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Research Commons consultations

Summary of themes from discussion at RC GAA Team meeting, Dec 4, 2020. Questions to prompt the discussion:

  • What has worked well in your consultations with users?
  • What would you like to improve or change?

Themes

Consultation preparation

Clarifying the question

  • Clarify exactly the question the client wants to review in advance.
  • If anyone needs help setting up a good series of questions on their Consult form so that you have sufficient background info, please ask Eka.

Getting help with MAC platform

  • If you are a PC user that is offering a MAC consultation and the software is different enough that the OS is going to be a significant hurdle during the consult, consider reaching out to some of your Research Commons Librarian or Staff teammates that are more fluent in MAC use.

Store shared datasets on the RC GitHub website

  • Having shared code that help illustrate a variety of common questions can be very useful in consults. (R consults for example)
  • The teams can create this code and then anyone can use it on the fly in a consult.
  • GitHub also useful for sharing content with UBC and non-UBC affiliated folks.

Use the remote machines

  • You can access remote labs here: https://remotelabs.ubc.ca/
  • This can be a great way to create a setup before your consult to demonstrate to your client.
  • Also works well when client might not have all softwares or files on their machine that you are recommending.

During consultations

Use Remote Desktop (Zoom)

Use the Annotations (Zoom)

Using the Annotations feature in Zoom is also very useful.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005706806-Using-annotation-tools-on-a-shared-screen-or-whiteboard

Number of team members in consult

  • Make sure you tell the person in advance if someone will be shadowing the consult.
  • Can work well to have two team members in a consult because you have doubled the expertise.

Volume of consults

Various volumes of consults based on different team structures

  • Certain teams are oversubscribed in terms of consults - Citation Management, NVivo, R, and Thesis Formatting.
  • Other groups facilitate learning in the community through other means. For example the GIS team spends most of their hours doing project work because they find this the best use of a very limited amount of hours.
  • Digital Scholarship team offers mostly workshops. Eka gets a lot of consultation-like requests but they are usually big project type questions and it is not possible to parcel out appropriately-sized questions for GAAs to handle with their limited work hours.
  • In all cases more than enough work for GAAs to do without adding more consults on top of current workload.

Limiting consults to UBC-affiliated folks only

To set up your consults so that they are restricted to UBC only clients, please follow Eka’s instructions found here: https://ubc-library-rc.github.io/rc-docs/docs/usingthercspaces/consultsinlibcal.html> specifically: “Consults prioritize members of the UBC community. Under “Enable LibAuth Authentication” select “CWL only” to enforce this. If you have any questions about this policy please discuss it with your team lead.”

Repeat clients

  • Please refer to our booking policies to guide how many consults you provide to the same client: https://researchcommons.library.ubc.ca/consultation-booking-policies/
  • Note that the client should be bringing a new question to your consultation (not the same question week after week).
  • If the client is asking you questions that are answered in a workshop, you can tell them to register for a workshop. Consults are reserved for specific questions that are not covered in our workshops.

Relationship between workshops and consults

  • Often workshops generate consults. Be sure to remind attendees at the end of your workshop that they can book a consult.
  • Sometimes consults are booked for items that are handled in the workshops. If clients are booking repeat consults for items handled in the workshops, redirect them to the workshops.
  • Workshops can help reveal how different units at UBC are using softwares etc.

Promotion of consults

  • Eka adds resources mentioned in workshop to follow-up email. Suggested also adding link to booking consults in case participants want to book to learn more.
  • Want to make sure that our promotions don’t invite people to come to a consult for something we cover in a workshop.
  • Being specific about what we can offer in a consult is important. We are looking for ways to clarify this in the follow-up emails and on the website.