Colleagues,

 

As promised, a round-up of responses to my request- “I'd be grateful if you could share with me details of your provision for researchers- doctoral, early career, contract etc.”

 

·         PhD students asked to attend a week-long induction programme, at which the library delivers a generic session of about 2 hours

·         New PhD students are approached by their liaison librarian and invited to meet for a session

·         Any researcher may make an appointment with their liaison librarian

·         For PGRs everything has been in flux this year, as 2015-16 saw the launch of the Liverpool Doctoral College, which is intended to be the central organising body for all PGR training, bringing together links to training delivered by academic schools, the Library, the Graduate Skills team, Careers, and so on. For the library, this had the undesired effect of doing away with the concept of compulsory and credit-bearing PGR trainings, as we used to have compulsory library training which overwhelmingly got feedback like “that was so much better than I expected” and “I thought I knew all this, but I was so wrong”!

Specifically for PGRs we have this LibGuide – http://libguides.liv.ac.uk/pgr, so you can take a look at that to see some of the training materials on offer. For all researchers we have this LibGuide - http://libguides.liv.ac.uk/researchsupport. Over this year we laid on a programme of events looking at things like social media for researchers, tools to combat information overload, copyright for researchers, how to get published, and so on.

·         We currently run EndNote, open access and research cafes but are hoping to put on a broader range of activities in the autumn-IP sessions, social media, altmetrics, OrcID…

·         We have three librarians with responsibility for research - it's a bit idiosyncratic and based on where subjects are located but we've got a 0.6 member of staff for Law, part of my new job for Business (I'm supporting PGs in a more trad subject librarian way too), and then a full time post for our Schools of Arts and Social Sciences, then a bit of someone else's role covers Health.

In terms of IL provision, you can probably get a flavour of what we cover from our online guide - http://libguides.city.ac.uk/researchers  We have subject specialists too so for very specific questions we generally refer to the most useful person but for IL teaching I think it's mostly been more generic approaches

·         At Ulster we are integrated into the University's Researcher Development Programme for new doctoral students.  We are allocated a 3-hour slot as part of the programme at the start of each semester.  The library class breaks down into services/resources and then a RefWorks introduction.  The students are encouraged to arrange a one-to-one session later in their research.  We continue to have individual faculty teams and they provide the support although this is likely to change in the not-to-distant future with a planned library restructuring to better reflect the new University vision for Teaching&Learning and Research Support.

·         http://library.northumbria.ac.uk/info-researchers - series of web pages specifically for researchers http://library.northumbria.ac.uk/info-researchers/RDE - dedicated Researcher Development Week (currently 2 or 3 focused weeks each year) http://nuweb2.northumbria.ac.uk/library/skillsplus/sublist.html?researchskills - Skills Plus is the library's online repository of all our helpguides, videos, online RLOs etc - this link takes you to our research-specific RLOs.

Researcher Development Programme, REST7001: Literature searching Available face-to-face and online Introduction to literature searching for your thesis, specialist databases, developing keywords, systematic and advanced searching techniques, citation searching keeping up to date, and accessing material outside of the university Researcher Development Programme, REST7517: Good Academic Practice and Reference Management Available online Academic integrity, referencing styles and how to cite and reference, using RefWorks, and introduction to other reference management tools Elevenses research topic sessions Measuring the academic impact of your research, improving your research visibility, and reference management.Plus usual support from Subject Librarians

·         We have recently assembled a Researcher's Toolkit which includes IL content http://libguides.ucs.ac.uk/researcherstoolkit

 

Regards,

Pete

 

 

Pete Smith LLM FHEA

Research Support Librarian  | Library and Student Support Services

 

 

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Direct line  0114 225 2525

 

For Library Research Support queries:

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