You need to dress professionally, Part the second

I wrote a while ago about dressing professionally. Here's a great related post by Sarah Houghton at Librarian in Black.

Not everyone thought it was great. One of the commenters on her post said: "Just one of the reasons librarians are not taken seriously which results in inadequate pay and status."

Oh dear. The debate continues.

Research data management

There's a lot of talk in our Library lately about research data management. Our institution is in the process of creating policy around research data and the question in the Library is "How will we support research data management?"

A look at the literature tells me this isn't a new topic. Academic libraries overseas have already tackled the issue of data management and some have created libguides and web pages about it. The support provided by these institutions seems to focus on assisting with the writing of a data management plan and consulting on steps within the data management process, like file format conversion, metadata creation and the choosing of an appropriate repository to archive the data.

I'm interested in how we will approach this topic. What skills already exist in our Library to support research data management, and how much training will be required so that we are able to meet this challenge? My sense is that there is a handful of librarians who are aware of the issues and who have enough of a foundation to begin to support data management. But the roles need to be thought through: will this become another aspect of the subject- or liaison-librarian's job? Or will it be a specialist task, reserved for staff in a new "Digital Scholarship" centre in the Library?
 

Thoughts on social scholarship

My assignment this week was to examine social scholarship. There seems to be a number of terms for social scholarship, including open scholarship and digital scholarship. The definition I found most helpful was this one from Veletsianos and Kimmons:

“the open scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it – at any stage of its development.”

We were asked to explore the use of social media tools by researchers, academics or scholars - whatever you want to call them - to disseminate or enhance their research and to aid in the research process. 

It was interesting looking at the various tools that are used by researchers. Many use the common ones - Academia.edu, or LinkedIn - but what was more interesting for me was the use of tools like Twitter, Scoop.it, Slideshare and blogging. One of the common threads in the literature on this topic is the use of these tools for crowdsourcing of research and to discuss the research process - as Veletsianos and Kimmons put it: inviting ongoing criticism...at any stage of development. And yet what I found (in my tiny, unscientific study) was that the researchers I looked at didn't use the tools for this purpose. For them, it was more about getting the word out about their research output, enhancing their reputation, and gaining more citations. 

I'd be keen to do a proper study of what's going on at my University in this regard. One of the researchers I interviewed believes that the potential for the use of social media tools in research is enormous and that it has already changed scholarship.

The other area we investigated was the role librarians can play in supporting the use of social media by researchers. I can think of two main roles: training in and promotion of different tools. Are there any others you can think of?