Today was again quite packed with useful information sessions. We had a quick meeting with Kara, who gave us a bit of background to some of the meetings coming up during the day. She also organised for us to attend Engage: Public engagement in practice next week. (Engage is an annual event where they showcase and celebrate the varied ways that researchers engage with the community.) Our first meeting of the day was with Katie Evans, their Research Analytics librarian. This was a superb session showing us examples of bibliometric reports she delivers to Research Committees, describing how she had to build the service. Katie is very inspiring and has a lot of expertise in the field. We will definitely stay in contact in future. We got lots of ideas from her on how to improve our bibliometric/research impact services. More about this also later when we return to Stellenbosch... This afternoon's session was with Lizzie Richmond who is responsible for their Archives and Special Coll...

Something I read in my inbox today: The Realities of Research Data Management is a four-part series that explores how research universities are addressing the challenge of managing research data throughout the research lifecycle. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2017/oclcresearch-research-data-management.html

The discussions this afternoon about Research Data Management was very interesting and overwhelming at some points. They have a team of 3 staff members working only with research data services at the Library. They also work together with their computing services and research development section on all matters related to Research Data Services. We attended a Research Data Operational Group meeting this afternoon. Some issues they discussed were additional active data storage, an engagement plan, allocation and deallocation matters, as well as compliance monitoring. More about this later when we return to Stellenboch... For now I would rather continue to share some photographs of our first two days... Bath itself is really beautiful, we haven't seen half of it yet, but here are some first impressions: The Abbey A scene just around the corner from our flat Romantic in the evening... The space where Alvina will work and will be able to log onto a PC The me...

We arrived yesterday (Sunday 23 April) in the beautiful town of Bath and checked into our flat. It is located right in the centre of town, next to the Roman Baths and the Abbey... After a few busy days of travelling and walking in London, we tried not to walk too far on our first day in Bath, our feet were still aching from the previous day of walking "through London" :-) The University Librarian, Kate Robinson and the Head of Library Research Services, Kara Jones, met us on the first evening and took us out for dinner at a great Lebanese restaurant. They really made us feel very welcome. Thank you Kate and Kara! The University is about 5 kilometres out of town on a hill , so we need to take a bus there every day. Fortunately it is very easy to find the correct bus and after a few stops and about 15 minutes we arrived this morning well ahead of time. Kara showed us around in the Library, introduced us to some of the Library staff and showed us to a meeting room, where we ...

It is a huge privilege for me and Alvina to visit the University of Bath during the end of April and early May. I decided to record a few notes on a daily basis and share it with colleagues on the go. I am really excited about the programme they put together for us. It will include more or less the following: - We will attend a general staff meeting on the first day and do presentations on Stellenbosch University and the Library and Information Service - Sessions with the Reseach Analytics librarian to find out more about their services regarding bibliometrics, altmetrics, et.al. - Sessions with staff involved with Research Data Management - Sessions with different Subject Librarians - Marketing of research services and workshops - Discussions on ORCID and the implementation on campus - We will attend several staff meetings related to the topic of interest (Research Services) We will also be visiting the University of Bath Spa Library (another University in Bath) and the...