Let’s all go down the Strand!

Monday, 30 August 2010 10:08:16 a.m.

Commuters, residents and shoppers who regularly tread one of London’s most famous streets are now being asked to contribute to a new online resource.

The aim is to use social networking and mobile technologies to foster a sense of community in the Strand area of central London through a technique known as life-writing.

Life-writing is a broad and creative field which explores personal life stories, and how they intersect with accounts of the lives of others. Residents, business owners and employees working in the area will all be visited by researchers from the JISC project, Strandlines Digital Community based at King’s College London.

The researchers will also visit local community centres and events, digitise materials from the King’s archives and interview staff at King’s and launch a website in the autumn to generate contributions.

Go to source: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2010/08/strand.aspx

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ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee: 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries

Monday, 30 August 2010 10:06:57 a.m.

The ACRL Research, Planning and Review Committee, a component of the Research Coordinating Committee, is responsible for creating and updating a continuous and dynamic environmental scan for the association that encompasses trends in academic librarianship, higher education, and the broader environment. As a part of this effort, the committee develops a list of the top ten trends that are affecting academic libraries now and in the near future. This list was compiled based on an extensive review of current literature. The committee also developed an e-mail survey that was sent to 9,812 ACRL members in February 2010.

Go to Source: http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/6/286.full.pdf+html

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Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge

Monday, 30 August 2010 10:04:32 a.m.

Eager to prove their relevance among scholars leaving print behind, libraries have participated vocally in the last half-decade's conversation about digital research data. On the surface, libraries would seem to have much human and technological infrastructure ready-constructed to repurpose for data: digital library platforms and institutional repositories may appear fit for purpose. However, unless libraries understand the salient characteristics of research data, and how they do and do not fit with library processes and infrastructure, they run the risk of embarrassing missteps as they come to grips with the data challenge.

Whether managing research data is ‘the new special collections,’ a new form of regular academic-library collection development, or a brand-new library specialty, the possibilities have excited a great deal of talk, planning, and educational opportunity in a profession seeking to expand its boundaries.

Faced with shrinking budgets and staffs, library administrators may well be tempted to repurpose existing technology infrastructure and staff to address the data curation challenge. Existing digital libraries and institutional repositories seem on the surface to be a natural fit for housing digital research data. Unfortunately, significant mismatches exist between research data and library digital warehouses, as well as the processes and procedures librarians typically use to fill those warehouses. Repurposing warehouses and staff for research data is therefore neither straightforward nor simple; in some cases, it may even prove impossible.

Go to source: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/salo/

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University Investment in the Library, Phase II: An International Study of the Library's Value to the Grants Process

Monday, 30 August 2010 10:02:47 a.m.

Academic libraries must find ways to measure and demonstrate the value of their collections and services to all of their stakeholders. Academic library collections (both print and electronic) and library services provide value in many ways, including value to research, teaching, and student development. Return on investment (ROI) is one way to quantify the value of the library. This study examines the ROI of the library in one functional area—ROI in all stages of the grants process. This project expands and tests a case study conducted with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Luther, 2008) which developed a methodology for calculating the library’s ROI to the university through grants received. This new study expands that methodology to 8 institutions in 8 countries to see if the methods are widely applicable in academic research libraries worldwide. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected, including surveys of faculty, interviews with university administrators, and data on grant proposals, grant income, and the library budget.

Go to source:
http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/whitepapers/roi2/2010-06-whitepaper-roi2.pdf

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Climate data to be opened up

Monday, 30 August 2010 10:00:56 a.m.

Climate scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) will soon be demonstrating new methods of providing open access to research data thanks to a major new investment from JISC to improve the way UK university researchers manage their data.

Dr Simon Hodson, programme manager at JISC, says: “Climate scientists have been under the spotlight recently: there have been technical and cultural challenges to making data and methods openly available, and a perception of failure to do so has been taken by critics of mainstream climate science as an indication of unsound science.

“Clearly, confidence in research findings – among scientists and the general public – depends upon the underpinning data and methods being open, reusable and verifiable. What is more, researchers aren’t just producers of data; they are also consumers, so by funding projects which will improve practice and will give climate scientists and others better guidance on research data management JISC aims to help them make that data more usable and valuable,” he added.

