I know this is meant to be a serious info lit related blog, but it was so exciting today to see 2 ospreys. In fact, sitting still and just turning my head, I could see an osprey, an egret, an ibis, a pelican, black swans and cormorants. So here is Darryl’s picture of the osprey today (his camera is so much better than mine!) and more birdie pics will decorate the blog in future. I’ll be back to serious comments and pics of Murdoch for the rest of the week though!

On Monday I was invited to a meeting of a working group convened in order to send a coherent info lit based response to the Vitae consultation document on the Researcher Development Framework. I’ve already blogged about this, but it’s worth repeating.

The proposed framework has been created as “a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education. It describes the knowledge, skills, behaviours and personal qualities of researchers and encourages researchers to aspire to excellence through achieving higher levels of development”. It incorporates and extends the old Joint Skills Statement (JSS) into a framework which has different phases of development as well as different attributes. Interestingly for me, the consultation document describes five types of researcher, similar to the 7 Ages model I wrote about last year.

Our working group has representation from JISC, SCONUL WGIL, CILIP CSG, RIN, HEA, JISC, DCC, Vitae, BAILER, RLUK and UKCGE, so a fairly wide range of interests. I was just there as myself!

In our discussions, we did highlight some areas of the framework which we feel need rewording and/or reorganising to bring out the IL elements more clearly and I think there also too much emphasis still on the skills and competencies involved in becoming information literate. It is possible however, to draw an IL thread through the framework and it does have an underlying premise of developing behaviours and personal qualities which chimes well with my personal definition of IL as being an attitude or habit of learning, rather than just a set of skills. I think that if we can blend this approach into our response it will be a big step forward for IL development.

Consultation responses can come from individuals and groups until 11th Dec – a great opportunity to get IL firmly embedded into the development of researchers in HE.

Ostia Antica, Italy 09

http://www.vitae.ac.uk/po…nsultation.html

I went to a very interesting presentation at the Vitae conference on the Researcher Development Framework – badged as “a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, preofessional and career development of researchers” I was pleased to hear that the framework goes beyond just describing competencies or skills and addresses knowledge, behaviours and personal qualities as well. This sits much better with my own understanding of information literacy as being about attitudes, habits and behaviours relating to information, rather than just skills in managing it and I could see how IL could sit comfortably within the new framework.
The proposed framework builds on the Joint Skills Statement, with a matrix of “domains” and “descriptors” based around 5 levels of development. From the small section I saw, there are definitely elements of IL already present. It will be released for consultation soon and I look forward to seeing the whole framework and hopefully contributing to it’s final form.

Hadrian’s Wall, Lanercost.

My attendance at the Vitae conference was sponsored by SCONUL and supported by RLUK and the RIN, so that Wendy White and I could give a presentation highlighting some of the issues in the RIN Mind the Skills Gap report. As usual I promised to put our slides onto my blog, so that anyone attending could download copies, so here they are:

Some of the feedback from our presentation was gathered on post-its, answering the question “tell us one thing which has occurred to you during this talk” (yes, I’m hooked on the one thing feedback idea!)and again, I promised delegates I’d include their comments on the blog, so here they are, in no particular order and in unedited form:

– need to review university training in respect of information literacy for wide researcher base, particularly research leaders
– information about information should be made available online so that all researchers can access the material – perhaps RCUK should fund such an exercise
– as a senior researcher/trainer/postgraduate developer how do I address my huge information skills gap in order to then more effectively encourage other researchers to fill their gaps!? It’s so important and a little overwhelming.
– incentives for improving data curation skills
– I think everyone today is in danger of information overload so in order to be an efficient researcher you really need to have the skills to recognise what is useful information and what is not
– impact, impact factor, new web based developments
– how can I promote my research publications to improve my H index?
– work with library staff to devise appropriate training for research staff
– how do we get buy in from these different stages of researchers? Is the message well received?
– choosing to plagiarise or not to plagiarise – links information skills and personal effectiveness (self confidence, finding your own voice etc)
– a lot of this conference seems to be about information literacy if we take this definition, why don’t I know more about it?
– the quote says it all [ quote was “The more you know, the more you realise that you don’t know, whereas if you don’t know you don’t know, you can be quite confident that you know”]
– need to think about the idea of attitudes and behaviours in relation to information, I haven’t thought of it as more than competencies before

http://www.vitae.ac.uk/re…-.html#pageInfo

On Tuesday I attended the Vitae Researcher Development Conference at the University of Warwick. It was attended by around 400 delegates, all people involved in supporting researchers, but only a handful of librarians were present. The conference was a great opportunity to hear about new developments in researcher support and you’ll find lots of information about it on their web pages.
I liked their use of Twitter in the opening plenary. Delegates sat around circular tables to listen to the speakers, each table equipped with a laptop, so we could twitter during the presentations and afterwards during our discussion. All the tweets were displayed on the large screens around the room and this gave very quick feedback on any common threads arising from the discussions. I wonder if we could use this technique within a teaching session with students?

Lea Gardens yet again

http://www.vitae.ac.uk/vitaeconference2009

Yesterday I participated in a meeting organised by the RIN, tasked to look at ways to move forward from the situation painted in the RIN Mind the Skills Gap report. There were representatives there from many of the organisations who have an interest in supporting researcher development: Vitae, HEFCE, RCUK, RLUK, SCONUL, CILIP, BAILER, IOP and more. We had some very fruitful discussions about strategic engagement, matching training to needs and practical training issues, with the aim of identifying some practical outcomes which can be taken forward. Notes from the discussions will be made more widely available via RIN soon.

More rhododenrons from Lea Gardens

Pat Gannon-Leary and I gave a talk recently at the DARTS2 conference, based on our “one thing” research, where we asked editors, experienced researchers, research students and library staff what the “one thing” was they would say to people who want to write for publication.
You can see a copy of our presentation here:

During our talk, we asked all the participants to tell us “one thing” they were going to take away from the session, or “one thing” they wanted to share. I promised to post the summary of their responses on the blog, so here they are, with apologies for the delay:

And here am I giving the presentation:

I was very pleased to be asked to talk at the AHIS (Animal Health Information Specialists) conference at the beginning of June. The theme was library support for research (again!) and in particular writing for publication, but in addition to the talk I’ve done in the past, I added some thoughts about how libraries can facilitate publication by supporting a CoW – a Community of Writers.

Slides are here:

Last week I helped organise the UC&R Northern Group meeting focused on support for international students. Karen, Marie and I presented our work on the SCONUL Guidelines again and I’ll link to our slides below.

However, the interesting part of the day for me was hearing the views of international students and scholars themselves. We invited two scholars to talk to us – Jarka Glassey is a senior lecturer at Newcastle now and she talked about her experiences learning in Slovakia and the issues she encountered coming to the UK. She made me aware that as well as planning support for new students, we must remember that we have many international scholars at all levels in our universities and must ensure that we cater for their experiences too.

Ramesh is a postgraduate student from Iran and she gave us her perceptions of the differences in learning and libraries in the countries she has studied in, the UK, Sweden and Iran, with some useful summaries on her slides.

Pat Gannon-Leary and Rosie Crane from Northumbria summarised their research findings on international learning cultures, highlighting issues in learning experiences which we need to be aware of when planning to teach international students.

We ran out of time for a proper discussion at the end of the day, but I am hoping we shall continue an online forum, as there were lots of interesting points to follow up.

Links to all the presentations are below: