Introduction

This is a practical book consisting of ideas and suggestions for library and information staff working with researchers, garnered from librarians all around the world. Inevitably, as the author is based in an English university, it has a UK HE bias, but the concepts and tips will often be transferable to different situations and countries. The aim is not so much to give you a definitive answer but to set you on the path to finding your own solutions.

The book has been developed using a mind map to gather tips into natural chapters and very much reflects the interests of the contributors. Hence, you will not find a detailed theoretical exposition; there are other books in existence that do this very well and they are listed in the further reading; this book aims to raise awareness of issues and suggest ways to begin to address them.

We all know that librarians love to share and this book is a shining example of sharing in practice. Over the last year, at conferences and meetings, via email and social media, I have explained what I was doing and asked for contributions. This is the result and you may well recognize a comment or idea in the following pages. I have tried to acknowledge everyone who has helped and apologize now if I have inadvertently missed someone. In this respect, therefore, the tips are self-selecting, representing the main interests and discussions prevalent at the time of writing.

My story

I'm a Faculty Liaison Librarian at Newcastle University and I've spent many years working with researchers at all levels, as well as researching into different aspects of information literacy and research workflows.

When I moved from a ‘new’ teaching-focused university to a Russell Group university over 16 years ago my job description said I was responsible for ‘research support’ but when I asked my new colleagues what that meant in practice, no one could give me a simple definition. This led us at Newcastle University to initiate a research project to find out what our researchers needed from us, resulting in our original library web pages for researchers, which we called ResIN: Research Information at Newcastle (Bent, 2004). For a few years they were very successful and acted as a model for several other university libraries.