By Chris Awre, Head of Information Management, University of Hull.

As we move ever closer to the REF submission in late 2013, I was recently asked to provide a generic paragraph outlining the Library’s support of research and researchers to inform Impact and Environment statements. Doing so provided a useful chance to reflect on how the Library has helped support research at the University.

Clearly, the Library provides information resources to inform research activity, we provide the space to study in, and we also offer training courses to develop research skills around managing information. So far, so traditional. But in this digital world we have also moved into the management of the digital content that is generated by the University. In partnership with our ICT Department, we have sought to establish a repository infrastructure that can deal with anything digital that researchers throw at us (in principle). This can include research outputs (textual, audiovisual, even software potentially), data generated by the research and any grey literature emerging from the research process: we have also had discussions around the management of born-digital archives so these can be used to inform research. Okay, it is not a panacea, but it is adaptable to changing requirements. And in the digital world requirements seem to change often.

This infrastructure came out of an idea that any repository we implemented would need to tackle three observations:

• Digital content is only going to grow in quantity
• Digital content comes in many formats and we need to be able to deal with these as they emerge
• Digital content needs to be managed over time, and therefore needs to be managed using standards (open standards, preferably)

These observations informed the implementation of a repository built around a Fedora core (the Fedora digital repository system, not the Linux distribution), with Hydra as the user interface/management layer. Both of these packages are open source. More importantly for Hull, both packages are centred round active software developer communities that push the systems and allow us, as a medium-sized university, to take advantage of a wider resource base we would not normally have access to. Fedora’s community existed already, and we have been fortunate to help build Hydra’s community as a partner in the project. This experience has been fruitful, and we have been able to contribute back to the development communities as much as we have taken from them. There are still improvements to be made, but we now have a solid infrastructure to serve researchers.

The work we have undertaken is, I hope, a development of research support that we as a Library can bring expertise and value to. For example, we feel we can support grant applications by informing on required resources and curate materials from the start of the research process. To further inform these ideas I recently attended the Digital Research 2012 conference in Oxford to learn more about how research is being affected by the digital environment. I learned a great deal and the experience and knowledge gleaned will help in future conversations with research staff here at Hull. But I also noted that I was one of only two librarians present (I think – hands up any others who were there!). Was this due to a lack of directed advertising, or lack of clarity in the scope of the event that meant librarians didn’t see the benefit of attending? What I heard at the conference seemed to be researchers with quite clear information and content management needs – had they talked to their library for assistance? Mind you, I also heard about a conversation between a researcher and librarian, where the librarian thought the library had the knight in shining armour solution and was rather surprised to be told it wasn’t what was needed. A balance and better understanding of requirements and how they can be met is needed

A few years ago Purdue University in the US raised the profile of interactions between researchers and librarians through a number of presentations and events. There is much good material that we in the UK can learn from. We need to talk more with our research colleagues and understand what it is most valuable to build services to do. Managing digital content has been a good start for us, and we look forward to building on this to meet and support local research needs.