USTLG Spring 2012 Meeting – Being a Science/Engineering Librarian

A very, very late report on the Spring meeting that I attended and spoke at, which was held at the University of Newcastle.

Although the main theme of the event was sharing experiences of being a science and engineering librarian, some other loose themes emerged becoming embedded vs becoming generic, and the way the profession has/is changing.

Being a subject librarian – Changes to the Profession

So, what does it mean to be a subject librarian? Jenny Campbell, Newcastle University

- Recognise how our jobs are changing – teaching, marketing, web guru
- Allowed to develop more things on OA & Endnote.
- Different ways of teaching, larger groups, lectures with drop-ins
- Research support growing – workshops at Faculty level (50-60hrs to PhD students) + need to do more
- Using social media & have some engagement
- Student surveys for refurbishment of library = more study space, quiet areas, more books, power supply at every desk, more IT…

The Environment and Technology librarian: a new professional’s perspective, making the role your own, Emma Illingworth, University of Brighton

- Know my students, researchers, school staff, academics, subjects
- Social networking on the student/staff community networking site
- Twitter for the subjects – but are the students on there? Professionals are on there but students prefer FB. Are there better ways of engaging?
- Little funky business cards to give to staff & students
- Mainly a L&T role & has become embedded in some modules
- Info skills in each year – need a clear path through the modules
- Tried various ways of delivering teaching – for some groups need to change activities to keep attention
- Email before session to online noticeboard to ask what they want out of session – works well for some groups & not others
- Working collaboratively with academics & sharing successes
- Helped with open day & it was pointed out as a unique selling point to students = their own librarian
- Future – wants to be an embedded librarian

From Soviet Studies to Science and Engineering, Jenny Brine, Lancaster University

- 40 years of librarianship, but only science for a few years
- 1st degree in Russian & first post was running library for Russian & East European Studies = Essential to have language skills, hard to find reliable information, embedded/worked closely with research staff, encouraged to do a PhD, specialised, treated as member of research team and found researchers didn’t want to share data until after they were published,
- Moved to Aberdeen & started teaching IL skills (just didn’t realise that they were called IL, but had been compiling bibliographies for years so had the skills required) to a wide range of subjects, encouraged to do a teaching qualification, had to supervise students doing searches in many subjects – learned about how to find out about research/suject vocabularly,
- Lancaster Uni Library – started in ILL which gives you a good picture of research within the Uni plus contact with staff and students, could notice trends and suggest books for purchase.

- Learning about new subjects – informal (family), formal – colleagues, reading, web resources etc
- Read new scientist
- Support from sci & tech lib colleagues e.g. lis-medical, USTLG, courses & conferences
- Read the study skills/research skills books for subjects
- Talk to academics – get invites to meetings or to look around the Depts.

Widening Participation: building on the role of a science librarian, Tony Wilson, University of York

- Helps with Developing Independent Learning Day for schools & colleges network – aimed at 6th formers
- Library challenges = researching & evaluating info (other session on day about academic writing, campus tour & student ambassadors help with day)
- Quzzies about how library works
- Wanted to work closely with other Uni services to make the events more joined up – collaborated more & became the actual widening participation co-ordinator for Uni
- Extended projects may start to be taken into consideration for Uni admissions
- Develpoing a realising opp website at York – freely available resources
- Also work with local primary school projects – they liked the tour of the library! Done some sessions with school librarians and 10yr olds about evaluating websites
- Challenges – Doing on top of normal liaison post, need to be an all rounder, lack of clear leanining objectives from schools, maintaining discipline within classes
- Top tips – use student ambassadors, ensure clear understanding/agreement over what is being covered, keep session interactive, keep groups small
- Now have a relationship management team with WP as an area they deal with, share the workload – in future all liaison librarians will play a role.

All Change! Restructuring Academic Liaison, Selina Lock, University of Leicester

- I talked about our restructure from a team of subject librarians to a team of T&L Librarians (each with a subject remit for UG & PGT students) and a Research Support Team (each with a much wider subject remit for PGR and Researchers).

- I move into my new position supporting STEM researchers in a couple of weeks and I already know I need to learn more about/provide more support on our research archive, OA publishing, REF preparation, copyright, research data management… on top of the experience I already have in teaching literature searching and bibliographic software.

