Yet more from the Information Resources Academic Development Group

Louise Preston

Within our team in Information Resources, we have a wealth of experience and a real diversity in skills and knowledge. Everyone, in every workplace wishes they had more time for professional development, and within Information Resources, we carve out an hour, every six weeks, to get together to talk about our work and focus on our development, as part of our Information Resources Academic Development Group (IRADG). Louise Preston looks at what's happening in the IRADG.

I last blogged about the IRADG back at the end of 2014 and the group had a small hiatus whilst I was on maternity leave.

However we are back and stronger than ever (or something like that!). We rotate our meeting topics, as we are such a diverse group, with alternate meetings focusing on searching and the interim meetings focusing on teaching and research respectively. This allows us to address the needs of everyone in the group, whilst acknowledging that the vast majority of us got into the role through information science and librarianship roles.

It has been really useful having Mark and Naila, as newer members of Information Resources at the meeting, as they bring knowledge and expertise from their previous roles that add to our experience.

So far in 2016, we have spent some time grappling with the advanced capabilities of Endnote (as we have relatively recently moved to Endnote from Reference Manager) and spent time discussing the development of teaching and training materials for online learning, and the pedagogical differences between face to face learning and online learning….and it’s only the start of March!

In our next session we are planning to discuss the following paper about the role of stakeholders in systematic reviews Recording and Accounting for Stakeholder Involvement in Systematic Reviews.

Information Resources, despite being a small team, always provides a team member to participate in the “Gone in 60 Seconds” slot, as part of our larger section meetings, with our colleagues in Health Economics and Decision Science – this month Angie Rees is going to talk about the ScHARR Health Utilities Database. This ensures that the work we do gets regularly shared with our colleagues in ScHARR.

Our future plans include a session on development of models and searching to populate these, from our very own Suzy Paisley and a catch up on all the conferences and seminars we have been attending and presenting at in 2016.

So as you can see, as well as focusing on our day to day jobs, we all enjoy taking the opportunity to get together and learn from one another!