Writing research proposals and publications

After meeting with one of my mentees this week and saying that she should try to write about courses and events as she went along instead of way after the event, I thought I should practice what I preach, especially as I'm working towards my Fellowship.

So here goes..... After studying the PKSB I identified desk research and publication as being an area I was interested in and wanted to work towards for my Fellowship.  One of the reasons being that criteria three asks you to demonstrate what you've done for the library profession.  Research and publications are both ways of achieving that goal.  Not having many written many publications myself, other than brief write ups for various library newsletters, I thought I needed to find out more.

I was fortunate that Cilip ILG (Information Literacy Group) and Cilip LIRG (Library and Information Research Group) organised a workshop on writing for publication in September 2014 at Cilip which fitted the bill.  I must admit I was very dubious about the day as I'm certainly not much of a writer and thought this course might be over my head. 

The course was good and approached the subject of research and publishing articles, step by step:

• decide subject focus
• develop the question
• choose your strategy
• select your method
• arrange the practicalities
• collect data
• analyse findings
• report your findings

Quite a lot of this I knew, in relation to doing a literature review, searching for journal articles, collecting data, obtaining ethics permissions, etc, but it was useful to see the whole process.  As librarians we often help students or researchers find information and show them search techniques which will help their retrieval of articles, however we only see a very small part of the research process.  We don't see how they come up with their research question, or the statistical data they find or how they choose whether to use qualitative or quantitative methodology to analyse their findings.  This course was going to make us do just that! So armed with this methodology we delved deeper into the practicalities of doing the above steps.  I found this much harder than I imagined.

Writing the research question which would help answer our hypothesis was extremely difficult.  It needed to be concise, direct, focused on central issues and could be broken down into multiple smaller questions.  I think I failed miserably and was very grateful to the rest of my group who seemed to have more of an idea than me.  (It was at this point that I felt a lot of the other participants had done a lot of research already in their library roles and I felt out of my depth.)  For the rest of the morning we went on in groups to focus our question and think about the methods we could employ to find out the information we needed.


We also talked about the importance of doing a literature review to see if someone else had already done that research. We discussed what to do if your findings confirmed other studies and how a new angle could be looked at instead.  We also talked about finding that your piece of research broke new ground and the importance of identifying gaps in subject areas that hadn't been looked at previously.

The afternoon turned to writing proposals.  A good research proposal needs to be:

• pitched correctly
• clear and concise
• have the wow factor
• be achievable and realistic
• feasible
• have a degree of originality
• be intelligible to readers with no jargon
• *follow the guidelines given*

We then practiced writing that killer headline, like the Daily Mail which has an immediate impact, followed by a longer sentence with the key points.  Again this wasn't as easy as it sounded.


Writing for publication was next.  The presenter spoke about where to publish, who our audience was and most importantly to read the journal guidelines.  Another tip was to read other articles from the particular journal to give you an idea of how others had written their articles.  We were also told that if you were collaborating with other writers that it was easier for one person to write the first draft and the second person to review it, rather than trying to write it together. Otherwise the article could sound like it had two voices rather than one.  This was useful advice and I will hopefully put this into practice.


The day ended with a run down of some of the library journals we might want to publish in:

• Journal of Information Literacy
• Library and Information Research
• Innovative Practice in Higher Education
• New Review of Academic Librarianship
• Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

The course was very useful, although at the end I wondered if this was more in depth than I wanted. The research and teaching skills course which we had done over the summer, wasn't going to fit into this model as we hadn't sought ethics permission and come up with a research question and proposal.  Perhaps writing it up for Cilip Update or on a blog would be better.  Although if we were doing it a second time perhaps we could think about getting these things ready in case we wanted to publish something.

Having said that in November we did write a proposal for LILAC 2015 to talk about our in-house teaching skills course for librarians, as I felt it was a gap in the information literacy area.  The writing proposals section came in handy for this and must have helped as our submission was accepted.

The presentations for the course are all on slideshare:
Getting started - Alison Brettle

Writing a research proposal - Geoff Walton & Graham Walton

Tips for aspiring authors & meet the journal editors - Jane Secker & Angharad Roberts

Induction Week - October 2014

I always feel the start of term approaching with the arrival of Alumnae Weekend. This heralds two of the busiest weeks of the year for the library in College, where the warmth of welcome is essential to alumnae, new students and parents in making them feel at home within the college.