Becoming Embedded (in various ways…)

Embedding information literacy teaching within Engineering, Liz Martin, De Montfort University

- Moved from one induction slot in 2005 to sessions in induction, 1st yr, final yr UG, PG students
- Web-based Induction before students arrive & available all during their first year plus face to face induction within course induction

- 1st yr session = 2hr within design project module (e.g. design a remote controlled gutter cleaner), within report have to show evidence of research & IEEE referencing.

- Final yr UG as part as project briefings, big lecture to everyone as a refresher with the option to sign up for tutorials for more help.
- PG (MSc) – 2hr session
- How from one induction to embedding? Lots of chance opportunities, put together a Bb module for another subject & then showed it to other academics, Technology module leaders liked it, other links were forged through management boards (external examiner feedback), once referencing session in place led to other academics being interested & 1st yr engineering project session came through that, also worked with study support to introduce sessions on report formatting & do team teaching on some sessions.
- Future – a lot of teaching still ad-hoc/short notice, would prefer to be timetabled, see students every year of course, keep plugging for other subjects.

Making yourself indispensible – Science Community Librarianship, Steve Lee, University of Glamorgan

- Science, sport, chiropractice – too many subject to be traditionally embedded!
- Must be valued by our users – how?
- Make our users lives easier – if they value us they will fight to keep us
- Get out of the library – go to where users are
- Visit academic staff in their offices (on their turf) – what are their problems & work out action plan to resolve problems
- What are their problems? = time management, getting research time, dealing with students, accessing journals, searching easier on google, marking, admin takes time, keeping up to date etc
- Library matters not a priority, help solve their problems and their priorities – what makes their life easier?
- Visit your researchers & find out their interests – keep notes
- Plan individual strategies to meet needs – become valued member of support team
- Upskill users – you don’t loose value as they will come back when they need updating
- Takes time to set up e.g. new book lists & Journal ToC, but once up & running they can become automated
- Can then focus on individual problems- take ownership of problems & see it through to resolution instead of passing on to someone else
- Staff & students want fast resolutions to problems – want help now.
- E.g. staff member wanted to be able to borrow moe than 15 books – is it a resonable request? What do other institutions do? Present evidence to colleagues to increase loan limit & take it to senior management – agreed to put it up to 22 for a year – tiny amount took it up but had a few very happy academics.
- Periodically revisit staff to re-evaluate & find out about new needs.
- If you can’t solve the problems then at least they know you tried.
- In response to student need – sits in chiropractic dept at set times to help, as they are in a building away from both libraries – sit in student computer room so became another channel for helping students solve other problems too. Other people wanted same service & now done in other Depts.
- These surgeries allow you to get to know students, staff & researchers, can do work even if people don’t come, on average answer a couple of indepth queries each time, gather evidence for resources needed, only do in term time (exam times usually very quiet).

- Have to be pro-active so users cannot afford to loose you…

Hiding library training in other classes, Kirsty Thomson, Heriot-Watt University

- Students not keen on library training – think they already know it – even if they turn up they are not there in spirit.
- What do students care about? Getting their degree.
- Intro to Essay writing – biology students in wk 2+3, jointly teaching with effective learning tutor – saw in groups of 60-70 & got them to do group work looking at extracts of texts (e.g. journal, textbook, fiction, newspaper)
- Think about the style of writing, could they use it for essay, where/what did it come from, followed by group discussion on what is/isn’t appropriate for essay writing
- Fake essay extract with no references, talk about importance of referencing & got them to look at the essay to see whether they picked up where it should be referenced
- Class discussion on plagiarism – ‘is this plagiarised or not?’ slides
- 75% of class said info about referencing was useful & relevant
- Liked group work, working with examples
- Followed up by essay feedback class – essays submitted via TurnItIn – which librarian could see & based follow up on the kind of mistakes they’d made e.g. structuring, problems with referecing, using illustrations
- Made you realise what students don’t know! e.g. don’t realise a 70% mark =  a brilliant essay
- Go to meetings, volunteer for anything that is IL related, work with other services e.g. effective learning
- Needs to be relevant to student interest & worries
- Be convinced your teaching is interesting – if you’re not interested then they won’t be!
- Be careful what you call your sessions e.g. Avoiding Plagarism became ‘Copy & Paste: Just Say No!’ (only works if you remember Grange Hill!) – finally became ‘Using evidence in your essays’
- Don’t give up on an idea too quickly, but be ready to change classes if not working.
- Link to an assignment if possible
- Future: put shorter IL content into other lectures – build links to course content.

