on Humanities Commons to keep everything in the same place.

I have compiled all of my training materials to date at the imaginatively titled Research Support Training together with lists of conference presentations and publications. All of the materials are available under a CC-BY 4.0 licence meaning that they can be used and adapted as needed as long as the original author is credited. 

Topics covered include Open Access, data management, the publication process, copyright, metrics and librarians as researchers. There are a variety of formats to choose from including printed materials, online courses, podcasts and webinars so there should be something for everybody.

Further training materials will be added as and when they are developed but for now please help yourselves! 

Moving Online: Training Librarians in 2018

This blog has been a little neglected of late as I have had several projects to work on which sadly leaves limited time for blogging. Hopefully many of these projects will be wrapping up soon and then I can get back into writing. In the mean time you can catch up with some of what has been keeping me busy via the blog post below which was originally published on the Unlocking Research blog and is reposted here via a CC-BY license.

Moving Online: Training Librarians in 2018

As we move into 2019 it is a good time to look back at another year spent training the library community, both in Cambridge and more widely. Over the last 12 months, the Office of Scholarly Communication has held nearly 50 training sessions for Cambridge staff on topics ranging from navigating copyright issues to the mechanics of the publishing process. 

Face to face

We have continued to deliver high-quality face-to-face training sessions on many topics. Sometimes sessions just work better when participants are all together in a room, especially if there are a lot of activities. For example, our sessions looking at Research Data Management and Data Management Plans are designed to be interactive and so wouldn’t really work in any other format. Feedback from sessions tells us that participants really value the chance to meet other librarians and hear their perspectives on things.

Cambridge has more than 100 libraries including faculties, departments, colleges and connecting institutions. Many staff do not get to meet each other unless working on a specific project and even working in the same university it can be hard to avoid becoming too focused on local issues. Attending workshops and other training sessions allows conversations to happen and several people have told us that they really value the chance to connect with their colleagues. 

Webinars to the rescue!

Of course, librarians are very busy people so sometimes it’s just not possible for them to attend sessions in-person. Working in small teams often means that staff are unable to leave the library to go to training, especially when travel time and family commitments are factored into the equation.

To help with this we introduced webinars as a delivery method in 2017. This means that staff can either attend training sessions remotely or catch up with a recording.  Because of the success of this project we have continued to deliver sessions via webinar in 2018 and feedback from attendees tells us we are doing something right! Several people have commented that they have attended sessions online which they would otherwise not have been able to make but others have had some suggestions for improvement.

It can be hard to carve time out a busy schedule to attend even an hour-long webinar so there needs to be some incentive like an activity so people get the benefit of attending live. We have taken this on board and tried to build in interactive elements where appropriate. The main lesson we have learnt about webinars is that they are particularly useful for information delivery sessions which would usually involve someone standing at the front of the class delivering a talk. People can easily listen to this at their desk and/or ask questions through the webinar chat box without having to leave work.

Most of these webinars are shared with a Cambridge audience only but a few have been released more widely such as our talk on How to Spot a Predatory Publisher. As discussed in our previous post on advertising videos we have discovered that naming our content something that people are likely to Google is a great way to increase hits! 

Increasing discoverability

As we offer more and more webinars we are starting to think about the best way to collate and share these. Although they can be useful resources, people need to know where to find them without having to hunt around. One of our priorities for 2019 is to gather both our webinars and online resources together to create a mini-hub where library staff can go to find more information.

These resources include webinar recordings but also the results of two other training projects from 2018: our Research in 3 Minutes videos and our Scholarly Communication Information Booklets. Research in 3 Minutes in a series of short videos which outline basic concepts in scholarly communication. Most of these areas can be quite complicated and terminology laden and these videos aim to provide an accessible introduction. They can also be uploaded for display on screens around the library or on other webpages to engage users. We started to create Information Booklets when we realised that all librarians love a handout (at least in our experience!).

These four-page booklets can be viewed online or printed out and offer a more in-depth look at areas we are often asked about, for example what exactly is a Creative Commons license? There are six booklets in the series so far, covering everything from the publication lifecycle to academic social networking and we aim to add more in 2019. 

Online learning

One of our biggest forays into online learning took place with the Research Support Ambassador programme. This is an annual programme aimed at educating library staff on the core elements of research support and in previous years it has been run both face-to-face and via webinar.

