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Moving online: training librarians in 2018

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As we move into 2019 it is a good time to look back at another year spent training the library community, both in Cambridge and more widely. Over the last 12 months, the Office of Scholarly Communication has held nearly 50 training sessions for Cambridge staff on topics ranging from navigating copyright issues to the mechanics of the publishing process.  

Face to face

We have continued to deliver high-quality face-to-face training sessions on many topics. Sometimes sessions just work better when participants are all together in a room, especially if there are a lot of activities. For example, our sessions looking at Research Data Management and Data Management Plans are designed to be interactive and so wouldn’t really work in any other format. Feedback from sessions tells us that participants really value the chance to meet other librarians and hear their perspectives on things.

Cambridge has more than 100 libraries including faculties, departments, colleges and connecting institutions. Many staff do not get to meet each other unless working on a specific project and even working in the same university it can be hard to avoid becoming too focused on local issues. Attending workshops and other training sessions allows conversations to happen and several people have told us that they really value the chance to connect with their colleagues. 

Webinars to the rescue

Of course, librarians are very busy people so sometimes it’s just not possible for them to attend sessions in-person. Working in small teams often means that staff are unable to leave the library to go to training, especially when travel time and family commitments are factored into the equation.

To help with this we introduced webinars as a delivery method in 2017. This means that staff can either attend training sessions remotely or catch up with a recording.  Because of the success of this project we have continued to deliver sessions via webinar in 2018 and feedback from attendees tells us we are doing something right! Several people have commented that they have attended sessions online which they would otherwise not have been able to make but others have had some suggestions for improvement.

It can be hard to carve time out a busy schedule to attend even an hour-long webinar so there needs to be some incentive like an activity so people get the benefit of attending live. We have taken this on board and tried to build in interactive elements where appropriate. The main lesson we have learnt about webinars is that they are particularly useful for information delivery sessions which would usually involve someone standing at the front of the class delivering a talk. People can easily listen to this at their desk and/or ask questions through the webinar chat box without having to leave work.

Most of these webinars are shared with a Cambridge audience only but a few have been released more widely such as our talk on How to Spot a Predatory Publisher. As discussed in our previous post on advertising videos we have discovered that naming our content something that people are likely to Google is a great way to increase hits! 

Increasing discoverability

As we offer more and more webinars we are starting to think about the best way to collate and share these. Although they can be useful resources, people need to know where to find them without having to hunt around. One of our priorities for 2019 is to gather both our webinars and online resources together to create a mini-hub where library staff can go to find more information.

These resources include webinar recordings but also the results of two other training projects from 2018: our Research in 3 Minutes videos and our Scholarly Communication Information Booklets. Research in 3 Minutes in a series of short videos which outline basic concepts in scholarly communication. Most of these areas can be quite complicated and terminology laden and these videos aim to provide an accessible introduction. They can also be uploaded for display on screens around the library or on other webpages to engage users. We started to create Information Booklets when we realised that all librarians love a handout (at least in our experience!).

These four-page booklets can be viewed online or printed out and offer a more in-depth look at areas we are often asked about, for example what exactly is a Creative Commons license? There are six booklets in the series so far, covering everything from the publication lifecycle to academic social networking and we aim to add more in 2019. 

Online learning

One of our biggest forays into online learning took place with the Research Support Ambassador programme. This is an annual programme aimed at educating library staff on the core elements of research support and in previous years it has been run both face-to-face and via webinar.

This year we decided to do something different and used Moodle to create a completely online course. Participants were able to work though modules including video content, quizzes and discussions to test their understanding of the concepts. Each module was assessed by an activity which allowed learners to put their new knowledge into practice by undertaking a research support task. Examples of this included assessing a data management plan and attempting to spot a predatory publisher.

