our own, offer a comprehensive suite of academic skills sessions for undergrad- uates and taught postgraduates, few have integrated comparable offerings for postgraduate research students. The library is a natural home for this. The PGDO uses a hotdesk in the UGS building at set times during a work- ing week and so maintains a good relationship with UGS colleagues and understands how best to communicate our complete training offer. This close relationship has meant that initiatives such the new mandate in 2017 that PhD students complete a Data Management Plan (DMP) at the end of their first year before progressing to the next, has meant that the rest of the team has been able to respond by developing work- shops both for PGRs themselves and for supervisors, to train on the principles of research data management, and in the use of the DMP Online tool. The PGDO also recruits, trains and mentors four postgraduate teaching assistants who carry out a number of the skills sessions for their colleagues. This has the dual benefit of offering work and development opportunities to PGR students, and also means that they facilitate the sessions from the closest possible perspective of a current research student. The PGDO herself has a PhD and so understands the per- spectives and pressure experienced by participants.
High-level support
Once the Research Skills Team had produced their ‘offer’ and a commu- nication plan, they were invited to present this with a short paper for the University Research Committee. The Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research en- dorsed the paper and commended the menu to his Director of Research col- leagues and other committee members who gave their support.
Skills as a service
The creation of a small but focussed team, ultimately means that a tightly run service with a well-defined mission can be operated by:
l A focus on processes. Admin support means that academic related library staff are free to deliver sessions and develop new materials.
l Tangible offer to the community. Working with colleagues in other library teams has enabled us to create a professional booklet which defines our offer and advertises it to the academic community.
l Flexibility to develop new courses. Open Research is beginning to be discussed more as a discrete concept (particularly in the context of REF),
January-February 2020
University of Birmingham with the new library to the right.
and although it pervades all our training we can take the opportunity to work with our Scholarly Communication Services colleagues to develop content to meet this new interest.
l Suite of publications that support main tenets of offer. A number of branded documents are used as support material in workshops and these are also available for researchers to use separately.
l Online versions of some key ideas. A number of Canvas (University of Birming- ham’s iVLE) courses have been developed, particularly a suite of content branded ‘Influential Researcher’.
l Ability to offer consultancy to profes- sional services colleagues. The developing expertise of staff in the Research Skills Team, means that they are uniquely placed to offer advice in areas such as bibliometrics. When External Commu- nications undertook work on helping academics improve their publication profiles on key databases, the team were able to consult with key individuals to suggest improvements such as author disambiguation.
Questions for the future
l After one complete academic year with the new menu of workshops, we have noted that we have a good deal of take-up from PGRs, but less from academic staff. We need to review our workshop titles and consider timings – shorter sessions with snappier titles may appeal. We also need to investigate our communication channels to work out if we can send more targeted (and perhaps branded) advertising.
l Currently our workshops are offered across the spectrum of researchers. It’s possible that some more senior staff are put off by this, should we offer separate sessions?
l We know that PGR students are given a handbook from their academic college when they start their PhD studies. Unlike
undergraduate handbooks, the produc- tion of these is not centralised, and so we would like to see what is given out in case information about the library needs to be updated.
Familiarity with a new team and services takes a long time in the bureaucracy of a university, but by working with colleagues across the ser- vice and the rest of the institution, we are building momentum with our new offer. Focussing support for individual researchers through the Research Skills Team has enabled Library Services to articulate the wealth of material, tools and value added services available to them. IP
**Since this article was written, the Research Skills Team has moved into a different division alongside Scholarly Communi- cation colleagues within Library Services, but continues to operate in the same way.
References
1 Library Services, University of Birmingham (2018). Research Skills Team.
https://bit.ly/2Rg- pVW5 (Accessed 3 May 2019)
2 We have not found a structure that mirrors ours, but would be interested to speak to col- leagues who work in this way.
3 Vitae (2010). Vitae Researcher Development Statement.
https://bit.ly/2RdHPZt (Accessed: 25 April 2019)
4 Dempsey, L., (2016). Library collections in the life of the user: two directions. LIBER Quarter- ly. 26(4), pp.338–359. DOI:
http://doi.org/10.18352/ lq.10170
5 Coalition S. (2018). Plan S: making full and immediate Open Access a reality. https://www.
coalition-s.org/ (Accessed 25 April 2019)
6 Association of College and Research Librar- ies (2013). Intersections of scholarly communi- cation and information literacy. P.20 http://www.
ala.org/Intersections (Accessed 3 May 2019)
7 Vitae (2010). Vitae Researcher Development Statement.
https://bit.ly/38pzp79 (Accessed: 25 April 2019)
8 Research Skills Team, University of Birming- ham (2019). Additional PGR Skills. https://bit. ly/2TJqauw (Accessed 29 April 2019)
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 47
RST
pp44-47.indd 5
22/01/2020 20:44
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