The library is very much involved in the arrival of freshers on Arrivals Day on Saturday.  Its a very smooth orchestrated affair which has been used for quite a few years.  The students and their parents are shown through the first room where they receive their tutorial pack and accommodation information. They then proceed to the library where we ensure that their cards are added to the Voyager Library Management System, followed by the IT Resource Centre where we make sure they received their email from the University Computing Service (UCS), telling them about their computer information, email and passwords, etc.  We also give them a USB with instructions for logging onto the network in their rooms and sell wired cables to those students who don't have one.  After this they are collected by current students and taken to the Porters Lodge to collect their room key and showed to their rooms.  Usually the Assistant Librarian and Library Assistant deal with adding cards in the library whilst the IT Manager and myself deal with the IT information.  This year was a little different as the UCS had sent out usernames and passwords before the students arrived.  Previously we had been responsible for helping students download their computer passwords from the web.  We did have a couple of issues however with the new system as some emails had been sent to school addresses which had been closed down after the students received their results.  Unfortunately this meant some students couldn't log on until the Monday.  I suggested that a few temporary accounts could be set up so the students could log on until Monday when UCS could resend their details.  This seemed to appease the situation.  This was fed back to UCS by the IT Manager, so hopefully they won't use school email accounts next year.

Library staff also attend Freshers fair on the Monday afternoon which gives us an opportunity to meet the students and hand out library bags with library information.  I chose free bags to give away instead of pens or usb's as we're always asked for bags in the library office. It also enables us to promote the library when the students use them for shopping!  We give library inductions but I also feel its important for students to receive library information in the bags as well. Some students don't attend the inductions or forget what you've said afterwards.

18 months ago, I suggested that we should move time of Freshers Fair to allow graduate attendance. They are often in the departments until 4.30-5pm.  Freshers Fair is now 3-6pm to allow graduates to come and feel part of the student body.  This year though some clubs and societies left early, even though it went on for another hour.  This meant that only a few stalls remained for graduates to look at and some thought the fair was closing up.   I fed this back so it can be included in next years planning.

The student inductions themselves start on the Thursday before Arrivals day for the early arrivals and international students and continue during the first week of term. They consist of a library tour and small online session on electronic resources which are voluntary.  This relates to my own teaching philosophy, that students learn at their own pace, when they want to or more likely when they need to and that essay deadline is looming!  Therefore, when I started at the library 5 years ago, we decided to do away with the compulsory induction.  I expected some discussion with Directors of Study explaining my reasoning but it didn't come.  Surprisingly there was a lot of support for this new idea. People felt that the students had so much to cram into the first 3 days of term, that it gave them the opportunity to have some time to reflect on the fact that they had arrived in Cambridge and what lay before them.   I personally don't feel its a productive use of time for myself or the other library staff giving tours or indeed the students listening if they don't want to be there.

In spite of the inductions being voluntary the attendance numbers have risen over the last 4 years which is very encouraging and shows that students do still want to attend.  Statistics kept of the tour attendances show an increase with a stabilization this year. This academic year (2014-15), saw 154 book and 115 attend.  In the previous academic year, 2013-14, 143 students booked and 116 attended, this was an increase of 45 students on the previous year (2012-13, 99 booked and 71 attended). Figures for earlier years are as follows: 2011-12 show 71 booked and 60 attended and for 2010-11, 71 booked and only 49 attended.

This steady rise of attendance could be because they think it is compulsory or it could be due to the shorter terms and supervisions in Cambridge, which means they need to get going on work straight away and have supervision essays each week. Therefore it is imperative they get to know how the library works very quickly.  Coming from much larger libraries such as UCL, University of Westminster and University of Chester, I got the impression that the students there had a longer lead into the term and weren't necessarily interested in the library until weeks 3 or 4. In our college library it is the end of induction week (week 1) and week 2 where the students utilize the library as they've just been given their first supervision essay.

For the first time this year I collated statistics on the level of students attending. This is mainly because college is looking at the graduate experience as well as the undergraduate experience. The library itself, for example mainly provides books to part 1 of the Tripos, with some provision of key books for part 2.  Books for graduates aren't really catered for, except for those on clinical medicine courses and Mphils in economics.

The attendance broke down into 120 undergraduates booking with 85 attending, 30 graduates booking with 26 attending and 4 PhD students booking and attending.  Its too early to really draw any conclusions as we have no previous data, but we can clearly see that a greater proportion of PhD and graduate students book and attend than undergraduates where the non attendance rate is much higher. This is probably because graduates and PhD student perceptions of libraries and what they can offer is much higher.  Although we also know that first year undergraduate students have a lot freshers events on offer, have lots of meetings to fit in at their departments and forget to cancel appointments or even forget about their bookings altogether.  It will be interesting to see what the figures are next year.