EPUB vs PDF

Interesting question from my boss this morning asking about the EPUB format especially as it contrasts to PDF, which i confess I know little about.  This is on the back on one of our departments increasingly looking towards making material available on eReaders rather than our VLE (BlackBoard).  My thanks to the folks on twitter whom have kicked in the following bits of insight.

• EPUB is basically a zipped bag of xml and css with slightly improved DC metadata in it. Best for reflowable text, unlike PDF.
• PDF is written in stone so doesn’t flow well on ereader devices.  Best ereader for PDF is iPad. EPUBflows.
• Calibre makes EPUB
• EPUB will work better on e-readers like kindle – PDFs work but difficult to read
• Think there is linked data potential in the metadata.
• http://bit.ly/g7CzSe v.3 is particularly interesting from a metadata perspective
• Not just for ereaders IMO. Range of advantages Inc. Reusability & accessibility

So there you are – all the wiser now.  The link above is actually well worth following as it does give quite a clear view.  Is it enough information for the boss?  I don’t know, but I’ll pass it along and see what else she’d like to know.

LRA Most Accessed Research April 2011

1. Facebook, social integration and informal learning at university: ‘It is more for socialising and talking to friends about work than for actually doing work’ (Madge, Clare et al)
2. The Impact of Labour Turnover: Theory and Evidence from UK Micro-Data (Garino, Gaia et al)
3. Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change (Sandell, Richard)
4. Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care (Pitchforth, Emma et al)
5. Educational Leadership: an Islamic perspective (Shah, Saeeda J.A.)
6. The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths (Sim, Chow Yen Desmond)
7. Authenticity in ELT Task Design: A Case Study of an ESP Project-Based Learning Module (Choi, Lai Kun)
8. A cross-cultural study of predictors of self-handicapping in university students (Pulford, Briony D. et al)
9. Optimal Number of Response Categories in Rating Scales: Reliability, Validity, Discriminating Power, and Respondent Preferences (Preston, Carolyn C. et al)
10. Thomas C. Schelling’s psychological decision theory: Introduction to a special issue (Colman, Andrew M.)

The same paper as last month tops the charts for April, and sets a new record high for accesses (1019 accesses!); clearly a hot topic for the moment. Overall this month there has been a rise in all the items appearing in the chart; even while as a whole access to the LRA were down this month. However, the Easter extended shutdown likely affected the levels. Countrywise the same top ten countries continue to show up as last month.

1. United Kingdom
2. United States
3. India
4. Australia
5. Canada
6. Germany
7. China
8. Malaysia
9. France
10. Italy

In other news the LRA Annual report for 2010 is now available online for consultation.  One thing is very clear – this month’s top item scored almost as many accesses as last year’s annual top item.  It seems the use of research shared on the LRA just continues to rise month on month to new heights, which is a real credit to the LRA Administration team for making it possible!

LILAC 2011

I was able to get to the third day of LILAC Conference 2011 (Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference) this year held in London on the final day at the LSE.  I’ve put down the main points I picked up from some of the sessions I attended.

Does information literacy have a future? Geof Walton & Alison Pope.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that people are concerned about their future in an economic climate of cuts that this session was so well attended.  Geof Walton modelled a session on enquiry based learning by giving us all a set of questions to discuss in small groups and report back.

It was a discursive session that covered a lot of ground, here is a selection of the type of issues that all the groups came up with:

- How do we manage the expectations and perceptions about the library and information of various groups; from students to academics / researchers to admin staff.
- How to make more connections to get more timely training/ teaching into student’s courses.
- Information Literacy as a birthright, related to literacy in general being able to read. Its not a luxury but a life skill.
- Need to be able to demonstrate the positive outcomes.
- Teach alongside academics so they can contextualise information literacy skills.
 
Geof Walton emphasised the need for research informed teaching, and enquiry based learning. Information literacy is the scaffolding to enquiry and it can blend with technology supported learning.

Information Literacy beyond 2.0. Peter Godwin
Peter Godwin had trouble getting any sound for his video clips, but that didn’t matter as he is direct and entertaining enough without needing to resort to videos.  He favours big global themes and here are a few he mentioned:

- Web 2.0 is old now, but actually no one knew what it was.  Its settled down but not gone away and we are all influenced by it.  Students don’t know what web 2.0 is although they experience and use it themselves all the time.
- We are heading for an increasingly mobile and social world and that won’t change. Our job is to accommodate to that.
- There are early adopters and slow adopters.  People don’t change quickly.  We can watch the early adopters and watch from their mistakes.
- The nerds are a minority.  Most young people use tools but don’t have a techie understanding of them.
- Younger generation are not good at sharing and neither are academics / researchers or librarians.  We need to reallocate the time we have and change the way we behave and work.
- Only when you try to write something for wikipedia do you realise how difficult it is.

