Research Skills Toolkit

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours at OUCS (Oxford University Computing Services) helping at the Research Skills Toolkit event for mathematical, physical and life sciences. These events are workshops aimed at first- and second-year higher-degree researchers and students run by staff from the Bodleian Libraries and OUCS, with each event focussing on a specific subject area.  There were 10 tasks for the participants to complete introducing IT and library tools for research.

The three tasks run by staff from the Radcliffe Science Library covered searching in, creating alerts from and exporting references from databases on the Proquest platform; searching for conference papers via IEEE Xplore and finding upcoming conferences; and basic searching, cited reference searching and journal citation reports on Web of Knowledge.  Each task was set up on computers around one table with one member of staff per task, although everyone was able to answer questions on all the tasks.  Most of the questions were about navigating the websites, finding the right links and understanding what each database was searching.  Participants also seemed to find it useful to have subject librarians there to ask more in-depth questions that came up.

These events are continuing to run for the rest of this week and I’ll be back in week 8 when more are planned.

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