Hello and welcome to the DRS podcast, the podcast of the Dahlem Research School at Freie Universität Berlin. I’m Dr. Marlies Klamt and I’m your host for today’s episode. Today I’m speaking with Dr. Cosima Wagner and Stefan Cordes from the university library at Freie Universität Berlin. Together, they have developed the Library Starter Kit for Doctoral Researchers, an online platform that brings together a wide range of library services, training opportunities, and support in one place, and is designed to help doctoral researchers get an overview and find the right contacts and resources more easily; and what kind of questions and uncertainties doctoral researchers currently have when it comes to using AI in their work. So, let’s get started with the interview.

Before we dive into the topic, I’d like to ask both of you briefly to introduce yourselves. Cosima, would you like to start? Who are you and what is your role at the university library?

Dr. Cosima Wagner: Hi, my name is Cosima Wagner. I’m a liaison librarian for East Asian Studies and I’m working in the publishing and research services department of the university library at Freie Universität, concretely in the research data management team. But I’m also the team leader of the subject librarians for East Asian studies in the campus library. And so these are my liaison roles and my special focus areas are digital humanities and research data management for area studies disciplines.

But like Stefan, I’m also engaging and working in working groups in the library. And today, I’m here with my hat as membership in our working group, increasing the visibility of library services, where colleagues from all faculty libraries and the central library work together.

And Stefan, the same question to you. Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us what you do at the library?

Stefan Cordes: Yes. Hello. My name is Stefan, Stefan Cordes. I’m the deputy head of teaching and learning services of the department here at the university library. And I’m also coordinating the university library’s professional or further development program trainings for professors and doctoral candidates. And among other things, I’m here with Cosima as a co-coordinating member of our library starter kits, which we are talking about today.

Exactly. The reason we’re speaking today is that you have created a wonderful resource for doctoral researchers, the library starter kit. How did the idea for the starter kit come about, Stefan, and what reoccurring questions from doctoral candidates led to its development?

Stefan Cordes: Well, the start kit concept is actually … has a long tradition. I’m working at the Freie Universität since 20, 21 years. And in 2013, there was a center called Center for Digital Systems at the Freie University, in which I was responsible for e-teaching services and for further professional development programs as well.

And in 2013, there was an idea to build a starter kit, a welcome package for newly appointed professors. This was, by the way, strongly supported by the administration of the university, the chancellor and the president of the FU at this time. And this package was, as I mentioned, explicitly aimed to new professors at Freie Universität Berlin. So, the main focus was helping and supporting e-learning projects and e-research projects for the newly appointed professors as the CEDIS, Center for Digital Systems, was involved in supporting e-learning and e-research initiatives at the Freie Universität.

For example, there was support and advice services related to the use of Blackboard, which is a learning management system at the Freie Universität, as well as offers to record video sessions of seminars and other things and make them available online. So this was a support concept, a welcome package to feel comfortable for new professors at the university. After the center of digital systems, the CEDIS was incorporated into the university library, I think it was around 2020 this previous starter kit was expanded to include many of library services and offerings. And so it was developed much more further than only e-learning projects.

A so-called team starter kit was established. We made some surveys to discuss with our new professors, new appointee professors, but we had more focused on library services than on e-learning services that we had before. And when this starter kit was developed and it was successful, we didn’t sit back and say, so now relax, it’s okay. But we addressed a new audience or a new target group, our doctoral candidates, and in 2024 and 2025, we developed a starter kit for doctoral candidates, which we are talking now about.

Thank you, Stefan, for introducing us to the history of the starter kit. Could you now walk us through the structure of the starter kit and tell us what it includes?

Stefan Cordes: Yes. So the new starter kit for doctoral candidates was developed by maybe the same working group which we called AG Sichtbarkeit to make services of the library visible. And it bundles now all library services and can help doctoral candidates successfully complete their doctorate. So as we see on the portal side, we made an online portal for the doctoral candidates, how to use the library, how to get information and organizing on their research.

