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Strategies for engaging senior leadership with RDM – IDCC discussion

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This blog post gathers key reflections and take-home messages from a Birds of a Feather discussion on the topic of senior management engagement with RDM, and while written by a small number of attendees, the content reflects the wider discussion in the room on the day. [Authors: Silke Bellanger, Rosie Higman, Heidi Imker, Bev Jones, Liz Lyon, Paul Stokes, Marta Teperek*, Dirk Verdicchio]

On 20 February 2017, stakeholders interested in different aspects of data management and data curation met in Edinburgh to attend the 12th International Digital Curation Conference, organised by the Digital Curation Centre. Apart from discussing novel tools and services for data curation, the take-home message from many presentations was that successful development of Research Data Management (RDM) services requires the buy-in of a broad range of stakeholders, including senior institutional leadership. 

Summary

The key strategies for engaging senior leadership with RDM that were discussed were:

  • Refer to doomsday scenarios and risks to reputations
  • Provide high profile cases of fraudulent research
  • Ask senior researchers to self-reflect and ask them to imagine a situation of being asked for supporting research data for their publication
  • Refer to the institutional mission statement / value statement
  • Collect horror stories of poor data management practice from your research community
  • Know and use your networks – know who your potential allies are and how they can help you
  • Work together with funders to shape new RDM policies
  • Don’t be afraid to talk about the problems you are experiencing – most likely you are not alone and you can benefit from exchanging best practice with others

Why it is important to talk about engaging senior leadership in RDM?

Endorsement of RDM services by senior management is important because frequently it is a prerequisite for the initial development of any RDM support services for the research community. However, the sensitive nature of the topic (both financially and sometimes politically as well) means there are difficulties in openly discussing the issues that RDM service developers face when proposing business cases to senior leadership. This means the scale of the problem is unknown and is often limited to occasional informal discussions between people in similar roles who share the same problems.

This situation prevents those developing RDM services from exchanging best practice and addressing these problems effectively. In order to flesh out common problems faced by RDM service developers and to start identifying possible solutions, we organised an informal Birds of a Feather discussion on the topic during the 12th IDCC conference. The session was attended by approximately 40 people, including institutional RDM service providers, senior organisational leaders, researchers and publishers.

What is the problem?

We started by fleshing out the problems, which vary greatly between institutions. Many participants said that their senior management was disengaged with the RDM agenda and did not perceive good RDM as an area of importance to their institution. Others complained that they did not even have the opportunity to discuss the issue with their senior leadership. So the problems identified were both with the conversations themselves, as well as with accessing senior management in the first place.

We explored the type of senior leadership groups that people had problems engaging with. Several stakeholders were identified: top level institutional leadership, heads of faculties and schools, library leadership, as well as some research team leaders. The types of issues experienced when interacting with these various stakeholder groups also differed.

Common themes

Next we considered if there were any common factors shared between these different stakeholder groups. One of the main issues identified was that people’s personal academic/scientific experience and historic ideals of scientific practice were used as a background for decision making.

Senior leaders, like many other people, tend to look at problems with their own perspective and experience in mind. In particular, within the rapidly evolving scholarly communication environment what they perceive as community norms (or in fact community problems) might be changing and may now be different for current researchers.

The other common issue was the lack of tangible metrics to measure and assess the importance of RDM which could be used to persuade senior management of RDM’s usefulness. The difficulties in applying objective measures to RDM activities are mostly due to the fact that every researcher is undertaking an amount of RDM by default so it is challenging to find an example of a situation without any RDM activities that could be used as a baseline for an evidenced-based cost benefit analysis of RDM. The work conducted by Jisc in this area might be able to provide some solutions for this. Current results from this work can be found on the Research Data Network website.  

What works?

The core of our discussion was focused on exchanging effective methods of convincing managers and how to start gathering evidence to support the case for an RDM service within an institution.

