Universities can improve academic services through wider recognition of altmetrics and alt-products

Universities can improve academic services through wider recognition of altmetrics and alt-products

"As altmetrics gain traction across the scholarly community, publishers and academic institutions are seeking to develop standards to encourage wider adoption. Carly Strasser provides an overview of why altmetrics are here to stay and how universities might begin to incorporate altmetrics into their own services. While this process might take some time, institutions can begin by encouraging their researchers to recognize the importance of all of their scholarly work (datasets, software, etc)........ "

Data sharing and its implications for academic libraries

 Jeonghyun Kim, (2013) "Data sharing and its implications for academic libraries", New Library World, Vol. 114 Iss: 11/12, pp.494 - 506
Purpose – As an important aspect of the scientific process, research data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research publicly available for use by other researchers. This paper seeks to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the data-sharing challenges and opportunities posed by the data deluge in academics. An attempt is made to discuss implications for the changing role and functioning of academic libraries.
Design/methodology/approach – An extensive review of literature on current trends and the impact of data sharing is performed.
Findings – The context in which the increasing demands for data sharing have arisen is presented. Some of the practices, trends, and issues central to data sharing among academics are presented. Emerging implications for academic libraries that are expected to provide a data service are discussed.
Originality/value – An insightful review and synthesis of context, issues, and trends in data sharing will help academic libraries to plan and develop programs and policies for their data services.

Impact of use of academic online resource on research

Impact of the consumption of electronic contents on research productivity in the universities of Castile and Leon

Highlights

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The Big Deal model has brought a greater consumption of academic contents.

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The availability of e-resources contributes to a growth in the academic output.

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Usage and value-for-money data are essential for managing and taking decisions.

UCT Open Initiative's Michelle Willmers on the state of Open Access

Michelle Willmers on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access ......  Michelle Willmers, Project Manager of the OpenUCT Initiative at the University of Cape Town in South Africa

23,000 scholarly journals now included in JournalTOCs, the free current awareness & alerting service

This is a great service.

JournalTOCs  is delighted to announce that you can now keep up-to-date with the latest research papers from over 23,000 scholarly journals from over 2,000 different publishers.  Of those 23,000 journals, 6,600 are Open Access (OA).

 JournalTOCs is used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide to find and be alerted to the latest published papers, and is free for individual researchers. Registration is free, email alert options for new Tables of Contents (TOCs) are free.  Seethe most Followed journals 

 In addition, there is a low-cost institutional Premium version of JournalTOCs  aimed at research, commercial and academic libraries.  Used by pharmaceutical libraries, health and medical libraries, the European University Institute, the VSSC, etc, JournalTOCS Premium enables libraries and resource centres to provide a customised and easily managed current awareness and alerting service to users.

 A new project funded by the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account will enable JournalTOCS 1: to help publishers to implement standard access-rights elements in their RSS feeds to enable the systematic identification of Open Access articles from hybrid and Green OA journals, and; 2: to broaden the benefits of current awareness on scholarly publications for researchers from developing countries. More details 

Does the Library have a role in scholarly communicaton?

Recent developments in scholarly communication: a review

This review article on recent developments in scholarly communication focuses on the content of three 2013 publications.

 

 

(Scholarly communication is defined by the Association of College and Research Libraries as ‘the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use’ (Association of College and Research Libraries))

'We have an obligation to imagine' …

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

Lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agency's annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

Tablets boost global device growth

With the market being driven by a shift to lower-priced devices, worldwide combined shipments of devices (PCs, tablets and mobile phones) are projected to reach 2,32-billion units in 2013, a 4,5% increase from 2012, says Gartner.

http://www.it-online.co.za/?p=76797?utm_source=dailymailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article

Deal with it: Tablets are here to stay

There's no point living in denial: more and more staff are bringing tablets to work so organisations have to adjust their policies in response.

Tablets are becoming a standard business tool for many workers, so businesses need to rethink their attitudes towards devices, whether they are buying them or not.
Research by analyst Ovum found that 17.6 percent of the employees it surveyed had already been provided with a tablet by their employer, up from 12.5 percent in 2012: but of the respondents who owned a tablet themselves, 66.7 percent used that device at work.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/deal-with-it-tablets-are-here-to-stay/?tag=nl.e101&s_cid=e101&ttag=e101&ftag=TRE684d531

Useful resource for research and writing tips

30 tips for successful academic research and writing

from

Editing Tip of the Week: Using a Thesaurus

I came across this great site which offers writing and publishing resources for research - some useful tips available.
The hints on how to use a thesaurus  would be very useful to students, I'm sure.

Incunabula: The Early Printed Books

Incunabula: The Early Printed Books
 
The term Incunabula (also incunable or incunabulum) refers to a book, pamphlet or other document that was printed, and not handwritten, before the start of the 16th century in Europe.  The first recorded usage of the term incunabula came in 1639 when the noted bibliophile Bernhard von Mallinckrodt issued a pamphlet to mark the bicentenary of the advent of printing by movable type titled De ortu et progressu artis typographicae (“Of the rise and progress of the typographic art”). 

The end of libraries?

Provocative piece by someone who (in my opinion!) is blinkered and out of touch with the reality of the needs of real people - particularly those who do not have the gadgets (money?) available to the 'so-called'' privileged of society.
 
