eResource of the month: the Financial Times

Each month we spotlight one of our databases to highlight the range of resources available to our users. This month, Business Faculty Librarian Ben Taylorson writes about the Financial Times.

I’m always keen to draw the attention of our users to the vast collection of news and newspaper resources that we have. I feel they are something of a hidden or underutilised resource, but one that can prove invaluable to those studying certain subjects.

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Team Work Makes the Dream Work: My Experience at Durham University

By Amber Russell

Becoming a book conservator isn’t easy. Finding a program that will teach you the necessary skills and techniques is difficult enough, then you have to find a job. That’s normally when a post graduate work placement comes into play. Work placement is like a mini-internship, you will generally end up emailing every conservation lab, library, university, or museum you know and ask them, in a politely begging tone, to let you come and do volunteer work with them for a handful of weeks. If you’re very lucky and find someone kind enough to say yes then you get the opportunity to walk into a conservation lab as a volunteer conservator complete with responsibilities and goals and a few projects on your desk, and you do your very best not to blow it. Like I said: not easy. But if you’re very, very lucky you get to work in one of the most incredible settings in the world, with a collection people only dream of, and with a amazing team of not just conservators, but archivists, librarians, and the various staff that keep a collection available to the public. It just so happens, I am very, very lucky, because I was able to spend my work placement at Durham University.

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“I want the work I am involved in to be discoverable and accessible to an audience beyond the Ivory Tower, Westminster and Whitehall”

Celebrating Dr Michelle Addison: Associate Professor, Department of Sociology – International Open Access Week 2023

A post by Open Access Publications Officer, Katie Skellett

The theme of International Open Access Week 2023 is ‘Community over Commercialization’-spotlighting focus on supporting communities to seize the ‘opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around the importance of community control of knowledge sharing systems’.

As Open Access Publications Officer at the University, the announcement of this year’s theme made me wonder…how do our researchers relate to the idea of knowledge sharing systems when embarking on iterative research processes, and is this idea of ‘community control’ over emerging knowledge a part of our researchers’ consciousness? Certainly, within the Open Research Team we understand that community control can be a valuable form of protection for researchers against inequalities that exist in the academic publishing space. We also realise though that it’s our occupational ‘bread and butter’ to consider these things, and that, we aren’t, for the most part, engaged in day-to-day research processes that might distract from exploring inequalities in this arena.

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Open Access Week 2023: Durham’s Research Publications Policy

While our team will enthusiastically bang the drum for Open Access all year round, Open Access Week provides us with a great platform to highlight the work we do, and the ways in which we’re able to remove barriers to accessing the research being undertaken and published by our academic colleagues. It also always feels like an appropriate moment for us to reflect on what we’ve achieved over the past twelve months, particularly as it feels as though 2023 has been a uniquely busy year; it’s seen us launch our new repository in Worktribe, start using our Safepod in the Bill Bryson Library, and provide an institutional open access fund – all of which helps us in our aim of assisting researchers and readers across the full spectrum of Open Access and academic publishing.

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Item of the Month: Photograph Album from the White Russian Camp in Kellerberg

The Kellerberg (also spelled Kellerburg) and Feffernitz Camps in Austria housed 10,000 displaced persons between them in the late 1940s. The Camp was located near the town of Kellerberg in the Drava River valley, northwest of Villach, Austria. Largely new barracks, the camp consisted of, at minimum, beds and basic structures, although it was built up to include a Church, Cemetery, Theatre Hall, and barracks for living quarters as more persons arrived. The camp was multinational, Slovenes were the largest group followed by persons from the Baltic countries and other Eastern and Southeastern countries of Europe. While families had their own barracks for privacy, single men and women had separate barracks, one for women and one for men.

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Open Research: In conversation with Nikki Rutter, Department of Sociology

Nikki Rutter is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, who completed her PhD in October 2022 (and you can read her thesis in Durham’s theses repository).  One of her main areas of research focuses on child-parent violence, and with the second CPA (Child to Parent Abuse) Awareness Day being held on October 14th, it seemed like an apt time to shine a light on her research in this area. Nikki met up with Repository Officer, Kelly Hetherington, to share her thoughts…


How would you describe your research?

I am really interested in researching how families, particularly mothers and children, respond to, understand and makes sense of the harm in their lives.  That can mean harm from external things and how that impacts on family dynamics, or it can be the harm within the family which impacts how they’re able to engage in the wider world.  It is about people’s everyday lives and how that connects to child to parent violence.

What does your research involve?

It involves working directly with families in a collaborative, participatory way.  The research is quite time sensitive because we are talking about people’s everyday lived experiences with their children.  There is nothing more intimate. I really value people’s time and the energy they put into the research, and I want to get that out into the public sphere as quickly and seamlessly as possible in a way that recognises and values their contribution. Publishing this work is a long process, but for me, it’s a priority.

In your recent paper, “My[Search Strategies] Keep Missing You”: A Scoping Review to Map Child-to-Parent Violence in Childhood Aggression Literature, the abstract states “Child-to-parent violence is often referred to as one of the most ‘under-researched’ forms of family violence.” Why do you think this is?

