‘The postgraduate research student’s user experience (UX): How can libraries support researcher skills development more effectively’ - Helen Young (Loughborough University)
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Presented at CONUL conference, May 2017, Athlone, Ireland
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‘The postgraduate research student’s user experience (UX): How can libraries support researcher skills development more effectively’ - Helen Young (Loughborough University)
- 1. The postgraduate research student’s user experience (UX): How can libraries support researcher skills development more effectively? Conul Annual Conference, May 2017 Helen Young, Loughborough University Laura Montgomery, Taylor & Francis
- 2. What will we cover? Project overview & methods Routes PGRs took to information materials How PGRs developed their skills Reflections on the project
- 3. What we wanted to know 3 How can libraries and publishers improve the services and products we offer PGRs? 5 KEY QUESTIONS How do PGRs reach information? How do they use and manage this information? How do they use the library and what role do librarians play in their research? How do they use publishers’ platforms? How satisfied or frustrated are they with the research process?
- 4. Who was involved? Loughborough University Library Graduate School School of Arts, English and Drama Marketing & Advancement PGR participants Taylor & Francis Journal Publishing Communications Research & Analytics Web development
- 5. How we did it 5 1 • T&F and Loughborough ran a joint ‘how to get published’ workshop for PGRs. • PGRs recruited to complete an initial survey 2 • Participants (based on quality of survey response) from range of disciplines • Financial incentive offered 3 • Monthly diary completed by PGRs over 8 months • Additional thematic questions posed each month • Support offered by academic mentors 4 • Focus group 5 • Findings collated and analysed
- 7. Example 1
- 8. Example 2
- 9. Example 3
- 10. Example 4
- 11. Our reflections • Wide variety of routes to information • Lack of awareness of, or willingness to use, ‘basic’ library services – Interlibrary loan – Enquiries – Book purchases – Searching advice • Authentication methods creating barriers
- 13. How did they develop their skills?
- 14. Quotes Also some of the training workshops offered by the graduate school has helped me know what is available for example keeping up to date in my research area by having alerts based on specific keywords and what services the university has for us postgraduate students. Overall, I have developed these skills over my education however all of these information keeps changing so much because of the way technology is advancing. Hence, one has to continually be learning what is new to add on to skills they already have.
- 15. I think keeping up to date is something that I am probably the weakest on out of all the areas mentioned above. I think its difficult to measure whether you actually are keeping up to date in comparison to whether you feel that you are up to date. I’ve been on the grad school course ‘keeping up to date’ which provided me with a couple of new skills in which to keep up to date. From being on this course and speaking to other post graduates about their means of finding out about new resources I have set up a number of email alerts on places such as google scholar, zetoc, web of science to name a few.
- 16. Managing references: As mentioned above, we were taught to use reference managers (RefWorks in my case) during seminars or library workshops at undergraduate level, so this is probably the main way in which I initially learned how to manage references as well as the benefits of properly organising or managing your references. However, once I started my Master's degree and moved to Loughborough, I found that most people here were using Mendeley, and that this was highly recommended by many of my fellow students, both in the same department as me and in other departments. So more recently I've picked up skills on managing references from fellow students, who have recommended Mendeley and have talked me through how to use it.
- 17. was pointed to other websites and databases by my supervisors. I think that most part of my research skills were developed by looking how my supervisors used to do. How they organized their books and papers and materials to save time and to find easily the information they needed. How they organized their agenda and how they select the key authors to support the argument on their research, how they collected the data, how they shared information and how they used to work collaborating with other researchers.
