Back in November 2013 (I can’t believe it was a year ago now, but it was), I reviewed my PDP (Personal Development Plan) to ensure that it was up-to-date. Well, in the last year things have moved on, and the plan needed reviewing again. My first job was to review the 2013 plan and see what I had (or hadn't achieved):
Of the eight goals on the list, I’ve fully achieved five of them, and partially achieved three. The five I’ve fully achieved are listed below:
1) Prepare an updated staff development hour session on open access, research data management the repository
I prepared this with my line manager in preparation for a session in May 2014. Whilst I wasn’t able to help run the May 2014 session, we updated it again for Open Access Week in October 2014, and this session I did run. I was able to learn more about research data management, learn how the newest version (version 5) of Turning Point works, and gain confidence in my ability to both present and discuss open access and research data management in detail with my colleagues.
2) Determine the best referencing managing software to store and organise my references (assess Zotero, Mendeley and RefWorks)
Not longer after I wrote my last PDP, I investigated a range of reference manager tools, and came to the conclusion that RefWorks was my preferred tool. I have been using RefWorks since, although admittedly somewhat sporadically…
3) Understand more about the new CILIP (Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals) rules and regulations
Reading the new CILIP website, talking to colleagues and attending an online training event have all enabled me to understand the new CILIP rules and regulations in relation to both Chartership and Revalidation. You can see the proof of this in goals four and five…
4) Become a CILIP mentor with 1 or mentees
As of January 2014, I have been a CILIP mentor. I am currently mentoring two Chartership candidates, and hope that at least one of them will successfully Charter in the next six months.
5) Register for Revalidation
I have not just registered for Revalidation, but actually successfully Revalidated (as of November 2014). I’ve written more about my Revalidation experience (albeit before I discovered I was successful) at http://www.annaslibrarythoughts.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/recording-continuing-professional.html.
And the three goals I’ve been a little less successful with:
1) Keeping my cpd23 blog up-to-date
I wasn’t doing too badly with keeping this blog up-to-date. I was trying to write at least one post a month and, on the whole, I was succeeding. Or at least until August of this year I was. Since then I’ve only written one post (in October). This has largely been due to the nature of what’s been happening at work and in my personal life (more about that in a minute).
2) Engaging more with Twitter
I have actually been using Twitter more, but primarily for keeping up-to-date. I read a lot of other people’s post, and have begun to tweet and re-tweet more often – but certainly not once a week. It’s more like once a month on average. Some weeks I go mad and tweet four or five things; other weeks I’m deadly silent.
3) Learning more about research data management
I’ve certainly learnt a fair amount about research data management, both through working with it more closely on a day-to-day basis at work, and through a range of reading I’ve done (for example, reading Graham Pryor’s book Managing Research Data). I’ve also begun the RDMRose training module, but I’m barely half way through. And whilst I have found some other training materials, I haven’t had the time to work through any of them.
So, what next? Well, there are a couple of things affecting what now appears on my updated PDP. Firstly, I have a new job. I’m still working in the same team, but I’m now Research and open Access Librarian, rather than Research Repository Support Librarian (better know as the Repository Manager). Basically it’s a promotion with our Library Research Support Team. So my responsibilities have changed a little - I now have more of a focus on research data and open access generally, and less of an exclusive focus on the research repository.
Secondly, I’m due to go on maternity leave again in January 2015. So whilst there are plenty of things I’d like to do in the next 12 months, I know I need to be fairly realistic about what I’ll actually be able to achieve. Therefore, there are only six things on my PDP this time around – most with timescales somewhere between six and fourteen months away. In some cases, I’m also relying on partnerships with others to achieve the final goal. For example, one goal is to determine how the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) OA (Open Access) policy affects our current repository workflows, and update these accordingly. Whilst I can advise on our current workflows and whether or not the policy means they need changing, I’m unlikely to be in a position where I can oversee any changes.
I'll aim to come back and review the PDP on this blog next November at the latest - and write related posts about specific goals in the mean time...