When you look at children and young people who instigate harm more broadly: Young people’s mental health, young people’s offending, challenging behaviour, learning disabilities – they are all hugely explored areas. It is the experience of parents – that’s the bit that’s not so researched. 

It’s becoming much more popular as a topic to explore, partly because of activists and campaigns and people willing to have these conversations.  Funding bodies are willing to fund these types of projects and the Home Office are changing bills to incorporate this phenomenon.

I recently attended the European Conference of Domestic Violence and was part of a panel talking about child to parent violence.  The room was full.  People are much more interested in acknowledging this issue now, and I think more importantly is recognising that this isn’t about children being perpetrators of harm and parents being victims.

What’s really coming through in the field now is that children are harmed by this behaviour too. It’s harmful to them. They aren’t to blame.

Some parents might feel judged that their children are behaving in a way that society perceives to be wrong.  How would you respond to this?

There’s such an element of parental judgement around child to parent violence – that it must be something that the parent has done or is doing.  I don’t think it’s helpful. That energy should be put into understanding the child and what their underpinning needs are. This idea that parents have the responsibility for moulding children into whatever they want to be completely neglects children’s individualised experiences and what they experience in schools, in their community, with their siblings. It’s not this wholly bidirectional relationship between, say, a mother and a child.  A child is existent in the wider world, with complicated feelings and complicated relationships – from the very beginning. So, I find it really challenging that people make it so the only relationship that ever matters to a child is the one with the primary caregiver at home.  That completely neglects all those other rich and important relationships.

I also feel that society’s expectations on children are so far beyond what we would ever expect of an adult. We expect a level of relationship building, self-control and emotional regulation that we wouldn’t expect of an adult.

A lot of your research is published via the ‘gold’ open access route but you are also very good at ensuring your outputs are deposited in our institutional repository, Durham Research Online.  What do you think is important about research being made open access?

My background is social work so I’m really interested in making sure that my research is as relevant to practise as possible.  I receive emails from people with lived experience of this issue emailing me saying, I’ve just read your article and it speaks to my experience – it’s made me feel seen.  [This wouldn’t be possible if the research was behind a paywall]. To me, this is more important than any REF score – that I’m writing work about people’s lives and other people can access it and think “it’s not just me”.

Also, as a social worker – I want other practitioners and professionals to be easily able to read the work.  There are organisations, such as a couple across Wales and the Thames Valley who have used the methodology from my research in their practice which involves using arts and narratives to really unpack and understand the everyday lived experiences of families (“I’m meant to be his comfort blanket, not a punching bag” – Ethnomimesis as an exploration of maternal child to parent violence in pre-adolescents – Nikki Rutter, 2021 (sagepub.com)).  They would never have been able to do that if this wasn’t Open Access work.

What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently engaged in an ESRC funded participatory action research piece of work, which is funded through the Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre.  I’m working with children who are instigating and experiencing this form of harm and parents to look at what has worked for them?  What hasn’t worked for them?  What support systems and pathways are available? Could support pathways have been more helpful?  If they worked as families needed them to, what would that look like?  This will run until April 2024.  There are twelve parents and eight children – so it’s very much a pilot study.


To read Nikki’s research publications, visit her page on Worktribe: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/person/507657/nikki-rutter/outputs

For more information about CPA Awareness Day, visit the Parent Education Growth Support (PEGS) webpage: https://www.pegsupport.co.uk/

Thank you so much to Nikki for spending the time talking about her research!


Item of the month: An Account of the loss of HMS Athenienne in October 1806

Athenienne, a 64 gun third-rate ship of the line saw service during the War of the Second Coalition in the French Revolutionary Wars. She also supplied the British fleet following the Battle of Trafalgar. She sank in 1806 with the loss of over 300 lives. GRE A2229 details an account of the loss of the ship on 20 October when it ran aground on a submerged reef in the channel between Sardinia, Sicily and Africa.

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SafePod

Durham University recently became part of the SafePod Network – an exciting innovative research network that significantly improves access to secure data. The University’s Safepod is coordinated by three ULC staff members and we asked two of them, Katie and Sarah, to tell us more…

In January this year, the University’s SafePod went live, and we started taking bookings from our academic community and beyond. 

Now we should admit that, prior to 2022, neither of us had come across a Safepod before and we were somewhat ignorant about what it could possibly be. So when James Bisset, Senior Manager for Library Research Services, announced the Library would be installing one, Katie will openly say that she initially imagined Safepod as some sort of panic room … and we can both admit to thinking that perhaps it was even a portal for accessing the dark web (!)

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Durham Research Online’s new home: Worktribe Outputs

In early August, after seemingly never-ending preparations, meetings, and putting together of guidance and process reviews, the Open Research team were able to go live with our brand new services on Worktribe. The Outputs module and the new repository platform for Durham Research Online will allow us to support our academic colleagues right through their research process – from ensuring researchers are compliant with requirements from the University and their funding bodies when they have research accepted for publication, to making that research as widely accessible as possible, often to people who may not be able to access it otherwise.

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