Instructional Preferences of First-Year College Students with Below-Proficient Information Literacy Skills: A Focus Group Study.

The Attaining Information Literacy Project has focused on identifying
first-year college students with below-proficient information literacy skills, gaining an
understanding of those students’ self-views and perceptions of information literacy, gaining an
understanding of their instructional experi- ences and preferences, and developing an intervention
that will address their instructional needs. Focus groups were conducted with students with
below-proficient skills to determine their instructional preferences. The findings from the focus
groups indicate that students place a high value on personal relevance in the knowledge and skills
they are learning, and they prefer a combination of demonstration and hands-on activities,
interaction with the instructor and other students, and the availability of supplemental
instructional materials in the form of handouts. In addition, they feel that incentives to
participate in instruction are crucial and that a number of communication strategies are needed to
advertise effectively the availability of instructional sessions.

Making your research available on open access services increases citation and helps ensure greater impact

Opening up your research: a guide to self-archiving
Making your research available on open access services increases citation and helps ensure greater impact, argues Deborah Lupton. In this post she has advice for sociologists in particular on different ways to self-archive, formatting and how to overcome barriers such as complex copyright legislation.

Is this being taught by our Library and Information Schools in SA?

see this slide set  :  
"Libraries are taking the lead [in Digital Curation] because
• they have a highly relevant skill set:
– they already know about how to organise and document information to make it
easier to find and put into context, so it is not a big leap to transfer those skills
to data;
– they already teach information literacy to students, so are well placed to teach
research data management;
– their experience of running publication repositories can be transferred to
running data repositories;
– they already know how to liaise with departments, and negotiate with
publishers;
• they already have good relationships with researchers, so it is easier for them to
provide support;
• they have been leading the way towards open access to research publications, so it
seems natural to extend that to data as well."

From Tweet to Blog Post to Peer-Reviewed Article: How to be a Scholar Now

From Tweet to Blog Post to Peer-Reviewed Article: How to be a Scholar Now

Digital media is changing how scholars interact, collaborate, write and publish. Here, Jessie Daniels describes how to be a scholar now, when peer-reviewed articles can begin as Tweets and blog posts. In this new environment, scholars are able to create knowledge in ways that are more open, more fluid, and more easily read by wider audiences.
Digital media is changing how I do my work as a scholar. How I work today bears little resemblance to the way I was trained as a scholar, but has everything to do with being fluid with both scholarship and digital technologies.  To illustrate what I mean by this, I describe the process behind a recent article of mine that started with a Tweet at an academic conference, then became a blog post, then a series of blog posts, and was eventually an article in a peer-reviewed journal.

ImpactStory awarded $300k NSF grant!

has been awarded a $297,500 EAGER grant from the National Science Foundation to study how automatically-gathered impact metrics can improve the reuse of research software.

They will use this to:

•  improve ImpactStory’s ability to track and display the impact of research software.
• use quantitative and qualitative approaches to see if this impact data helps promote actual software reuse among researchers.
• work to build an engaged community of researchers to help support the project

Article-processing charges (APCs) add complexity to librarian role

Earlier this year SAGE and Jisc organised a librarian roundtable to examine the implications of managing article-processing charges. Research Information editor Siân Harris, who also wrote the report of the event, describes some of the key findings