We have information about the training courses and the special workshops only for doctoral candidates. We have a page and information package for services for the researching. One they made their doctoral work as publishing via what you call Refubium, which is a special software and database software. And especially we have a focus on how to get in contact with our experts at the Freie Universität. And therefore we built an online platform where the doctoral candidates can get in contact with us.

You already mentioned, Stefan, that you’re offering training courses specifically aimed at doctoral researchers. Can you tell us a bit more about what kind of training courses are offered?

Stefan Cordes: Especially for writing a dissertation, to make a research in our library databases, especially about good scientific practices, about using now, it’s a very new thing for us, how to use AI tools for the dissertation. And so we have more focused on the research and the writing of the dissertation than on e-learning or learning at the university.

I think we’re going to talk about specifically AI later on, because I think that’s a topic our listeners are specifically interested in. But before we talk about that, Cosima, I have one service I would like to ask you about that caught my attention when I was looking at the starter kit website, and that’s the „Book a Librarian“ offer. That sounds very interesting. Could you tell us a bit more about how it works?

Dr. Cosima Wagner: Yes. Book a librarian is the idea to get in contact with our colleagues in the central library. You know, our library system, we call ourselves university library, but we have a central library and of course we have faculty libraries. And in all libraries, doctoral candidates can find their specific librarians, whether they are interested, for instance, in subject-specific services.

So, if they are interested in trainings on geosciences and databases or so, they would, of course, contact their faculty librarian, the subject librarian at the geosciences library. But, of course, also in the central library, we have colleagues and they developed this „Book a Librarian“ form and service. Unfortunately, it’s not working for all subject librarians yet, so „Book a Librarian“ is a service for finding colleagues in the central library and they will give consultations, for instance, on databases like, if you would like to know about our libraries discovery system in general and how to use maybe literature management software like Zotero or if you would like to have support about citing sources. So more general topics. So if you would like to know, for instance, about what is a social science citation index and so questions, general questions like that would be included in the „Book a Librarian“ service. In the starter kit platform, we have one button for contacts. And there you will also find the contact to subject librarians, so if you are interested in specific questions on your PhD discipline.

That sounds like a great service. Another service you offer, and one I really wish had existed when I was doing my doctorate, is a digitization service. Cosima, could you tell us a bit more about how it works?

Dr. Cosima Wagner: You can request a digitization of a book or a paper and you can just use the discovery system Primo and if you will find an article which you are interested in and you can find on the website a button which you can press and then ask for digitization. And of course, we cannot digitize whole books, only if these books are out of copyright, so mainly then older books. But for general digitization requests or maybe articles or so, you can just press this button and get digitized text.

Cosima, let’s take a closer look at international doctoral candidates in particular. What specific challenges or support needs do international doctoral candidates have when it comes to using library services?

Dr. Cosima Wagner: Yeah, actually, this is a very good question because at the moment we are conducting interviews specifically with doctoral candidates and we expect to expand our starter kit specifically for international doctoral candidates. But what we know so far is that, of course, they will come from a different country with a different library culture. And this is maybe a very basic thing, but that you know that you can just enter the library without showing an identity card or that all our libraries are open to everyone. And to know where can I book a room, maybe a carrel for studying during my time at Freie Universität, how to find things which are maybe differently organized in other libraries in the world.

I think this is one of the things, of course, always cultural adjustments one has to do. And of course, we know that language is an issue and here also we at the university library want to improve ourselves because unfortunately websites are not fully translated yet. And we know that in general also at Freie Universität, for instance, with the VPN, virtual private network, installation, there was no explanation in English for a long time. But these are basic things which you would need to know.

And so we know that this is, of course, a basic problem for international students. And of course, then also in the library, and sometimes doctoral students also maybe are not aware of that they can make acquisition requests that we would buy academic literature for their PhD, or maybe they are used to services which we don’t have. This can also happen, of course. And I think our idea for the starter kit was to bundle and to make our services, which are not only in one place, but in the central library and faculty libraries, and to make this more easily findable for doctoral candidates in general.