Doomsday scenarios

We all agreed that one strategy that works for almost all possible audience types are doomsday scenarios – disasters that can happen when researchers do not adhere to good RDM practice. This could be as simple as asking individual senior researchers what they would do if someone accused them of falsifying research data five years after they have published their corresponding research paper. Would they have enough evidence to reject such accusations? The possibility of being confronted with their own potential undoing helped convince many senior managers of the importance of RDM.

Other doomsday scenarios which seem to convince senior leaders were related to broader institutional crises, such as risk of fire. Useful examples are the fire which destroyed the newly built Chemistry building at the University of Nottingham, the fire which destroyed valuable equipment and research at the University of Southampton (£120 million pounds’ worth of equipment and facilities), the recent fire at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and a similar disaster at the University of Santa Cruz.

Research integrity and research misconduct

Discussion of doomsday scenarios led us to talk about research integrity issues. Reference to documented cases of fraudulent research helped some institutions convince their senior leadership of the importance of good RDM. These cases included the fraudulent research by Diederik Stapel from Tilburg University or by Erin Potts-Kant from Duke University, where $200 million in grants was awarded based on fake data. This led to a longer discussion about research reproducibility and who owns the problem of irreproducible research – individual researchers, funders, institutions or perhaps publishers. We concluded that responsibility is shared, and that perhaps the main reason for the current reproducibility crisis lies in the flawed reward system for researchers. 

Research ethics and research integrity are directly connected to good RDM practice and are also the core ethical values of academia. We therefore reflected on the importance of referring to the institutional value statement/mission statement or code of conduct when advocating/arguing for good RDM. One person admitted adding a clear reference to the institutional mission statement whenever asking senior leadership for endorsement for RDM service improvements. The UK Concordat on Open Research Data is a highly regarded external document listing core expectations on good research data management and sharing, which might be worth including as a reference. In addition, most higher education institutions will have mandates in teaching and research, which might allow good RDM practice to be endorsed through their central ethics committees.

Bottom up approaches to reach the top

The discussion about ethics and the ethos of being a researcher started a conversation about the importance of bottom up approaches in empowering the research community to drive change and bring innovation. As many researcher champions as possible should convince senior leadership about important services. Researcher voices are often louder than those of librarians, or those running central support services, so consider who will best help to champion your cause.

Collecting testimonies from researchers about the difficulties of working with research data when good data management practice was not adhered to is also a useful approach. Shared examples of these included horror stories such as data loss from stolen laptops (when data had not been backed up), newly started postdocs inheriting projects and the need to re-do all the experiments from scratch due to lack of sufficient data documentation from their predecessor, or lost patent cases. One person mentioned that what worked at their institution was an ‘honesty box’ where researchers could anonymously share their horror data management stories.

We also discussed the potential role of whistle-blowers, especially given the fact that reputational damage is extremely important for institutions. There was a suggestion that institutions should add consequences of poor data management practice to their institutional risk registers. The argument that good data management practice leads to time and efficiency savings also seems to be powerful when presented to senior leadership.

The importance of social networks

We then discussed the importance of using one’s relationships in getting senior management’s endorsement for RDM. The key to this is getting to know the different stakeholders, their interests and priorities, and thinking strategically about target groups: who are potential allies? Who are the groups who are most hesitant about the importance of RDM? Why are they hesitant? Could allies help with any of these discussions? A particularly powerful example was from someone who had a Nobel Prize winner ally, who knew some of the senior institutional leaders and helped them to get institutional endorsement for their cause.

Can people change?

The question was asked whether anyone had an example of a senior leader changing their opinion, not necessarily about RDM services. Someone suggested that in case of unsupportive leadership, persistence and patience are required and that sometimes it is better to count on a change of leadership than a change of opinions. Another suggestion was that rebranding the service tends to be more successful than hoping for people to change. Again, knowing the stakeholders and their interests is helpful in getting to know what is needed and what kind of rebranding might be appropriate. For example, shifting the emphasis from sharing of research data and open access to supporting good research data management practice and increasing research efficiency was something that had worked well at one institution.

