New Participation from UJ Library

Hi everyone,

Myself (Pavlinka Kovatcheva) and Santha Raju from UJ, have been added recently to the list of participants. I'm quite excited after I saw the preliminary programme. I'm currently a subject librarian for 11 Sciences Departments @ UJ. I help students from their 1st year through their Postgraduate levels. I also support the academics and researchers for these Departments. It is a challenging job to balance and anticipate the needs of such a diverse scientific community. In the last few years I learned a new skills, such as to make use of Web 2.0 technologies. I adapted my traditional librarian skills to a new virtual skills and that "spiced" my services to users. Two years down the road, I have a single portal for my users to access subject related information. I make use of a wiki for a Sciences portal, blogs for current awareness and feedback, a twitter, a social bookmarking for "cataloguing or tagging" information, IM to chat with users, etc. My librarian life become exciting, but very busy.

For 2nd year now, I'm register for my Masters degree, but because of my "virtual developments" I have barely had time to make any progress. In practice writing a literature review or a chapter, become my nightmare (it is so much easier to explain the process to other researchers, than to do it yourself). I hope the research academy will help me build a strong research knowledge and skills, so I will be able to finish what I have started.

See you in 2 weeks time.