One size won’t fit all in information policy and provision

The British Library and the Research Information Network have published a report Patterns of Information Use and Exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences.

The key conclusion of the report, “that the policies and strategies of research funders and information service providers must be informed by an understanding of the exigencies and practices of different research communities” is no surprise, but it is worth going to the report to read some of what led to that conclusion.

For example, even within what might be categorised a discipline, there can be marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange, as evidenced by the seven case studies in the report. An Information Flow map is produced for each of the case studies, each map made up of activities or concepts joined by links. Librarians will be interested in the vast array of information or data sources listed. In the Botanical curation study, for example, scientific papers and monographs are just two of the eighty-two named activities or concepts.

Academic libraries have long worked to understand the needs of their different communities, as is evidenced by the faculty librarian or subject support model in place in most libraries, increasingly complemented today by the role of research support librarian. It is interesting to see in this report, however, the recommendation that researchers should ‘reconnect’ with information professionals. The model that has worked for so long needs to be updated and made stronger.

Academic libraries need to provide more than strong disciplinary support in the provision of and access to information. There is a need for concerted efforts to be made to understand how information is produced within individual disciplines, in order to support and develop new relationships and functions, particularly regarding data curation and information sharing.

PhDs and Web 2.0 tools

Zoë Corbyn from Times Higher Education has just written that researchers aged between 21 and 27 aren't using Web 2.0 tools like RSS and social bookmarking in their work.

In my work as a research support librarian, I have been promoting Web 2.0 tools to researchers. An increasing number of researchers are using them but its very far from reaching a critical mass - they're far from being an essential part of everyone's work. I believe this is because:

1. RSS feeds from databases and journal publishers are difficult to set up. Publishers often expect users to create personal accounts and click through numerous screens before they get to an RSS icon. Every publisher does things differently - some only allow table of contents alerts, some automatically stop your feed after a year.
   
2. Social networking/bookmarking. There's a lot of startup services for researchers and academics - I've come across about ten of them - but no single one has taken off yet. Some of them, like Academia.edu, look great, but they're all stuck in a situation where no one is signing up because none of their friends/colleagues have signed up first.
3. None of these services talk to each other. I can set up a Web of Science feed on my Google Reader, but Google can't easily transfer the references to RefWorks and its just an tricky sending them on again from RefWorks to my citeulike account. The future may be with Zotero, which is trying to do all this in one service.
   

The fact is that the volume and complexity of information researchers need is on a different scale from the general public and can't be simply automated with Web 2.0 tools. That's why a good working relationship between researchers and librarians is so important. Librarians can offer hands-on help with all these technologies, and advise and train researchers on the best ways to find / manage / share / publish their information.