But of course, we hope that our English translated starter kit will also be of special use or specifically useful for international students. But as I said, we are just at the moment conducting interviews and we expect to expand the starter kit then for international students as well.

That sounds like a great idea and a great initiative. Your training courses span a wide range of topics such as research data management, good scientific practice, and the use of AI tools in research, as Stefan had mentioned before. As AI is still quite a new topic and highly relevant for many doctoral researchers, I’d like to focus on this a bit more. I’ve noticed that many doctoral researchers feel quite uncertain about if and how they can use AI, not only on a practical level, but also when it comes to legal and ethical aspects.

Cosima, could you tell us more about the main challenges or maybe also concerns doctoral researchers have in this area and how your courses help them use AI in a responsible and also effective way?

Dr. Cosima Wagner: Of course, the challenges are not only for doctoral students, but also for us as librarians, because I guess in general, the topic of artificial intelligence and academic practice and especially good academic practice is just being discussed and some guidelines exist already, but not maybe very specific. And there’s a lot of discussion going on about that, and of course also in the library. So how we started, I think, was first of all to hire expert librarians who already have good knowledge about tools, for instance, searching literature and how AI tools in the library could be of use and academic practice. But also then to train ourselves and have train-the-trainer workshops for ourselves to know about what’s going on, what is a large language model, first of all, to begin with, and which tools are out there.

And of course, what we also notice, for instance, publishers are constantly developing AI tools and want to, for instance, if you’re using electronic resources and would be referred from our discovery system to a source, which is on the publisher website, then an AI tool will pop up and you will ask yourself, what am I allowed to do with this? Should I use it? So, this is, I think, a very, for us as well, a topic which we are still working on.

But we, of course, give trainings, first of all, for not only doctoral candidates, but also doctoral candidates, where we introduce tools and where we also raise questions. Where is it particularly useful or maybe where is it not useful? Or do you really need to use this tool to do your academic work? So, I think this is our way of how we approach the topic, but we are also very open.

And for my field of the area studies, of course, we are very concerned because we know that or we see already that the academic publishing market and the basic corpora with which a large language models are trained, especially when it comes to chatbots, but also academic literature. There’s so much, we are highly biased towards anglophone academic literature and all the research publications, for instance, in Japanese, Chinese or Arabic or Hebrew or the many languages or Russian, they are not that much included. And of course, there’s also a bias of which texts are part of the large language models and which stereotypes maybe or content is coming up and so this is not at all helpful for academic research because you will get a biased information and the text maybe will be summarized in a way which does not represent research from other areas of the world.

There, we don’t have courses yet, but of course, when we do, for instance, we have a welcome course for doctoral candidates from the Graduate School of East Asian Studies, where we introduce the library. There, we will include this topic and also discuss with students about their experience already and the topics we see. And we can also explain because in the library, we are, so to say, in the data center for academic metadata so we can see and we know how data is processed and trained. And so for me as an area studies librarian, I’m very critical then of using AI tools when it comes to searching literature and getting text summarized or produced by AI tools.

Thank you, Cosima, for this extensive elaboration and also thank you for mentioning the bias and the limitation. I think that’s a very relevant point. So thanks for bringing that up.

Stefan Cordes: Maybe I can add something to this point, because as I’m responsible for the training courses, I can add that by far we have the highest number of registration for our training courses about AI courses, which underscores the great importance of this topic at all.

I’m not surprised by that. Do you know what’s the main issue doctoral researchers usually have and what makes it most likely they’re going to book a course with you or a workshop? Cosima, could you elaborate a bit on that?

Dr. Cosima Wagner: As Stefan said, so we have two colleagues who are experts and have special trainings. and library and AI tools. And of course, I’m also not in their courses, but what I know about is that, of course, doctoral candidates would like to get more information, basic information. How are these tools working?

