Monash University and its library: organisational chart, some facts and figures, and my presentation

Monash University was established in Melbourne in 1958. Today Monash University has seven locations, five in Australia, one in Malaysia and one in South Africa. In 2015, the number of students was 70,071 and 37% of them were international students.
The total number of staff is 14,869 (8,423 full-time equivalent). 764 staff work in Malaysia and 252 in South Africa.

The Monash University Library was established in 1960, and today it falls within the portfolio of the Provost & Senior Vice President of the university. The Library is represented in the Academic Board, the Education Committee and the Research Committee.

Under the University Librarian there are four directors:
Director, Resources
Director, Research
Director, Excellence and Engagement
Director, Education

Under the Director, Education you have some Faculty team leaders, the Manager for the Caulfield Library, the Manager for the Law Library, the Manager for Information Research Skills, the Manager for Learning Skills, the eLearning Coordinator, and the Copyright Adviser.

I wished we would have some of these positions in our library!

Under the Director, Excellence and Engagement you have the Manager for the Sir Louis Matheson Library, the Communications Manager, the Manager for Strategy and Planning, and the Operations Manager.

Under the Director, Resources you have the Information Resources Manager, the Information Systems Manager, the Rare Books Librarian, the Document Delivery Librarian, the Lending Services Librarian.

Under the Director, Research you have the Director for Monash University Publishing, the Research Data Management Coordinator, the Manager for the Monash University Research Repository, some Faculty team leaders, the Manager for Berwick and Peninsula Libraries, the Manager for the Hargrave-Andrew Library and the Manager for CL Butchers Pharmacy Library.

Here you have the organisational chart:  http://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/594278/library-organisational-structure-aug2016.pdf 

The library has a physical collection of 3.1 million items and an electronic collection of 1.1 million items. In 2015, the library conducted 1,571 Information Research and Learning programmes (courses) with a total of 59,578 participants. There were 6,372 enquiries at the Research and Learning Service Points, 9,259 enquiries by telephone, 1,258 enquiries via email (ask.monash) and the ask.monash FAQs were accessed 14,092 times.

Most interesting is that the library tries to avoid the use of the words " services" and "support". Instead it prefers the words "collaboration" and "partnership".  And the library has really achieved being a partner of teachers and researchers and not only a service provider. 

I also gave a presentation to some of the library staff and got lots of questions again. It is so good to be able to give something back!

See the next blog post for more information about the Research Skill development Framework that is included in the university's educational plan!!!
  

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.

Research@Library at The University of Melbourne

All research support services and information is available under the "logo" Research@Library. See   http://library.unimelb.edu.au/research

The services are delivered across the research lifecycle, that means there is this online platform for the researchers/users, so that they can get what they want when they need it. Have a look at the link above to see what information and services are offered under the various stages of the research lifecycle.

The library also has a Digital Scholarship team. The library's webpage states: 

"Digital Scholarship aims to modernise scholarly practice via digital techniques with the aim of maximising the value of research data. We provide training, advice and examples of good practice in digital humanities, digital archiving and preservation and research data management."

Digital Scholarship services are:

• Research Data Forensics  (services for examining, analysing, recovering, re-using and preserving data stored in digital media in a forensically sound manner)
• Research Data Management  (supporting researchers in managing their research data)
• Research Data Curation  (ongoing, structured processes for capturing and providing stewardship for research data)
• Training and outreach  (workshops that educate on Digital Scholarship-related tools and best practices; events that equip researchers and information professionals with global knowledge of trends in the area of technology and scholarship)

Another interesting thing is SCIP, the Social and Cultural Informatics Platform, that supports research in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Education and the Visual & Performing Arts. Have a proper look here:  http://scip.unimelb.edu.au/
 
When having the conversation with Donna, the Director for Research and Collections, she also mentioned MANTRA, from the University of Edinburgh.
MANTRA is an online course designed for researchers or others planning to manage digital data as part of the research process (it was funded by JISC Managing Research Data programme).
Research Data MANTRA has developed online learning materials aiming to reflect best practice in research data management grounded in three disciplinary contexts: social science, clinical psychology, and geoscience.
In addition to web-based learning units that students can work through at their own pace, the course includes video interviews with leading academics about data management challenges, and practical exercises in handling data in four software analysis environments: SPSS, NVivo, R and ArcGIS.
The resultant materials are available on a website for anyone to use and will also be deposited with an open licence in JorumOpen, a national repository for open educational resources.
Here you have the link to the online course: http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/

Last but not least, I got to know there is a Researcher@Library Week. 
Researcher@Library Week showcases the many ways the library can support researchers through the research process. There is a range of activities, including hands-on sessions, tours, keynote speakers and presentations. Several of these events are recorded and are made available online. In 2016 there was an ePoster competition. University of Melbourne graduate researchers designed posters to showcase their research, bu they didn't do the 'classic' conference poster but an electronic version that visualised their theses. Btw, the first prize was a $1,000 Visa cash card.
Another great idea that we can adopt at NTNU, can't we???