Information Skills and Support (ISS)
The Information Skills and Support team helps students carry out research and search and find the right articles.
Dominique is part of this team, together with Gemma and Saskia: "Doing research is very new for (first year) students. Searching for articles via a database can be tricky. Among other things, our team runs practical sessions within different courses to help students get started with the research, and we also offer individual guidance." In addition, LibGuides have been created for each subject area with all kinds of information, such as Psychology's LibGuide.
Research Support and Quick Solutions (RSQS)
Rebecca is part of the Research Support and Quick Solutions team, which supports staff, PhDs and researchers in various parts of their research. Examples include advice on literature searches and literature reviews, help with building a systematic search strategy, (open access) publishing of research, and help with software such as Endnote and ASReview. People from these two teams again form one team within the faculty, namely the UBN Team of Social Sciences.
Not everyone knows about us. I would love to hear from researchers and PhDs to learn what types of support are most helpful.
The division of these teams within Information & Library Services is still quite new. As a result, Rebecca and Dominique notice that not everyone knows about them. Rebecca: "I would love to hear from researchers to learn what types of support are most helpful. That way, we as a team can offer them appropriate support where it is needed. We are always available to answer questions."
Which task belongs to which team?
Some tasks of both teams occasionally overlap. Dominique: "The big difference between the teams is the target group and working methods. We (ISS) are focused on students and help within courses, whereas the RSQS team focuses more on staff, PhDs and researchers and does so through workshops and individual consultation. So ISS is more education-oriented, and RSQS is more researcher-oriented."
The RSQS team will organise all kinds of different workshops for researchers. The first workshop took place on 24th October and was about effective literature searching. The workshop discussed how to conduct systematic and reproducible literature searches within databases and also how to use additional search techniques such as citation analysis and grey literature search to find more relevant sources. Participants also had the opportunity to work on their own search strategy and found the workshop useful for their work. The new workshop is on 23rd November from 13:00-15:00.
Getting in touch with researchers
Rebecca would like to hear from researchers so that the UBN team can respond with new workshops and other support. "We are here to make things easier for researchers, so we would love to hear your feedback and ideas" she says.