Showing posts with label RefWorks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RefWorks. Show all posts
Sunday, 30 November 2014
Sunday, 15 December 2013
Managing Research Data
Now that my team at work have taken on creating and maintaining the university's data repository, one of the goals on my current PDP is to learn more about research data management. More specifically, one of the actions related to this goal was to read Graham Pryor's book, helpfully entitled Managing Research Data (for the full reference see the end of this post). I figured there was a clue in the title as to how useful this book was likely to be.
Having now read the book, I can state that this book was, in fact, incredibly worthwhile reading. The book has 10 chapters, and I ended up making notes on six of them. I've written up comprehensive notes and thoughts and added these to RefWorks (see, I am making an effort to use it), but some of the most useful points and my key thoughts are below.
In her chapter on the life-cycle of data management, Higgins talked about the importance of having a collection development policy for a data repository, which I really think will be necessary for us, as we have limited storage space. The ability to refer to a collection development policy to state why we will and won't take certain types of data could be invaluable. Related to this was Ellen Collin's discussion on how certain data repositories make decisions on whether or not to collect data, and these could be considered when writing our collection development policy.
A theme running through a number of the chapters was a discussion of why some researchers aren't keen on making their data openly available (and, more broadly, objections to managing their research data in general), and in contrast, the positive reasons for doing so. All of these arguments are helpful to be aware of when discussing research data management with researchers, and go some way towards pre-empting their questions and concerns.
Finally, Sheila Corrall provides a list of questions that Witt and Carlson asked researchers when they were trying to identify potential research dataset additions for their data repository. One of our current actions at work is to talk to researchers at the university about their data and data management plans, and this set of questions could be a useful starting point for us if we're not sure where to begin these conversations.
So, overall, this has been a really helpful book - both in terms of helping me understand more about the issues surrounding managing research data as a librarian (and for libraries generally), and enabling me to come up with ideas and plans to support our current work.
Reference: Pryor, G. (ed). (2013). Managing Research Data. London: Facet Publishing.
Having now read the book, I can state that this book was, in fact, incredibly worthwhile reading. The book has 10 chapters, and I ended up making notes on six of them. I've written up comprehensive notes and thoughts and added these to RefWorks (see, I am making an effort to use it), but some of the most useful points and my key thoughts are below.
In her chapter on the life-cycle of data management, Higgins talked about the importance of having a collection development policy for a data repository, which I really think will be necessary for us, as we have limited storage space. The ability to refer to a collection development policy to state why we will and won't take certain types of data could be invaluable. Related to this was Ellen Collin's discussion on how certain data repositories make decisions on whether or not to collect data, and these could be considered when writing our collection development policy.
A theme running through a number of the chapters was a discussion of why some researchers aren't keen on making their data openly available (and, more broadly, objections to managing their research data in general), and in contrast, the positive reasons for doing so. All of these arguments are helpful to be aware of when discussing research data management with researchers, and go some way towards pre-empting their questions and concerns.
Finally, Sheila Corrall provides a list of questions that Witt and Carlson asked researchers when they were trying to identify potential research dataset additions for their data repository. One of our current actions at work is to talk to researchers at the university about their data and data management plans, and this set of questions could be a useful starting point for us if we're not sure where to begin these conversations.
So, overall, this has been a really helpful book - both in terms of helping me understand more about the issues surrounding managing research data as a librarian (and for libraries generally), and enabling me to come up with ideas and plans to support our current work.
Reference: Pryor, G. (ed). (2013). Managing Research Data. London: Facet Publishing.
Friday, 29 November 2013
Zotero, Mendeley, RefWorks
So, on to the first action on my PDP (well, the first one I've decided to tackle anyway). I've been meaning to look at, and use, a referencing tool properly for a while now.
When I first looked at Zotero back in August 2011, I actually quite liked it. So I thought trying it out again would be a good place to start. Unfortunately, the things I originally loved about Zotero (how user-friendly it seemed, the fact that it automatically attached full text where a PDF was available) either didn't seem to happen anymore, or had become so unintuitive (at least to me) that, after spending a good hour or two playing with it, on at least two separate occasions, I gave up.
