Friday, July 08, 2011

Research evaluation – is it our business? The role of librarians in the brave new world of research evaluation

JIBS User Group - Workshop 29 June 2010 – University of Birmingham

As the tweets (#JIBSre) appear to indicate, this JIBS workshop apparently hit just the right topic at just the right time. People came with all different levels of experience, and being so well-attended the workshop opened up many opportunities for sharing that experience. Whether embedded in your work already or not no-one could have left the day without gaining a wide array of ideas for practical action to take back to institutions. And the venue was the stunning campus of Birmingham University – on a stunning June day.

The workshop’s remit was inspired by institutions’ interest in procuring a CRIS (Current Research Information System) and the perceived and growing requirement from multiple points of view – both internal and external – for analysis of bibliometric information. Procurement of a CRIS is one solution among many (and there are as many hybrid as PURE solutions) that comprises re-tooling of current internal systems, and alternative uses to those originally intended for institutional repositories. At the centre is the librarian – or is s/he? “Is it our business?” It was one of the day’s main aims to contribute ideas to feed into librarians’ individual and collective strategies for getting involved in this new area of work; an area that is of crucial significance for institutions as they face the REF in 2014 . Equally librarians find they must step up to calls to assist in and facilitate the supply of information to researchers for enhancing the visibility of their research output and their personal and research teams’ profiles as institutions manage their internal promotions and their outward-facing impact globally.

Read a report of the workshop here.

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