I am the senior library officer and currently the sole library staff at the Insurance Training College Library, I manage all aspects of the library's operations. My responsibilities include cataloguing and organizing the collection, assisting students and teaching staff with research and resource needs, and maintaining the library's digital and physical resources. I also develop and deliver training sessions to help users effectively utilize library services and resources. Additionally, I oversee the acquisition of new materials, manage the library's budget, and ensure a welcoming and efficient environment for all patrons. Through these efforts, I support the teaching, learning, study, and research goals of the college community.
Open Access (OA) is about making academic research freely available online to everyone. So that people can easily find and read them. This approach helps more people access knowledge and can lead to greater collaboration and faster progress in research.
Open Science takes the idea of Open Access further by promoting transparency and sharing throughout the entire research process. This involves not just sharing the final results, but also the data, methods, and tools used in research.
Open Scholarship is a broader concept that includes both Open Access and Open Science. It also focuses on open educational practices and resources. This includes creating and sharing free educational materials (Open Educational Resources or OER) and involving students in the creation of knowledge (Open Pedagogy). Open Scholarship also supports the use of open licenses like Creative Commons to make it easy to share and reuse academic work.
From the upcoming training,
- I expect to gain a comprehensive understanding of the importance of institutional repositories in enhancing the visibility of our research outputs at the Insurance Training College.
- I aim to learn how to effectively use open infrastructure and services such as DSpace and DataCite tools to make our research outputs open and easily discoverable.
- The training will equip me with the skills to teach and train librarians, ICT professionals, and research administrators on implementing DataCite tools and services, including DOIs, metadata, and APIs. Additionally.
- I hope to become confident in addressing challenging questions about open research outputs and to develop the ability to plan and execute training activities, incorporating best practices for various formats.
- Finally, I look forward to understanding how to engage with diverse audiences, including institutional administrators, to secure funding for DataCite initiatives and to evaluate the impact of these efforts effectively.