He had some engaging thoughts on information literacy, for instance it has been ‘pampered’ by its attachment to academia, he suggested we should be thinking of it in the context of transliteracy.  This made me think that information literacy as we know it is based almost entirely on textual information rather than visual or audio.  We are dealing with increasingly multimedia information for instance from the familiar such as video to emerging technologies for instance Mike Matas; A news generation digital book and augmented reality / virtual reality.  New media is in perpetual development but on a day to day basis our students need help dealing with old media and communication tools.  Perhaps the gap between the two is where we come in at present.

This links in with Jesus Lau’s keynote speech on the UNESCO project to develop international indicators of information literacy. He has been developing this alongside folk from the media world to develop Media Information Literacies.  The focus is on everyday experience for instance access to news media rather than academic information. The competencies are based on how these intertwine. 

Information Literacy of Health Students: assessment and interventions. Lana V. Ivanitskaya

Led by faculty member who is not a librarian Lana Ivanitskaya is an academic in industrial / work psychology.  She designs tests such as personality tests and has to assess them.

Her first point was that competencies are not just knowledge and skills but also attitudes and beliefs.  If you only focus on the skills you will miss a lot.  Students own knowledge of their skills gaps is a familiar scenario for librarians. First year students think there is nothing you can teach them (often), PhD students seem to have the opposite attitude.  Lana Ivanitskaya described the RRSA (research readiness self-assessment) online survey which includes tasks such as evaluating websites and application of knowledge.   The survey includes ‘soft’ questions which assess the students’ beliefs as well as their results and they have found this is very predictive of their level of attainment.

The RRSA survey also found some interesting differences between students and experts at information skills. They found experts better and that students overestimated their skills.  In fact the experts under estimated their skill the more expert they were. 

Lana stated that students still find how to do research hard and are not taught how to do it.  She compared the number and quality of references cited in student papers between those who had completed the RRSA and those that had gone through library information literacy training.  She found that the impact of library teaching was three times better than the RRSA, but that the students preferred doing the RRSA and were more willing to do it.

So the message? Lana wondered if we should focus more on online training.  Without seeing in detail what either the RRSA consisted of compared to the library training its hard to say of course.  Perhaps its down to the old messages of getting to the students at the right time and place and using the right voice.

Knotworking as a means to strengthen information skills of research groups.  Elija Nevalainen & Kati Suvalahit.

Finding new ways to connect with colleagues across campus that work isn’t always easy.  At the University of Helsinki they had success using ‘Knotworking’ a way of working developed by one of their academics, Professor Yrjö Engeström.  The process brings together different groups from across the organisation to work more quickly and less hierarchically than team structures.  ‘Knots’ are formed to find solutions to specific problems, and the problem they wanted to address was how to re engage with researchers. 

Here is my summary of what they found:

- Research groups think information literacy is for the good but they have no time to do it, its best aimed at Masters students.
- Information skills still important to research groups are; bibliographic tools, searching databases, current awareness, obtaining material you can’t get locally, establishing networks of contacts, organising references, consulting library staff. 

Interestingly the librarians learnt that their changing role put them in the same boat as the researchers, and they learnt a lot about the researchers from this project. The project also had the unexpected effect of gelling together the researchers as a group.  The project reinforced the value of personal networks and working with user groups. Working with researchers as equals also had a beneficial effect on the library staff who developed greater confidence in working in emerging subjects and services they don’t yet have expertise in.  These themes are not new of course, but success in developing a change in culture is something often dreamed of but not realised.

JISC Information Environment Event April 2011

Here are my notes and comments on the event I’m attended at the University of Aston as an invited speaker by the JISC on Thursday 7th April – resources from the event can be found here. 

Neil Jacobs from the JISC opened the day and gave it some context – taking us from the HE environment of 2009 and the days of the Digital Britain Report to 2011 and the current circumstances.  He detailed the various strands of the programme: Repositories, Preservation, Geospatial Data and infrastructure, Library Management Systems, Activity Data, Developer Community, Infrastructure for Resource Discovery, scholarly Communications, Rapid Innovation and Linked Data.

HE today is beginning to look to bibliometrics for research excellence and impact, which are fairly significant drivers.   Moves towards starting/supporting innovation and entrepreneurship need to be watched closely.  The event as a whole was aimed to share the highlights of learning from the various strands of the programme.

