Supporting Researchers

One aspect of my role that I have been asked to develop is Researcher Support. While I do have some experience in this area, it's been a while since I last dipped my toes in the world of Higher Education research. In an effort to bring myself up to speed, last week I attended an event organised by CILIP's Yorkshire & Humberside Academic and Research Libraries Group titled Supporting Researchers At Your University. I hopped on a train in the wee hours of the morning and made my way down to York.

By Rodhullandemu (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.

I found the day incredibly interesting - and really appreciated hearing about how research support has been implemented in different university Libraries across the country. A few of my observations from the day;

• Lots of Universities have merged their IT and Library departments. Those who I heard from did report that there was still some division between these groups despite becoming a merged service. In the past I have observed that this is often due to the different emphasis that Library and IT departments place on customer support.
• Lots of Libraries have a calendar of events supporting a dedicated research skills development programme.
• Everyone uses a 'Research Cycle' or a 'Research Compass' or 'Circle-Shaped-Research-Thing' to place their services in context. It works well as a visual description of an iterative process.
• The lines of responsibility between university research offices' and Libraries' appeared to be a constant theme - yet this was something that few people were willing to discuss in any detail. I appreciate that it can be a politically sensitive issue, but clear communication is an important aspect of collaboration. And in this case, collaboration between university research offices' and Libraries' is unavoidable.

I was able to take away something to think about from every presentation; from Elizabeth Gadd's recommendation that academic Librarians attend the annual ARMA conference, to Eddy Verbaan's ruminations on incentivising research data management.