Abstract
The Research Support Team at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) runs events called research cafes throughout the academic year. During these cafes, we bring together PhD students, early career researchers and more established academics over lunch to give them an opportunity to talk about their work to a lay audience of their peers and the public. From its inception in 2013 we have maintained the overall format of the research cafe, based as it is on promoting interdisciplinary dialogue in an informal setting, while also making a few small but significant changes. These changes have in turn increased the visibility and reach of research promotion within the Library. Against that backdrop, this article – which is based on a lightning talk and poster session presented at the 41st UKSG Annual Conference, Glasgow, in April 2018 – will outline why the library is ideally placed to facilitate this type of scholarship sharing and why research and community engagement should be viewed as an integral part of a university library’s agenda. It will also discuss how its success has allowed our Team to work in partnership with colleagues from across the University in new and exciting ways. Finally, it will address what further developments we can make to continue to improve and help the research community at LJMU and beyond.
Highlights
The context for research cafésIn 2012 the Director of Research at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) proposed that the Library hold informal seminars, with coffee and cake, to promote awareness of the range of research across different faculties
The Research Support Team at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) runs events called research cafés throughout the academic year
This article – which is based on a lightning talk and poster session presented at the 41st UKSG Annual Conference, Glasgow, in April 2018 – will outline why the library is ideally placed to facilitate this type of scholarship sharing and why research and community engagement should be viewed as an integral part of a university library’s agenda
Summary
In 2012 the Director of Research at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) proposed that the Library hold informal seminars, with coffee and cake, to promote awareness of the range of research across different faculties. The café idea was inspired by the ethos of Cafe Scientifique whereby members of the public could learn about science in an informal setting. Started in the UK, different iterations of Cafe Scientifique have emerged across the world.[1] The idea of bringing researchers together to share their work with a wider audience is not a new one and research cafés themselves are not a new concept; in the UK context, this has manifested itself in a variety of forms, from large-scale university events to much smaller community-based initiatives.[2] The content of these events would involve discoveries from academics and researchers that could be shared, with an emphasis on being of interest and understandable to ‘non-experts’ and have a ‘degree of currency’ to make it relatable to a wider audience.[3]
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