Intro Week at ScHARR Library

Sheldon Korpet

This week, ScHARR Library welcomed our new Postgrad students. Information Specialists, Claire Beecroft and Mark Clowes, delivered an information skills session teaching students about searching for literature. ScHARR Library even created some goodie bags for the occasion!

Rachel Walker

The library is a place to work within the department, use the PCs and Chromebooks or sit on the soft seats for a coffee and a chat. The meeting table is also bookable for group work.

Myself and Rachel, Information Officers on the library enquiry desk, look forward to meeting and helping our new students. 

Here are our #ScHARRIntro17 tips for new ScHARR students:

• Improve your assignments by working on your information skills – try the IRIS quizzes on MOLE to find out how good you really are at finding and organising

• We can help you find information –if you have any burning questions please ask Rachel or Sheldon at enquiry desk

• Our books and dissertations can be searched through our catalogue here (Note: our items are not on StarPlus)

• We hold core text books for your courses

• We accept book suggestions – please Tweet @ScHARRLib or email the title and author to scharrlib@sheffield.ac.uk

Fun afternoon listening to @Shush_radio getting some goodies together for our new @scharrlib students 🔊🎶 #iamalibrarian pic.twitter.com/1xpuAnDSKO

— Sheldon Korpet (@SheldonKorpet) September 15, 2017

Cite Hacks - A new video series to support scholarly communications, digital academia and gain a few extra citations (hopefully)

Andy Tattersall

Over the last couple of years I have created three series of videos to help researchers and academics make more out of technology and the web to support their work. The first series was Research Hacks which appeared in 2015, Learn Hacks followed shortly and then last year App Hacks was launched. You might notice a bit of a theme here, but the purpose of these videos are to offer quick and simple suggestions for the progressive academic to work differently. They were part instructional and part inspirational and focused on a myriad of technologies, tools, websites and opportunities. The videos are usually shorter than three minutes long and are an introduction to such topics and how I can help others take advantage of them.



Cite Hacks
Cite Hacks are about what academics can do to improve their chances of getting cited. More than that, the videos are about making your research easier to discover and exploit fresh opportunities within digital academia. There is conflicting evidence as to the many ways you can improve citations but these videos offer opportunities for explore much more. If you don't try then you won't know. The exercise of blogging, making data and research open, using social media and using better keywords and titles are all part of where academia is heading.



Cite Hacks Playlist

The Digital Transformation of Research Support - Northern Collaboration Workshop Presentation

Andy Tattersall

Myself and Alison McNab (University of Huddersfield) delivered a workshop of the Northern Collaboration Conference held at The University of York. The conference is a regular joint event between 27 northern based university libraries. Our workshop explored the potential for the creation of a specialist role that helped support research that was very much aligned to the library and information community.

The workshop was an opportunity to ask attendees what digital, research and library competencies they already had that could contribute to the role of an academic/research technologist. We asked them to suggest other attributes form our list and then chose which ones they would most like to focus on. It was a really good opportunity to discuss these embryonic ideas at the conference. The findings from this workshop will form more presentations and writing as we explore this idea further. Our slides and abstract are below.  

Abstract 
This session will provide delegates with an overview of the digital research landscape, an introduction to tools and resources to tame the landscape, the opportunity to consider the skillsets required in the context of their own workplace, and an introduction to the research technologist manifesto. Please bring a mobile device (and your Eduroam password) to contribute to this interactive session.

Alison McNab

Researchers increasingly need to understand a multitude of topics including digital copyright, impact, altmetrics, communications, social media, research data management and sharing, open access, infographics, video, animation and mobile apps. Yet all too often they have little time, support or encouragement to explore these topics and have they need to make informed judgements on the most appropriate technologies. 

For decades skilled LIS professionals have provided researchers with excellent services around collection management, content curation and discovery, critical appraisal and reference management. More recently they have stepped into new areas of support and applied their knowledge around social media, metrics, scholarly communications and research data management. Given that the modern LIS professional is adept of working across platforms, good at problem solving and the use of new technologies, are they positioned to guide and work alongside researchers as research technologists?

The Digital Transformation of Research Support from Andy Tattersall