Gwyer, Roisin

Jones, Linda

Matthews, J.

Worden, Anne

English

Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)

SCONUL Focus 47 2009 19
R@P: developing 
and promoting 
the Referencing@
Portsmouth 
service
James Matthews
Floor manager, 
Social Sciences, 
University Library, 
Portsmouth
Tel: 023 9284 3241 
E-mail: james.matthews@port.ac.uk 
Roisin Gwyer
University Librarian, 
University Library, 
Portsmouth
Tel: 023 9284 3221
E-mail: roisin.gwyer@port.ac.uk
Linda Jones
Faculty Librarian, Law and Criminology, 
University Library, Portsmouth
Tel: 023 9284 3240 
E-mail: linda.jones@port.ac.uk 
Anne Worden
Faculty Librarian, 
Humanities and Social Sciences
Tel: 023 9284 3243 
E-mail: anne.worden@port.ac.uk 
Rationale
The library at the University of Portsmouth 
(UoP) has for some years been providing advice 
on referencing across the institution, either at 
enquiry desks or through subject/faculty librar-
ians. In addition, annually updated short guides 
to Vancouver and Harvard (American Psychologi-
cal Association variant) were produced by the 
library, and distributed to new students in their 
thousands. This sufficed for a time but in the 
last three or four years the number of referenc-
ing enquiries being fielded by library staff has 
increased tremendously in response to a number 
of trends common across UK higher education, 
mainly issues concerning the increased possibili-
ties for intentional and unintentional plagiarism 
20 SCONUL Focus 47 2009
that the web affords. Enquiries about referencing 
new (usually web-based) sources of information 
that were not covered by the traditional referenc-
ing conventions – developed in a predominantly 
paper-based era – were also growing and staff 
were having to give ‘best guess’ solutions. Locally, 
new courses were much more concerned with 
electronic and visual media than more traditional 
courses, and law courses were being developed 
that had their own referencing conventions. The 
introduction of penalties for poor referencing 
meant that students were seeking advice from 
library staff, from academic tutors and from the 
university’s academic skills unit and there was a 
worry about consistency of advice.
Our first response was to collect our replies to 
referencing queries as a way of saving staff time 
and ensuring consistency of both advice and inter-
pretation of the conventions. Originally it was 
intended that these be mounted as FAQs (Fre-
quently Asked Questions) on the library website 
but it was soon realised that something more con-
sistent, coherent and easily accessible was possi-
ble, so a group of interested people was convened 
and a bid for funding was submitted and accepted 
by the university’s learning and teaching commit-
tee. The core team comprised a technical support 
person and some librarians closely involved with 
subject support work. In addition in the early 
days there were some academics, a member of the 
academic skills unit and a librarian from a local 
further education college who together acted as a 
reference group when advice was needed.
A hierarchical approach was adopted to encour-
age students to think analytically about what they 
were referencing, and to identify correctly the 
type of material they are using; a failure to do so 
had prevented many from using the correct refer-
encing style. The selection tool adopted enables 
the student to make choices while other options 
are still visible, so that they can easily backtrack; it 
is an approach they are likely to be familiar with 
from commercial sites. A guiding principle in the 
design was that the number of clicks should be 
minimised. From the opening ‘traffic light’ page
 (see Figure 1), the student is guided to the selec-
tion page (Figure 2) and the destination page 
Figure 1. The opening ‘traffic light’ page
Figure 2. The selection page
Figure 3. The destination page
(Figure 3) is only one click further away. A pro-
prietary search tool was incorporated for those 
situations where the selection tool was less help-
ful, or for students who prefer that approach. It 
!
!
!
SCONUL Focus 47 2009 21
was important to have it on the open web, so that 
students could access the site whether they were 
working at home or in the university. Harvard 
APA style was covered initially, but the traffic 
lights have been abandoned with a site revision, 
to accommodate two other referencing styles (see 
Figure 4).
Figure 4. Page showing different reference styles
Common issues are covered in ‘FAQ’, ‘What if’ 
and ‘Cite it’ in the text pages linked directly from 
the home page. 
PRomotion of RefeRencing@PoRtsmouth
A variety of approaches has been used to promote 
the site within UoP. Academic staff have been 
targeted via presentations at internal UoP con-
ferences, as well as via discussion of the site at 
internal academic committees and other meetings. 
Subject librarians demonstrate the site to students 
as part of subject-specific information literacy ses-
sions, with some also providing quick overviews 
during ten-minute ‘guest’ slots at the beginning or 
