Supporting Research Students

Citation

Crnic, J. (2011), "Supporting Research Students", Library Management, Vol. 32 No. 1/2, pp. 131-132. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435121111102647

Supporting Research Students has been authored by an experienced educator and now PhD, Barbara Allan, who is also the Director of the Hull University Business School's Centre for Innovations in Learning and Teaching and the author of several books related to teaching and learning.

In the introduction, the author indicates that she saw a need for a text like this resulting from her own experience of pursuing a research degree as a part‐time student. She witnessed the struggles faced by fellow students who did not have a background in academic study and were not as familiar with the workings of higher degree institutions and were subsequently not able to make full use of the support resources available to them.

Barbara Allan has designed this text to be used as a practical guide for librarians working within universities, who are finding that research students are making up a greater proportion of their clientele, and who find that they need a more intimate look at the world of research from research students' perspectives.

The organisation of the book generally follows a sequential path to indicate the different elements involved in the research process and how a research student may progress through each segment.

The author admits that the book is not designed to provide an in‐depth analysis of research and the research process admitting that there is a whole body of literature that adequately provides for that.

The strengths in Barbara's approach lie with her ability to simplify and make easily understandable what is essentially a complex and individual process such as research.

The first four chapters provide a clear and concise overview of the nature of research and the relevant stages of the research process. The next two chapters were particularly relevant to my work personally and I was pleased to see lots of case study examples that I could follow up myself. The checklists were particularly meaningful, despite the fact that they were exclusively UK‐based.

Chapter 7 is an extended look at the Hull University's Graduate Virtual Research Environment. It provides a useful entry to the following chapters, which tackle various avenues of virtual support, but it could have been further extended by examining examples from further afield, as comparisons.

The book concludes with two chapters that look at communities as supports for researchers and communities that professional librarians should avail themselves of.

The book overall works well as a librarian beginners' guide to the research process and how libraries can best respond with targeted training and support. There are many texts on the market that provide greater detail and insights into studying for a PhD, but they generally skim over the information needs of research students. This book is a welcome addition and definitely fills an information gap.