Session 1: Learning from Other Institutions

David Millard (University of Southampton) spoke first focussing on lessons learned from how educational repositories were not working .  They spoke to teachers -real teachers didn’t understand terminology or files from OERs, let alone working with digital resources even themselves.  Research repositories on the other hand give a real service to the researchers that they get (I might question that for some academics!). Looked to sharing sights (YouTube/SlideShare etc) which give teaching resources a home, have community and organisation – but it’s not through altruism for many people.  Developed software called EdShare, a post-learning object repository, that offered various advantages – not trying to force people to model their courses or materials in one particular way.  It also had light, non-restrictive metadata.  Tried to make the educational repository part of the living cycle.  Want BlackBoard to feed EdShare which feeds iTunesU as well.

Kamalsudhan Achuthan was up next (filling in at short notice)  talking about improving research information management, something close to my heart with the current local work towards implementing and integrating a CRIS.  The final report from the project can be found here.

William Nixon gave the next talk talking about embedding repositories into practice.  One of the outcomes of the project has been about  building the relationships between the repository and research office staff.  He noted that the future is embedding the repository within the institutional systems, although interoperability is not automatically easy.  The aim might well be to have an invisible repository moment, when it is seamless integrated into the whole.  The repository was used to gather a lot of the information for the min-REF that Glasgow ran, including impact and other metrics.  Embedding and integrating is about adding value, enabling reuse, reducing duplication and exploiting new opportunities.  Advocacy has evolved (as at Leicester) where it’s about working with the Research Office and other people across the campus; which I would say is a very good thing.  At the same time the project showed that there are different needs for the different disciplines.  He finished by suggesting that the job of a repository manager is moving into new, and exciting, territory.

Damian Steer closed the morning through talking about information architecture.  Interestingly he touched on data sources such as blogs and newspaper reports on the work; which would contribute towards demonstrating an impact for the REF.  Behind the scenes at Bristol they use linked data from the Semantic Web.

After lunch myself, Ben Showers from JISC and Nick Woolley (King’s College) talked about various resource and time saving activities.  I was presenting the highlights from my recent survey (my thanks to all those whom responded) rather than talking from personal experience!  You can access my slides here. Ben’s talk (Why you shouldn’t bother with advanced search) is also online.  While the session (which was repeated) was not exactly well attended, there was a spirited debate following the talks on both occasions.

Finally Margaret Coutts from the JISC Infrastructure and Resources Committee came on to deliver the keynote.  Among the comments she made, were that it is important top remember that research repositories are not solely for archiving for the REF, nor are teaching repositories solely for exploiting the content – they should both work in that area.  There is a need to develop life-cycle  management for the documents within them as well.  Academics are now more ready to come forward and expose all the extra effort they put into preparing journals – unpaid contributions and asking the questions – just what are publishers doing for us?  Will they challenge the publishers?  Uncertain as there is  desire not to damage peer review in the process.

The change in scholarly communications is a long game, and not one that will happen in the next few years, although there will be work in the right direction.  Work on LMS indicate that shared systems may well generate shared efficiencies and reduce costs.

One of the big growth areas in the coming years was suggested to be teaching and OERs, where platform rather than standard will be more important.  Likely there will be pressure for more sharing of these both within and without institutions, although there will be some items for local access as well as those for fully open access.  Digital Preservation is something that keeps falling off the edge.  We know what digital preservation is, but keeps being postponed because there are other more pressing things -but this is a time bomb.  We need to address this as a community sooner rather than later.

Urgency for solutions is going to increase.  Are there quick wins we can gain from the JISC projects, that can be put out to the sector.

Rachel Bruce then capped the day off by looking at the way ahead for JISC, which even though it has reduced funding is still charged with enabling innovation but at the same time ensuring that lessons learned and applications developed are able to be taken up by the LIS community.

RSP Winter School: Day 2

(You can read about Day 1 here.)

Day two opened with lightly less overcast skies, and Jackie Wickham giving an overview of the work of the RSP; past and future.  This was followed by Max Wilkinson from the British Library talking about their Datasets Programme; which I was especially looking forward to hearing.  It was interesting to hear about an area, which by accord, most of the room wasn’t doing a great deal about practically.  That data sets are of a volume magnitudes greater than the publications that most repositories deal with is no surprise, and that most repository softwares are not especially great ay handling them wasn’t either.  I was hearted to hear that the BL are working in this area, and appear to be thinking about it at a national level.  I must confess that personally I’d expect that a national solution for data sets repository is more likely to be effective than a local one; but thinking that and seeing it happen are two very different things.