This year we decided to do something different and used Moodle to create a completely online course. Participants were able to work though modules including video content, quizzes and discussions to test their understanding of the concepts. Each module was assessed by an activity which allowed learners to put their new knowledge into practice by undertaking a research support task. Examples of this included assessing a data management plan and attempting to spot a predatory publisher.

Overall the course was completed by 20 participants who gave us a lot of positive feedback on the format as well as suggestions for improvements. In the next few years this is something we would like to expand on, perhaps to those outside Cambridge… 

Beyond the University

That doesn’t mean we have neglected non-Cambridge librarians this year. In March our Research Support Skills Coordinator delivered two well-attended sessions on Moving Into Research Support with CILIP. The original session was so popular that we had to add a second and attendees came from around the UK to hear how they could get involved in this exciting new area. There was also a return visit to CILIP HQ in London for their 2018 Careers Day where attendees were introduced to the wonders of working in research support (including dealing with penguin poop and breaking the internet).

We also contributed to a range of other events such as LILAC 2018 and Dawson Day held in the summer – both of which gave us a chance to talk about the need for training in scholarly communication literacy for library staff. 

All in all 2018 has been a very busy year for training but we will not be slowing down in 2019. We have plans to expand our online training offer and deliver even more face-to-face sessions for our community. Who knows what this blog will contain this time next year? Readers had better stay tuned to find out! 

Originally published 8th January 2018 on the Unlocking Research blog.

No Nonsense Guide: Chance to Contribute a Case Study

The blog has been through a quiet period recently for several reasons but perhaps one of the biggest is that I have been writing my first book! The No Nonsense Guide to Scholarly Communication and Research Support will be published by Facet in early 2019 and aims to offer an introduction to the main areas of research support that librarians will deal with. Hopefully it will offer a pain-free introduction to the work of scholarly communication for those new to the area or planning to move into it.

Perhaps one of the most important chapters will look at the career paths available for librarians in research support. Because of my current day job I spend a lot of time talking to people about training for library staff and it worries me to hear that they are often unable to recruit for research support roles from within the library profession. Sometimes this is because of a lack of skill and other times a lack of confidence which means that people perfectly qualified to apply don't. One of the aims of my book and this chapter in particular is to encourage people to get involved in this area and that is where I would like to use the expertise of the community. 

As part of the chapter I want to include some case studies from people in the library and information sector who work in roles with some element of scholarly communication or research support. By talking about their careers so far, what they really do in their roles and the skills that they use I hope this will demystify some of the roles and encourage librarians to apply. If you would like to contribute to a case study then please fill in the Google form below, answering as many questions as you are able to. I'm happy to receive case studies from colleagues in a variety of roles around the globe at different levels. Depending on the amount and range of case studies I receive I may not be able to include all of them in the book and there is no financial incentive for contributing. The chapter will be made available via Open Access upon publication and by contributing you consent to both publication of the case study in the book and wider open sharing.

Contribute a case study here: https://goo.gl/forms/I4IWldaEunkA9DMi1

The deadline for case studies is Friday 16th November.

If you have any questions about this or would like to know more please feel free to contact me via the blog or at claire@librarianintraining.com.

Demystifying Peer Review: International Peer Review Week 2018

This week is International Peer Review Week which highlights and celebrates the role that peer review plays in scholarly communication. The theme of Peer Review Week 2018 is Diversity and aims to encourage more people from a range of different backgrounds to get involved in the process. Peer review as a process is changing - the introduction of open peer review aims to make it a more transparent process for both reviewers and reviewees. Hopefully by demystifying how and why peer review is carried out and arguable changing it for the better, more people will be encouraged to take part.

Much of my work this year has focused on developing online resources so I thought I would add to those this peer review week. Below you can find the first in a series of guides produced by the OSC which look at different aspects of scholarly communication. These first three titles look at different areas related to peer review - the publication lifecycle, avoiding predatory publishers and of course  the peer review process itself. These booklets can be viewed online or downloaded and printed here. All of them are available under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license which means they can be shared and adapted as needed.

Enjoy!

Less is More: Introducing Research in 3 Minutes Videos

I'm now well into the third year of my job and finally starting to feel somewhat settled. I've done a lot of face to face training in the last couple of years but it can often be hard for staff to get away from the demands of their day jobs to attend sessions - however much they might want to! As a result I've been experimenting with more online training and I'll be sharing this on the blog over the coming months. 

