strategy

Opening Remarks #3: Open Research

In this quite long third episode of Opening Remarks, we take a look at the work that we’re doing in the Library to help foster an open and responsible research environment at The University of Manchester. There are three segments: a conversation with Scott Taylor about the Open Research Programme that he’s leading, a chat with Zoë Fletcher and Eleanor Warren about their contribution to that work, and then some snippets from our recent Open Research Exchange event.

All of this follows a slightly longer than usual preamble from me (Steve) and Clare where we talk about: Nigel Slater, figs, interior design, lockdown life and some other stuff. Skip forward to 11 minutes if you want to give that a miss.

During the episode, we promised to link to some things in the episode notes. Here they are:
The University’s Open Research Position Statement
Resources from the Open Research Exchange event – includes slides, video and audio

The Library’s resources on Open Research
Follow us on Twitter at @UoMLibResearch

Thanks for listening! Hope you all have a lovely festive season!

Music by Michael Liggins
Artwork by Elizabeth Carlton

Download episode here

Mathematics approval plan

A guest post written by Academic Engagement Librarian Nick Campbell.

As part of The University of Manchester Library’s new suite of Strategy Projects a work package was set up to investigate supplementary mechanisms for acquisition and collection development. One element of this was to run an “approval plan” to see if this method of purchasing would benefit the Library. We did this by subject area selecting Mathematics as a test School.

The plan itself was defined by Dewey range and readership level; our supplier had the Library’s full holdings file (updated monthly) to avoid supplying anything already in stock, and focused primarily on final year undergraduate and research level items. In essence the idea behind the project was to harness the power of available data for collection development and to determine if the Library might take some of the strain off academic staff in the area of complementary book selection. Of course teaching and research staff can continue to suggest and independently purchase items, and we greatly value this, but the thinking here was to explore an alternative method of acquisition.

The results so far have been good. A number of items purchased (examples below) via the scheme have already been borrowed, renewed and reserved by interested readers.

Alan Turing: The Enigma

An Introduction to Computational Stochastic PDEs

Thanks to Nick for this guest post – you’ll be able to read more about our investigations into data-driven collection development in a future post by Rachel.