A day in the life: Yvette

Hello and welcome to my contribution to our Day in the Life blogpost series.

A typical day for me in the Research Support Team is very likely to involve Open Research Online (ORO), The Open University’s research repository that to date, holds over 48,000 items! Whether it’s importing and editing records, updating and verifying the Open Access status of a publication, or resolving a query for a member of our research community, ORO work keeps me busy!

Many of the team’s queries come through to our Research Support team mailbox, so this needs to be monitored throughout the day. Queries are varied and can be anything from a copyright issue to arranging ORO access for an academic, so no two days are the same!

I also act as representative for the team with the University’s postgraduate researcher (PGR) Liaison group and Professional Doctorate committee, enabling a direct link between our team, the wider OU Library and our researchers. Preparing for these meetings can sometimes be a reactive process, making sure that a particular Library event, update, or wider scholarly issue is picked up on as it happens and relayed quickly.

In addition, I’m a member of the Library’s Web Quality Improvement and Library Search groups. This offers a way for our team to represent the needs of our PGRs and academics, and to raise key issues. I am currently working on improving some webpages to better promote our team’s training sessions ready for the new intake of PGRs in the Autumn. Planning for the new season of training sessions is underway in the team and I am preparing my copyright and your thesis session, as well as a potential new session to cover copyright issues relating to conference and workshop presentations so watch this space! I really welcome the varied nature of my role here and enjoy supporting our fantastic OU researchers 😊

Aside from Research Support related work, I enjoy contributing to a mental health and wellbeing group where we discuss improvements and new ideas for our wellbeing services for staff. The group helps to maintain webpages that signpost staff to useful resources and we have a Wellbeing Buddy system where you can be randomly paired with another person to have regular informal chats. This has been so beneficial to many staff members during the pandemic, helping us to feel less disconnected.

Before I go, I should introduce my work companion, Daisy.

© YH

Here she is on the beach. Her favourite place, somewhere I keep promising we’ll go back to soon. In the meantime, she will make sure we both have plenty of snacks during the day and provide me with soothing snoring sounds in the background. Who needs a white noise generator to help you work when you can have a snoring dog?

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