Then Prof Keith Jeffery from euroCRIS/STFC gave a talk which…well it was very information rich.  I described the talk afterwards as akin to the “last 30 minutes of 2001, only without a monolith”.  Keith was nominally talking about euroCRIS but this was almost submerged in the presentation that whipped past with terms half known and unknown.  There was certainly a worth in hearing someone as plugged in at the national level to STEM work as Keith; it was unfortunate that his talk wasn’t really pitched at a sufficiently practical level for those in the room.  I shall however, look forward to re-reading his slides (assuming the RSP shares them) at my leisure, over perhaps a day.

Next up was Mark Cox from King’s College talking about the Readiness4REF project.  Leicester has been slightly involved in this project, with respect to CERIF so some of what Mark ta;lked about was familiar to me.  I came out of this talk taking away the message that making sure your repository is CERIF compliant will make it faster, more effective and ready to interact with the wider community; which can only be a good thing.

And then he was followed by Theo Andrew from EDINA who presented what I can only describe as THE talk of the conference for me.  Theo outlined a world where a lot of work is repeated at different institutions, where three co-authors at different unis are each asked to make a deposit of a copy of their paper, with varying levels of success and engagement.  The Repository Junction project proposes to streamline this, so that when one academic deposits, the software seeks out the repositories of the other authors and punts the paper into their verification and deposit workflows.  William Nixon (Glasgow) refered to it as a killer app and to be frank I think if it works he won’t be proved wrong.  Theo’s only working with a limited number of institutions but the plans are to expand out to a larger group; and I like many in the room I can imagine would be only be too happy to be involved!  I’ll be following the project blog with interest.

After a delicious lunch (which made me glad I skipped breakfast) Balviar Notay from JISC spoke about the Take Up and Embedding Programme projects, which was I admit a bit of a blur of acronyms.  All the same some interesting work is going to be carried out under this banner.

She was followed by a workshop session fronted by Jackie Wickham and four willing helpers, which ran into the early evening.  Four facilitators (Miggie Pickton, Nicky Cashman, Jill Golightly and Rachel Proudfoot) moved around four groups and spent 30 minutes discussing issues related to their own projects, locals and experiences.  The small group format allowed for a more intimate level of discussion than might have been enjoyed in the whole group.  I must confess that the first couple of these sessions did little for me (other than further developing my sense that Glasgow has done so much that many of us will struggle to ever achieve their level of success!).  However, the sessions with Nicky and Rachel were much more suited to my personal interests and certainly clarified one or two ideas I’ve been having of late about the LRA and our future direction. 

The day’s sessions was followed by the conference dinner, and repository related discussions and exchanges which lasted long into the night (I lasted ’til around 11.30 but then had to call it a night). An intensive, packed day with a lot for me to reflect on and revisit now I’m back at Leicester.

(You can read about Day 3 here)

USTLG Winter Meeting 2

This follow on with my report of the USTLG Winter Meeting.

Finding the known unknowns and the unknown knowns, Yvonne Nobis, University of Cambridge.

• Talked about their development of the http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/scienceportal/website aimed specifically at researchers (which I know some of our researchers rather like the look of!)
• Researchers often don’t known what they’re looking for: unknown unknowns, as research skills might need updating, looking for something outside their field or don’t know where to begin.
• Scientists don’t tend to use the Cambridge libraries (over 100 of them so confusing system) and they want everything electronically so looking for a way to meet their needs.
• Found most visitors to the science library are those looking for historical (print) information, or students wanting a place to study.
• ~95% journal are online and ~95% of monographs are still print only.
• In response to this they will now scan on demand from their own collections for Cambridge researchers (currently a free service as charging would have copyright law implications).
• As the staff would often need to retrieve these items from storage the scanning has not added too much extra effort.
• Science librarians at Cambridge do a lot of training of early career researchers.
• Science@Cambridge contextualises information within a subject area to help researchers start their searching.
• Includes a federated search option where relevant databases have been chosen (to steer researchers away from just using Google Scholar as they don’t realise what scholar doesn’t index: unknown unknowns).
• Trying to make resource discovery as easy as possible.
• Have problems with making eBooks easy to access, especially individual titles on catalogue records.
• Trialled using chat with subject  librarians but not really worked so looking at centralising enquiries more.
• Training branded through College or Computing Services gets a better turn out than library branded training.