Overall the course was completed by 20 participants who gave us a lot of positive feedback on the format as well as suggestions for improvements. In the next few years this is something we would like to expand on, perhaps to those outside Cambridge… 

Beyond the University

That doesn’t mean we have neglected non-Cambridge librarians this year. In March our Research Support Skills Coordinator delivered two well-attended sessions on Moving Into Research Support with CILIP. The original session was so popular that we had to add a second and attendees came from around the UK to hear how they could get involved in this exciting new area. There was also a return visit to CILIP HQ in London for their 2018 Careers Day where attendees were introduced to the wonders of working in research support (including dealing with penguin poop and breaking the internet).

We also contributed to a range of other events such as LILAC 2018 and Dawson Day held in the summer – both of which gave us a chance to talk about the need for training in scholarly communication literacy for library staff. 

All in all 2018 has been a very busy year for training but we will not be slowing down in 2019. We have plans to expand our online training offer and deliver even more face-to-face sessions for our community. Who knows what this blog will contain this time next year? Readers had better stay tuned to find out! 

Published 8 January 2019
Written by Claire Sewell
Creative Commons License 

Book Review: Scholarly Communication – what everyone needs to know®

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As we wind down towards the last days of 2018, thoughts go to gifts for family and friends. Here, as our last minute gift idea to you, is a book that should be under the tree of every scholarly communication aficionado.

The following book review appeared in Research Fortnight on 15th September 2018 with the title ‘New readers start here‘. It was edited by John Whitfield and is reproduced here with permission.

Book Review

It is odd to be reviewing a book that stresses the importance of “positive reviews in…prestigious publications” to potential sales and publishers’ reputations. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that Scholarly Communication: What everyone needs to know, by Rick Anderson, is excellent.

Scholarly communication is a complex and fast-growing area. Even those working in it find keeping up to date a challenge. The challenge is much greater for those working more widely in research and academia, let alone the general public. The market is ripe for an understandable, generalist overview that explains what scholarly communication is and why anyone should care.

To address the latter point, Anderson notes in his introduction that “there are issues related to scholarly communication about which it would make sense for all of us to know something”. His argument is that decisions made worldwide on health, environment, economics and so on are all underpinned by academic research, reported through the scholarly communication system.

Anderson does a masterful job of distilling the stakeholders, issues and facts into an understandable whole. The discussions about open access and controversies and problems are handled sensitively; a challenge given the wide range of perspectives in this area.

The chapter on copyright is particularly helpful. This is a fundamental aspect of almost all scholarly communication and an area where many people are unsure. In clear language, Anderson explains fair use and fair dealing, licensing, the Creative Commons licences used in open-access publication, orphan works and patents. To do so without overwhelming or boring the reader is something of an achievement.

Anderson’s writing is eloquent and his explanations are clear and precise. Other highlights include discussions of how researchers use e-books, the projects from Google and the HathiTrust repository to digitise books, and an excellent description of how digitisation is allowing libraries to share their special and rare collections with a wider audience.

The book is structured as a series of questions with short answers of one to five pages. This format invites readers to dip in and out of the sections they are interested in. Mostly this approach is successful, although it does result in some repetition.

Anderson is also a victim, in a small way, of the very dynamism that he aims to capture. The volatility of scholarly communication means that most of the specialist discussion tends to occur in outlets that publish quickly, such as mega journals and blogs. The timescale for a regular journal article, which can take a couple of years to get from submission to publication, is too long and risks the contents losing relevance. Books have similarly long lead times; coupled with the dynamic nature of scholarly communication, this makes some out-of-dateness inevitable.

For example, in his chapter on metrics Anderson notes that “the universe of altmetrics is a highly dynamic one, and products and services…seem to be born and die nearly every month”. This is evidenced within that very chapter: among the companies offering research metrics, it mentions Thomson Reuters (whose intellectual property and science business was sold to private equity and changed its name to Clarivate Analytics in October 2016), Delicious (bought by Pinboard in June 2017) and Plum Analytics, which has kept its name but was bought by Elsevier in February 2017.

As the associate dean for collections and scholarly communication at the University of Utah, Anderson makes for a well-qualified author, although the text does reflect his North American perspective. Generally this is not a problem, although a statement such as “There is a professional organisation for university press publishing: the American Association of University Presses” implies, inaccurately, that the rest of the world lacks such organisations.