What can they do? And where are the limitations? And I think high topic is, of course, good academic practice. So where does the use of AI tools violate good academic practice and rules for dissertation manuscripts and how to cite, I know from the trainings with doctoral candidates from the Graduate School of East Asian Studies, questions like, how do I cite these tools or can I use this text in my dissertation at all? Because, of course, there’s a high danger of having plagiarized text because the tools, they are only stochastic parrots. They use the text they are trained on and then reproduce them. And it can be, I think there have been studies now out there that sometimes really parts of articles or works which should be cited correctly are included in the text, even word-by-word, and you just thought, oh, I use this AI tool to summarize this PDF, and then you don’t notice that it’s a word-by-word citation which you should mark. So these, I think, are questions which are especially when you’re writing a PhD and want to publish it, of course, and don’t want to violate a good academic practice, then I think this is very important. These are very important questions which come up now.

Stefan Cordes: In this context, maybe when it comes to AI tools, they always ask which tool they are allowed to use, because we have one tool at the Freie Universität, an AI tool, and I asked, do I have to use this tool or can I get external tools? And what am I allowed to do with external tools?

And is there an easy answer to that or is it too complex to answer here on the podcast?

Stefan Cordes: Oh, I think there is not an easy answer for me.

Dr. Cosima Wagner: No. But my easy answer at the moment, and I must say I’m very critical of using AI tools in academic work when it comes to the main aim which we have at the university and why I’m writing a PhD. It is about, from my point of view, to learn about a topic, to read, to analyze by yourself and not to outsource this, to cognitively offload this process to a tool. So I would say, and if you think about the energy thing, so I would say, please really think about whether you would need to use an AI tool for your dissertation.

Of course, there are other things I would like to mention, which are really good to use AI for. And for instance, we have colleagues here in our digital interview collection team who have trained an AI on the transcription of qualitative interviews. So for instance, if you are doing an interview, and I think this fieldwork method is done in many disciplines, then not only cultural anthropology, but also political sciences or area studies or sociology and others. So, and even in geosciences, I learned recently.

You could then upload your interview data, the audio, and then our colleagues trained a transcription tool in many languages, and then you would get a text manuscript. And of course, it’s always important to check, is it transcribed correctly? But the transcription and AI tool is located here on a server in our library cellar. And it will not be uploaded to any other internet things.

So it’s highly secure from our perspective. And you could use this then also to, for instance, if you’d like to know, maybe you have … the interviewee mentions names, which should be anonymized. And then this tool also enables you to use named entity recognition to mark all the places where this name came up, then you can anonymize the name.

And of course, in digital humanities and in digital scholarship, I think there’s a lot going on where you could use AI, but specifically for searching literature and for getting texts summarized, I would not recommend to use it. I would say it’s not good academic practice.

Stefan Cordes: But this is not a new discussion. We had these discussions when we implement in the past old tools like Dropbox or Google docs or other things, a wiki system, external or internal. It is always more safe to use the internal tools than the external tools, but we do not have every time an internal tool. So we have to talk and discuss with the people about using these tools.

Yeah, thanks for mentioning that, both of you. And I think it’s very important to know the dangers of not using internal tools. But then also, I think it’s great that you have the possibility, that you have some tools like the one you mentioned, Cosima, the transcription tool that you can actually use and where you can be sure that your data is protected and will not end up in the worldwide web. We’ve talked about quite a few different elements of the starter kit now.

In your experience, Cosima, when do doctoral researchers typically start using it during their PhD journey? And what are situations where it is especially helpful?

Dr. Cosima Wagner: Maybe first of all, we have to say that the Starter Kit is a fairly new initiative. So we want to evaluate the service. Therefore, I cannot say that I have the feedback already when PhD students told me that they used it and that it was specifically useful. But we will do this of course. After one year, we will check and we also would like to encourage everyone who listens to this podcast and who has a feedback maybe already or maybe also colleagues from the Dahlem Research School or the faculties. Whoever’s listening and has some feedback for us, please contact Stefan Cordes and me.