This also led to a discussion about the perception of RDM services and whether their governance structure made a difference to how they were perceived. There was a suggestion that presenting RDM services as endeavours from inside or outside the Library could make a difference to people’s perceptions. At one science-focused institution anything coming from the library was automatically perceived as a waste of money and not useful for the research community and, as a result, all business cases for RDM services were bound to be unsuccessful due to the historic negative perception of the library as a whole. Opinion seemed to confirm that in places where libraries had not yet managed to establish themselves as relevant to 21st century academics, pitching library RDM services to senior leadership was indeed difficult. A suggested approach is to present RDM services as collaborative endeavours, and as joint ventures with other institutional infrastructure or service providers, for example as a collaboration between the library and the central IT department. Again, strong links and good relationships with colleagues at other University departments proved to be invaluable in developing RDM services as joint ventures.

The role of funding bodies

We moved on to discuss the need for endorsement for RDM at an institutional level occurring in conjunction with external drivers. Institutions need to be sustainable and require external funding to support their activities, and therefore funders and their requirements are often key drivers for institutional policy changes. This can happen on two different levels. Funding is often provided on the condition that any research data generated as a result needs to be properly managed during the research lifecycle, and is shared at the end of the project.

Non-compliance with funders’ policies can result in financial sanctions on current grants or ineligibility for individual researchers to apply for future grant funding, which can lead to a financial loss for the University overall. Some funders, such as the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the United Kingdom, have clear expectations that institutions should support their researchers in adhering to good research data management practice by providing adequate infrastructure and policy framework support, therefore directly requesting institutions to support RDM service development.

Could funders do more?

There was consensus that funding bodies could perhaps do more to support good research data management, especially given that many non-UK funders do not yet have requirements for research data management and sharing as a condition of their grants. There was also a useful suggestion that funders should make more effort to ensure that their policies on research data management and sharing are adhered to, for example by performing spot-checks on research papers acknowledging their funding to see if supporting research data was made available, as the EPSRC have been doing recently.

Similarly, if funders would do more to review and follow up on data management plans submitted as part of grant applications it would be useful in convincing researchers and senior leadership of the importance of RDM. Currently not all funders require that researchers submit data management plans as part of grant applications. Although some pioneering work aiming to implement active data management plans started, people taking part in the discussion were not aware of any funding body having a structured process in place to review and follow up on data management plans. There was a suggestion that institutions should perhaps be more proactive in working together with funders in shaping new policies. It would be useful to have institutional representatives at funders’ meetings to ensure greater collaboration.

Future directions and resources

Overall we felt that it was useful to exchange tips and tricks so we can avoid making the same mistakes. Also, for those who had not yet managed to secure endorsement for RDM services from their senior leaders it was reassuring to understand that they were not the only ones having difficulty. Community support was recognised as valuable and worth maintaining. We discussed what would be the best way of ensuring that the advice exchanged during the meeting was not lost, and also how an effective exchange of ideas on how best to engage with senior leadership should be continued. First of all we decided to write up a blog post report of the meeting and to make it available to a wider audience.

Secondly, Jisc agreed to compile the various resources and references mentioned and to create a toolkit of techniques with examples for making RDM business cases for RDM. An initial set of resources useful in making the case can be found on the Research Data Network webpages. The current resources include A High Level Business Case, some Case studies and Miscellaneous resources – including Videos, slide decks, infographics, links to external toolkits, etc. Further resources are under development and are being added on a regular basis.

The final tip to all RDM service providers was that the key to success was making the service relevant and that persistence in advocating for the good cause is necessary. RDM service providers should not be shy about sharing the importance of their work with their institution, and should be proud of the valuable work they are doing. Research datasets are vital assets for institutions, and need to be managed carefully, and being able to leverage this is the key in making senior leadership understand that providing RDM services is essential in supporting institutional business.