My next port of call was Mendeley. I knew I'd found this less intuitive than Zotero in the past, so I wasn't surprised that I wasn't especially keen on the product when I tried to use it again. Although at least it didn't keep jumping me back to the start screen for no apparent reason every time I clicked on something, as Zotero had been doing. Another disadvantage to Mendeley was that I couldn't see anywhere to add my own notes to an article, which is really important for me.
My final possible referencing tool was RefWorks. I had shied away from using this a little, as it's a paid-for piece of software. UWE, where I work, does have a subscription to it, but what happens if I use it, rely on it, and then leave UWE? The obvious answer to this is to make sure I export all my references before I go - and in RefWorks this, thankfully, is fairly simple to do. The one problem with that is that RefWorks does have a place for personal notes, but they don't get exported along with the reference. In a worst case scenario this would mean copy and pasting all those personal notes alongside each reference - which leads me to the question; if you're organised, is this really then any better than using Word to store your references? Perhaps not a popular question amongst librarians who advocate and support using referencing software, but maybe one that we should be asking.
For the time being though, RefWorks does do everything I want it to, and is fairly user-friendly. It's also easy to use at home and at work thanks to UWEs very simple 'log-in once' system. Using it also means that I'm learning more about a piece of software I'll potentially get asked questions about at work, so it is beneficial to me in another way. As I've already started to add a couple of references to it I'll continue to do so, but if I didn't exist I'm not sure I'd see adding my references to a Word document as a particularly worse option. But then, I am very organised and will format my references as I go and pretty much always remember to add them (and notes about the text) to a Word document. RefWorks actually means I have more work to do in one go here, as although it exports references in the wanted format, they still need to be checked and corrected as they're never 100% right.
Having said all that, maybe if you're a less organised person a referencing tool like RefWorks or Zotero is a better choice than a text file for managing your references. You decide...
When I first looked at Zotero back in August 2011, I actually quite liked it. So I thought trying it out again would be a good place to start. Unfortunately, the things I originally loved about Zotero (how user-friendly it seemed, the fact that it automatically attached full text where a PDF was available) either didn't seem to happen anymore, or had become so unintuitive (at least to me) that, after spending a good hour or two playing with it, on at least two separate occasions, I gave up.
My next port of call was Mendeley. I knew I'd found this less intuitive than Zotero in the past, so I wasn't surprised that I wasn't especially keen on the product when I tried to use it again. Although at least it didn't keep jumping me back to the start screen for no apparent reason every time I clicked on something, as Zotero had been doing. Another disadvantage to Mendeley was that I couldn't see anywhere to add my own notes to an article, which is really important for me.
My final possible referencing tool was RefWorks. I had shied away from using this a little, as it's a paid-for piece of software. UWE, where I work, does have a subscription to it, but what happens if I use it, rely on it, and then leave UWE? The obvious answer to this is to make sure I export all my references before I go - and in RefWorks this, thankfully, is fairly simple to do. The one problem with that is that RefWorks does have a place for personal notes, but they don't get exported along with the reference. In a worst case scenario this would mean copy and pasting all those personal notes alongside each reference - which leads me to the question; if you're organised, is this really then any better than using Word to store your references? Perhaps not a popular question amongst librarians who advocate and support using referencing software, but maybe one that we should be asking.
For the time being though, RefWorks does do everything I want it to, and is fairly user-friendly. It's also easy to use at home and at work thanks to UWEs very simple 'log-in once' system. Using it also means that I'm learning more about a piece of software I'll potentially get asked questions about at work, so it is beneficial to me in another way. As I've already started to add a couple of references to it I'll continue to do so, but if I didn't exist I'm not sure I'd see adding my references to a Word document as a particularly worse option. But then, I am very organised and will format my references as I go and pretty much always remember to add them (and notes about the text) to a Word document. RefWorks actually means I have more work to do in one go here, as although it exports references in the wanted format, they still need to be checked and corrected as they're never 100% right.
Having said all that, maybe if you're a less organised person a referencing tool like RefWorks or Zotero is a better choice than a text file for managing your references. You decide...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)