International Association of Scientific and Technological University Libraries

IATUL News Alerts

Extending the Scope of Trove: Addition of E-resources Subscribed to By Australian Libraries

Friday, 27 January 2012 4:04:15 p.m.

Trove is the national discovery service for Australia managed by the National Library of Australia. It was released in December 2009. It contains metadata for millions of freely accessible items, from more than 1,000 contributing institutions. The focus is on Australia and Australians. In 2011 it was developed further to include selected sets of e-resources subscribed to by Australian libraries. Trove v4.0 was released in May 2011 after 120 million subscription e-resources were successfully included. This took the Trove content total to almost 240 million items. This article describes why and how the work was undertaken, what was achieved, the issues and future plans for development.
Go to source:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november11/holley/11holley.html

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Developing students’ digital literacy to give them the best chance of success

Friday, 27 January 2012 4:04:15 p.m.

Many learners enter further and higher education lacking the skills needed to apply digital technologies to education. As 90% of new jobs will require excellent digital skills, improving digital literacy is an essential component of developing employable graduates.
 
Courses that embed core digital skills, as well as subject specific use of technology, enable students to gain the skills and confidence they need to use digital technology not only to support their learning but also in the workplace.

Go to source:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/supportingyourinstitution/studentjourney/digilit.aspx

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Mapping Research Excellence: exploring the links between research excellence and research funding policy

Friday, 27 January 2012 4:04:15 p.m.

This report explores patterns of national research excellence in a selection of the world’s top performing countries, the UK, the USA, China, Japan, Australia and Germany, using a new measure of excellence developed by Elsevier.
National research funding systems and policies are areas of huge complexity and so the aim of this report has been to elucidate some of these processes and consider how these might affect research excellence.

This report is not a comprehensive guide to all research policies. Rather, it has been our intention to identify links, provoke thought and prompt the direction of future policy interventions. Whilst observations are made about national funding, higher education policy and its interaction with research excellence is considered in more detail.

Go to source:
http://www.1994group.ac.uk/documents/110915_MappingResearchExcellence_1.pdf

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Capturing Business Intelligence Required for Targeted Marketing, Demonstrating Value, and Driving Process Improvement

Friday, 27 January 2012 4:04:15 p.m.

The University of Wollongong (UOW) has undertaken an innovative and collaborative research project to demonstrate the value that can be provided by academic libraries. The tool developed, the “Library Cube”, is a data warehouse linking student borrowing and use of electronic resources to students’ academic grades and demographic information. The project is different to other institutions’ efforts to link usage to student outcomes, in that the Library Cube is not a one-off research project, but is now an ongoing part of UOW’s systems and performance reporting and represents a fundamental shift in evaluating the student experience through the integration of discrete systems and datasets.
 
The Library Cube demonstrates a new direction for evidence-based research. Analysis enabled through the Cube has revealed a very strong relationship between library usage and students’ academic performance. This information will improve UOW Library’s ability to demonstrate value to clients and stakeholders. The Library Cube has also delivered some anticipated and unexpected findings on the relationship between social variables (such as gender, age, and citizenship) and library usage behaviors; and in doing so has also identified potential target audiences for Library promotions and engagement strategies.

Go to source:
http://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/242/

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Multi-Publisher, Multi-Purpose Platforms: Current Trends and Suggestions for the Future

Friday, 27 January 2012 4:04:15 p.m.

The landscape surrounding publishers and libraries continues to change, with increasing amounts of content being converted from print to electronic format. All those involved are still looking for the most practical, useful and efficient ways to adapt to this changed, digitized environment. There are no easy fixes and there is certainly no consensus.

Go to source:
http://www.accucoms.com/about/ACCUCOMS%20White%20Paper%20Multi-Purpose%20Platforms

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SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios

Friday, 27 January 2012 4:04:15 p.m.

The SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol was designed to facilitate the interoperable deposit of resources into systems such as repositories. The use of an interoperable standard eases the burden of developing clients to deposit such resources. This paper examines nine different deposit use cases, and provides case studies and examples of each use case to demonstrate the wide range of repository deposit scenarios. The use cases range from the deposit of scholarly communication outputs from a publisher to a repository and the automatic deposit of data from laboratory equipment, to inter-repository transfer and collaborative authoring workflows.
Go to source:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january12/lewis/01lewis.html
 

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Academic Libraries on Facebook: An Analysis of Users' Comments

Wednesday, 30 November 2011 10:41:28 a.m.

This paper examines users' comments on the Facebook pages of 20 American academic libraries and subdivides them into 22 categories. A total of 3,513 posts were examined and analyzed in various ways, including how many of the posts included user comments and how many had none; how many comments were included in each post; and what the percentage of user participation was on the library walls, in terms of "likes" and comments. The most significant findings are that approximately 91% of the posts do not include any comments, over 82% of user participation is expressed via the "like" functionality and most comments on academic libraries' Facebook pages are not uploaded by prospective users (i.e., college and university faculty and students) but rather by library personnel, employees affiliated with the same institution as the library, and alumni.

Go to source:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november11/gerolimos/11gerolimos.html

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Launch of ‘living’ books breaks barriers between humanities and science

Wednesday, 30 November 2011 10:41:28 a.m.

A series of 21 ‘living books’ has been launched online as part of a pioneering initiative designed to provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.

The Living Books About Life series is written and produced by humanities scholars from universities across the world – from the UK and America to Poland and Australia – and has re-packaged and re-presented science-related research material to make it more accessible to a humanities audience.

Funded by JISC and published by the Open Humanities Press (OHP), the books address a number of scientific topics whose unifying theme is life, including air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, energy, neurology and human cloning.

Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: "By drawing only on Open Access material to create these ‘Living Books about Life’, the team is helping define a new era of scholarly communication – and thereby exploiting JISC’s vision to make the results of publicly funded research available to all."

Go to source:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2011/11/livingbooks.aspx

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New generation library learners seminar, Melbourne 27 October 2011

Wednesday, 30 November 2011 10:15:02 a.m.

The presentations from the successful seminar held in Melbourne recently are now available athttp://www.iatul.org/conferences/workshops.asp

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Does Library Use Affect Student Attainment? A Preliminary Report on the Library Impact Data Project

Wednesday, 30 November 2011 10:15:02 a.m.

The current economic climate is placing pressure on UK Universities to maximise use of their resources and ensure value for money. In parallel, there is a continuing focus on the student experience and a desire that all students should achieve their full potential whilst studying at University.
Internal investigation at the University of Huddersfield suggests a strong correlation between library usage and degree results, and also significant under-usage of expensive library resources at both school and course level. Data from over 700 courses using three indicators of library usage; access to e-resources; book loans and access to the library were matched against the student record system and anonymised.

 

Go to source: 
http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2011-1/index.html?000522

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