Published 5 May 2017
Written by Silke Bellanger, Rosie Higman, Heidi Imker, Bev Jones, Liz Lyon, Paul Stokes, Dr Marta Teperek and Dirk Verdicchio

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Libraries’ role in teaching the research community – LILAC2017

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Recently Claire Sewell, the OSC Research Support Skills Coordinator attended her first LILAC conference in Swansea. These are her observations from the event.

LILAC (Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference) is one of the highlights of the information profession calendar which focuses on sharing knowledge and best practice in the field of information literacy. For those who don’t know information literacy is defined as:

Knowing when and why you need information, where to find it and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner (CILIP definition)

Showcasing OSC initiatives

Since it was my first time attending it was a privilege to be able to present three sessions on different aspects of the work done in the OSC. The first session I ran was an interactive workshop on teaching research data management using a modular approach. The advantage of this is that the team can have several modules ready to go using discipline specific examples and information, meaning that we are able to offer courses tailored to the exact needs of the audience. This works well as a teaching method and the response from our audience both in Cambridge and at LILAC was positive.

There was an equally enthusiastic response to my poster outlining the Supporting Researchers in the 21st Century programme. This open and inclusive programme aims to educate library staff in the area of scholarly communication and research support. One element of this programme was the subject of my finalLILAC contribution – a short talk on the Research Support Ambassador Programme which provides participants with a chance to develop a deeper understanding of the scholarly communication process.

As well as presenting and getting feedback on our initiatives the conference provided me with a chance to hear about best practice from a range of inspiring speakers. A few of my highlights are detailed below.

Getting the message out there -keynote highlights

Work openly, share ideas and get out of the library into the research community were the messages that came out of the three keynote talks from across the information world.

The first was delivered by Josie Fraser, a Social and Educational Technologist who has worked in a variety of sectors, who spoke on the topic of The Library is Open: Librarians and Information Professionals as Open Practitioners.  Given the aim of the OSC to promote open research and work in a transparent manner this was an inspiring message.

Josie highlighted the difference between the terms free and open, words which are often confused when it comes to educational resources.  If a resource is free it may well be available to use but this does not mean users are able to keep copies or change them, something which is fundamental for education.

Open implies that a resource is in the public domain and can be used and reused to build new knowledge. Josie finished her keynote by calling for librarians to embrace open practices with our teaching materials. Sharing our work with others helps to improve practice and saves us from reinventing the wheel. The criteria for open are: retain, reuse, revised, remix, redistribute.

In her keynote, Making an Impact Beyond the Library and Information Service, Barbara Allen talked about the importance of moving outside the library building and into the heart of the university as a way to get information literacy embedded within education rather than as an added extra. The more we think outside the library the more we can link up with other groups who operate outside the library, she argued. Don’t ask permission to join in the bigger agenda – just  join in or you might never get there.

Alan Carbery in his talk Authentic Information Literacy in an Era of Post Truth  discussed authentic assessment of information literacy. He described looking at anonymised student coursework to assess how students are applying what they have learnt through instruction. When real grades are at stake students will usually follow orders and do what is asked of them.

Students are often taught about the difference between scholarly and popular publications which ignores the fact that they can be both. Alan said we need to stop polarising opinions, including the student concept of credibility, when they are taught that some sources are good and some are bad. This concept is becoming linked to how well-known the source is – ‘if you know about it it must be good’. But this is not always the case.

Alan asked: How can we get out of the filter bubble – social media allows you to select your own news sources but what gets left out? Is there another opinion you should be exposed to? He gave the example of the US elections where polls and articles on some news feeds claimed Clinton was the frontrunner right up until the day of the election. We need to move to question-centric teaching and teach students to ask more questions of the information they receive.

Alan suggested we need to embed information literacy instruction in daily life – make it relevant for attendees. There are also lessons to be learnt here which can apply to other areas of teaching. We need to become information literacy instructors as opposed to library-centric information literacy instructors.