At least locally there seem to be two main problems with learning about scholarly communication and research support: a lack of time to learn about something that may not be directly relevant to their role and not understanding the terminology (and therefore not knowing if particular training sessions are relevant). To help with this I've put together a series of short videos covering Research in 3 Minutes. Each video looks at a research support topic such as peer review, metrics and predatory publishers (click the image below for more). 

The videos themselves were easy to put together using a site called Lumen5. This was something I saw mentioned on Twitter as a way to create short videos easily so having little or no design competency I thought I would give it a try. Designed as a way to make blog posts and other content more visual, the site takes text and automatically turns it into the videos you can see above. It also automatically selects CC0 images for each slide although the algorithm which does this didn't always get things right! This can all be changed along with moving the text between slides, highlighting certain words and selecting the (copyright free) music. I just used a free version which allows you to have forty slides and this was plenty.

Some top tips for creating videos like this:

• keep them short and sweet. Keeping the videos to roughly three minutes each allowed me to get my point across without going overboard
• plan out what you want to say beforehand. The site allows you to copy and paste text from a word file and I found this to be the easiest method to make sure I stayed within my slide/word limit
• always check your finished video, even if you have taken the time to prepare the text. Some things worked well in the Word document but didn't have the right flow in the video
• the site offers both still images and video and I recommend trying to mix these up. Having both keeps the video fresh but having too many videos followed by a static image can be a little distracting
• I used the same music on each slide for consistency but looking back I would change this. If someone was to watch more than one or even the whole sequence it can get pretty annoying! 

The videos were a nice distraction from some of my more intense work over the last few months and are helping to build up a solid bank of online training materials. I hope to release more in the future so watch this space! 

New Skills, New Challenges: CPD in the Information Profession

Readers of this blog will know that I have always been interested in professional development for library staff. Recently I was asked to put together a special virtual online edition of the New Review of Academic Librarianship looking at the way CPD has evolved over the years, as reported in the literature. The result can now be found online here with all articles made openly available for a limited time. As part of this exercise I also wrote an introductory editorial on New Skills, New Challenges: CPD in the Information Profession which can be found with the articles. But don't worry if you don't get a chance to read it now - there is also a version of my editorial available in the Cambridge repository. Currently under an embargo it will be available to read early next year. 

Putting together this editorial was an interesting exercise. I've never been a big fan of literature reviews and even choosing publications from a defined list was hard. It was also difficult to get the balance and tone of the actual editorial right but I think I managed it in the end. It really helped me to focus and gave me a new perspective on some of the other writing projects I'm working on.

I've written a lot in the past about librarians getting involved in the publication process and I can recommend literature reviews as a route to try. They are often more helpful to readers than the original articles as all the hard work has been done for them! 

The Unexpected Side of Working in Research Support - CILIP Careers Day

Last week I traveled what is starting to become a familiar route down to London to speak at the CILIP Careers Day. This annual one day event started in 2017 as a way to reach out to those who have been working in the information profession for a while and were looking for a way to take the next step or refresh their career. The sessions included both talks and practical workshops from people working in a variety of different sectors. We also heard about valuable techniques such as networking, reading a job advertisement and how to move on if you are stuck in a career rut.

I was asked to speak about working in research support, an area which is becoming increasingly important in libraries as evidenced by the number of job advertisements that keep cropping up in this area. Librarians sometimes get nervous about the language that is used in these adverts and worry that because they are not experts in areas such as Open Access and Research Data Management that they shouldn't apply for these roles. However, if you actually look at the skills that are being asked for then hopefully it should become apparent that librarians know a lot about this area already:

• We are used to dealing with and describing data in order to open it up to a wider audience
• Librarians tend to be very adaptable and good and problem solving - ideal for dealing with publishers who change their policies (and consequently your department workflows) at a moments notice
• We know about different methods of publishing and the differences between them - for example that journals often appear in print/online faster than books. This is the kind of advice we can pass on to our users
• We are accustomed to explaining sometimes complex procedures and rules to our users in a way that makes sense to them which comes in handy when trying to explain various Open Access policies!

