In this blog post, Claire Sewell, the OSC’s Research Support Skills Coordinator reflects on a busy year for the professional development of Cambridge library staff.
Librarians are always learning and 2016 was a bumper year for training in the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC). The OSC has taken an active role in professional development since its foundation but things have stepped up since the dedicated training role of Research Support Skills Coordinator was established at the end of 2015.
The OSC runs two parallel professional development schemes for library staff:
- the Supporting Researchers in the 21st Century programme (a continuous programme of training aimed at all staff)
- and the Research Support Ambassador Programme (an annual intensive training programme, typically run in the summer months)
Supporting Researchers in the 21st Century Programme
The Supporting Researchers Programme offers training in the area of scholarly communication to all library staff at Cambridge University and is designed to equip staff with the skills they will need to work in a modern academic library.
In 2016 there were a total of 30 events attracting an audience of nearly 500 library staff. Attendees were drawn from across faculty, college and the University Library with several repeat attendees. Topics covered included:
- Altmetrics
- Bibliometrics
- Copyright
- Metadata
- Open Access
- Research data management
- Research integrity
- Presentation skills
Attendees have been quick to praise the sessions offered with an average of 71% rating sessions as excellent. Feedback has also been positive:
“[I learnt] a lot about metrics and the confidence to go and find out more”.
“Very engaging. Like the speed, got through a lot without it getting too boring or slow!”
“Appreciated that we were walked through the process and implications of funding requirements”
A presentation skills workshop – Presentations: From Design to Delivery – was by far our most popular session of 2016. Although originally scheduled to run twice, three extra sessions had to be added to cope with demand. In total 71 library staff attended these sessions and consistently rated them as excellent. We hope to build on this success by offering further presentation skills training in 2017.
Research Support Ambassador Programme
This intensive programme ran from June – October 2106 and included sixteen participants from across colleges, departments and the University Library. This spread across the University is particularly gratifying as participation is voluntary. The Research Ambassadors embarked on a training programme made up of three strands:
- Targeted training sessions in areas covered by the remit of the Office of Scholarly Communication such as Open Access and Research Data Management
- The development of transferrable skills such as leadership, presentation skills and working in teams
- Small group project work to create tangible training materials which can be shared across the wider library community
This programme has been adapted in response to feedback received after an initial pilot run in 2015. More structure was introduced through the regular training sessions which Ambassadors were required to attend. Extra optional sessions were also offered according to demand, mostly in relation to group projects. Lastly there was a narrower scope to the group project element to ensure that Ambassadors could complete the task within the time available.
The small group projects Ambassadors worked on aim to give back to the Cambridge library community by producing training materials that can be used by all under a Creative Commons licence. In 2016 Ambassadors worked on three projects:
- Digital Humanities webpages – webpages highlighting the work that Cambridge University Library is doing in this increasingly important area of scholarship.
- Metadata toolkit – these slides and associated activities can be used to teach the research community about the importance of metadata creation.
- Online videos – bite sized videos which showcase various different tools which will be of use to researchers in disseminating their research.
The Research Ambassadors are now able to work confidently in their own libraries to provide point-of-need help to the research community. At the same time they have improved their knowledge of the scholarly communication landscape and the range of ways in which they can support the research community.
Promotion
We’ve also been working hard to promote the training we offer in the OSC, both to Cambridge librarians and the wider world.
Webpages have been created for both the Supporting Researchers in the 21st Century and Research Support Ambassador programmes so that interested parties have something to refer to and all information is kept in an accessible place. We held two Research Support Ambassador Showcase sessions in April and October to allow Ambassadors to demonstrate their outcomes and reflect on their participation on both a personal and professional level. There have also been two blog posts about the initial run of the Ambassador programme from both an insider and observer perspective which helped to give new insight into the initiative.
We have more formal plans for promotion of the programme through conference proposals and journal article submissions. More details of these will be made available once we know the outcome!
Moving forward
We have some exciting plans for training in 2017. The OSC recently sent out a survey to help with planning our next round of training and the response has been overwhelming. Re-runs of some popular topics such as copyright and presentation skills were requested along with new sessions on search skills and researching in the workplace. It looks like 2017 is going to be an exciting year for training so please follow our progress via this blog and our training webpages.
Published 17 January 2017
Written by Claire Sewell
