International Association of Technological University Librarieshttp://www.iatul.orgPurdue Libraries’ Dean James Mullins Honored by ARLhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=368On April 4, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) honored Dean James Mullins and the Purdue University Libraries for their enduring commitment to ARL’s Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce (IRDW), and for advancing the cause of diversity and inclusion in academic and research libraries. Since 2005, Dean Mullins and the Purdue Libraries have hosted IRDW Diversity Scholars at an annual “research library visit” designed to provide an inside look at operations in a major research library in the Midwest. During the closing reception for the eighth visit, held at the Purdue Black Cultural Center, Dean Mullins was presented an engraved trophy in recognition of this continued dedication to hosting the site visit.

Congratulations to IATUL Board member Jim Mullins!

Go to source: http://www.arl.org/news/pr/Mullins-11may12.shtml

]]>Mon, 14 May 2012 02:23 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=368Wikipedia founder to help in government's research schemehttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=367
Academic spring campaign aims to make all taxpayer-funded academic research available for free online.
 
The UK government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it.
 
The initiative, which has the backing of No 10 and should be up and running in two years, will be announced by the universities and science minister, David Willetts, in a speech to the Publishers Association on Wednesday.
The move will embolden what has been dubbed the "academic spring" – a growing campaign among academics and research funders for open access in academic publishing. They want to unlock the results of research from behind the lucrative paywalls of journals controlled by publishing companies.

Go to source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/01/wikipedia-research-jimmy-wales-online
]]>Thu, 03 May 2012 21:52 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=367Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of open accesshttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=361UNESCO issued this publication to demystify the concept of Open Access (OA) and to provide concrete steps on putting relevant policies in place. Building capacities in Member States for Open Access is a necessary but not sufficient condition for promotion of the concept. Creating an enabling policy environment for OA is therefore a priority.
 
This publication will serve the needs of OA policy development at the government, institutional and funding agency level. The overall objective of the Policy Guidelines is to promote Open Access in Member States by facilitating understanding of all relevant issues related to Open Access. 
The guidelines are not prescriptive in nature, but are suggestive to facilitate knowledge-based decision-making to adopt OA policies and strengthen national research systems.
 
Written by Dr. Alma Swan, an eminent expert in the field of Open Access, the draft went through an open consultation and peer review at the Open Access Community in the WSIS Knowledge Communities. 
 
The Policy Guidelines can be used by individuals as a basic text on Open Access and related policies. The publication will be useful to both the beginners as well as experienced in the world of Open Access, and will assist the decision-makers, administrators and research managers to focus on OA policy development.

Go to source:

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/policy-guidelines-for-the-development-and-promotion-of-open-access/

]]>Thu, 03 May 2012 21:17 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=361Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success: Final Research Reporthttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=362This report briefly presents the findings and recommendations of the "Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success" project which investigated the extent to which publishing has now become a core activity of North American academic libraries and suggested ways in which further capacity could be built. The research described (consisting of a survey, some case studies, three workshops, and a set of further reading recommendations) was mainly conducted between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2011. It was supported by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Libraries Studies, made to Purdue University Libraries in collaboration with the Libraries of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.

 
Go to source: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/24/
]]>Thu, 03 May 2012 21:17 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=362JISC Inform 33http://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=363The Spring edition of JISC Inform looks at how tech-enabled universities and colleges in the UK are embracing the web to showcase their expertise and work smarter.

Go to source:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/jiscinform/2012/inform33.aspx
]]>Thu, 03 May 2012 21:17 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=363Clarifying the Roles of Libraries in Research Data Management: A Discussion Day to find Creative Solutionshttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=364The purpose of the day was to clarify the research library agenda with regard to research data management, and to establish where RLUK can add value to the process through collaborative action. The session was facilitated by Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, and took the form of a mixture of presentations and working sessions. The presentations were by David Carr of the Wellcome Trust on Why good RDM is important to the institution; Sheila Corrall of the University of Sheffield on library staff development issues, Simon Hodson of the JISC on The skills that researchers may expect librarians to have, and Martin Lewis of the University of Sheffield on Working with other institutional actors.
 