We use a similar idea to Science@Cambridge in our subject rooms, but could learn more from them when redeveloping our Rooms as part of our digital library overhaul? Hopefully using Summon in future will make resource discovery easier at Leicester

Lunch!

Obviously the most important part of any conference is the lunch provided. This time it was a good spread sponsored by Wiley Publishers, and in a very unexpected place…

Lunch in the Divinity School

Citations Count! Experience of providing researcher training on bibliometrics, citations and Open Access publishing. Kate Bradbury,  Cardiff University.

• Training in citation data in response to REF raising interest in bibliometrics, funders requesting bibliometric data, help deciding where to publish and to promote work. 
• Training covers: WoS/Scopus/Google Scholar, looking for data in other sources (e.g. book citations, full text resources which include references), what each database provides e.g. impact factors, increasing citations, using open access publishing and repositories.
• Format of training: 30 min talk and 1 hr hands-on using workbooks - activities such as finding impact factors, setting up citation alerts, looking at OA resource and using ResearcherID.
• Also do shorter, tailored talks for Departmental meetings etc.
• Sessions dones for subject librarians, staff development programme, specific schools/depts (e.g. Comp Sci, Engin, Psychology) and within seminar series.
• Lessons learnt: avoid too much detail, stay up to date with new database features and REF, emphasis benefits to researchers, takes time to build interest in training, targeted sessions best, be flexible & adapt sessions to suit audience, be prepared for discussions about the validity and use of bibliometrics!
• Stance taken: explain how to find information but leave it up to the researchers to decide if it is useful to them, including discussion of pros/cons of bibliometrics.
• Types of questions asked:
• How to pay for OA publishing?
• Shouldn’t we just write controversial articles to up our citations?
• What about highly cited, poor research?
• My journals not indexed in WoS, how do I get citation info?
• How to find book citation info?
• What about self-citations? Will they be excluded from REF?
• BMJ article said no observable citation advantage from OA publishing…
• Can I import articles on in WoS into ResearcherID? (can do, but tricky)
• What is a good H-Index to have?
• Doesn’t H-Index just reflect length of career?
• Where’s the best place to put an OA article?
• I use a subject repository so why also use institutional repository?
• I don’t want an early version of my work available…
• What next in terms of training? – Continue with sessions, support subject librarians to run their own sessions, introduce Bristol Online Survey to collect feedback from attendees, respond to individual follow-up questions and do a separate presentation on OA publishing.

Wiley Publishers: WIREs, Alexa Dugan.
Next up was our sponsor for the day Wiley talking about their new product:

• WIREs = Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews.
• Reference work meets journal review article -  a new concept in publishing.
• Have been finding it difficult to find authors/researchers with enough time to devote to writing traditional reference works, especially as those works do not gain professional recognition .i.e. they are not indexed or cited.
• WIREs is Wiley’s answer to this: invited content with high quality editorship, drawing on their research journal community ties (so like a reference work), but also managed to get them indexed in major databases and WoS so the authors can get recognition.
• Each Review has a carefully thought out structure, which is kept up to date with a range of article types e.g. focus (news) articles, opinion pieces, basic reviews, advanced reviews etc.
• Content is added every two months (so serial like a journal) & articles retain their title and DOIs for citation purposes.
• One of their flagship titles: Climate Change Review has won several awards already.
• FREE for first two years: wires.wiley.com


Getting Interactive

Researcher@Library – becoming part of the research cycle, Katy Sidwell, University of Leeds.

• Leeds, like many of us, have managed to get a certain amount of library training embedded or offered to PhD students, but what about Academics and other Researchers?
• Started to think about how to support researchers so thought about the life cycle of a research project:
• Ides (pre-funding) – Planning (finding application) – Action (research/life of grant) – Dissemination - Application (of research knowledge/transfer) – back to beginning of cycle.
• They got us to think about how we all support these stages of the cycle & feedback (using post it notes – a good bit of interactivity to wake us all up!).
• What they (and from the feedback, others might do) are:
• Ideas = library collections, current awareness & literature search training.
• Planning =  Identify funding sources ^ support research bids (though in Leeds this only happens in particular areas as it’s labour intensive and unscaleable).
• Action = PhD workshops, bibliographic management, lit search support, data management advice, user behaviour research, friendly space for researchers.
• Dissemination = RAE/REF support, etheses online, institutional repository, publications database.
• Application = intellectual property advice (Business officer), market research for knowledge transfer e.g. patents.
• Hard for researchers to know about training – where/how to promote?
• Created a website for researchers to bring together the various things available to them (need user needs analysis to find out what to put there).
• Researchers wanted a website that was not solely library resources/focused, not tutorial but advice that could be dipped into at appropriate time, simple navigation, no login but not really basic advice – appropriate to their level.
• library.leeds.ac.uk/researcher
• Work in progress – need to clarify purpose, look at navigation issues, obtain feedback and roll out across other faculties.
• Where now? – created Library Researcher Support Group to continue the work and look at how it fits in with the new Vitae researcher development framework.

A good day all round. The presentations from the day can now be viewed at the USTLG site.

USTLG Winter Meeting 1

On 25th November 2010 I attended the University Science & Technology Librarians’ Group Meeting at Keble College, University of Oxford. The theme for the day was “The role of libraries in the research process.” I nearly walked straight past the little wooden entrance to Keble College, but was greeted with a magnificent vista on entering…

Keble College

An academic perspective on libraries supporting research. Professor Darton, Dept Engineering, Oxford University.

Professor Darton expressed his love of books, talked about his ancestors being publishers of children’s books and having founded the Darton Juvenile Library. He also talked about how he had fought to keep the Engineering Library at Oxford under the control of the Department as he felt it played an important part in their culture.

He had brought in a couple of classic engineering texts and said it was difficult these days for academics to find time to write “classic” types of textbooks and they were hvaing to find other ways of conveying information to students.

In his time as an engineer he thought that libraries/librarians had moved from being a status symbol (the bigger the library the more knowledge) that was protected and guarded by the librarians for their specific patrons, on to being providers of information which encouraged access for all and finally, these days, being more of an online gateway with librarians as web managers.

He then went on to argue that for science and engineering researchers the library is no longer needed – they rarely use physical texts, there is a huge amount of good quality information accessible via Google (as long as you have the skills to judge quality) and more movement towards open access materials online (e.g. in his are of sustainability). He argued that he would be happy, as a researcher, for there to be a subscription team who oversaw journal subsciptions on behalf of the University, a storage/retrieval service for older print items and for the sciences to stop funding the expensive physical libraries needed by the arts. Or even move to a model where all researchers are given a portion of the library funding to “buy individual article on demand” instead of having a central library service! As you can imagine this was a controversial point of view…

The audience asked if he thought the same applied to undergraduates and he thought up until their 3rd year projects that might have different needs, but by project time they might still need a budget to buy relevant articles.

When asked if he saw any role for librarians he thought there was still an important role in training people to be critical of information, and recommends library training to his students. Also that journal subscriptions would be more cost effective than buying individual articles so perhaps librarians should become/be seen as skilled negotiaters. Librarians need to show how they can help researchers.

Professor Darton was also critical of the current peer-review system, and as an editor of a journal it was becoming very hard to find good reviewers. He suggested that publishing the names of the reviewers might improve the quality of the reviwing. He was also suprised to find younger researchers don’t have a concept of what a journal is as they have never held a print copy in their hands.

USTLG Talk

 

Update on REF, Kimberley Hacket (REF Team)

Main points of interest:

REF will be a process of critical review and some will include bibliometric information.

3 elements: Outputs (research) ~60%, Impact of research ~ 25% and Environment ~15%.

4 outputs per researcher (less if early career).

36 sub-panels looking at different subject areas.

Outputs selected by HEI

All types of outputs can be selected as long as they conform to REF definition of an output, including open access outputs.

Citation information can be used by a sub-panel if they wish. However, it will be used to inform expert review and not on it’s own.

If panels request bibliometric information then it will be supplied by REF (not by institution) and will conform to agree simple metric methods.

Panels being selected and will be announced early 2011.

Impact is not just economic but also social, quality of life etc.

Do not want to discourage curiosity-driven research.

Data collection will be built on the RAE system – pilot in late 2012, live in 2013.

Assessment in 2014 – results by end of 2014.

Any bibliometric data used will come from a single supplier appointed by REF.

 

Old Bodleian Library

Research Metrics, Anne Costigan, University of Bradford.

Anne talked about looking at metrics with researchers and the issues around metrics:

Metrics can be used at author, article, journal or institution level – journal level most known.

Citation metrics available from Web of Knowledge, Scopus & Google Scholar.

Journal Citation Reports (WoK) – impact factors most famous – attempts to measure importance and quality of journal.

Citation Reports usually ignore books, conferences and non-journal research information/citations.

Researchers tend to get hung up on journal impact factor – seen as “league table of journals”. However, be wary as different subjects have different amounts of journals listed, impact factor can change over time so look at trend, encourage people to also look at ranking.