Three independent reviews focused on hacked emails from climate scientists at UEA. The reviews found that the CRU researchers’ scientific rigour and honesty was not in doubt, but the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee said that climate scientists should take even more steps to make available all their supporting data – right down to the computer codes they use – in order that research findings should be properly verifiable.

Go to source: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2010/07/data.aspx

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Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia

Monday, 30 August 2010 9:58:50 a.m.

In late 2009 the National Library of Australia released version 1 of Trove to the public. Trove is a free search engine. It searches across a large aggregation of Australian content. The treasure is over 90 million items from over 1000 libraries, museums, archives and other organisations which can be found at the click of a button. Finding information just got easier for many Australians. Exploring a wealth of resources and digital content like never before, including full-text books, journals and newspaper articles, images, music, sound, video, maps, Web sites, diaries, letters, archives, people and organisations has been an exciting adventure for users and the service has been heavily used. Finding and retrieving instantly information in context; interacting with content and social engagement are core features of the service. This article describes Trove features, usage, content building, and its applications for contributors and users in the national context.

Go to source: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/holley/

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The Idea of Order: Transforming research collections for 21st century scholarship

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:44:17 a.m.

The Idea of Order explores the transition from an analog to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation, and reconstitution, and the implications of this transition for managing research collections. The volume comprises three reports. The first, "Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?" by Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry, explores the degree to which a new research library can eschew print. The second, "On the Cost of Keeping a Book," by Paul Courant and Matthew "Buzzy" Nielsen argues that from the perspective of long-term storage, digital surrogates offer a considerable cost savings over print-based libraries. The final report, "Ghostlier Demarcations," examines how well large text databases being created by Google Books and other mass-digitization efforts meet the needs of scholars, and the larger implications of these projects for research, teaching, and publishing.

Go to source:
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub147abst.html

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Semantically enhancing collections of library and non-library content

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:41:57 a.m.

Many digital libraries have not made the transition to semantic digital libraries, and often with good reason. Librarians and information technologists may not yet grasp the value of semantic mappings of bibliographic metadata, they may not have the resources to make the transition and, even if they do, semantic web tools and standards have varied in terms of maturity and performance. Selecting appropriate or reasonable classes and properties from ontologies, linking and augmenting bibliographic metadata as it is mapped to triples, data fusion and re-use, and considerations about what it means to represent this data as a graph, are all challenges librarians and information technologists face as they transition their various collections to the semantic web. This paper presents some lessons we have learned building small, focused semantic digital library collections that combine bibliographic and non-bibliographic data, based on specific topics. The tools map and augment the metadata to produce a collection of triples. We have also developed some prototype tools atop these collections which allow users to explore the content in ways that were either not possible or not easy to do with other library systems.

Go to source:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/powell/07powell.html

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JISC Inform issue 28 Summer 2010

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:40:18 a.m.

This edition is all about discovery – of data and knowledge, like-minded teachers, researchers and organisations.

New learners can discover rich educational materials online, published under open licences, as shown in our feature on Open Educational Resources. We also bring you examples of how colleges and universities are discovering new partnerships with business, ways of working together and how to share vital services and knowledge.

With the research environment in flux due to the economic climate and rapid digital developments, researchers are having to do more with less, and so it makes sense to urge them to discover new digital technologies that allow them to tap into global resources. We report on the research behaviour of ‘Generation Y’ and the increasing usefulness of virtual research environments.
While twenty years ago a group of scholars working on a common problem would have had to spend considerable amounts of money and time to enable their collaboration, new virtual environments allow online, real-time collaboration and speed up vital processes of innovation – as seen in the case studies about African sleeping sickness and the Roman tablet.
Today’s big problems such as climate change and global financial turmoil require new combinations of knowledge, helped by innovative digital technologies. This is why JISC is an indispensable resource for both individual institutions and the sector as a whole.

Go to source:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/jiscinform/2010/inform28.aspx

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Quality assurance and assessment of scholarly research

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:39:06 a.m.

A new guide has been produced to provide researchers, academic administrators and librarians with an understanding of quality assurance processes and some of the current issues surrounding the debate about quality assurance.

It provides an overview of some of the key issues surrounding quality assurance and assessment of scholarly research. It is intended for academic administrators, researchers and librarians who deal with elements of quality assurance and quality assessment as part of their daily work, but who wish to understand more about the broader context of that work.

Go to source:
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/quality-assurance-and-assessment-scholarly-researc

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