end of normal lectures. Enquiry desk staff show 
students how to use the site if students come to 
the desk with a referencing query. Links to R@P 
are included on our library website, on the Skills@
Portsmouth study skills site, on the university’s 
VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and on the 
library’s Facebook page. Post-it notes and pens 
containing the R@P web address have proved 
extremely popular with students and staff alike.
Once we saw how popular R@P was becom-
ing at Portsmouth, we thought it important to 
share what we had developed with other librar-
ians because answering referencing queries is 
a common activity. In 2007 presentations were 
made to the CILIP CoFHE (Colleges of Further 
and Higher Education) spring meeting held at 
Portsmouth and to local National Health Service 
librarians, and a conference paper about R@P was 
presented at LILAC, whilst a poster about it was 
presented at CILIP Umbrella conference. In July 
2008 a presentation will be given at the British 
Business School Librarians’ conference. These 
presentations have in turn led to more interest in 
the site, with several other universities requesting 
permission to use it.
use of the site
Feedback told us that the site was proving popu-
lar but site statistics indicate just how much use 
of the site has grown during the time it has been 
available, for example almost a five-fold increase 
in use if January 2007 is compared with January 
2008. Meanwhile total site access has grown from 
78,607 for September 2006 – June 2007, to 157,410 
for September 2007– April 2008.
2007 2008
October 3,706 10,829
November 7,938 25,809
December 6,146 20,900
January 7,761 35,562
February 5,030 12,018
March 9,915 18,353
April 16,153 20,744
For each academic year, peaks in use correspond 
with assignment hand-in dates. Meanwhile 
student and staff comments, obtained via a survey 
in spring 2007, show just how useful R@P has 
become across campus and beyond: 
‘Very useful, found it invaluable when stuck on how to 
reference.’ (Politics year 1 student)
‘Very comprehensive and easy to use!’ (Criminal jus-
tice distance learner)
‘It is a great help. I have recommended it to my fellow 
students when they have referencing problems.’ (Part-
time education student)
‘I use it to check odd references and also during tutori-
als … I think it is brilliant, easy to use, simple and 
clear.’ (European studies lecturer)
‘I advise students to have this link open in a second 
window whilst they are working on their essays.’ 
(Public administration lecturer) 
!
22 SCONUL Focus 47 2009
One student even told us that the only thing miss-
ing from the site was the essay itself!
a subject libRaRian’s Point of view
The project has given subject librarians and 
enquiry desk staff a different approach to how 
they work with students on referencing, ‘work-
ing smarter’ rather than harder. From comments 
of the staff who support academic skills, this 
has been a general benefit across the university. 
Instead of creating ad hoc replies to difficult stu-
dent queries, staff are able to take a planned stra-
tegic approach which provides agreed answers to 
problems with new sources in line with each ref-
erencing style’s basic philosophy. Routine e-mail 
queries can be answered with a brief message 
and web reference rather than creating complex 
parallel examples or giving lengthy explanations 
of punctuation, capitalisation and so on. Personal 
enquires can be handled with reference to the 
website: there is something to show the students, 
and they see how to use the site for themselves.
We did not count the personal enquiries we took 
on referencing before we created the site, but 
anecdotal evidence suggests that these have 
decreased, and are now confined to students 
who want someone to see whether they have an 
overall grasp of the style. However, one subject 
librarian has recorded the details of her e-mail 
enquiries. In the two years prior to the introduc-
tion of the site, she recorded 303 and 297 Harvard 
APA enquiries, plus 32 and 70 law enquiries for 
the OSCOLA (Oxford Standard for Citation of 
Legal Authorities) style. In the year after the 
introduction of the site, she answered only 105 
Harvard APA enquiries, whilst the law enquiries 
rose to 124 (these collected prior to the addition of 
OSCOLA).
Law provides an example of how the site can help 
students with referencing tricky sources. The APA 
style manual deals only with US law, but our stu-
dents are referencing mainly UK and international 
law. Therefore all the APA style guidance has 
to be invented in accordance with general APA 
principles. The law librarian has drawn on the 
expertise of lecturers in our institute of criminal 
justice studies for APA referencing and that of 
law lecturers, as well as from national experts on 
OSCOLA referencing.
Teaching of referencing has been modified. 
Instead of concentrating on the nitty-gritty of 
word order and punctuation, more emphasis 
can be placed on the underlying principles, such 
as traceability, recoverability and consistency. 