- 18. Reflections • Face-to-face workshops have a role –Most referred to were generic sessions • Skills often developed before get to PhD • Supervisors need to be aware of (and ideally model) best practice
- 20. What worked well? • Participation by PGRs • Variety of partners involved from both organisations • Mentoring to support participants • Flexibility • Having a research team to analyse the results • Having T&F marketing team promote the project in a variety of ways
- 21. What would we do differently? • Follow up questionnaire data to understand more clearly some behaviours • Liaise more about data analysis so both parties could benefit from different knowledge bases • Be more optimistic about recruitment • Set aside more time…
- 22. Key messages for Loughborough… Generic sessions have value Need to manage researcher expectations Services and support need to be visible at point of need Embed good research practices at UG and PGT level Accept a variety of search routes Facilitate and learn from researcher peer-to-peer knowledge sharing
- 23. … and for Taylor & Francis Publisher platform-based searching uncommon Investment in Google discoverability key Need cleaner user interfaces with less clutter Work with libraries to better signpost bought content Work with libraries on more seamless content access Develop / communicate better pay-per- view models Help Librarians and PGRs understand Open Access Book chapters to be more searchable
- 24. What next? • Feed results of this project into planning and content of Library PGR workshops through dissemination within Academic Services Team and elsewhere in Library • Continue link between Taylor & Francis and Loughborough to explore other areas • Development of Taylor & Francis toolkit for others undertaking research into the ‘reality’ of their own researchers
- 25. Contacts • Helen Young – Academic Services Manager – Loughborough University Library – h.young@lboro.ac.uk • Laura Montgomery – Communications Manager (Library Relations) – Taylor and Francis – laura.montgomery@tandf.co.uk
- 26. References • Spezi, V. (2016), Is information-seeking behaviour of doctoral students changing?: A review of the literature (2010 – 2015). New Review of Academic Librarianship, 22 (1): 78-106. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1361453 3.2015.1127831
- 27. Image: Valerie Everett from flickr.com. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 licence
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Our study sought the answers to five key questions: Reaching the information: How are PhD students discovering online journal resources? Using the information: How aware are PhD students of the origin of the resources they are using? How much time do PhD students spend on the various stages of the research journey? How are PhD students managing their references? Just focussing in on two key areas today – reaching information and my key interest researcher skills development The library: How are students using library space? What relationship do students have with their librarians? Frustrations: What are the common frustrations with research in the digital library? We hoped that the findings would help libraries and publishers improve the services and products we offer PGRs. From a publisher perspective, we also wanted more in depth information about PGR interaction with different publisher websites to get insights into how their functionality, layout, navigation, content, and extra information compared. These findings need further probing.
- Loughborough is a top 10 UK university, it is research intensive, home to over 17,000 students, and came 1st in the 2016 Student Experience Survey, No of PGRs – 2015-16 FT= 921; PT= 148 Library workshop programme embedded into Grad School programme for many years – 2015-16: 34 workshops and 784 attendees. Taylor & Francis Group has published scholarly journals since 1798 and books since 1836. We now publish over 2,400 journals and 5,000 new books each year across a broad range of disciplines, and have offices in Beijing, Singapore, New Delhi, Oxford, Philadelphia, and Melbourne, Emphasise that although both organisations had different perspectives the end goals were actually very similar at a high level T&F used the project as a great opportunity to engage with end users i.e. researchers, to which the University, and more precisely, the Graduate School had access (PhD students) Innovative collaboration Lesser explored area Experience of research – Graham Experience of publisher collaboration – Emma and Sussex Improve services for PGRs Provide experience of publishers and research for PGRs Improve T&F website Funds
- An initial survey was completed by 26 PGRs. From these, T&F and Loughborough worked together to identify the best quality responses, and these PGRs were offered a small financial incentive for taking part in the study. The participants were all 1st or 2nd year PGRs and came from a range of disciplines: sociology of sport sport marketing Psychology Geography Design civil engineering, sport & health science and management. One was visiting from overseas. A monthly online questionnaire was completed by each student providing an overview of how they had approached their research that past month and how they had managed the resulting digital information. Because we were seeking rich descriptions of the user journey, the survey has concentrated on gathering qualitative rather than quantitative data. Accompanying this process, we also held a focus group offering the opportunity for students to share views about online research through group discussion. Mentors supported the participating students throughout, which guaranteed long term commitment and quality of response.