The point that I (hopefully) made on the day was that librarians often expect to be baffled by research support roles but once they start digging a bit deeper then they realise that they know more than they think. As with any librarian role the subject knowledge can be learnt, it is much harder to be the sort of person who has the aptitude to work in research support but I think librarians have all of the necessary traits already.

Every day working in research support is different, even if the tasks can sometimes seem a little bit routine. In my own department there is always something to make the day go faster - like the time that someone uploaded multiple images of penguin guano as the data supporting their publication, the day my office crashed the Cambridge University server by publishing Dr Stephen Hawking's thesis or the fact that I have a Krispy Kreme loyalty card for work purposes! 

As well as getting to meet a great bunch of people (and hopefully not putting them off a career in research support!) I learnt a lot from the other sessions. I've always been a bit nervous of networking but the excellent session by Jo Wood and Michael Jones helped to boost my confidence so will probably be my top takeaway.

For those interested in either working in research support or what colour penguin guano is, my slides are available below:

Penguin Poop, Breaking the Internet and Doughnuts: What It's Really Like Working in Research Support from Claire Sewell

Skills in Scholarly Communication – Needs & Development

This post is reblogged from Unlocking Research, the blog of the Office of Scholarly Communication, Cambridge.

This blog post is part of the write-up of an investigation into the background of people working in scholarly communication, with a specific focus on skills.

Introduction

Library staff need to have a wide range of skills in order to undertake their roles. Whatever type of library they work in and whatever their individual role there is a range of both generic and specialist skills which staff need to acquire over the course of their career. In the Office of Scholarly Communication our focus is on making sure library staff are equipped to work in research support roles but we also have a wider interest in who makes up the global scholarly communication workforce.

In late 2016 we conducted a survey to find out more about this issue. We were slightly overwhelmed by the popularity of the survey which gathered over 500 responses from people who self-identified as working in scholarly communication which we defined as:

The process by which academics, scholars and researchers share and publish their research findings with the wider academic community and beyond. This includes, but is not limited to, areas such as open access and open data, copyright, institutional repositories and research data management.

You can read a summary of some of the findings from this research here but we wanted to delve a little deeper and look at which skills scholarly communication staff felt they needed and how they developed them. This blog post looks at that question.

Which skills?

Rather than come up with yet another list of skills that staff should or could have we made the decision to use an existing list from UKeIG – the UK eInformation Group of CILIP. This list is comprehensive in its coverage and we felt that it would provide a good basis for future comparisons as well as providing a list with which the community would be familiar. The list is of course not exhaustive and respondents were invited to add any additional skills which they felt were relevant to their roles.

Respondents were asked to highlight the skills which they used in their current roles. Their responses are summarised in Figure 1 (all figures can be viewed at higher resolution by clicking on them).

FIG 1: Skills used in current roles

Institutional repository (management/curation) (72%) and Copyright (63%) were the skills most used, closely followed by Open Access – content discovery (59%) and Understanding metrics (55%).

Some skills were used with much less frequency such as Resource Description and Access (RDA) (10%), Post-cancellation access and archiving (9%) and Mobile technology (8%). Under the option Other skills specified by respondents included knowledge of open educational resources, educating faculty and students about how to get published and electronic theses.

Skills for future roles

Respondents were also asked to select the skills they felt would be important for the future of the profession. The results are summarised in Figure 2:

FIG 2: Skills of importance to the future of the profession

The top four selections had a similar number of responses: Innovations in academic publishing (51%), Research data management (50%), Understanding the user experience (47%) and Copyright (46%). It is interesting to note that Copyright is the only skill to appear in the top five of both current and future skills.

The other end of the scale again included RDA (6%) and Post-cancellation access (7%) as well as working with standards (6%). Under the option Other skills included instruction and education, developing strategic partnerships and gumption!

Developing these skills

What we really wanted to know was how people working in scholarly communication developed these skills – through their formal education, on the job training or self-directed learning. Survey respondents were asked how they had developed the skills included on the UKeIG list, and their responses can be seen in Figure 3 below:

FIG 3: How did you develop your knowledge about the following areas?

Almost all of the respondents had some level of either undergraduate or postgraduate education, with 71% either holding or working towards a postgraduate qualification in library and information science. Given this, it is surprising to note that so few felt that they had developed the skills they needed for their role through formal education. This gap could perhaps be attributed to the fact that 74% of respondents have held their qualifications for a significant amount of time and so these subjects were not offered at the time. They would have had little choice but to learn these skills on the job or in their own time as it was unlikely to be practical to return to formal education.

Generic skills on the list scored much higher with participants for formal education, perhaps because library school courses are designed to produce well-rounded information professionals able to work in a variety of sectors and so cover the skills that are most likely to be of use in a broad career.

Looking at the results in more detail we can see that a potential skills gap is being created. Looking at the top five skills respondents’ have identified as using in their current role we can see that the levels of formal learning for each are low (Figure 4).

FIG 4: Current needs: How are these skills being addressed?

There is evidence that this skills gap could continue into the future. Figure 5 shows the top five skills respondents think will be of most importance to the future of the profession. Again the numbers developing these skills through formal education are low, showing that those working in scholarly communication are having to rely on either on the job or self-directed learning to develop the skills they identify as being important to the future of the profession.

FIG 5: Future needs: How are these skills being addressed?

Next steps

We will continue to analyse the results of the survey to find out more about how those working in scholarly communication have developed their skill sets and how they see future offerings being delivered. In the meantime the OSC is part of a group which is looking to tackle the provision of dedicated scholarly communication in the UK. As well as sharing our discussions on this blog you can talk to us at various events. We have already visited RLUK and are scheduled to present at LILAC and CILIP Careers Day so do come and chat to us if you have a chance!

Originally published: Unlocking Research, March 23rd 2018

Cool Cartoons

One of my biggest achievements of 2017 was having my first peer reviewed article published in the New Review of Academic Librarianship. It was an intense experience and I learnt a lot - not least to cut our research community a bit of slack. I was only writing one article - they write several! 

I was thrilled to learn at the end of the year that the article was being turned into a cartoon abstract. These are cartoon versions of the usual textual abstract that goes with the article. They come in a variety of formats depending on the interpretation of that particular artist(s). Cartoon abstracts are also a really good way to make an instant impact with your article. The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is true - the casual reader's attention is caught more by a an image than a paragraph of text that they have to read through. It also great to see someone else's interpretation of my work (particularly as I'm not artistic myself). Plus, it's kind of cool!

You can see the cartoon abstract by clicking below and you can read the accompanying article here (OA).

The Research Support Ambassador Programme

Developing the Staff of the Future: Training Librarians in 2017

This post is reblogged from Unlocking Research, the blog of the Office of Scholarly Communication, Cambridge.

2017 was an exciting year for training our library community. As well as continuing to cover the basics of research support, the OSC was able to introduce new topics and new methods of delivery to ensure that Cambridge library staff have all the information they need to support the research community. In this blog post our Research Support Skills Coordinator Claire Sewell reflects on the successes of the past year and her plans to make 2018 even better.

This time last year I was reflecting on my first full year in my role, having started in November 2015. After more than two years in the role some things have remained constant but there have also been a great many changes in training, so it seemed like a good idea to stop and reflect again.

The OSC runs two parallel professional development schemes for library staff: Supporting Researchers in the 21^st Century and the Research Support Ambassador Programme. Supporting Researchers is open to all library staff and offers a regular programme of training in areas related to research support throughout the year. The Research Support Ambassadors programme is a more intensive programme which runs every summer and is designed to create a library workforce who feel confident in helping researchers with their queries.

Supporting Researchers in the 21^st Century

The world of the academic library is changing and it’s important that institutions work to equip the staff with the knowledge they need to take advantage of these changes. The Supporting Researchers programme offers a range of training opportunities from general talks to in-depth workshops which are designed to help staff keep on top of the rapidly changing world of scholarly communication.

In 2017 we ran twenty-three training events catering to the needs of over four hundred staff. In addition to covering some of the expected areas such as Open Access and Research Data Management we looked at some new areas such as Text and Data Mining and predatory publishing. These sessions proved to be a hit with attendees, with 70% of those attending rating the sessions as ‘excellent’. They were also enthusiastic in their feedback:

Excellent session on predatory publishers. We’ve started to get a lot of questions in this area and knowing more about it came at the perfect time

It was really engaging and a perfect introduction to the topic. I only had a vague idea at the outset as to what predatory publishing is but by the end of it I felt really well-informed (and in a short space of time!)