We would be very interested to hear about it. But we will also start a systematic initiative, of course, as well. But what we hoped for, what we aim for PhD students when they start at Freie Universität and when they want to arrange everything for themselves and have to get to know best the library, how can I use it. So we hope that this is the one-stop shop where they can have the first overview of what is here and especially we want to encourage PhD candidates to contact us friendly supporting librarians in the central library or in the faculty libraries. And so we hope this starter kit is good for this overview and also for lowering the barrier to contact us as librarians.

If someone wants to provide feedback about the starter kit, who would they write to? You personally or is there like a general email address?

Stefan Cordes: We have a general email address for the starter kit as starter kit for newly appointed professors. And the starter kit for doctoral candidates there is no special email address because much more people than maybe the 40 newly professors in a year, but they can write to startpaket@ub-fu.berlin.de.

We’re definitely going to link to the starter kit and so we can make sure that people are going to find the email address to provide feedback or ask questions as well if there are any questions after the interview.

Stefan Cordes: And of course, they can write to Cosima and me for ourselves.

Dr. Cosima Wagner: Yeah, and we will start with our systematic review process this year, I think. And then we will, of course, have a button or something, an email address or whatever, a link maybe to a questionnaire on the website as well.

Okay, perfect. Stefan, we’ve talked a lot about the starter kit and the different elements it includes. To zoom out a bit, how does the starter kit fit into the broader landscape of the library services?

Stefan Cordes: Now we have two starter kits and I think they are working very successful. So we’re going to discuss our starter kits once more in a national context or in an international context. We are now in a few weeks on the great German congress called Bibliocon where we will discuss these starter kits. We are on international discussions and contacts with the University of Edinburgh two years ago and last year we were at Helsinki.

So we are providing these informations and what we are hearing is that most university or most libraries does not have such a service. So we are very interested to discuss these services and bring it to the other universities, maybe in the German context, in a national context, but also in international context. And as a next step, Cosima just mentioned, we will develop a new starter kit for international students. So we are on our way.

That sounds like a great initiative, a great new project. Is there anything you would like to mention that we haven’t talked about yet?

Stefan Cordes: Maybe it’s just a point. With the newly appointed professor, when we went to their offices to talk to them, discuss to them, and also with the doctoral candidates, we feel that they are very comfortable with these services because they haven’t heard about such a service at other universities. So this makes us, Cosima, I think, a little bit proud that we are on the right way with our services and that we could make our services much more visible than in the past time.

Dr. Cosima Wagner: Yeah, but we hope that it will prove true for the PhD candidates as well. Maybe I would like to mention, maybe just again to stress that when you asked how and when doctoral candidates can make best use of the starter kit. So just maybe to mention that, of course, it’s a first overview, but that we would like to draw the attention to ask them to check for their specific subject librarians and the faculty libraries. That they can book study rooms in the libraries, that there’s research support also when it comes to data management questions or digital humanities networking or consultation questions.

Qualitative interviews I already mentioned. Publication support, of course, is maybe a very strong library service, where we have also workshops on publication strategies for PhD candidates in the humanities. But also, of course, we have colleagues who work in the department for publication services. And when it comes to the question, where can I publish my dissertation, or I would like to publish a research paper already, and where can I get open access support. So we hope that PhD candidates find these services very fast and then can already make use of it right from the start of their PhD.

Cosima Wagner, Stefan Cordes, thank you very much for joining us today and for sharing your insights on the starter kit. I’m sure many doctoral researchers will find this a really valuable resource and appreciate how easy it is to access so much relevant information, guidance and support in one place. Thank you so much.

Stefan Cordes: Thank you for having us.

Dr. Cosima Wagner: Thank you. We are looking forward to meeting PhD candidates.

That was Dr. Cosima Wagner and Stefan Cordes talking about the library starter kit for doctoral researchers at Freie Universität Berlin. We talked about how the starter kit was developed and how it can support doctoral researchers in navigating the different services and offers available to them.

If you’re interested in related topics, you can find more episodes here in the podcast. My name is Dr. Marlies Klamt and this is the DRS Podcast by the Dahlem Research School at Freie Universität Berlin. Thank you for listening and until next time.

[Note: your host for this episode was Dr. Marlies Klamt]

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