Often asked “what is a good impact factor?” = how long is a piece of string? Varies tremendously by subject e.g. a specialist area might have many citations missing as journals not indexed, or papers in conferences etc.

Self-citation can skew figures.

Review journals tend to be very highly cited.

Editors have been known to insist that articles always cited articles from within the same journal to inflate impact factor.

Controversial papers are usually highly cited and can skew figures (could be a “bad” paper).

Other options to look at: Eidenfactor (WoK) – complex algorithm where citations from highly ranked journals hold more weight. H -index e.g. 34 papers which have at least 34 citations = H-index of 34. H-index does favour those with a longer career.

Article metrics – times cited (WoK, Scopus, Google Scholar) – different results from each. Scopus & Google Scholar tends to include more non-journal citations.

Author metrics – WoK can create citation report & remove self-citations. Problems with identifying papers belonging to certain authors (e.g. similar name to someone else.)

Can use ResearcherID (free service via WoK) to register articles under your author name.

Scimago – uses Scopus data for free.

What about repositories?

MESUR – combines citation & usage data.

Rise of Web2.0 – vote for your favourite article?

Researchers like easy to undertsand metrics e.g. H-index.

Uses of metrics – where to publish, what to subscribe to, in recruiting researchers, at Dept or Institutional level for marketing…

No measure perfect – always look an a combination of things.

Legal Issues in Web 2.0 and cloud computing

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the above named UKeiG course.    The day consisted of a full  programme jam packed with useful information, knowledge and anecdotes, all provided by Professor Charles Oppenheim in his usual engaging manner.

The morning focussed on IPR issues, both in relation to the ‘rights holder(s)’ of user generated content produced via Web 2.0 applications, but also the incorporation into such content of different types of 3^rd party material, which of course is a completely separate but equally important issue. 

Charles helpfully directed us to the Web2Rights materials, which I have found useful in the past for their flowcharts and diagnostic tools, and tested us with a number of scenarios.  As I and my fellow participants were from a wide range of copyright/IPR/Web 2.0 technology backgrounds it we interesting to see that we were all fairly consistent with our responses/approaches to the issues raised. 

The most interesting sessions of the day for me were those covering the issues of defamation and data protection.  The increasing adoption of Web 2.0 technologies as part of educational engagement means content generators need to be aware of UK defamation law, and what can constitute libel, even if said in jest.  

Whilst many of us know the basics of the Data Protection Act (DPA), it might come as a surprise to those who have embraced cloud computing that personal data such as that covered by the act should not be moved outside the EEA, unless the recipient country has an ‘adequate’ level of protection themselves, and that data held in a ‘cloud’ is often moved around the world, albeit temporarily, to maximise system efficiency. 

It was a day that provided much food for thought, and I think it would be very easy to get weighed down in the detail and the intricacies of the Acts. However, in the first instance I think I shall just draw up some guidelines to include in my training materials!

Visit to South Leicestershire College

On Wednesday I represented the University Library at the College-University of Leicester Network (CULN) Librarians meeting. This meeting was hosted by Lesley John at South Leicestershire College, and we got a tour of the new College building, as you can see from the photos below.

The new building brings all their departments together in one place, where they were previoulsy on several campuses. Including those such as construction (below). Each subject has their own teaching area or Pod, which includes an area where the students can drop in to use computers or do group work.

Lesley told us that the library being integrated into the new building has meant more visits from students and staff, including harder to reach users.

eBooks, eBooks everywhere

eBook by PPL 2A on Flickr

eBook discussion are popping up in all areas of my life at the moment, from print vs e on the British Fantasy Society forum, the new Doctor Who book by Michael Moorcock being available on the Kindle, to creating comics for the iPhone/Pad, to students asking about them in inductions, to many friends having just bought Kindles or iPads… so a very hot topic, particularly since the Kindle came down in price recently.

I was kindly allowed to gatecrash the CULN eBook & eReader session being run by the BDRA last week. so, here’s a few thoughts from that session and other things I’ve been reading:

