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- All Subjects: Research -- Methodology
- Creators: Pardon, Kevin
- Creators: Lee, Young-Joo
Methods: Facilitating open access publishing, best practices in literature reviews, scholarly research writing, clinical research data management, preservation, and accessibility: all of these are areas that librarians are working to support in many institutions. In this paper, two librarians from two research-1 universities provide a brief review of relevant literature. They follow with lessons learned and best practices identified during experiences as part of graduate student or faculty learning and working groups. These include: participation in a clinical research evaluation course; being a coauthor during writing, submitting, and revising of a scholarly peer-reviewed article, and negotiating copyright terms with an academic publisher; and participating in a faculty writing group for mutual motivation and constructive commentary on in-process writing projects.
Results: In this observational and participative study, the authors found that by taking advantage of opportunities to join groups in their research communities, they expanded their own skill sets while also expanding their contextual understanding of researcher support needs, including faculty, instructors, researchers, and graduate students. Through physical and online participation in learning, training, and working spaces along with their constituent communities, the authors built strong connections and mutual understanding. By being present (online or in-person) when questions occurred, they increased opportunities to provide in-context support for literature review searching techniques; citation management tools; copyright, journal selection, and publishing questions; and data management planning.
Conclusions: Each profession, discipline, and employment has its learning communities, informal or time-specific subgroups that come about as needed or for required trainings. Learning communities are where those in a given discipline or employment explore tasks in a collaborative setting and learn together, developing new skills and mastery through practice with peer and expert feedback. Such communities might take the form of a course on clinical research, an informal writing group, a seminar series, or even a cross-department event-planning group. By joining such groups, librarians can build on common experiences to form stronger relationships with their communities, gaining two critical benefits: (1) opportunities to provide research and information expertise in context and (2) greater recognition as part of the community and of what librarians do and their areas of expertise.
Objectives: While PhD dissertations are typically accessible as part of a university library’s general collection, or as content within a proprietary database, many other terminal degree projects remain invisible and inaccessible to a greater audience. This poster will describe the development and creation of a digital repository collection containing doctor of nursing practice (DNP) student’s final projects.
Methods: The “Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Final Projects Collection” was created over the course of one semester and included initial discussions with program faculty and administrators, the creation of a student consent form, the development of a process for adding student work to the repository collection, and a presentation to graduating students. This poster will describe the process in more detail, discuss benefits and challenges, as well as highlight the considerations to keep in mind when developing and creating a digital collection of student work. Additionally, best practices and lessons learned will also be described to provide valuable information to others considering creating this type of collection at their own institution.
Results: At the end of the first semester of implementation, twenty student projects existed in our public collection. On the whole, both faculty and students were pleased to have a collection highlighting the work being done in their program. Valuable lessons were learned that can be applied in the next semester of implementation. Specifically, metadata consistency was an issue during the initial uploading process. Gaining select faculty and student buy-in by allaying concerns related to some student’s wanting to publish in a peer-reviewed journal on the topic of their final project remains vital.
Conclusion: Creating open access collections of student applied final projects or capstone projects allows for greater visibility of this type of often overlooked student scholarship. Specifically, the final projects showcased can now be found and accessed by potential employers, researchers, other schools, and other DNP students. In many cases these final projects have applied real-world impact related to answering clinical questions or patient care that should be shared with the world.