Academics’ online presence - should the Library be involved?

Academics’ online presence: A four-step guide to taking control of your visibility 

I was extremely please to discover (via Twitter!)  this excellent guide written by Laura Czerniewisz (a faculty member of UCT's Centre for Higher Education Development) and Sarah Goodier - both from the OpenUCT Initiative. I feel that the Rhodes Library will in future become more involved in assisting academics and senior postgrads to raise their research profiles - this Guide gives an excellent introduction to the topic.  

As some of you know I have been experimenting with tweeting research publications from Rhodes on @RhodesResearch since June last year.  You may like to have a look (the idea is that the Principal Faculty Librarians tweet articles - from the publisher's website - information is gleaned from affiliation alerts which we have set up on various databases). I also provide a monthly blog publication of research from the Science and Pharmacy Faculties (which I have found to be very popular with academics).

 It is early days yet but it will be interesting to see what the future holds in this area.  With the rise of organisations such as Altmetric and Impact Story which facilitate the collection of article level metrics we might well find that this will become an accepted part of our job responsibilities.  On that topic you might like to read the article by Amberyn Thomas  (Manager, Scholarly Publications, University of Queensland Library) which appears in Elsevier's latest LibraryConnect issue

From the introduction to Laura's Guide:
"In today’s digital world, if you use the web, you have an online presence. Online content is exploding; there were 1.8 trillion gigabytes of online information in 2011 and academics are part of that content.  Universities have web pages profiling their stats. Academic networks such as LinkedIn andAcademia.eduare used by researchers around the globe to keep in contact with colleagues and collaborators. In addition, social media are increasingly being used for purposes in addition to ‘social’. It is fair to say that academics want to make a difference;having an influence is almost a job requirement. Research and other outputs need to be found and read, and nowadays that means online. A searcher browsing a topic is likely to use what they find online rather than forage for more in the analogue world. Moreover someone looking for you personally is likely to accept what they find as the full story. This means that academics need to know what is already out there about them, whether they like what they see, and whether their work is actually ‘findable’at all....."

What stand-up comedians teach us about library instruction

From the latest C&R L issue
Some useful suggestions here for our IL workshops - know the audience, relate, variety, feecback

What do our library users want?

Just been browing thought this article  Library Space Assessment: User Learning Behaviors in the Library in the J of academic librarianship
 

Perhaps we should investigate what our users want for the new computer-space we are developing in the Level 3?

 One of the results of this study at Olin Library that struck me was ---  "We did not anticipate users seeking individual studying space in a social learning environment"

Also - "the availability of food and drink makes it conducive for social learning in the library"- Library cafe??

2014 Tech trends

What 5 tech experts expect in 2014

Relevance to RU Library?

Openness: 

 Open Access -   RU Digital Commons?

Analytics:  

 Performance measurements (support researchers -  altmetrics? Impact Story? 

                    Google citations? h-index? Incites? Web of Science, Scopus)

Cloud:   

                              

Google Calendar?    RUL change to this?

Connected learning pathways:  

Online learning - for information literacy?

Can we use Pinterest in the RU Library?

I signed up for Pinterest some time ago so this article caught my eye - it considers:

1.	What are possible uses of Pinterest in instruction and information literacy?
2.	How do we create social value within library information services?

Anyone else in the Library interested in investigating if we could use this???

Abstract: "... investigates social curating activities on the website Pinterest and relates them to the librarian's traditional role of curating information. Pinterest is a social curation site that combines features of gathering, creating, and sharing with the information management characteristics of successful data curation. Libraries have begun to think about pushing services into social networking sites and adding social networking features to their own services. This study evaluates the webpages of Association of Research Libraries member libraries for presence and use of Pinterest, and suggests ways research and academic libraries can use Pinterest to support their patrons."