EMLIP Meeting – 9 August 2012

I attended an EMLIP meeting hosted by Nottingham Trent University.  We were a select group this time – due to some members acquiring last minute Olympics tickets!  The meeting was held in the Newton Building – a showpiece conference centre – with excellent lecture theatres and meeting rooms – and delicious biscuits to accompany the coffee.

We discussed the presentations given by Thomson Reuters at our previous meeting; and there was considerable interest in Solcara as a federated search engine.  Westlaw have gone quiet on a release date for their new interface – none of the group had heard from their reps, and were concerned as they prepared for new students and trainees. 

We discussed summer projects, and conversation also turned to Talis Aspire and Patron Driven Acquisition.  The Universities at Nottingham Trent and Derby have both implemented these initiatives, and had some words of advice and caution.  Talis Aspire: Nottingham Trent have experienced difficulty adding digitised materials to their reading lists.  They also feel Talis have prioritise development of ‘social media’ functionality over fixing known software bugs.  PDA: both librarians had been dissatisfied with the range of legal titles included in the collections – they had encountered both old editions and foreign jurisdictions – are were concerned that students might select inappropriate materials.

The group exchanged experiences of the BIALL Conference held in Belfast in June.  Generally experiences were positive, with some stand out speakers on financial law, US law and tender processes.  Some sessions were described as ‘very interesting but not practical’ – such as the ‘importance of case law’ session.  Finally, there was a general feeling that many sessions were ‘focus groups’, with the speakers gaining more than the delegates. 

Finally the group discussed the emergence of Isential Solutions, a new ’library outsourcing’ company established by former managers at Integreon.  Isential have been targeting managing partners at law firms in the Midlands offering ‘library health checks’ and promisng to save ££££s on their library spend.  Naturally, law firm librarians are worried.

There was no official speaker at this meeting – so we had to buy our own lunch …!  We had very nice pizza at an Italian restaurant around the corner from City campus, made all the nicer for the glorious sun shining down on us.

Farewell and good luck

As most regular readers of this blog know, I’m departing Leicester tomorrow, which means with regret this’ll be my last blog post here.  I’ve very much enjoyed sharing these infrequent, but I hope mostly interesting, snippets of library life here with the broader audience; and in the meantime I’m sure my fellow bloggers here can keep the content flowing.

And I hope you’ve enjoyed them too!

Most Accessed LRA Items (July 2012)

After a break for a month or so while we sorted out some underlying problems with our stats module, we’re back with the top 10 LRA items for the month of July 2012.

1. New insights into the crustal structure of the England, Wales and Irish Seas areas from local earthquake tomography and associated seismological studies (Hardwick, Anthony James) (2381/8615)
2. Mobile technologies and learning (Naismith, Laura et al) (2381/8132)
3. UKCoRR – At the Heart of the UK Open Access Repository Landscape (Johnson, Gareth J.) (2381/10872)
4. TEM studies of microstructural evolution in creep exposed E911 (Qin, G. et al) (2381/4740)
5. The Relationship of Principals/Directors’ Leadership Styles, as Perceived by the Faculty, to the Job Satisfaction of the Faculty Members in a Public University of Punjab, Pakistan (Amin, Muhammad) (2381/10774)
6. The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas (Mercer, Justine) (2381/4677)
7. Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change (Sandell, Richard) (2381/52)
8. 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) (2381/9016)
9. Development of Advanced Ferritic Steels for High Efficiency Power Generation Plant (Qin, Guixiang) (2381/9944)
10. The Development of Nurture Groups in Secondary Schools (Colley, David Rodway) (2381/10132)

And I’ll try not to look too happy that in this, my final stats report, one of my own papers has shown up in the list. The power of positive use of social media again to promote, and the power of open access to enable readers beyond the publisher paywall to access the text.

In terms of the countries that have accessed LRA items the most, the top 10 looks like this.

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

Summer Not Loving the Repository Hits

Behind the scenes at the moment we’re tinkering away with the Google Analytics settings at the moment (there’s been a rather strange and unexplained series of drops in our hits which we’re investigating).  One of the things we’re going to need to look at is the impact over time of some tweeks we’re making to the code that supplies the data to Google.  As a result I found myself this morning taking a look at the same three month period over the past 4/5 years – as charted below.

