Browsing by Author "Rainier BA"

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    Exploring library support for researcher needs in an academic context
    Clark JS; Rainier BA; Lamond H
    The international reputation of a university is heavily based on the quality and influence of its research and hence the competence of its researchers. To provide support and enable the research community, an university library needs to have a good understanding of their current needs, and insight into areas for future support. To gain this information, a survey of Massey University researchers was undertaken by the Library in 2014. The survey instrument was based on the Research Libraries UK (RLUK) Re-skilling for Research report and used a ranking scale response to statements of current and potential areas of support through the stages of the research life cycle. The data was further analysed according to respondents’ faculties and their career stages to highlight specific areas that needed to be addressed. Traditional academic library services, such as strategies for keeping up with published research and managing literature search results, rated highly desirable across all faculties and career stages. Researchers rated assistance to maximize the visibility of their own research and help in understanding the potential of emerging information technologies, in order to achieve the former, as highly desirable. Support with data management, curation and preservation, however, did not feature highly. The survey responses provide us with data to inform our Library strategic planning in terms of research support, but will also enable us to design appropriate professional development for librarians in order to better support the research community.
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    I didn’t know what I didn’t know – Postgraduate science students as new library users
    White BD; Rainier BA
    While considerable effort goes into equipping undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering and medicine with knowledge discovery skills and an understanding of the scientific literature, many of them complete their first degrees with a relatively basic level of competence. Undergraduate science education demands an intensive development of subject knowledge and technical skills with less emphasis on the primary literature, and unless an information literacy element is expressly built into science programmes undergraduate students are not routinely required to make use of library resources (Bogucka & Wood, 2009; Wiegant, Scager, & Boonstra, 2011). Postgraduate study, particularly at masters and doctoral level, places quite a different level of demand on students, and even to formulate a research question requires an extensive knowledge of the existing literature. The first part of the thesis journey is the literature review which provides a theoretical and methodological grounding of the whole project, but students often arrive at postgraduate study poorly equipped to perform this task (Hoffmann, Antwi-Nsiah, Feng, & Stanley, 2008; Miller, 2014). Those skills that they have acquired tend to be based around Google and Google Scholar (Wu & Chen, 2014) which provide a good result for relatively little effort, but which lack the functionality to fully support a literature review at this level (Johnson & Simonsen, 2015). Increasing internationalisation of postgraduate education is another factor impacting on this situation, although it would be wrong to assume that English-speaking students or those from “developed countries” possess the appropriate skills for an advanced degree literature review.