Key points from other sessions

There is a CILIP course coming soon on ‘Copyright education for librarians’. This will be thinking about the needs of the audience and relate to real life situations. New professional librarians surveyed said that copyright was not covered in enough depth during their courses however many saw it as an opportunity for future professional development. The majority of UK universities have a copyright specialist of some description, but copyright is often seen as a problem to be avoided by librarians.

There is a movement in teaching to more interactive sessions rather than just talking and working on their own. Several sessions highlighted the increased pressure on and expectations of students in academia. Also highlighted were the benefits of reflective teaching practice.

There are many misconceptions about open science and open research amongst the research community. There is too much terminology and it is hard to balance the pressure to publish with the pressure to good research. Librarians have a role in helping to educate here. Many early career researchers are positive about data sharing but unsure as to how to go about it, and one possibility is making course a formal part of PhD education.

Claire Sewell attended the LILAC conference thanks to the support of the Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

Published 27  April 2017
Written by Claire Sewell 

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Shifting sands: notes from UKSG2017 workshop on skills

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Library education needs to teach skills over knowledge to remain relevant into the future, conferences are a useful place to learn about scholarly communication and libraries need to employ a wider range of staff  were some of the outcomes from two workshops held at the recent UKSG conference called “Shifting sands: Changing academic library skill sets”. The slides – which include notes from the discussions on both days – are available in Slideshare. The hashtag for the conference is #uksg17

The workshop was held twice, on Monday 10th April and on Tuesday 11th April. The audience on both days consisted of just over 50 people and were primarily library staff with a few publishers and some intermediaries. About half of the people both times had responsibility for hiring staff.

The premise of the workshop was: The nature of academic libraries is changing dramatically. What is the role of the library in a wholly open access world? And what does this mean for our staffing?

The library qualification

According to CILIP”s May 2016 document Qualified library & information professionals in Further Education – Case for Support , qualified librarians have:

  • An accredited library and information qualification
  • Chartered Membership of CILIP (MCLIP) to demonstrate ongoing engagement with the profession
  • A relevant teaching or training qualification is occasionally required
  • An IT or e-learning qualification is occasionally required.

So this then raises the question: if Scholarly Communication is becoming an increasingly important part of the work academic libraries do then what do library degrees offer in the way of training in Scholarly Communication?

A SCONUL report that came out in November 2016 – Developing the professionals of the future Views from experts in ‘library schools’ had views from seven universities offering library qualifications. Three did not mention anything related to scholarly communication (University of Ulster, University of the West of England, Robert Gordon University). Aberystwyth University and University College Dublin have new degrees in Digital Curation. Dublin Business School referred to “future library programmes” that “will incorporate modules such as the Research Librarian & the Librarian as Publisher to reflect new roles & activities in the sector”. Only City University London mentioned any scholarly communication specific topics: mentioned “research data management, repository management and digital asset management”.

While not interviewed as part of this report, it is worth noting that the library courses at Sheffield University and UCL do incorporate units relating to scholarly communication.

This paucity of inclusion of scholarly communication instruction flies in the face of a clear need. A 2012 analysis of job announcements identified ‘Scholarly communications librarians’ as a new role for health sciences. Two years later, a paper on scholarly communication coaching noted: “To successfully address the current needs of a forward-thinking faculty, the academic library needs to place scholarly communication competencies in the toolkit of every librarian who has a role interacting with subject faculty.” Five years ago, RLUK published a report Reskilling for Research which identified high skills gaps in nine key areas.

For those of you interested in this topic, the blog Changing roles and changing needs for academic librarians is a literature review of research on the issue of training for librarians.

Activity – Job analysis

The activity part of the workshop started with the room breaking into groups of four. Each group was given paper copies of a job description. The job descriptions were also available online in a GoogleDoc. The 29 job advertisements have appeared in my in-box over the past two years and were for roles based in the UK that incorporate some aspect of scholarly communication.

The participants were asked to identify from the job description the specific knowledge or systems that were being requested, the types of generic library skills the job description was asking for and the type of person they needed.

Attendees were asked to complete an online table, although post-it notes were available for those who preferred. I later transferred these responses into the document.

Discussion – reflections on job descriptions

The groups then were asked to reflect on their analysis and to have a short discussion together considering whether these were the kinds of skills, knowledge and people they are currently employing or working with? They were also asked to discuss the appropriate training source for certain skills and knowledge.

We then opened the floor.

The discussions around the way Scholarly Communication has developed were interesting. In several cases the library only had a copyright person by chance (someone happened to have that knowledge). In others an individual’s interest became a ‘thing’ that then needed to be recruited for because it becomes core. The impression was that it is only very recently that libraries have started seriously thinking strategically about staffing for Scholarly Communication.

There was (not surprisingly) some defensiveness about library qualifications. One person said “Library schools can’t churn people out with these skills because they are always changing”, and another noted that “Learning is episodic – one time learning won’t set you up for your career. These are jobs that don’t even exist yet. They should be teaching critical thinking”. These positions are both correct, however these are not new skills. Repositories have been around for over 12 years.

Another comment echoed this “Things are changing and developing all the time. What you learnt in year 1 of your qualification might be completely irrelevant by the time you do the job.” Courses should lay groundwork and be around flexibility and adaption as much as the knowledge.

The suggestions for new kinds of skills it would be useful for graduates to have included: working as part of a team, advocacy skills, liaison skills, communication, resilience, flexibility, critical thinking and the ability to adapt. One participant suggested it would be more useful to teach librarians customer service skills or relationship management. It was agreed that the university courses need to balance the base information with other types of skills and knowledge.

Professional development options

A component of the RLUK Strategic Priorities 2014-2017 is ‘A Creative Community: Nurturing leadership, innovation and skills throughout our libraries’. This was intended to be implemented by working “with Information Science schools to shape both CPD and professional training for students, fitting them for the challenges presented by modern academic libraries and the changing landscape of higher education”.

However training opportunities remain scarce. In the past couple of months, very few have been advertised. A bibliometrics course in Chicago (at great expense), a digitisation course, a course on licensing, and a catch-all on open access and open science all in London were the only courses I could find at short notice.

There are some options for the keen. The ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit is full of good resources and FOSTER offers Key Skills for Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation. There is even a MOOC on Scholarly Communication.

Indeed much training in the area of scholarly communication occurs at conferences such as UKSG. This is slightly problematic, because each individual’s experience of the same conference can differ widely. It is also difficult to demonstrate value. It is not usual to walk into a job interview with a list of the conferences you have attended.

There is also the problem of some employers not recognising the essential nature of attendance at conferences due to the perception they are ‘a bit of a jolly’. Anyone who has prepared a presentation, presented, live tweeted from that presentation, taken notes during other presentations, kept up a twitter feed on the conference hashtag, ensured the email inbox is not completely out of control, connected with all the colleagues you need to network with and written up blog posts about the event afterwards will tell you this is not very jolly at all.

Change librarians or change the library?

This discussion touches on questions about where librarians see themselves. There is some movement away from the ‘handmaiden’ role towards being a co-investigator. A recent informal question on a discussion list in the UK raised some commentary about what Scholarly Communication was. Half of the libraries who said they were offering services in areas such as open access were calling this ‘research support’ rather than Scholarly Communication. In some instances this was a deliberate choice because they saw Scholarly Communication as driving change and they didn’t wish to be associated with that agenda.

At the UKSG Forum last year Dr Sarah Pittaway presented “When is a librarian not a librarian?” where she argued we need to broaden our definition of ‘librarian’. Diversity is beneficial, she argued. Recently at the RLUK conference the issue of people working in libraries identifying as ‘not a librarian’ was a hot topic of conversation.

