Research support

Given Curtin’s beginnings as a primarily undergraduate teaching institution, the Library was well equipped with services, collections and programs to support students and staff in those areas, but had limited services to support researchers. As Curtin made the transition to a research university, the Library developed an innovative ‘senior librarian model’ to provide services to academic staff and to higher degree by research students. 23

The Library recognised that academics and research students had special needs well beyond the basic level of information literacy that undergraduates required. Senior librarians were appointed to each academic division or branch but, radically for the time, their offices were not in the Library but in their academic divisions. This placement embedded the service and provided the potential for the librarians to become a critical part of the teaching, learning and research life of their divisions. In the same vein, a librarian was placed at Technology Park for a time to support staff and research students working there.

The first senior librarian appointment was made in 1993 to the Division of Humanities and by 1997 senior librarians had been placed in all divisions and their services were in high demand.

The model was flexible enough to allow the librarians to use their individual strengths and interests to provide support appropriate to the diverse and changing environments they worked within and to the needs of particular researchers.
In general, all senior librarians provided specialist support in information literacy to researchers (one-to-one and via classes), facilitated collection development, promoted Library services and in turn, kept the Library informed about the environment in the divisions. 24

The range of classes offered to academic staff and research students grew over time and by 2002, senior librarians collaboratively presented a seminar series ‘Mastering research resources’, as well as a variety of sessions on specific topics including database searching, scholarly communication, and managing references using the software program EndNote.

Catering for off-campus staff and research students was an issue because much of the support provided by senior librarians was delivered face-to-face. By 2001, the Library had begun development of a web-based advanced information literacy program, InfoTrekkPlus, to help address this inequality in service provision.