- Look at routes to the information that the PGRs took and how library services and/or staff could have helped more – variety of students and different months and tasks they were doing. Each month they were asked to identify a task that they undertook and detail how they got to the information. Colleague, Gareth Cole, took this data and turned them into process maps to help see if there were any common themes. I then looked at these to see if I could identify how the library could have helped. We’ll have a look at a few of these to see what they did and if we could have helped.
- Mixed approach – using specialist databases, catalogue, social media, Scholar RG – adapting search terms. Query – why had to use normal search rather than advanced search – professional advice could have helped save time possibly – otherwise not a lot could advise. Or is it that our advanced search isn’t doing what it should?
- Examples shows the barriers that we put in place because of authentication issues. Some in the room won’t have this issue but we still use classic Athens; also have multiple sources for some journal articles which we display on the catalogue when users click on the link for full-text access – sadly in neither case for this user did they get taken straight to the full-text. At least this one kept pursuing – we know anecdotally that some users give up at this point.
- A bit convoluted, but honest!
- Personal recommendation for items – then GS (working off-campus as Athen not required on –campus for vast majority – could also have used VPN as wouldn’t have been asked for it then either)!!! Gave up on papers that could have been helpful/essential?!
- No ‘one’ route – which is fine, People, websites, databases, library catalogue, research gate, Facebook. Most frequently mentioned were: Google Scholar; Library Catalogue and Google. Perhaps think we shouldn’t be surprised by the Library Catalogue, but often have the impression when running sessions that Scholar is the always the first port of call and when have enquiries about purchase or resources it is not unusual for us to find that we do already have it!
- Asked how they had developed their searching, managing, keeping up-to-date skills. We provide generic sessions via the Graduate School – approx. 34 run each year covering wide range of topics from ‘Finding information for your literature search’, ‘Keeping up to date’ to Creating a Publication Strategy, Copyright and your thesis, Research Data Management and Systematic Reviews. Feedback can indicate that the PGRs would like the sessions to be more subject specific (although I personally dispute this as PhD topics are so specific that even if you run a School specific session that will still be too generic for many and we market the sessions as a good opportunity to network across campus and campuses too). I was therefore gratified to see that workshops were the most frequently mentioned method for gaining their skills – either in the form of a general workshop or one specifically noted as being a Library one. Interesting too (and not something we had considered in any depth) was the development of skills prior to PhD – we don’t know which UGs we teach will go on to become renowned academics (although we are aware that all UG need good info skills for life) so need to be aware that they get firm foundations, as some might not attend any other skills teaching until PhD or even then (as our sessions are not mandatory for all PhDs) – considering now whether should be teaching RDM skills at least at an earlier stage.
- There was a feeling that they were always in catch up in relation to skills and information because of the march of technology. Never stop learning….
- Subtle difference between feeling up to date and being up-to-date.
- Goes on to say: In hindsight, while I was relatively familiar with the concept of managing references at undergraduate level, I don't think it was a skill that I really used very often due to the fact that we were never really required to use that many sources at once. Now that I am studying at PhD level however, and am used to dealing with many sources and references at once, I can really understand the need for managing references which I think is why I sought out a different way of doing it; when other students introduced me to Mendeley, I found that it was far easier to use (from my point of view at least) than RefWorks, particularly for the amount of references that I need to manage.
- Role of supervisors – key for this student and anecdotally for other PGRs too.
- We know it was a small group of participants but the richness of the data and the correlation with other recent research about ECRs means that we have some useful learning points:
- . Be optimistic about recruitment … we had a really strong response. Involve as many relevant sections of an institution or group of institutions as you can because having those different experiences … they all bring different perspectives. Think about what you want, but be prepared to be flexible in how you might get it. (i.e. tweaking questionnaire in relation to Library – separated into digital and physical)
- If you want to get really interesting, granular information from your participants, then you need to be aware that it takes a lot of time
- We know it was small set of particpants!!!!