So we have a choice – we broaden the definition of library and librarian and bring in colleagues from other areas, or we adapt our existing staff (or both). And this itself is challenging. In a talk in 2015 at Cambridge, Susan Gibbons from Yale University spoke of the project she had undertaken to ensure that all staff have an outreach component of their role. She noted that for some existing staff this was not comfortable – they wanted to be curators. The feeling for these people was they ‘changed the rules on me’. She noted that “Some have come along the outreach path, others have moved somewhere else – and the university helps them with that move.”

Training existing staff in the area of Scholarly Communication is not just going to be culturally difficult. It is nigh on impossible in the absence of training opportunities. At Cambridge we have employed a staff member whose sole job is to address the knowledge and skills gap with our library community through the Supporting Researchers in the 21st Century and Research Support Ambassadors programmes.

Discussion: Challenges for the future

The participants were then asked to break into their groups again and discuss what the implications of the situation were for hiring processes, current staff and their own practice.

In the discussion that ensued (full notes from which have been incorporated into the slides) several issues and suggestions arose:

In terms of the recruitment process, a suggestion was that we should be looking at job descriptions and regularly review them to ensure they stay up to date – to give the opportunity to adapt and change. We also need to be placing our advertisements in different outlets to the ones that are traditionally used by libraries.

There needs to be a relaxation on the need for a library qualification, particularly for people who have years of experience in a related field. It is unlikely someone like that would spend five years getting a new qualification. One person noted they were going to do a course last year, but CILIP said that it was an academic qualification not a professional qualification, so they abandoned it. One person observed that “CILIP is the elephant in the room here”. Another noted that it is possible with CILIP to be an associate or chartered with a significant portfolio.

There was the observation that the requirement for library qualification is moving from ‘essential’ to ‘desirable’ in job advertisements, and some are just asking for experience. One participant said that increasingly library qualifications are less relevant.

The question about learning on the job came up several times. This was widely seen as being the best way, however it causes huge operational issues because of the sunk cost of the staff doing the training. It also implies that everyone is coming in at entry level. One person said they recruit “and there is not a lot of staff out there – it is a significant lack of knowledge. They have to go on a steep learning curve.” One solution for this was a person who hired three part time people to give jobs for year to develop the skills sets.

There was some concern during one of the discussion that the term ‘legacy’ staff had a connotation. In some cases their situation was not of their making. “If there are no opportunities internally then it is limited. Staff can be retrained. Make the best of who you have got”, was the argument. However another person noted that they had had to change job descriptions to get to a point that we can get the kind of person we want through recruitment.

One participant noted that the discussion was very familiar because they had been an e-resources librarian, which was a massive transition. They didn’t feel qualified, got more training from the job and from a graduate traineeship. Their concern was that we were losing the battle again in scholarly communications and library skills have not caught up again. Another observation was that library schools have narrow attitudes and it is difficult to teach skills in curiosity. This is an argument against a formal route. They also suffer from a conflict of interest because of the need to ensure a number of students – there are economic considerations.

Take home messages

It has taken me some time to get to the point of ‘going public’ on this issue. Anecdotally I have heard time and time again the dissatisfaction of librarians with their library degree. But the plural of anecdote is not data.

In an attempt to gather some evidence about where people working in scholarly communication have come from, the Office of Scholarly Communication sent out a survey in September 2016. The hypothesis was: there is a systematic lack of education on scholarly communication issues available to those entering the library profession. This is creating a time bomb skills gap in the academic library profession and unless action is taken we may well end up with a workforce not suited to work in the 21st century research library.

We received over 500 responses to the survey and we are in the process of employing a researcher to analyse findings, but initial findings show that many people working in scholarly communication come from outside the library sector.

Bringing this discussion to UKSG has been very instructive. It is still anecdotal but there are significant numbers of people who feel angry about the time and expense they have had to invest in what has been a ‘useless’ degree.

But the conversation has begun and there is the intention for several bodies in the higher education area to work together to find a solution to this looming skills gap.

Danny Kingsley attended the UKSG conference thanks to the support of the Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

Published 12 April 2017
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley 

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