PhD student support at the Library : from generic courses to contextual learning

For many years Malmö University Library arranged a course for PhD students, called Searching for academic information. This annual course was very appreciated by the participants. Still, in 2015 we decided to explore how we could develop the doctoral student support further. Academic disciplines differ in structure and approach - we wanted a support model that could be more adjustable to various disciplinary practices and different postgraduate programmes. We started a one year project with the aim to understand how the library's support to doctoral students can be designed, based on their contexts. This was especially important for us since our pedagogical strategy at Malmö University Library focus on contextual learning. We explored in particular how to support the PhD students based on the individual projects, the postgraduate programmes progression for learning how to be a researcher and epistemic cultures. The project was inspired by action research. Participation is an important component and action research is both practice-oriented and change focused. As doctoral students were the target group we worked to involve both them and others outside the library in order to develop our support model. Our method was iterative; we repeated, evaluated and changed steps subsequently. In this paper we present how the method of action research is useful to develop your organisation in relation to user needs, in this case the PhD students. The project resulted in a flexible support structure with various activities that can be changed as needed with thematic content in different formats. The activities are planned and performed by librarians from the part of the library that has the relevant competence. Examples of seminar topics are; systematic search strategies, reference management, publishing strategies and research data management. We will discuss the choices we had to make and the pros and cons of having a flexible support structure rather than a traditional course. New web page - Library support for doctoral students: http://mah.se/library/doctoralstudent