Teaching@Library, Scholarly Literacy Framework and Bibliometrics at The University of Melbourne

Teaching@Library, Scholarly Literacy Framework and a bit about Liaison Librarians

All teaching and learning support services and information is available under the "logo" Teaching@Library. See  http://library.unimelb.edu.au/teaching
Under Teaching Resources you can find information about how to use and find Course Materials, about Request a Custom Research Skills Program (the library works with teachers to develop customised classes to improve the students' research skills), about the Use of Existing Online Resources (i.e. research skills video tutorials and subject guides to embed in the Learning Management System) and about Other Help with Teaching.
Under the link Scholarly Literacy you can find information about the document called Scholarly Literacy @ Melbourne that explains the recommended approach to developing students' research skills. You also find information about the Scholarly Literacy Framework and how to integrate it into the curriculum, and about examples of how teachers and librarians have used the framework to improve the students' performance.
In addition, there is a link to Speak to a Librarian. So academics, researchers and students can send subject-specific enquiries to the various Subject Liaison Librarians. See below for more information about the role and tasks of subject liaison librarians.

Scholarly Literacy Framework

As the library webpage states "The Scholarly Literacy Framework forms the basis of all scholarly literacy programs at the University of Melbourne. Used by academics, librarians and other teaching and learning specialists, it provides common standards and learning outcomes that are core to embedding the development of scholarly literacy into curriculum. The Framework has been successfully used in all academic disciplines and can be tailored to meet the specific requirements of a subject or course. Talk with a Subject Liaison Librarian about how you can use the Framework to embed scholarly literacy into your curriculum, prepare your students for assessment tasks, improve student performance, address specific problems that your students are encountering, and more."

Like in other Australian university libraries, the Scholarly Literacy Framework is based on the Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework (ANZIL, 2004), the Research Skill Development Framework by Willison&O'Regan (2006, 2013) and JISC's 7 Elements of Digital Literacy (2014). There are five core capibilities: Search, Evaluate, Organise, Create, and Connect, and three research levels: Directed Research, Guided Research and Independent Research.
Please, have a look at the pdf file of the framework:  http://library.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/1620504/SLF_2016_Final.pdf

Faculty and Subject Liaison Librarians

Some years ago there has been a review of the roles of liaison librarians (among others by doing a literature review).
Now each of the university's Faculty/School has a team of librarians dedicated to working with academics, researchers and students to achieve their research, learning and teaching goals. Each team has a manager and several Subject Liaison Librarians. Each liaison librarian has specialist knowledge in either research support or learning/teaching support. There are also liaison support librarians who work on desks and who support the liaison librarians.
Faculty and Subject Liaison Librarians functions are:

• Provide individual, tailored research consultations to academics, researchers and graduate/ honours students
• Partner with academics on curriculum design to embed scholarly literacy and achieve strong student research performance
• Develop and deliver curriculum-based scholarly literacy modules for classes (both face to face and online)
• Provide advice on measuring citation impact, managing researcher profiles and publishing strategically
• Build library collections inline with the teaching and research priorities for their faculty, and
  take suggestions on new titles or collection areas

It was interesting to hear that the library tries to recruit more people with a degree in a university subject to support.

One of the most interesting things was that library staff, in particular the liaison librarians, would take a course/programme called "Digital Learning Design Programme" in order to develop learning design skills. On the programme's webpage you can read the following:
"The Digital Learning Design programme was written, developed and is delivered by one of the UK’s leading learning and development specialists, Clive Shepherd. Designed for learning professionals and subject specialists, the Digital Learning Design programme provides you with both the competence and the confidence to create engaging digital learning content. You’ll develop the skills you need to analyse learning requirements and audience characteristics, select the most appropriate forms of content, and then work individually or with specialists to design, develop and deploy your content." See more: http://shop.cipd.co.uk/shop/cipd-training/courses-qualifications/learning-talent/learning-technology/digital-learning-design-programme

Since most of our staff at NTNU University Library doesn't have learning design skills, this is a must do programme for all our subject/research librarians and teaching staff, and we should explore how to be able to do this!

 

Bibliometrics

I had a meeting with someone from the so-called Research Impact Library Advisory Service (RILAS) and she told me about the work on assisting researchers with academic promotion and grant applications. Because academic staff need to provide documentation about the impact of their publications and other research outputs when they apply for grants or promotion.
Usually researchers send a request to RILAS by email or they contact a liaison librarian directly. This service gets a lot of requests since the faculties' research offices refer to the library when researchers ask about measuring their impact. For example, in 2015 they provided 144 reports and in 2014 they did 163 reports.
After the request has come to the team (that comprises one liaison librarian from each liaison team) it needs to clarify a few things before starting with the report:
1. Clarify the purpose of request
2. Negotiate the time frame
3. Negotiate the level of detail an format of the report
4. Obtain the ORCID, ResearcherID and list of publications
The team also provides a lot of reports when people are about to get employed, that means the employers ask for the candidates' h-index, number of citations etc.

The RILAS team also provides some useful guides if researchers choose to do their own analysis:
A guide on Research Impact (tools for measuring and monitoring the impact of research, information on calculating citation, journal, book and researcher impact, h-indexes)
See here:  http://unimelb.libguides.com/research_impact?hs=a
A guide on Tracking Citations (citation analysis and alerting tools: Web of Science (ISI) , Scopus (Elsevier), Google Scholar)
See here:  http://unimelb.libguides.com/tracking_citations

Otherwise, there is also an altmetrics team at the library.