Moving school-university engagement beyond the role of recruiting sergeant

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Michael Francis.

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Photo: Michael Francis.

“The science faculty in your local university needs you!” could have been the headline on the recent Guardian article about the RCUK-funded School-University Partnership Initiative (SUPI).

There is much to commend in the article and in the activities fellow SUPIs have developed, delivered and assessed over the previous four years.

Is there a problem with the article?

I argue that this article is part of a wider discourse that limits how school-university engagement with research is planned for, enacted, represented and, ultimately, valued. But why should we care?

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New! Research Data Catalogue

This post was originally posted on The Orb, the Open University’s open research blog, by Isabel Chadwick, Research Data Management Librarian at the Open University

Swiss Army knife

The Research Data Management project is working to build a suite of tools which will enable OU researchers to manage, share, publish and archive their research data. I am pleased to announce that the first tool in this suite, the Research Data Catalogue is now live.

The Research Data Catalogue is facilitated by a new item type – “Research Dataset Record” – in ORO, the OU’s institutional repository. At this stage, ORO can only accept records which describe research datasets (what they are and how they can be accessed) the datasets themselves should not be deposited in ORO.

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Twitter @IOE Library

Nazlin Bhimani, Research Support & Special Collections Librarian

Early in June 2014, members of the Newsam Library & Archives met to discuss ways to better promote our services and collections to our users via Twitter. @IOELibrary joined Twitter in June 2011 and has gathered about 625 followers. We wanted to get a team, representing all the different sections in the Library (Collection Development, User Services, Technical Services and Administration), that would take responsibility for tweeting for @IOELibrary. We had no special requirements for the staff. They didn’t need to be experienced users of Twitter. We simply wanted interested people who had interesting things to say.
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