Apologies for not being able to make the Y-axis the same maximum value (suspect it’s an option if I wasn’t running GA in IE7…).  The way this year and last seem to trend is as expected a reduction in hits over the summer, and I was just about to declare this a regular trend when I spotted that actually in 2009 & 08 this doesn’t seem to be as true.

I have no explanation whatsoever for this trend – but I wondered if any other repository managers out there have the same sort of data they might be willing to share or comment on the above.  Do your hits lose their vitality over the summer months, or are they just as potent as ever?

The only big changes I can point to on the LRA are an expansion from ~3,000 records in ’08 to ~7,300 currently; and a shift from <25% full text in ’08 to currently 50% full text as of today (although by the end of August this proportion will plummet as we expand the records on LRA by about 15,000 metadata only records).

So…do people use the repository less the more full text we get in here?  That seems to run counter to every logical bone in my body.  If I had the time (and the funding) there’s probably a fascinating research project to be had out of this; anyone fancy funding me to do my PhD studying trends across the UK?

UKSG Introduction to Open Access Day

Another belated event report as I attended this in May. Recent events, such as the UK Government taking on most of the Finch Report recommendations (e.g. to make publically funded research results open access by 2014) have taken over the Open Access (OA) discussion. However, I think many of the points made below are still relevant:

Review of the traditional commercial pricing models for accessing electronic content  
James Pawley, Regional Sales Manager, SAGE Publications

-James started with a historical reminder of why people publish in the first place – the same reasons as the first journal ‘Philosophical Transactions’ was published by the Royal Society.

- To share knowledge while providing evidence for, and getting credit for your discoveries. – in the past this might get you patronage, now it might get you finding…

- The publishing ecosytem has developed since the introduction of ejournals in the 1990s and now the main competitors for publishers are Amazon & Google as these raise user expectations.

- Business costs – editorial board (to ensure scope, quality, prestige), platforms & discoverability tools – electronic publishing is not cheaper than publishing in print due to the metadata, user platform, citation tools, stats provision etc.

- Publishers need to be at cutting edge to keep submissions and quality high.

- E is also not cheaper than print due to VAT regs, complicated subscriptions models and being governed by different contract law to print.

What is Open Access and how does it differ?  
Charlie Rapple, Associate Director, TBI Communications

- Religion, politics & money – affects OA & for some OA is a religion!

- OA is young in publishing terms so not enough data yet to assess how viable a business model & data available is biased.

- Have to make your own mind up & keep an open mind…

- Green & Gold levels – green = self-archiving/OA repositories, gold = publisher version is OA or hybrid solutions

- OA is not… non-profit, the death of peer review (though may undertake it in a different way), not embraced by majority of academics at this point (it is not a priority for them – they want speedy publication, high impact etc), a panacea that will create savings everywhere (costs just move to a different place), not the only answer to the problems of scholarly publishing

- Benefits of OA – human genome project (funding this & making it OA had an enormous economic & research impact), some evidence for higher citations (but would that be true if everything OA?), might save money (but might just move costs elsewhere)

- Viable funding model? Author funding – shifts costs but costs still there, Membership funding – OA membership fees will be an easy target for cost cutting.

- Politicians getting involved – politicised: makes is harder to discuss in a sensible manner but has got OA on the agenda

- I want to break free! Current promotion system for academics is driven by publishing in high impact journals – if this doesn’t change then academic publishing won’t change.

- Don’t want to lose the skills, knowledge and value that publishers add – throwing the baby out with the bath water?

- Library skills may need to change in an OA world? Become repository managers instead of content purchasers?

OAPEN-UK  
Exploring open access scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences
Caren Milloy, Head of Projects, JISC Collections

- Arts & Hums project looking at scholarly monographs

- Needs to be talked about as it often ignored in favour of STEM journal OA

- Been a decrease in print monograph sales to libraries – so less published – concern for AHSS researchers in terms of getting their research disseminated

- Pilot – 5 publishers, submitted matched pairs of monograph titles, steering group chose titles to include, one of the pair in control group & one in experimental group, 58 titles. Control group made available as standard by publisher & experimental group made available OA under CC license (PDF version for free) through OapenUK library – can be put into institutional repositories etc as well & in Google books

- Key areas identified across focus groups:

- Metadata (needed for discoverability, auditing, who creates it? who maintains it? what is needed for OA? is it put into the supply chain, and whose version? most find things by searching so metadata vital)

- Versioning, preservation & archiving (CC commons license means people can re-use, mash-up – researchers felt threatened by this option & wanted preservation of their original version. who preserves & archives? )

- Methods of delivery (where should it be available? central platform, or anywhere? format & functionality?)

