Destroying the silo: how breaking down barriers can lead to proactive and cooperative researcher support
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Cath Dishman Liverpool John Moores UniversityKatherine Stephan Liverpool John Moores UniversityThe Research Excellence Framework open access agenda brought about opportunities for the library research support team to work more closely with the Research Office at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). The benefit of working collaboratively – for example, delivering joint sessions – raised the profile of research support across the university as a whole. As a team, we wanted to build on that by working with other support teams and academic departments across the university who share our aim of supporting researchers. Alongside that, we wanted to develop potential collaborations to make the library more visible to those that we are trying to support and develop. What we are often confronted with are individual silos where staff and academics work independently, towards the common goal of supporting researchers but with much duplication of work and practice. We would like to demonstrate how libraries are well placed to collaborate with colleagues across the university. Using examples of our own success as well as struggles, we will demonstrate how the library can be at the heart of the academic community in numerous facets: training, events, and advocacy to name a few. The session will encourage attendees to think about how they can coordinate and work with others to develop fruitful and collaborative partnerships to the benefit of their research agenda, their own department and their institution
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Destroying the silo: how breaking down barriers can lead to proactive and cooperative researcher support
- 2. We aim to: • Give you some background • Give you examples of our partnerships • Give you time to think about what you might be able to do • Give you some home truths
- 4. Research Support Team Established August 2015 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liverpool_John_Moores_University_Aldham_Roberts_Library_3.JPG Katherine Stephan Research Support Librarian @msiowaintheuk @ljmuresearch Cath Dishman Open Access and Digital Scholarship Librarian @Cath_Marlowe @ljmuresearch
- 6. Purpose
- 9. What is your purpose? Promoting & Supporting Research Excellence Activity
- 10. People
- 11. People
- 13. Activity Who could you work with?
- 14. Projects
- 17. Bigger and better this year Show off some tech Also an associated publication What do you think?
- 26. Barriers
- 30. Home Truths* *that aren’t all bad
- 31. There are always people that will never work with you.
- 32. People will always say they never heard about it, even if you advertised it everywhere.
- 33. You may not get thanked (but that’s okay).
- 34. Be open-you never know what may happen.
- 35. Despite 1-3, it’s still worth it. You never know what people get out of it (even if only one person turns up).
- 36. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liverpool_John_Moores_University_Aldham_Roberts_Library_3.JPG Katherine Stephan Research Support Librarian @msiowaintheuk @ljmuresearch Cath Dishman Open Access and Digital Scholarship Librarian @Cath_Marlowe @ljmuresearch
Editor's Notes
- *hopefully! We want you to leave today with a realistic picture of what breaking down barriers between departments/people/universities can look like. It’s not perfect and although some things have come about in a planned sort of way, there was also serendipity and chance involved, too. We are keen to not do a presentation where we talk about how wonderful our service is-we would like you to perhaps at least consider one relationship/opportunity you can build upon.
- We always aim to give a bit of context to us/our story, so that it doesn’t appear that this was all conjured immediately/without any struggle
- We are both members of the Research Support Team at Liverpool John Moores University. Including our line manager, we are currently at 2.2FTE We say this often when we do presentations, but we are a very small team at a mid-sized university with a decent research output with a number of increasing responsibilities both inside and outside of work. What this means in principle is that: We have a lot we have to do We have a lot that we need to do We have a lot that we would like to do We both really enjoy our jobs (yes, really!) and the variety and challenges that come with it. We also both really like working with other people and actively seek out opportunities. Not obsessively-but we often see things advertised and connect dots with others that would be interested. It’s taken us some time to realise that this is, at times, unusual in many work settings. BUT: we work to live, not live to work. We have children, family and interests outside of work. As stated in the brief overview of the session, our move into research support first came with Cath and her foray into research support via our online repository and involvement with Research Excellence Framework new open access requirements. Cath was managing OA repository and continuing with advocacy around open access and the REF (research excellence framework). Katherine started with research cafes (define research café) and was looking at other training we could offer. They were both new roles in a new team so we were starting out attempting to define what research support should look like in our institution. We wanted to look at what other things we could and should be offering. What we would like to focus on was how me moved beyond this and into other areas of research support, from the standpoint of : Being an entirely new team Providing relatively new services With a viewpoint to get involved anywhere we could
- The slide is how it is-we are fortunate to have a very supportive boss that sees the value in collaborative work. As she is only part-time, she also allows us the flexibility and space to make decisions, often without her. This can be tricky when you need to make a decision but in most cases, this has been fine. Let’s get started!
