The academic librarian working with academic specialists to help students become work-ready

What is it about?

The changing nature of work, research and life generally means the academic library is also changing. Because of this, librarians have the opportunity to employ their skills in information management, digital literacy, scholarly communication and technology to partner with academic staff. In this paper we use the example of academic librarians partnering with a physics and maths class and its lecturer to produce an Open Access student journal called "PAM Review". The success of this partnership has meant that there have been over 30,000 downloads over 4 issues of the students' work in 2017 alone - which include citations of their work in leading senior journals. This gives voice to the phenomenal work these students have done at a relatively early stage in their academic life and, with an ORCiD or academic identifier, gives them a digital CV that showcases their achievements to the world (and their future employers)!

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Why is it important?

To nurture informed critical thinkers who are also work ready is a key ambition of most leading universities today. This paper shows how academic librarians with their specialist information management skills and specialist academics can help progress this goal and produce, with those students, concrete skills and outputs that will help them secure work and capitalise on their education.