Excerpt:  "...It’s almost like some people want to interpret anyone talking about the end of libraries as talking about the end of learning — and, by extension, the end of civilization. The reality is that learning has evolved. It’s now easier than ever to look something up. And the connected world has far better access to basically infinitely more information than can be found in even the largest library — or all of them combined. This is all a good thing. A very good thing. Maybe the best thing in the history of our civilization. Yet we retain this romantic notion of libraries as cultural touchstones. Without them, we’re worried we’ll be lost and everything will fall apart...."
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I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/library.html#rkRDqL7eZGGO6dJM.99 

 

 

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/library.html#rkRDqL7eZGGO6dJM.99

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/library.html#rkRDqL7eZGGO6dJM.99

My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Isaac Asimov

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/i/isaacasimo400908.html#q64oP5OvrJAy566k.99

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Isaac Asimov

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/i/isaacasimo400908.html#q64oP5OvrJAy566k.99

Altmetrics Bibliography

Altmetrics Bibliography
The Altmetrics Bibliography includes selected English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding altmetrics.
The "altmetrics" concept is still evolving. In "The Altmetrics Collection," Jason Priem, Paul Groth, and Dario Taraborelli define altmetrics as follows:

Altmetrics is the study and use of scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments. The term has also been used to describe the metrics themselves—one could propose in plural a "set of new altmetrics." Altmetrics is in most cases a subset of both scientometrics and webometrics; it is a subset of the latter in that it focuses more narrowly on scholarly influence as measured in online tools and environments, rather than on the Web more generally.

This bibliography does not cover books, conference papers, digital media works (such as MP3 files), editorials, e-mail messages, interviews, letters to the editor, presentation slides or transcripts, unpublished e-prints, or weblog postings. Coverage of technical reports is very selective.

Sources have been published from January 2001 through September 2013. The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works.

Altmetrics: What, Why and Where?

Everything you need to know about Altmetrics

Altmetrics: What, Why and Where?

by Heather Piwowar, Guest Editor
Altmetrics is a hot buzzword. What does it mean? What's behind the buzz? What are the risks and benefits of using alternative metrics of research impact – altmetrics – in our discovery and evaluation systems? How are altmetrics being used now, and where is the field going?
This special section of the Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology focuses on these questions. Essays from seven perspectives highlight the role of altmetrics in a wide variety of settings.

Measuring the value of librarians?

Interesting read from Librarian by any other name 

 

" ......In this post, I want to ask instead how we measure not the value of libraries, but librarians. What are the altmetrics that we need to collect on ourselves to demonstrate that the work we do matters to our patrons?............ 

what does ......  say regarding my value as a librarian to the research community that I serve here at the University of Massachusetts Medical School? How do I measure that? What altmetrics are there that I can track and collect and show to my administrators to prove to them that I am, in fact, adding value to the work of the people that I serve and thus, ultimately, to the library?........

 

.... To me, this  (see her story on the blog post) is an unequivocal demonstration of my value as a librarian on that particular day. I did my job and I did it very well and I have the proof, in a tweet, of this fact. Great, isn’t it? But short of taking screen shots of tweets and email replies, short of catching conversations with grateful patrons on video and posting them to YouTube, short of saving notes and phone messages and journal entries describing “good days”, how do I systematically capture all of this “value”? It’s a challenge. It’s perhaps THE challenge that any and all of us who work in information, innovation, and intellect, and the service roles that operate in those realms, face. It’s perplexing..............

 

 This week I’ve been reading Kim Dority’s book, Rethinking Information Work, and I really resonated with her sentiment that ultimately we are all self-employed.

And believe it or not, this is good news. Because if we understand that regardless of our current employment situation we are solely responsible for the well-being of our careers (and paychecks), that means we can take control. We can focus not on lifetime employment, but on lifetime employability.."

 

The most famous book thief in history?

Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja (born January 1, 1803 in Florence, Italy; died September 28, 1869, in Fiesole, Italy) was an Italian count and mathematician, who became known for his love and subsequent theft of ancient and precious manuscripts.

Appointed the Inspector of Libraries in France, Libri began stealing the books he was responsible for, fleeing to England when caught, along with 30,000 books and manuscripts inside 18 trunks. He was sentenced in France to 10 years in jail in absentia; some of the stolen works were returned when he died, but many remained missing.

In June 2010, one of the documents he stole—a letter from the French philosopher René Descartes, dated May 27, 1641—was handed back to France after being found in a library in Haverford College, in Pennsylvania. The letter had been donated by the widow of a college alumnus in 1902, and was discovered only after a philosopher from Utrecht University in the Netherlands read about it on the Internet, and contacted the college to tell them what they had in their library; the existence of the letter had been known to philosophers, but not its contents. The letter was written by Descartes to Father Marin Mersenne who had been overseeing the publication of Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy.

Can we “fix” open access? (re the recent 'sting' article in Science)

Following all the hype around  the recent 'sting' article in Science (which has indeed "set off lots of smug satisfaction amongst those who fear open access...") I was happy to read these comments by Kevin Smith from Duke University  (some RUL staff met Kevin at the Berlin10 conference in Stellenbosch last year)

 

 As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing

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As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. - See more at: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/author/ksmithl2duke-edu/#sthash.k2gT4FzL.dpuf

As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. - See more at: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/author/ksmithl2duke-edu/#sthash.k2gT4FzL.dpuf

Another useful link - from The Guardian Higher Education network

Open access publishing hoax: what Science magazine got wrong

The sting operation on publishers doesn't point to the real crisis, says Curt Rice – the meltdown of the peer review system

 

 

As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. - See more at: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/about/#sthash.k4FiY4bs.dpuf

As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. - See more at: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/author/ksmithl2duke-edu/#sthash.k2gT4FzL.dpuf

As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. - See more at: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/author/ksmithl2duke-edu/#sthash.k2gT4FzL.dpuf

Top 100 Tools for Learning

Top 100 Tools for Learning

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.