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Karen runs a research group that makes antibodies and holds an untenured post. She has to write project grants to variety of bodies to keep hers and her staff’s jobs. Karen also supervises research students, post-docs and 4th year undergraduate Chemists, all of which she needs to write paper-based termly reports for. She publishes the findings of her research by writing papers for journals, giving talks and she also reviews papers for other researchers and journals. Karen feels like a huge amount of her time is responding to e-mail requests for antibodies which involves the administration of MTA agreements (Material Transfer Agreements). She sends a form to the requesting institution or group which they then have to sign and return - then she posts the agent. She says that at least one third of requests are followed by further queries which she has to respond to. She tends to deal with e-mail as it comes in rather than at specific times. She regards the Ethics procedure as a “paper marathon”. Because her research involves human tissue ethics she has to go through the NHS before the university board before she can submit a research bid. She spends a considerable amount of time “chasing up” the research services and there is no way of tracking grants and proposals other than phoning them up. She is sent monthly reports on a project’s grant budget by e-mail – but she often has to request state of budget.
Karen collaborates on a number of papers with colleagues both within and external to the university. She uses Microsoft Word’s track changes functionality which is “adequate for the task” although often she wants to show the changes but not who has made them. The process of referencing other sources in her paper has become quite an admin burden. She “used to use EndNote then Endnote was suddenly incompatible once I upgraded my computer. Now I curse a lot and don’t use Endnote”. She can still access her libraries but can’t get the software to integrate with Word. Checking references used to be very straight forward but now she has to check each herself. She is so pushed for time she doesn’t have time to look at other programmes or think about upgrading her system. Commonly does not share her bibliographic libraries but yearly puts one on the department website for the students. She updates her library every time she writes a new review or paper. She’s aware she can download citations straight into Endnote (e.g. from PubMed) but has not got around to it yet. She would be wary of using shared libraries of bibliographic references as there is no way of knowing if they have been entered correctly - would other people take the same care as her?
Karen supervises 4th year chemistry projects for 12 weeks. Before their internship she posts a project on chemistry website (via an online form). The students receive a blanket lecture then contact the relevant lecturer who runs the project they are interested in. At the start of the project the students are trained on health and safety procedures and have access to relevant folders of health and safety guidelines in the laboratories (this is standard across the university). During their project Karen checks on them in the morning and at the end of each day. The students have a lab book of everything that they do and all the results that they have – she encourages them to take pictures and scan things in so that they have an “electronic portfolio”, as they need that for their final write up. She can then access these from departmental server (“Cellsci Common”) which is only accessible within the department and is username and password protected. Teaching however, comes second to her research, and introducing IT into her teaching she feels would increase her workload:
::Research and the administration of running a research group is my main role and second to that, a long way away, is teaching…as far as I’m concerned more IT means more admin and I really don’t want to do any more of that.
::I: Why do you feel more IT would mean more admin?
::Well I’d have to learn the technology, then set up all the stuff in WebLearn, give all the students instructions, constantly check e-mails, discussion things, check it was working as it should be. It’s a lot of work.
In terms of using WebLearn Karen states:
::I need to start using the WebLearn. Students are starting to expect it you know, having access to handouts, reading lists ect. online, but I’ve heard that it’s not that easy to use and I just don’t have the time at the moment to sit down and work it all out. The amount of administration I have to do for my research group is massive, and that really takes up most of my time.
Karen says that the RAE doesn’t take up much of her time at all. The RAE officer does a PubMed search for papers via surname and first initial and pulled out their papers. Each researcher is given a list of papers that qualify for RAE and asked to write a brief description about it. However there is a problem in that not all the papers go into PubMed, and PubMed does not include papers that are not on line yet or are still in press/forthcoming (there is often a delay which can be up to 6 months).
On her computer Karen keeps a folder for each project she works on which hold grant apps, reports and any other relevant files. Often her colleagues will request a file from her and she e-mails it to them. The department has an electronic room booking system which only one administrator has access to. To book a room the meeting organiser must contact the administrator directly. There is no shared calendar facility and Karen does not use an electronic calendar. She feels it would be useful for her colleagues to see what days she is working at home on a shared calendar, but not otherwise, she arranges meeting via e-mail so everyone knows when they are. If she wants a particular electron tool to help her with her work she will “google for it”.
Karen feels she is “swamped by admin” and that it is very difficult to keep track of what things are due when and keep track of all her e-mails. She often delegates tasks to her Post Docs, such as sending anti-agents, but she often spends time chasing them up as she does not know whether they have done the task or not. Admin burden can be linked to very defined times of the year, however she feels that it is at its worst when unpredicted, one-off, short notice administrative tasks crop up (e.g. requests for article reviews).