- Usage (collection of data & standards for that data – vital for assessing value & impact & for researchers to know)

- Quality & prestige (perceptions of brand, reputation, quality & maintaining excellence. High concern about the quality of monographs being lowered)

- What do authors want? (Researchers say they want prestige, while publishers thought authors wanted financial reward)

- Copyright

- International issues (territories & markets)

- Changing roles (what stays, what goes – authors value the marketing from publishers. Authors do not want to do own marketing)

- Impact on processes (policies, mandates & behaviour)

- Ways of Making OA profitable, Risk, Funding

- oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org

Repositories Support Project  
The work of the RSP in supporting repository development in the UK
Jackie Wickham, Open Access Adviser , University of Nottingham

- Supports public access to public funded data – serves UK Higher Education

- OA repository benefits for institutions – showcase for research output, marketing mechanism, REF/research management, complying with funding mandates, management & preservation of assets, encourages collaboration.

- Benefits for academics – in principle academics support OA, but not in practice due to pressure for high impact publishing, faster dissemination, wider readership, increased citations.

- Benefits if they do deposit in repositories = compliance with funding mandate, secure storage environment, personalise services (stats on downloads, personal profiles/bibliographies as webpages etc)

- Study by Swan, A suggested OA citation advantage (but people disagree with the rigour of these studies!)

- Creative arts research – repositories for arts material can help with visibility & preservation

- RSP based at Notts Uni – offers advice, visits to institutions to support installations, advocacy, evaluations, telephone & email service, advocacy materials & briefing papers on website, buddy scheme, events programme, webinars, embedding repositories project to look at how this can be done (see website), skills training,.

BioMed Central (+ SpringerOpen)  
Bev Acreman, Commercial Director, BioMed Central

- OA Journals = Journal publishing just a different business model.

- Business model – article processing charge APC (also membership, digital sales, events etc)

- BMC offers several package options = prepaid funds, supporter fund (discount on APC), shared support split between author/institution.

- Hindawi = flat rate fee based on size of institution

- PloS = flat rate fee based on size of institution

- Subjects BMC support the authors are used to paying page rates & often built into research bids

- New journal – peerJ are offering a $99 life membership compared to the $1-3k APC of other OA publishers.

- SCONUL survey 2011 – 13% institutions manage OA payments centrally

- 2014 REF – 20% weighting to societal & economic research impact – easier to show if OA as research open to re-use & sharing

- Why funders support OA? Public access to funded research, wide dissemination, APCs are expected as part of research process, some have a charitable remit e.g. Wellcome Trust

- APCs waive fees to low-income countries but all authors can apply for a waiver e.g. lone researcher outside institution

- Growth in fee waived APCs e.g. Pakistand, Eygpt researchers

- Costs – pay academic editors, societies, writing workshops in China (China now has mandate for researchers to publish in western journals) & developing world, customer service, targeted digital marketing, sales team, editorial office & office systems, IT development

- Common misconceptions:

- Will publish anything = No, need to ensure quality & credibility & keep impact high

- All OA equal = no, there are certain companies who sign up to code of conduct, be wary of those that haven’t.

Nature Publishing Group  
David Hoole, Director of IP Policy and Licensing, Nature Publishing Group

- OA at Nature – focusing on it for business development but not something that’s easy to transition to.

- Recognise there is a shift in the balance of rights back towards authors – no longer ask for copyright, just exclusive publication rights.

- 2009/10 started turning most academic journals hybrid & more fully OA journals = sister journals to existing journals.

- Nature Communications born/launched in 2010 as hybrid – Nature branding with OA policy

- 2011 Scientific Reports – seen as competitor to PLoS one

- High rejection rate so looking at what can be done for good research that’s not appropriate for their top journals & efficient use of editorial teams.

- Nature & Nature Research journals are not OA due to the amount of money that is spent on editorial duties rejecting manuscripts (90% rejection rate) – if introduced APC rates would be phenomenal.

- APC for Nature Communications ~£3k – still a 60-70% rejection rate.

- Large amount of editorial input in Nature titles e.g. redrawing of diagrams & restructuring of articles which adds huge amount of value.