Go to source:
http://www.rluk.ac.uk/content/clarifying-roles-libraries-research-data-management-discussion-day-find-creative-solutions
]]>Thu, 03 May 2012 21:17 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=364Taking Steps Toward “Interactive Learning Online"http://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=365Extraordinary pressure is mounting on colleges and universities—especially public universities—to address the ever-increasing growth in the costs of higher education and to improve student learning outcomes. Online learning holds great promise to address these issues, but requires these institutions to operate in substantially different ways. “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in US Higher Education,” an Ithaka S+R report released today and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, highlights the challenges to be overcome by institutions so that they can take advantage of online learning technologies, and explores why highly interactive online systems have yet to take hold in any substantial way. 
The report summarizes and provides analysis based on the experience and impressions of senior administrators and deans from a range of institutions including research universities, small colleges, and community colleges. These impressions were gathered through interviews conducted largely by Lawrence Bacow and William Bowen, Ithaka S+R senior advisors, and Kevin Guthrie, ITHAKA’s president.  

Go to source:
http://www.ithaka.org/about-ithaka/announcements/barriers-to-adoption-of-online-learning-systems-in-u-s-higher-education
]]>Thu, 03 May 2012 21:17 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=365If Harvard Can’t Afford Academic Journal Subscriptions, Maybe It’s Time for an Open Access Modelhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=366Last week, Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council revealed that the school now spends $3.75 million annually on academic journal subscriptions. Why so much? According to a memo the council sent out, some journals cost the school up to $40,000 every year, with the two top publishers increasing the price of content 145% over the last six years.
This is troubling for a number of reasons. First, in an age where the public can browse nearly 4 million articles for free on Wikipedia, a curious person looking to read up on the latest scientific research can expect to spend nearly $30 to $40 for a single paper from publishers such as Elsevier and Springer.
While it would be nice if academic journals were affordable for the general public, they are an absolute necessity for university faculty and graduate students. Like your cable provider, publishers often sell content in huge bundles, packing in less desirable content with the good stuff and raising the price.

Go to source:
http://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/if-harvard-cant-afford-academic-journal-subscriptions-maybe-its-time-for-an-open-access-model/#ixzz1taWovq3A



 

]]>Thu, 03 May 2012 21:17 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=366Improving the discoverability of scholarly content in the twenty-first century: collaboration opportunities for librarians, publishers, and vendors.http://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=355Discoverability is a popular buzzword—ultimately meaning the degree to which scholars can locate the content needed to advance their research and other creative activity. Improved user discovery experiences require heightened collaboration among scholarly publishers and their published authors; search engine developers, database providers, abstracting and indexing services, and academic publishers; electronic resource management and integrated library system vendors; and librarians who advance institutional discoverability. Drawing from interviews with value chain experts, results of research studies, and insights from scholarly literature, this white paper assesses the currently fragmented discovery environment and proposes cross-sector conversations to further visibility and, ultimately, usage of the scholarly corpus, not only on the open web, but within library service

Go to source:

http://www.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/librarian/DiscoverabilityWhitePaper/
]]>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=355Value and benefits of text mininghttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=356Vast amounts of new information and data are generated everyday through economic, academic and social activities. This sea of data, predicted to increase at a rate of 40% p.a., has significant potential economic and societal value. Techniques such as text and data mining and analytics are required to exploit this potential.
 
Businesses use such techniques to analyse customer and competitor data to improve competitiveness; the pharmaceutical industry mines patents and research articles to improve drug discovery; within academic research, mining and analytics of large datasets are delivering efficiencies and new knowledge in areas as diverse as biological science, particle physics and media and communications.
 
