Foreword

This book is designed to prepare postgraduate students for advanced research at New Zealand universities, with specific content for Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington students. It advises and guides students on the research skills needed to carry out independent academic research projects for the first time. Students will be guided through key stages of research: formulating a research question, scoping search, comprehensive searching of the literature, evaluating information sources, and reference management. Later editions will cover Mātauranga Māori and Māori data. Practical and informative in style, the book does not cover writing and research methods.

This book started with a discussion at an OER Working Group meeting at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, which I lead. It was 2023. We are a member of the Open Educational Resources Collective, a shared open textbook publishing platform for participating Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL) Member institutions in Australia and New Zealand, with the aim of facilitating independent publishing by authors at participating institutions, as well as collaborative, cross-institutional publishing. This meant we could publish three open textbooks annually. We had room for another textbook at that time as no academic authors were ready to start a book. How about we write a book, we said! There was enough support and interest among the group for us to commit to it. We tossed around ideas for a book project that we had enough knowledge and ability to write and eventually settled on this.

This book focuses only on the skills a University Library teaches and supports, as topics such as research methods and writing literature reviews are well covered in other places, which are easy to access. There is no need to duplicate this. We know research support information for postgraduate students is widely dispersed among multiple owners and not easy to access at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, so we have included it here. This book brings together the necessary information and support services that the library provides in a unified and easy-to-navigate source for our postgraduate students. While written for Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington students, using our examples, links and references, the core text is generic to allow other New Zealand Universities to adapt the book for their situations and cohorts. Te Herenga Waka-specific content is kept in separate textboxes. We have aimed for a concise and straightforward style, ensuring it is accessible and easily understood by ESOL students. Links to further information, support services, and units at the University are included.

Always be aware that your Library will support you with advice and one-to-one help with search skills. My mother did an MA thesis in Geography at Massey in the 1970s and remembers being all alone in the library with no one to help. She had to work it out herself and felt proud to be able to do research. She could have got 1st class honours if she put maps in her thesis! She was good at drawing maps, but no one told her!! If she were starting her research today and asked for support in the library, her thesis would have been better.

The pace of change with the emergence of Generative AI has meant a rethink regarding how we support post-graduate researchers at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. As the AI space for academic research is evolving so rapidly, we decided to separate AI content into separate sidebars. When considering the impact of AI on writing this book, we decided that the advent of these new tools does not change the information literacy principles and frameworks that guide us. Neither does it change the fundamental values and principles of the library profession. In fact, they become more important and relevant as we navigate the choppy seas of AI and guide and support you, the postgraduate researcher.

Best wishes

Philip Worthington, Editor