- We really started to crystallise our purpose as a team when we were encouraged to look beyond our team. Katherine presented about research cafes at our Professional Services conference and was approached by someone from our Research and Innovation Support team (Mel) she said it was clear to her that we needed to talk Why? Because she could see potential issue of duplication of effort The potential for collaboration and sharing The potential of using our collective skills and strengths Coherent message communicated to our customers We also knew that a new person was starting to overview training in the Doctoral Academy so the three of us made sure we met Victoria when she started as well. When we met it was clear that we too shared a purpose too. For us in the library research support team we shared an audience and purpose with both Mel and Victoria. Mel was focussed on supporting academic researchers and Victoria on postgraduate researchers. Our remit was to support both. We’d all been doing or planning similar and often complimentary things but independently of each other – some of these activities have been running in some shape or form for years without a close relationship with the people in post.
- So this is our opportunity to stop working in individual silos and start working together. Our individual endeavours hadn’t been unsuccessful but how much more successful could they have been by working more closely together. This provides an opportunity to capitalise on our shared intelligence. And for our audience potentially a better less confused experience, maybe? So it’s important to identify what your purpose is. Time for you to do some work now
- First activity is to think What is your purpose? Why does your team exist? What’s the goal? Or goals? And if you don’t know=throw out some key words/talk to the person next to do We have lots of things on our job descriptions but when we sat down and thought about our overarching purpose it’s this Promoting and Supporting Research Excellence This is important because it will open up opportunities as you become more aware of others that might share the same purpose (or even a part of it)
- So we started by working with Victoria (Doctoral Academy) and Mel (who was in Research and Innovation but has recently moved to Leadership and Development Foundation, which in itself has increased our contacts) and to begin with this was just making each other aware of what we were doing to support researchers. And started to think about who else in the university had the same purpose as us and how could we find them or be introduced to them. Things we’ve done Inviting ourselves to things we think might be relevant – so for example we found out one of our faculties was holding a research day so we asked if we could come along and we knew they were having a marketplace over the lunch so asked if we could have a stand and they said yes. We adapted a quiz that our librarian‘s had used at another conference and offered a prize which gave us a talking point on the day – this has lead to us being invited every year to this conference and the year after we were asked to talk about predatory publishing as part of the event. Used our contacts to get invites to meetings (this works both ways as we’ll suggest meetings to our contacts as well) for example Victoria was invited to be on a committee organising an event for International Women’s Day celebrating women’s research – she told us and got us invited onto the group. Being involved in this has meant we’ve made new contacts among female researchers at our institution. Our faces are out there and as a result we get asked to get involved in other events – one of our Research Leads runs a conference each year for the Institute for Health Research and asked us to help out last year. We ran the registration desk and tweeted from the event so she’s asked us to do that again this year. It involves very little effort on our part but again raises our profile and the profile of our twitter feed by giving up a bit of time The other thing we do is follow folks on twitter and retweet things – it’s a small thing but leads to new connections. With Mel and Victoria we‘ve developed a shared calendar which has all our separate events on but in one place. This means we can try not to clash sessions where we think the audience overlaps. We’ve also started to develop joint training within the institution and also gone beyond that by developing relationships with other library teams. Katherine will talk more about that later.
- Here’s some of the people we’ve identified share our purpose
- Another activity for you now. Think about who you could work with Who are the people you could potentially work with that share your purpose? This might be outside of your own institution If you don’t know, how could you find out Our people
- We run something called Research Cafes-you may have heard me talk about them in a lightning talk last year! We bring together researchers at different stages in their career to talk about a part of their work over an informal lunch. I usually mention that we are keen to work with people if they want a bespoke research café (we had had one, about systematic reviews) but not a ton of interest. After one such event last year, Dr. Claire Burke approached me, asking if I would help her run a Drone Research Engagement Day (DRED), bringing together researchers from across LJMU. As the idea developed, I asked about inviting different universities to ask to attend and if to speak, to get in touch with Claire.
- And it sounds larger than the actual work involved. I literally googled: Drone university and got a list of courses, then emailed any person attached with it. I liaised with the Everyman, who provided the space for free, and we made sure the IT was set up on the day. What was exciting is that there were a lot of people that had never met each other and people literally ‘solved’ problems with some questions after the talks. One of our favourite anecdotes was that after this, a sociologist from Lancaster wrote a book and included a chapter on the work that Claire does with drones and astro-ecology. Neither of them were aware of each other’s work before this event. In the end, we had over 60 people attend, 8 different speakers, with over 11 universities represented.
- And so this year? Claire got in touch asking us to be involved. Last time we paid for cakes. This time, they had a budget! The event has developed to probably outside of the library’s remit on the surface of it. But like we always do, we had ideas: Could we host the conference proceedings on our open journals page? Could we link the event up with the Parliament people we met on their open day? Could we promote this with universities even further afield? Could we help price up costings for food, so a corporate sponsor could pay The answer, of course, was yes.
