In early July I post a question asking how many university
libraries had been involved with collecting material for this
round of the RAE. I am sorry if it seems to have taken a long
time to post the results but I felt that I wanted to give a
reasonable amount of time to allow for as many responses
as possible.
I had 16 replies to the question from a mixture of universities.
Which included both old and new as well as big and small.
Someuniversity libraries have been closely involved in
process of creating and managing their RAE collections
at a university wide level e.g. Kingston, Open University,
Leeds, Edinburgh, Imperial College.
Onthe other hand some university departmental libraries
have only been involved e.g. Brighton, Sussex.
Otheruniversity libraries have had no involvement at all
e.g. Stirling, Plymouth, LSE, Swansea, Luton.
Someuniversity libraries were involved at the last minute
to check bibliographical accuracy and had the carry out a
great deal of work in short time e.g. Napier.
Somecase university library involvement was merely to
locate materials from within their own collection or via
ILLs.
Someof the collections were very large, as one would
expect as in the case of Edinburgh with a collection of
6500 items, which required a full time member of staff to
manage it.
Somelibraries have been involved in locating materials
from within their own collections for members of staff who
are on the assessment panels e.g. Open University,
Kingston.
Onthe whole I had a relatively small number of responses.
Those who did reply highlighted a number of issues:
A sizeable number of libraries stated that they had not
been involved with the exercise.
Somedepartmental library involvement only.
Lastminute involvement tended highlight bibliographical
inaccuracies and in some cases difficulty in locating
some materials.
Insome cases libraries started out not being involved but
soon were. drawn into the process.
Finally I like to thank all those individuals who did respond to
my question.
Peter Knox
Research Support Librarian
Kingston University
Kingston Hill
Kingston upon Thames
Surrey
KT2 7LB
Telephone 0208 547 7380/5770
Email [log in to unmask]
|