In order to help staff plan their time and attendance we experimented with forming sessions into mini programmes which resulted in our Librarian Toolkit sessions on Helping Researchers Publish and Open Access. This seemed to be successful so it’s something we’ll be continuing in 2018. By far our most successful session was How to Spot a Predatory Publisher, which was delivered in direct response to demand from staff who were getting a lot of questions from their users on the topic. It was so successful that we’ve gone on to produce some local guidance and a webinar which has over 300 views to date.

Research Support Ambassador Programme

In 2017 the Research Ambassador Programme ran from August to October and attracted eighteen participants from across colleges, departments and the University Library. We tried something a little different this year by making most of the training available online. Librarians are notoriously busy people and coupling this with summer holidays and the introduction of a new library management system meant that it would have been impractical to schedule in a host of face-to-face sessions. The initial introductory workshop ran as an in-person session to allow Ambassadors to meet each other and put faces to names but all other sessions were delivered as interactive webinars.

Although formal feedback is still being collated, initial responses have been positive:

I feel much more confident now that I have a good overview of all the issues confronting researchers and I will be able to know how to train researchers and who to refer them to for more information

Thanks for the programme. The content was really interesting and delivering via webinar was helpful as I didn’t have to leave my desk. I feel much more confident in dealing with researcher questions now.

Now that we have three cohorts of past Research Ambassadors in Cambridge it’s time to expand the programme for those still wishing to be involved. It’s hoped that this will create a community of research support librarians and strengthen it into the future as new staff take part in the programme.

Webinars

Introducing a new training format is always a challenge but in the case of OSC webinars it’s one where the hard work has paid off. Many library staff have commented over the past two years that although they would like to attend training session they can’t due to issues with library staffing and other commitments. Repeating sessions and varied scheduling helps to some extent but we felt that more could be done. Having attended many webinars myself I knew they were a great way to attend training without having to leave my desk, especially if recordings could be accessed at a later date.

Over the course of 2017 the OSC delivered a total of nine webinars for library staff. Feedback on the format from library staff was positive:

Working in a small Library where most staff are part time makes it difficult to get out of the Library to attend training so being able to take part online was great.

I really enjoy the ability to listen back at a convenient time; I often cannot leave the library at short notice due to lack of cover, or unforeseeable research enquiries that overrun and unfortunately take precedence over courses etc.

Nice and flexible - can watch from anywhere!

As a result of this success, the webinar format is now being used for additional training for both the research community and an audience beyond Cambridge.

Moving beyond Cambridge

It’s also been a busy year for training library staff outside Cambridge. In May I went to talk to CPD25, the staff development programme of the M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries on Making the Modern Academic Librarian and gave a presentation on the Librarian as Researcher to CILIP in Kent in November. I was also lucky enough to visit Salzberg to talk about the skills librarians can bring to the support of Text and Data Mining. The OSC has also been involved in talking to other interested stakeholders about the wider need for research support training for library staff which has led to some exciting progress.

We’ve also been busy talking about Cambridge initiatives to the wider world. In April 2017 I went to LILAC – the major information literacy conference for librarians – in Swansea and gave three presentation including a poster on the Supporting Researchers in the 21^st Century programme, a presentation on the Research Support Ambassador programme and a workshop on Engaging Students with Research Data Management. This has led to a wider interest in these programmes and the issue of research support training more widely.

Perhaps the biggest impact we’ve had has been the publication of an article on the Research Support Ambassador Programme in the New Review of Academic Librarianship. To date this has had over two thousand views and was the most read article published in the journal in 2017. I was very excited to discover this week that it has its first citation and that it has been chosen to receive a cartoon abstract as part of the launch of the publisher’s new librarian platform this year. Lots to look forward to!

Future plans

So, what next? Plans for the Research Support Ambassadors are moving forward and we have several interesting sessions lined up for our librarians already. There has also been a lot of interest in offering training to a wider audience starting with a session on Moving Into Research Support in February and more to come. Hopefully there will also be more publications in the future and of course updates on this blog. The OSC is very much looking forward to working with our library community throughout 2018 and beyond to bring them more exciting training opportunities. 

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. 

Predatory Publishers Revisited

At the time of writing the most popular post on my blog is one that looks at the problem of predatory publishers and how to tell if a publisher is genuine. This was based on some work that I did at Cambridge including a training session for library staff.

