• Michael Jubb, John MacColl
• Online Computer Library Center

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05 July 2011Two organisations, OCLC Research and the UK’s Research Information Network (RIN), last year undertook a pair of parallel studies in the US and the UK on the theme of research support services in universities. In the US, they commissioned the library and scholarly information consultancy Kroll Research Associates, and in the UK they awarded the study to the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at University College London. Working jointly with the two organisations, each team chose four research-intensive universities in which to trawl for data on research support services, by means of interviews and focus group sessions with researchers, research administrators, and librarians.

The findings of both studies showed a relatively high degree of convergence on one fairly simple fact: institutionally-provided research support services are not appreciated by researchers in universities, who consider them marginal at best and burdensome at worst. Researchers are often resistant to services which they feel belong more naturally to their disciplines rather than their institutions—especially where these duplicate existing disciplinary services. They begrudge any time spent on activity which seems to them to serve an administrative need, seeing their job as to perform research, not administration. And the bad—if not unexpected—news for libraries is that institutional repositories fall squarely into the latter category, as far as researchers are concerned, since they lack any essential motivation to deposit their research outputs in them.

The fact that this results in a disorganised mess of uncategorised and unsecured research outputs worries librarians, but is not a major concern for researchers. A few quotations from both reports will suffice as illustration, but there are many from which to choose:

• They do not seek, nor do they want, non-specialist advice from the Research Office or any other internal agency remote from the colleagues they work with.

• The majority of researchers interviewed for this study use online tools and commercial services related to their discipline rather than tools provided by their university.

• Discussions with researchers revealed little enthusiasm or awareness of the benefits claimed for institutional repositories. Rather, they tend to be perceived as another burden creating additional work, even in areas where there are well-established and effective subject-based repositories.

• Many researchers flounder in a disorganised and rising accumulation of useful findings that may be lost or unavailable when conducting future research.