Key information literacy concepts for evaluat-
ing materials can be stressed: for example, if the 
student has no clear idea of authorship, the source 
may be less credible. Students can be encour-
aged to evaluate the relative merits of a reference 
to a blog, a government website or an actual act 
of parliament, and the whole idea of references 
appropriate to their discipline and purpose can be 
discussed with them.
The one major problem that remains to be solved 
is the process of agreeing and disseminating style-
appropriate policy across the university. With 
new sources we need to provide timely guidance, 
which is not usually best sourced via the formal 
university committee structure. Our initial author-
ity group was slow to respond to requests for 
opinions, so now we have adopted the policy of 
providing the best available guidance after infor-
mal e-mail consultation with appropriate individ-
uals, but including the alert that: ‘This source is 
not covered by the APA style manual. Check with 
your lecturer before using this suggestion which 
is based on APA style.’ A similar system will be 
adopted for our OSCOLA pages. 
maintenance and sustainability
Maintaining the information pages is much the 
same as creating them. To make this an easy task 
for librarians not used to creating web pages, our 
web designer created a template in Dreamweaver 
(Javascript and Perl were used to make the 
dynamic links). For a standard information page 
the editor only has to fill in predetermined fields. 
They can therefore concentrate on the punctua-
tion and layout of the referencing style. Updating 
a page is only a question of opening the off-line 
copy of the page, making the necessary changes, 
and uploading it to the web server when it is 
complete. A small change can be made and go live 
in a couple of minutes. Even the hierarchy of the 
selection tool can be easily and swiftly edited, by 
anyone who has grasped the underlying rationale. 
The template gives the student user a consistent 
layout, whatever type of source they are consider-
ing.
The first pages to be created focussed on the 
information sources that had been covered in the 
booklet which we still offer to students on the 
Harvard APA style. When these were in place it 
was possible to make the site live – we couldn’t 
offer less in an active site than we were offering 
as a printed booklet, or a PDF download. The site 
has been developed by adding pages on other 
information sources, partly by trawling the APA 
SCONUL Focus 47 2009 23
style manual, partly by responding to suggestions 
from academic colleagues and partly in response 
to questions raised by students. The ‘Contact us’ 
feature, which enables students to post queries 
to one of the project team, allows us to support 
them individually by e-mail, but it also alerts us 
to sources which we have not covered but which 
students are using. It prompts thinking about how 
the pages might be clearer, but we also use the 
site’s pages to answer queries, so as to encourage 
effective use of the site.
From the beginning there was a recognition that 
the site had to be sustainable through changes 
of personnel. This meant using standard soft-
ware products to build pages and so on, but also 
creation of shared documentation detailing all the 
processes involved in creating and maintaining 
the pages of the website. Though there are lead 
librarians for each of the referencing styles offered 
(we are now branching out from APA to OSCOLA 
and Vancouver, which are used by minorities in 
the university), deputies are or will be allocated to 
provide backup during leave or other absence.
PRoject to seRvice: the futuRe
Recently the service has been enhanced not only 
by a new look which is in line with the revamped 
library website but also with the addition of 
sections covering Vancouver and OSCOLA. This 
means that from October 2009 all major conven-
tions in use at UoP will be covered. The service is 
reasonably well embedded within the institution 
and it was gratifying that a recent review of the 
university’s learning, teaching and assessment 
strategy mentions the service. 
There are other referencing solutions appearing 
all the time, such as the facility within Word 2007 
to create a bibliography, but none of them deal 
with those new and unusual types of information 
source. R@P was built using commonly available 
software and our own staff to create a customised 
solution to a problem. It requires minimal upkeep 
and has been put together relatively cheaply but 
has already significantly reduced staff time in 
answering referencing queries. As one student 
wrote:
‘WOW that website is so helpful! THANKS’
The site is available at: http://referencing.port.
ac.uk 


R@P: developing and promoting the Referencing@Portsmouth service

Name not available

https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/6_5.pdf

R@P: developing and promoting the Referencing@Portsmouth service

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)

Name not available