This is a vast topic, and clearly decisions needed to be made over what to include and omit. Some omissions are easier to justify than others. I would have liked a deeper exploration of the commercial academic publishing market, as this drives much of the activity in the open-access space. The lack of this might reflect the level of disagreement over even basic definitions in scholarly communication, something Anderson acknowledges.

But that’s a minor quibble. Given the need for a book such as this, it would not be surprising if it became compulsory reading for training courses in scholarly communication.

Published 18 December 2018
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
Creative Commons License

Turn on, tune in, tweet out – experiments in engagement

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This time of year is often one of reflection – what went well, what could be improved and so on. In this spirit we are putting up here an assessment of the livestreaming aspect of our outreach programme over the past couple of years.

This blog asks what was successful? What flopped? Where did we get bang for buck? Read on and find out…

Lofty goals

The OSC works towards collaborative engagement with the research community and relevant stakeholders – amongst other things, this helps us to communicate policies, promote our services and identify needs and knowledge gaps within the communities we work with.  

It will come as no surprise, therefore, that the words ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ crop up frequently when we are planning our communications. In the context of events and outreach, we usually start from the position of wanting to invite as many guests to the table as possible – not just those within the University but across the whole scholarly communication community. Given the international span of this group of people, one obvious solution is to take the party on the road – virtually speaking, at least.  

Starting in October 2016 with the ambition to make the most of technological solutions to achieve this (whilst taking into account the limits of our A/V expertise and resources), we experimented over 18 months with various platforms and approaches in order to live-stream, record and share footage from the events we hosted. Evaluating the returns on these efforts has led to some useful lessons: whilst we’d like to share our events as widely as possible, we have had to make some strategic choices to make the venture worthwhile.  

In terms of evaluating the impact of online sharing, we acknowledge that social media marketing is one small part of our Communications remit – whilst the scope for digging down into statistics on YouTube and Twitter engagement is almost unlimited, the time available to devote to this activity is not.

Stepping into the stream: live broadcasting and video recording 

Livestreaming allows viewers to remotely attend events, and we hoped to find a method of broadcasting that would adequately capture all sound and visuals (including slide presentations) whilst allowing viewers to simultaneously contribute their questions and comments. We found these goals something of a challenge!  

1. Adobe Connect

When organising one-day workshops, we initially managed the streaming, recording and processing ourselves using the Adobe Connect package (which came with the advantage that we could use the University’s subscription without any additional costs for us).

However, this method required a stable connection to the wired Local Area Network (LAN), plus high-intensity input from our team members, neither of which were factors that could always be guaranteed – many of the University’s lecture rooms are in old buildings with minimal A/V infrastructure at best, and it was not always possible to plug into sound systems or connect to the ethernet.

After the events, we made recordings of the live-stream available via our YouTube channel, despite some of them falling short of our expectations in terms of sound quality and uninterrupted broadcasting. We concluded that whilst Adobe Connect was excellent for hosting webinars in a controlled environment (where the room was quiet and we were familiar with the available technological capacity) it was not suitable for livestreaming large events. 

2. Calling in the professionals

We took a different approach when organising higher profile events such as the Engaging Researchers in Good Data Management event in November 2017, hiring an external company to take care of both the livestream and video recordings. The difference in quality was remarkable – of course, you get what you pay for!

We also trialled the approach of making video recordings of one-day workshops, without live-streaming. Hiring professional recording equipment from the University Information Service to do this and having a quick in-house tutorial on how to use it again required high-intensity input from our team, although it produced higher quality results than filming through Adobe Connect.   

Was it worth it? 

After 18 months of trying out these different methods, we needed to establish if the investment of time and money was reaping rewards, particularly given that the hire of professional equipment and services accounted for the largest single expense for an event. We needed to decide how much priority to give recording and streaming events for sharing in our Communications Strategy.  