We have explored the costs, benefits, barriers and risks associated with text mining within UKFHE research using the approach to welfare economics laid out in the UK Treasury best practice guidelines for evaluation.
 
Go to source:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/value-and-benefits-of-text-mining.aspx#a01
]]>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=356Usage Factor: usage-based measures of journal impact and qualityhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=357The overall aim of the Usage Factor project is to explore how online journal usage statistics might form the basis of a new measure of journal impact and quality, the Usage Factor (UF). The specific objectives of the project are: to examine the ways in which journal quality is currently assessed; to assess whether the UF would be a statistically meaningful measure; whether it would be accepted by researchers, publishers, librarians and research institutions; whether it would be statistically credible and robust; whether there is an organizational and economic model for its implementation that would be acceptable to the major stakeholder groups.
 
The project is being executed in three stages, from 2007 onwards. Stage 1 focused on market research into the overall feasibility and acceptability of the Usage Factor in principle. Stage 2 focused on modeling and analysis, in which real usage data from COUNTER-compliant publishers was used to test the formula for calculation of UF, as well as the processes for doing so on a sustainable, ongoing basis. The full report on Stages 1 and 2 of the project is provided below. Stage 3 of the project, which commenced in October 2011, is now under way.
 
One of the first outcomes of Stage 3 of the project is now available, the Draft Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Usage Factors.

Go to source:
http://www.projectcounter.org/usage_factor.html
 
]]>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=357Open access: awareness and attitudes amongst the author communityhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=358While Open Access (OA), as a concept, has been around for over a decade and remains the subject of many a heated discussion by publishers and librarians alike, it has taken much longer for awareness of the model to filter down to the author community – who should eventually stand to gain most from the barrier-free access to their work that OA brings with it.

Go to source:
http://www.intechopen.com/js/ckeditor/kcfinder/upload/files/InTech_WhitePaper_FutureofOA_Dec11.pdf
]]>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=358Social awareness tools for science researchhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=359Tools for social networking and social awareness are developing rapidly and evolving continuously. They are gaining popularity in a growing number of professional as well as personal activities, including scholarly research. There are social awareness tools for science researchers that facilitate collaboration, help manage references, and offer options for presenting findings in new ways. This paper discusses those tools. Evaluating and understanding their functionalities requires effort, and scientists can be reluctant to invest the necessary time to learn to use and populate them on their own. This suggests that an important role for librarians is to evaluate the many social awareness tools available, to recommend the ones that are best suited to each researcher's needs, and to help researchers use those tools effectively.

Go to source:

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march12/mcmahon/03mcmahon.html

 

]]>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=359Open access: impact for researchers, universities and societyhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=360Open Access brings benefits for a variety of constituencies. Researchers gain from the increased usage and impact of their work. Their institutions benefit from the aggregated usage and impact of their researchers and the increased presence that Open Access brings. Society benefits from better technology transfer, better diffusion of know-how and a better-informed populace.

 
Open Access helps research to be carried out more efficiently by reducing duplication and blind alley research, by enabling researchers to find what they need more quickly and without cost and by helping researchers develop and diffuse the use of open standards. It makes possible better peer review and other methods of upholding academic rigour because researchers can easily see and judge the work of their peers and can access data for re-analysis and independent confirmation of findings. It also encourages collaborative endeavours by making research visible to new communities, including the general population.
 
Go to source:
http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/OA%20Impact%20briefing.pdf

 

]]>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=3602012 IATUL Conference - Early Bird registration closes 31 Marchhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=354A reminder that Early Bird registration for  2012 IATUL Conference in Singapore closes on 31 March.  To register please go to the website http://conference.ntu.edu.sg/iatul2012/Pages/home.aspx.