• What is an eBook? A document that can be read on an eReader?
• How do you read an eBook?
• Via computers, laptops, dedicated readers (Kindle, Sony eReader), iPad, iPhone, iTouch? Many different routes, some of which require the eBooks in certain formats.
• There is now a Kindle app for non-Kindle devices to allow people to buy ebooks from Amazon.
• eBooks formats: libraries still bound by publishers to use password/IP restricted sites, especially for textbooks, which only allow students to read the texts online rather than download them to their own devices.  The students are generally not impressed with this, nor the copyright restrictions that mean they can’t print much off either…
• PDF – the favourite of academic journal publishers and still very popular with other publishers as an easy format for them to provide, but not a format that works well on dedicated eReaders.
• Doc (word docs), txt (plain text), html.
• Mobi (Mobipocket) format – used by the Kindle.
• ePub format – used by Sony.
• Why use an eReader instead of a laptop/ipad etc? eReaders like the Kindle and Sony use electronic paper technology, which mimics what ink looks like on paper. The theory being that tis makes is much easier to read the text and easier on the eyes. (Friends with a Kindle have commented they find it much easier to read than a computer screen).
• Computer screens are backlit making them much brighter, and possibly causing more eye strain. Are younger readers more used to this technology?
• Formats like Mobi and ePub are also designed to resize easily to the size of the device and reader requirements than traditional formats.
• it is very easy to convert a Word document to various eBook formats using free software like calibre. (We have a go, it really is easy!). Calibre can also act as an eBook file organiser. e.g. inplace of iTunes on the Sony eReader.
• Public libraries in the USA and Hampshire Libraries in the Uk have started experimenting with loaning eBooks using the Overdrive system. However, the Publishers Association have just announced new restrictions that look set to put a stop to a lot of eBook lending options!!
• Lots of free (mainly out of copyright or creative commons) eBooks out there on services such as Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks and Manybooks.
• Amazon have a new feature on all their book pages that allows you to ”Tell the publisher, I’d like this book on the Kindle” – is this where the pressure for eBooks will come from in future?
• Also a very interesting piece by SF&F writer Charles Stross on why eBooks don’t cost much less to produce than printed books.

I’m sure there’s been lots more stuff out there that I’ve forgotten, anyone?

FileOpen is coming – help me test it!

File Open is the new secure electronic delivery mechanism the British Library have been moving to, to replace the rather less user friendly Adobe Digital Editions (to paraphrase the BL’s words).  Over the summer the update plug-in should have rolled out to all campus machines on the CFS network, with the student PCs being the last ones done this month.  Off campus people will need to download and install the FO plug-in for themselves, but this should be a relatively painless exercise, at least according to every document supply manager I’ve spoken to who’s already done it.

I’m currently mulling over when would be the best time to make the switch over, as term is kicking off all around me this week and next it doesn’t seem the right time to spring this; but perhaps a 2011 roll out would be more suitable.  it would certainly give me more time to do a spot of testing.  I wouldn’t want to push something out before I know it’s working for our readers!

In the meantime – if you get the chance to follow this link and try opening the document on a CFS machine (or download the plug in and try on your own machine) I’d be really grateful!  If you can tell me your machine type (Mac/PC), operating system and if you’re on CFS or not, that’d be even better!

Visit to Gondar, Ethiopia

I have just returned from a visit to Gondar in northern Ethiopia, under the auspices of the Leicester-Gondar Link, a long standing link between hospitals/universities in Leicester and in Gondar.     The link encompasses clinical hospital staff as well as academic and support staff, and has seen many visits of Leicester people to Gondar as well as the other way round.

I went as part of a team, along with Tatjana Petrinic of the University of Oxford and Getachew Bayissa of the University of Jimma, Ethiopia,  to teach an information skills module on a new MSc course.   The course is the first of its kind in Ethiopia, and there are courses for physiotherapists, clinical laboratory staff, midwives and anaesthetists.   The aim is to improve practice and also to have aa course that is self sustaining, with people who qualify going on to teach it.   There were 45 students, more than planned, reflecting the demand for such a course.

Ours was the first module, and ran from Wednesday to Sunday to avoid the Ethiopian New Year.   The module was called, rather grandly, “Evidence based practice and health informatics”.  We certainly covered evidence based practice (not sure about the health informatics!), along with website evaluation, critical appraisal (my favourite!), and the resources available through HINARI, a WHO initiative.  HINARI includes PubMed, as well as e journals made available free of charge to countries with low average income.

A theme in my thinking since my return is that although some things are very different in Ethiopia, a good many things are the same.  

Of course, the town of Gondar feels very different.   Very few people have their own car, relying instead on shared minibuses or autorickshaws (“tuktuks”).   We had a day with no electricity, and another with no Internet access.    But there are still students, who want to succeed.  Some of them have extensive knowledge of computers, although others have less.   We had the use of a 40 seater computer room, with digital projector.   The questions that came up in hands on practice time were not that different from what we get asked here.

And here are some photos…

Royal Enclosure, Gondar, Ethiopia

Teaching in progress

Blue Nile Falls, Bahar Dar, Ethiopia