Over the past few months we've been experimenting in the OSC with delivering training content electronically via webinars. So far this has been a success so as part of Open Access Week 2017 I delivered a webinar version of my training session. Since there has been so much interest in the original blog post I thought I would share some additional resources. Below you'll find a recording of the webinar, the slide deck, a link to the official OSC guidance and a predatory publisher checklist. Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY license and available for reuse (with the caveat that I'm a librarian not a lawyer so none of this should be taken as legal advice!). I hope it's helpful - please let me know if you use any of the material and what people thought!

Webinar recording (23:27)

Slide deck

How to Spot a Predatory Publisher from Claire Sewell

Predatory publisher checklist

OSC guidance

https://osc.cam.ac.uk/about-scholarly-communication/author-tools/considerations-when-choosing-journal/predatory-publishers

Internet Librarian International 2017

For the last couple of days I've been in London attending my second Internet Librarian International conference. The event aims to bring together an international audience of librarians to talk tech, tips and new innovations. I was there in a dual capacity - helping to staff the SLA Europe stand and giving a presentation on the work of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge. This presentation was part of a new strand at the conference on New Scholarly Communications which is an area many academic libraries are becoming increasingly concerned with as they move to develop and enhance the support they offer to their research community. There was a lot of other great information from the conference but in this blog post I'm going to focus on the scholarly communication track.

Several themes emerged which helped to tie the talks together. One such theme was the benefit that can be gained by encouraging researchers to promote their work via social media. Andy Tattersall from The University of Sheffield talked about the work he has done with academics to get them using social media to share their outputs. He recommends treating site recommendations like writing a prescription - instead of just encouraging people to use a tool because it's trendy we need to really think about what the tool is and why it's useful for that particular researcher. He used the example of someone working in linguistics where a YouTube presence might have more impact that a Twitter account. Andy has also adapted Maslow's famous Hierarchy of Needs to show the different tools which could most benefit researchers at different stages of their career (seen in slide number 24 of this presentation) which is a great visual way of getting the information across. This theme was continued by Nick Sheppard from the University of Leeds in his case study on using social media to engage the research community. He pointed out that modern academic libraries are central to the dissemination of the message of the university, most obviously through providing access to its research outputs. One of the aspects Nick has been looking at is the range of places this output is being accessed from (as seen in the tweet below):

#ILI2017 Feeling envious of libraries with research support teams who have time to collate/analyse this type of data pic.twitter.com/4yIBKyC5s1

— AlisonMcNab(@AlisonMcNab) October 18, 2017

Showing this kind of evidence to researchers really helps to show them the impact that sharing their research can have and libraries are ideally placed to offer help and advice. We're used to dealing with information, can help with copyright queries and often have a solid working knowledge of different social media platforms. I certainly learnt about a few new ones in the course of ILI!

Unsurprisingly in a track focusing on scholarly communication another theme was openness. The theme of open research is one of the core areas of modern scholarly communication and certainly underpins everything we do in Cambridge but there are of course external pressures to consider. One of these pressures is around the cost of an education. There are of course tuition fees to pay but I was surprised to learn from Bruce Massis from Columbus State College that textbooks can add as much as 31% to the cost of a course. This puts the cost of a college education beyond the reach of many, even if they can afford the initial fees and living costs. Massis suggests that one answer to this is using Open Educational Resources (OER) instead of the original textbook. OERs aim to equip students with what they need to learn on day one of their course but they need to be of good quality. Again this is where the library has a role to work with educators to adapt or create resources that are useful to students. The theme of openness was also present in the talk by William H. Mischo and Mary Schlembach from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who outlined their work opening up library spaces through digital scholarship centres. These centres combine technology with library space to encourage innovation and open up the library to new audiences.

The final theme of the track looked at the different services that libraries are providing in research support. Alison McNab from the University of Huddersfield talked about the new developments in reference management software, something researchers are always asking us about in Cambridge. She pointed out that these now go far beyond just managing references and offer services which integrate into every stage of a researcher's process. She recommends a flipped classroom approach when teaching students to use these tools. There are many instructional videos available from the companies behind the software so have students watch those in advance and then save class time for their questions and comments. Finally Andy Tattersall cautioned us to remember that researchers are busy people. When we're giving them advice on which software to use we need to remember that they have limited time to learn. Make things short and snappy so that it fits into their day (and their attention span!).