- We have also expanded into doing training collaboratively or as a part of someone else’s training programme but integrated within it. We now have regular slots within our Research and Innovation Support team (change name) and also our Doctoral Academy, including training by our liaison librarians and IT team, where appropriate. This means that the students/staff can get the most of the best of what we do. Some of our training has morphed into slots at conferences, which can be handy (see above our Public Health event) We are now trying to meet more regularly with other colleagues to talk about planning/running joint training and hear what they are doing.
- Or, that by volunteering to help, we can get seen by others and invited to take part in something else and this can really widen our audience. We also try and interact on twitter and build up links as/when appropriate. It doesn’t take tons of time but can have a nice result.
- But working jointly with others can also mean that you can get help from them, too. Call upon other people that are at your table to learn and benefit from their knowledge too! It’s not just the people that you are helping that learn!
- Like some things you might be involved in, LJMU is in various organisations with other libraries, so the idea of working across different work settings is not unusual. For example, we are part of NoWAL-14 academic libraries in the NW and Northern Collaboration: 28 academic libraries When we first started and didn’t know as much, when a call went out for potential events, we offered to host an ‘exchange of experience’. There is a triplicate purpose to hosting events: You can learn a lot We both have caring responsibilities, so if it’s nearby, we can more often than not go (this is no joke!) We can invite people from other places we want to learn about And this is a key point-we invite people-people we see on Twitter, people we meet at UKSG (hint, hint!), people just more generally. But breaking down that silo means you feel more inclined to ask. And if you don’t hear back, you can try someone else that might know them or just move on to the next person. So the first time, we offered to host and then the next year, we were asked if we would like to host something again, so this time we did it on bibiliometrics. Later on in 2017, we were introduced to the Scholarly Comms librarian at Liverpool, Sarah Roughley, and that started on a professional working relationship with another university-literally right up the hill. So the following year, they held an open research event.
- We had conspired to hold a joint research café or something, but timing and other commitments had gotten in the way. So in October/November of 2018, we met up with the idea of holding a joint week of events during Open Data Week in February. Luckily for Cath and myself, this was not during the half term (what is it with various international/national research events always coinciding with half terms??!! Rant over) and so we decided to plan a number of joint events. And that’s a key point-sometimes your grand plan of working together might need to change in order to meet everyone’s needs. I would also say that within that, it’s key to not be too fussy about arrangements. For example-we tend to hold research cafes over lunch-but this wasn’t an option. It was also going to mean that none of the ‘big’ events were held on the LJMU campus. Still-we branded it all as joint, made sure the speakers were okay about speaking on a ‘different’ campus and sold it as-this is a joint event, you will meet different people.
- We held a joint Love Open Research Café with speakers and attendees from both universities, as well as open to the public. This was held at Liverpool and the catering purchased by them. We had a fantastic turnout. We also held a number of database dating events, thereby involving various other librarians and departments.
- We also held a joint screening of the film Paywall, which was held at the Everyman theatre, a neutral space that both universities have arrangements with. We got together Liverpool’s head of research support, a PhD student and a researcher from LJMU, the director of Liverpool University Press and our deputy director. It meant that we had input from a variety of stakeholders and represented both universities quite well. On the back of this, we are hoping to do something bigger (but still manageable) next year and perhaps some joint events later on.
- Look at the people you’ve identified that share your purpose and think about what you could do together If you are thinking I don’t have time for extra stuff, DOES NOT HAVE TO BE BIG-could be a meeting/attending something Or think about what potential joint project or activity could save you both time. Is there something that you suspect you might be both doing independently that you could join forces on? Could I have ten minutes at the start of your session? Can I pop in? Can I listen?-5 things to do (Cath’s example with PGRs)
- This is not to say there haven’t been obstacles along the way-there are. And we aren’t always perfect at overcoming them.
- This is a good example of overcoming a barrier. Last year, our women’s day event was pretty big-really big venue, VC, etc, proper marketing. Without much fanfare, nothing was planned for this year and it didn’t seem right. Cath and I don’t have the budget so we approached our colleague Victoria in the Doctoral Academy, who also thought something should take place. As she was already running a writing event on the day, she offered to cover the cost of catering a little bit nicer lunch, and so we held a very successful research café on the day. So we held something smaller and different: International Women’s Day Research Café-PhD research by women, for women, about women
- Cath has mentioned this before but a really good way to overcome a barrier is to invite yourself and/or take what you can get. I have used this example before but at the first Doctoral Academy, I was literally invited to speak AS WE WALKED INTO THE ROOM The next year, and every subsequent year, we have been invited along. But more importantly, five minutes can go a long way.
- It’s worth re-showing this slide, so you can take a photo of our contact details. I’m not joking! We like hearing from people and are always looking for collaborators and allies. If you think there’s something you might like to work on with us, or if you fancy coming up to Liverpool to do a joint event, please get in touch! We will be around the rest of the conference if you want to chat, too! Thank you for listening.