The theme of the conference is “Library Strategies for New Generation Users”. There will be 45 paper presentations from 25 countries and a poster session. Our invited keynote speakers will provide perspectives from different angles. Prof Rakesh Kumar is a professor of pathology at University of New South Wales and he will speak on his experience in teaching the new generation of students and what it holds for libraries. Mr Joe Murphy, librarian & technology trend spotter consultant is a well-known blogger who represents the new breed of librarians. Finally to round off the conference, we have Dr Susan Gibbons, University Librarian at Yale University, who has done illuminating work at Rochester University on academic libraries and the Net generation students.

Beside 3 days of conference sessions, we have arranged a day of learning and networking events comprising multi-faceted cultural heritage tours and a spellbinding night safari at the Singapore Zoological Gardens to allow all to mingle and forge closer personal ties with an international crowd.

]]>Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:06 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=354UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resourceshttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=352JISC Collections, together with Professor Carol Tenopir from the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee, has carried out research to measure the value and outcomes from access to scholarly publications by academics.
Presented in the UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources report, the research examines how valuable scholarly reading has become for academics, especially in terms of access to journal articles. It surveyed academic and associate staff at 6 UK Higher Education institutions in 2011 exploring how academic library collections support research and teaching activities and how reading patterns of articles, books, and other materials differ.
The research also examined what academics would do if library resources were not available. The findings suggest that without the library, academics and their departments would not find articles of such quality, that they would find fewer related articles, and that it would be a significantly more costly and time-consuming process.
 
Go to source:

 

]]>Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:33 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=352Re-skilling for Researchhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=353RLUK has published a major report by Mary Auckland on the changing needs of researchers and the effect on the subject/liaison role within libraries.
As research activities evolve, research support must evolve with them. RLUK has been keen to determine what the new requirements of researchers are, and how best these needs can be met by the library.  We want to place the needs of researchers in the context of the libraries current offering, and look at how we must change to fulfil the new demands placed upon us.
This report, Re-skilling for Research, takes us a long way to mapping these requirements. It looks in detail at researchers’ information needs and begins to outline the skills and knowledge that are required to meet those needs. The Report offers a comparison of different models of library support for researchers, with valuable comparisons of current job descriptions. Finally, issues around the training opportunities for subject librarians to acquire the additional skills and knowledge they will need to fulfill their new roles are explored.
A report such as this does not provide a definite set of answers, but initiates a valuable process, highlighting a number of activities for individual institutions, associations such as RLUK, library schools, etc
Go to source: http://www.rluk.ac.uk/content/re-skilling-research
]]>Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:33 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=353The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles — a Framework for Article Evaluationhttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=348I propose five factors — peer review, open access, enriched content, available datasets and machine-readable metadata — as the Five Stars of Online Journal Articles, a constellation of five independent criteria within a multi-dimensional publishing universe against which online journal articles can be evaluated, to see how well they match up with current visions for enhanced research communications. Achievement along each of these publishing axes can vary, analogous to the different stars within the constellation shining with varying luminosities. I suggest a five-point scale for each, by which a journal article can be evaluated, and provide diagrammatic representations for such evaluations. While the criteria adopted for these scales are somewhat arbitrary, and while the rating of a particular article on each axis may involve elements of subjective judgment, these Five Stars of Online Journal Articles provide a conceptual framework by which to judge the degree to which any article achieves or falls short of the ideal, which should be useful to authors, editors and publishers. I exemplify such evaluations using my own recent publications of relevance to semantic publishing.
 
Go to source:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january12/shotton/01shotton.html
]]>Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=348The Squeezed Middle? Exploring the future of library systemshttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=349JISC and SCONUL recently held a two day workshop at Warwick (19 and 20 January) looking at the future of the library management system. It explored what a next generation LMS might look like (or even whether one would be needed).

Go to source: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/news/lmsworkshop

]]>Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=349Journal of eScience Librarianshiphttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=350The Journal of eScience Librarianship is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that advances the theory and practice of librarianship with a special focus on services related to data-driven research in the physical, biological, and medical sciences.
Go to source: http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/

 

]]>Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:14 GMThttp://www.iatul.org/news/default.asp?post=350