A summary of the statistics showed: 

  • maximum livestream engagement reached 50 participants (for the Engaging Researchers event)  
  • engagement with our content on YouTube at the time of dissemination (through advertising in our newsletters, emails and Twitter accounts) varied from ten clicks to 600 clicks. 

The engagement statistics at the time of the event were moderate, and the audience for the livestream did not exceed the audience in the room. We therefore concluded that we would reserve the option of livestreaming for events where sharing on-the-spot footage was of significant benefit to the wider scholarly communication and research data community – for instance for high-profile conferences or politically urgent discussions.

We would continue to hire professional AV services to video ‘headline’ events that were of interest to the community, but would not make recording standard practice for every event.  

A last experiment… 

We realised there was another aspect to this question: after the initial promotion of the recordings, they sat dormant in the YouTube playlist and embedded on our websites, relying on users discovering them by serendipity. We needed to think about continuing to maximise returns on the investment.   

In order to address this additional concern, between March and June 2018, we used our twitter accounts @CamOpenData and @CamOpenAccess to re-promote 33 and 54 videos respectively. We monitored the viewings on YouTube and looked at various metrics in the Twitter analytics. 

During that period we saw an average 16% increase in the YouTube video clicks, with some videos attracting far more attention than others. These viewing figures were less than we had anticipated, and there were various hypotheses as to why: 

  • We were re-promoting the videos to an audience that may well have seen the videos the first time around, so were not offering anything new. 
  • Some videos were specialised in subject and therefore appealed to a limited audience. 
  • Some videos were lengthy and likely to hold the attention only of the most dedicated viewers. 

It was notable that the professional videos we’d commissioned performed better in YouTube as well as in Twitter in terms of engagement rates and impressions. Perhaps due to our confidence in the quality of these videos, we invested extra time in promoting them (for instance by adding images to our tweets), and engagement was indeed higher. However, the fact that many of these videos were short recordings of single presentations may also have added to their relative appeal. 

What we learnt 

There were lots of positive outcomes of this final experiment. The re-promotion campaign helped to maintain the presence of our brand on Twitter and YouTube, resulting in almost 600 clicks on existing YouTube content over three months. It added diversity to the content of our tweets and increased tweet impressions as a whole. It contributed to our strategic aim to disseminate professional knowledge, maintained contact with our community, and influenced the acquisition of new followers. 

In addition, we observed the most popular themes amongst our Twitter followers:  

  • Open access monograph publishing  
  • How to spot a predatory publisher 
  • Peer review and the benefits of openness 
  • Copyright 
  • Text & Data Mining 
  • Data management needs for different disciplines and different institutions 
  • Standard practices for managing and sharing code 
  • How to make data publications first class research outputs 

These are insights that will inform our planning for future engagement activity. 

Looking ahead 

Our re-promotion experiment has given us a handy list of priorities that will allow us to keep using our film resources even when staff time is scarce, and will inform our event planning from the outset if we know we want to record the occasion.  Our top take-away tips: 

1. Less but better – Resources are limited: livestream important events only but don’t compromise on quality.  Short videos are better received: take into account the length of talks, panel discussions and workshops. Can longer talks be naturally broken into shorter segments? 

2. Specific, practical, catchy – Take time to create engaging and specific titles for videos, and emphasise their practical focus, for example by starting with “How to”. These items are instantly more appealing to the browsing viewer, and also appear higher on search rankings when the subject is Googled.    

 3. Re-use and repurpose – Use short clips from older videos on social media when their content complements news or trends. Routinely reference videos when writing content, for example blogs or training slides. 

Want to know more? 

You can explore these recordings of past events on the OSC’s website, and subscribe to our YouTube Channel.  

For an alternative perspective on using video to engage with the research and scholarly communications communities, join our Research Skills Support Coordinator, Claire Sewell, with an expert panel for the MmIT webinar, Using Video in your library and information service, 2pm Wednesday 12 December, and look out for her upcoming blog on preparing online training.   

 Published 10 December 2018
Written by Hannah Haines and Maria Angelaki
Creative Commons License