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First meeting of the WHELF Research group

Posted on Posted in Research group blog

22.9.15

Thank you to Beth Hall, Academic Support Librarian at Bangor University for this blog entry following the first meeting of the newly formed WHELF Research group:

“For the WHELF Research Group, I was assigned to the strands: “Research roles for librarians”, and “Managing Data”.  For the first meeting via video-conference we were asked to come up with 2 or 3 ideas per strand that we thought would help WHELF develop support for research in these areas.

My thoughts before attending the meeting are as follows, these were from a quick brainstorm and will need further thought on whether they are worth taking forward. I was very interested to hear the range of suggestions from the rest of the group, many of us had similar ideas.  I am looking forward to seeing how we might move forward with some of these suggestions.

Research roles for librarians

  • We have specialist roles such as Repository Manager, Open Access officer.  And then we also have some formal roles as Research Librarians or others working in Academic Support/Subject Librarian teams with the responsibility for research support, and these roles can be very broad covering supporting open access, research data management, supporting the impact agenda, bibliometrics, supporting a University publications strategy, researcher training, supporting systematic reviews, providing a current awareness service, collection development for research, research tools, supporting the REF, supporting social media, and more.  Is it sustainable to be covering such a wide range of areas, should we identifying priority areas?  Could we map roles across the Welsh institutions?
  • How closely are libraries working with the University Research Offices?
  • Moira Bent will have a new book coming out in November http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=300174#.VZOow3pVhfc that some of us have contributed to.  Could we arrange an event around this?
  • Where are the developing/new areas for library research support, where should we increasing/bolstering support?
  • Would we be interested in more guidance/event around what it means to be a researcher/what is research/the research lifecycle so that we can better understand what researchers need?
  • Gather together summaries of events that have already been held on this theme e.g. Digital and Information Literacies and the Researcher @ Cardiff Uni 28-11-14

Managing Data

  • Summarising on the blog some of the recent events that have already been held on this theme e.g. Research Data Management with Andrew Cox 1st July 2015 at Cardiff Metropolitan University, event at NLW in Sept 2014, DataCite training at Cardiff and Bangor, and drawing out recommendations
  • Looking specifically at solutions for preservation of data e.g. Archivematica software”