Deakin University Library’s liaison librarian capacity building program began in 2014 as the Training and Development Program. The program is developed and coordinated by the Library’s Research Services team and Learning and Teaching team. Each round is structured to meet the specific professional development needs of Deakin’s liaison librarians and scaffolds their skills and knowledge development. At the beginning of 2018, the program evolved to become the Liaison Librarian Learning and Research Forum.
Each year features eight sessions run every month from April to November. Each session focuses on a specific learning or research related topic. All of the training topics were designed around an annual training needs analysis. The program is evaluated and reviewed annually to meet liaison librarians’ changing professional development needs.
This infographic shows the range of topics covered from April 2014 to June 2018:
- ‘Developing leaders for the digital age: capacity building for liaison librarians @Deakin University’ was presented at the 2016 ALIA National Conference:
- A more recent paper was published in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management titled ‘Exploring the efficacy of training and development for liaison librarians at Deakin University, Australia’.
- Understanding the principles and process of managing research ethics
- Designing research projects
- Collecting and reviewing data
- Communicating research through internal reporting or external publishing.
Characteristics of the model
Organic and open
- A group of people come together with a shared interest and a shared project/task to achieve.
- In a learning circle, group members take on the collective responsibility to complete the shared task/project.
- Based on their individual interests and skills, each group member takes on a distributed leadership role, which contributes to the collective completion of the task.
- Participants as leaders, leaders as participants.
- Group members work as equal partners to share, discuss and reflect on ideas based on mutual respect.
Timeline
April to July 2016
- Learning circle groups were formed and our group immediately started brainstorming a topic of interest to all of us and outlining what we needed to do to draft a research proposal.
- Two of the liaison librarians in the group worked with creative arts academics and had an interest in designing a study that included a visual arts methodology.
- We decided to target academic staff so as to focus the study on one particular group.
- We formed the idea to collect data about what academics thought of liaison librarians. This was joined with the initial idea of a visual arts methodology and the proposal developed that we collect data from artefacts created by participants.
- After doing a literature review we established that this would be a unique way to collect data and would produce more original responses from academics, as opposed to what we could have collected using a method like surveys or face to face interviews.
- Ultimately we decided to invite academic staff to attend a focus group where they would create an artefact, then talk through their creation. That would be our research data.
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