Carla Marchesan kicked off the conference’s formal talks with an exploration of the online delivery for for MPhil and PhD students at The King’s Foundation. Much had changed during lockdown in terms of delivery as they area small educational institution for predominantly postgraduate students. They had to be creative and focus on online delivery. Lacking an e-resource budget they had to rely on promoting open access resources (images, books and in particular free JSTOR content and use of the British Library).
The pre-lockdown face-to-face approach has post-lockdown become predominantly an online one, with a permanent programme with information for different stages of the PhD. With more international students and less time spent ‘on site’, the online approach is more favourable. There are monthly sessions for year 1, termly sessions for year 2 and 3, plus additional sessions suited for all – more can be added as needed. These are short and focused one hour online sessions on Monday mornings:
Year 1 focuses on induction, IL, GenAI and research, copyright/plagiarism, Zotero, Notetaking and resources.
Year 2 focuses on Zotero as a communications tool, indexes/glossaries, foreign/technical terms, formatting theses (Word), publishing in journals and presenting at conferences.
For me it was most interesting to hear how this is all done as at my institution a lot of these topics are split between other services, the Library’s Academic and also its Research Services, as well as the University’s Skills Centre. It’s an interesting contrast to our Doctoral College’s programme of events which draw from various professional services. There is a preference generally for electronic delivery and recorded sessions, but increasingly we are reinstating face-to-face sessions. These are also recorded and many are repeated. Whether we could benefit from signposting content appropriate to different years is something worth exploring. Our Library’s doctoral skills programme has been going through some significant changes over the last year and this talk has provided a contrast and food for thought.
Year 3 focuses on HEA accreditation, AI for teaching (lesson plans etc), presentations and viva prep, exhibition curating and gallery affiliation (via an invited speaker). They are planning to use their library as a venue for public exhibitions.
It was fascinating to hear about such a different approach, but also think of some of the parallels in what we are trying to do. For instance, at a large institution like Bath, there’s so much research taking place that often our research postgraduates do not know what else is happening in their own department let alone elsewhere. There has certainly been demand for some method to share information on this. The idea of using the library for exhibitions is a very creative solution and ties into their training/development. At our institution we have just begun discussing ways to share visual research outputs in the library, to provide a central location for sharing across the institution and raising awareness of what else is happening – with potential to find collaborators.
Review and photos by David Stacey | University of Bath
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