As part of the strand I co-presented on the work of the OSC including it's triumphs and challenges and if this is of interest it can be found via the Cambridge repository. Overall ILI provided another great conference experience. I came away with lots of different ideas to put into practice over the next year until ILI 2018. If you want to know more about the rest of the sessions then multiple tweets can be found via #ILI2017.

Pin the Activity on the Research Lifecycle

Over the summer I ran the third iteration of the Research Support Ambassador programme at Cambridge. Every year I try to tweak the programme a little in response to feedback, getting rid of the bits that don't work and improving the bits that do. One piece of feedback I've had from previous runs is that participants would welcome a basic introduction to the scholarly communication landscape and how this relates to libraries. In response I ran the first Ambassador session as an interactive workshop called Scholarly Communication 101. 

Part of this workshop is an activity designed to get librarians thinking about how their work supports the research community. It's kind of like pin the tail on the donkey but without a prize as there isn't really a correct answer! Participants are shown a basic research lifecycle and given a brief explanation of the different stages. They then have to identify which of the stages they feel their role most closely aligns to and indicate this on the lifecycle (using a small librarian graphic). Next they are shown cards representing various research activities (data management, literature searching, grant proposals etc) and asked to indicate with stickers which activities their library currently undertakes and which activities they feel the library should be working on. These activity cards are then attached to the lifecycle. The end result looks something like this:

The point to this exercise was to illustrate to library staff who may be new to research support just how deeply both they and their library are involved in the research lifecycle. There is involvement at every stage through both new and existing services and the activity often provides a good jumping off point for discussions about the library's role in research support. I've run this exercise a couple of times and the results were quite interesting. Obviously what follows is a very non-scientific analysis of the outcomes from this activity but it does show some interesting patterns.

Which lifecycle stage do librarians identify with?
In fairness to the participants I asked them to only choose one stage to identify with but as expected they overwhelmingly went with the discover stage. There were a couple of librarians in the plan and manage stages but as a rule they tended to favor discovery. Given the established role of librarians this isn't a surprise and sparked useful discussions about the changing nature of library work.

Which services does the library currently provide?
Obviously this depends on the individual library and their audience. I'm also well aware that at Cambridge we have a well supported library system which impacts on the type and range of services we are able to provide. The results show that Cambridge libraries provide a wide range of services although staff had not always thought about them explicitly in terms of the research lifecycle.

By far the most popular current services were Open Access (in this context taken to mean OA advice and training), literature searching, citation advice and copyright. Also popular were reference and data management and advice on social media. Many of these represent 'traditional' library services in an academic context so participants were fairly keen to claim them. Interestingly there were no results for advice on publication agreements or the right format for publication, both of which are key elements of the research lifecycle. In both groups this led on to discussions about whether librarians had the skills needed to provide this type of advice. The conclusion was that they did and in fact often provided adhoc advice even if they didn't focus on it as a dedicated service. When participants placed these activities on the lifecycle they were spread across three of the five areas with only one (literature searching) ending up in the discovery stage they had previously identified with. 

Which services should the library be providing?
This turned out to be an interesting question. Following on from what was in the scope of the academic library there was lots of discussion about the types of service that should be provided. Again Open Access support, reference management, literature searching and citation and copyright advice were the most popular services but there was more of an even spread among the other areas. 

Providing advice on publication format was the only service not to be selected by any participants which needs further investigation on my part. Given that library staff felt that they had the skills and knowledge to provide this why aren't they? One suggestion was that it might be outside the scope of the library's role but it's something I've been working on addressing with training and support. Again these activities were spread out across the lifecycle when added by participants.

Conclusion

These results are in no way scientific and conclusive but they do point towards some interesting trends which will help me inform my future training. The most valuable aspect of this activity was in showing participants that both what they are already doing and what they would wish to do compliment the whole of the research lifecycle rather than being concentrated in one area. Hopefully after this participants would identify with more than just the discovery section of the cycle and place their token accordingly.

Resources

If you want to try this activity with your own staff as a way to open up a wider discussion or just as a way to find out how they understand their role in research support the materials can be downloaded here. If anyone does have a go I'd be really interested to learn about the results and whether they are similar across libraries or vastly different. Happy pinning!