- Their OA journals are small & targeted – they are launching new OA journals instead of subscription titles.

- Scientific Reports – all areas of natural sciences, peer-reviewed, 100% OA, rapid dissemination (less editorial input/added value), external editorial board (no other Nature journals have this), online only.

- Should sub prices lower to reflect the amount of OA? APCs don’t generally make up for the loss of revenue if subscription prices are lowered.

- Top tier, high impact journals – high editorial cost as every submission read, high circulation – cannot transition to APC model – APC would be £20-30k per article!

- Nature is 143 years old & does its job well, especially in communicating with the media & dissemination.

- Genome articles in Nature titles are OA because of human genome project being OA & authors insisting on it & have CC licenses for those articles.

- Encourages green self-archiving – can opt-in on many titles for submission to PubMed Central – self-archive after 6 months post publication.

Managing Open Access in the library  
Wendy White, Head of Scholarly Communication, University of Southampton

- At Southampton OA repository is designated a core system – good for institutional support but tends to put academics off.

- Not just about the library – also need IT, legal, research services, faculty admins etc

- Requirements & Encouragements (carrot & stick) – requirements to deposit where permitted by publisher, emphasis on author involvement over compliance, University mandates will not win people over, funder mandates then funders need to work with repository staff and academics, focus on author benefits.

- Cost & sustainability needs to be considered in future

- Repositories good at making available grey lit e.g. reports, conference papers, theses, art items

- Downloads & uploads – people want to know how often their work downloaded, need stats, RSS & twitter alerts – marketing & discoverability, Google analytics. Even amount of uploads – don’t want big deadlines & backlogs.

- Adding value & support – need to be part of researcher workflow so provide tools to make things easy – lots of ways of importing & exporting between systems.

- Adding value by gaining expertise – guidance on copyright & versions, quality assurance for metadata, engaging with researchers about developments in OA etc, linking the repository to other relevant services & uses in the Uni & professional development for library staff so they can communicate with researchers.

- Individual & group support – training for PGRs and research community, embedded where possible, bespoke session for Depts, session for copyright for teaching materials & OA educational objects, one-to-one support, enquiry service, support for new staff – does require resources.

Managing Open Access fees  
Chris Middleton, Head of Academic Services, Information Services,
University of Nottingham 

- Centrally managed fund for OA fees – challenges & admin issues:

- Drivers for institutional funding is the benefits of OA & the funder mandates.

- Notts have policy for OA e.g. deposit and encouraging OA publishing – need to back up with appropriate funding.

- Research income can be channelled to OA fund – build into research grant application e.g. in the indirect costs in the funding bid (retrospective – institution has to pay and then claim back – quite a complicated and not transparent in funding guideline)

- Notts OA fund is managed by research office but advocated by library

- Nottingham – had fund since 2006, which includes advocating the use of Wellcome Trust money

- Embedded in Faculty Team librarians remit when talking to researchers

- Total number of requests over 5 years = 615. From 27 requests 2006-7 to 262 in 2010-11

- Total costs = £714,244

- Average cost per article = £1,216. Highest = £3,095 (Elsevier/Springer) & Lowest = ~£200

- Mainly medicine & life sciences

- Apart from BMC then only 9 publishers received 10 or more payments (70 publishers overall)

- Biggest challenge = future publishing = costs high

- Changes might come from Research Councils, REF, repositories, future publishing models?

- Challenges of advocacy = OA and high impact are mutually exclusive, lack of awareness of funding options, stigma associated with “vanity publishing” (paying to publish), OA seen as not as high quality

- Repository & central fund is managed within existing staff resource, which is a strain.

Panel Discussion

- Lots of interest in how to set-up a central fund, do you fund first author or any author, split between several institutions if multiple authors? What’s the best value OA model if subscribing as a membership – may depend on area of publication & rate of publication. How to make sure the right fund is used e.g. central fund or Wellcome fund. Nottingham fought hard to say central fund should be funded from research money as it’s a research related cost (not from library journals fund).

Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. -Hans Hofmann

I’ve got to admit I was surprised to arrive at Information Literacy & Summon, Sheffield Hallam University, and find there were so many people attending.  There was a real buzz and engagement from the audience and the presenters.  The day was dedicated case studies and discussions about how the implementation of Summon (a discovery system that enables search across library electronic and print holdings, ranging from bibliographic database content to the library catalogue, using one intuitive interface) has changed how they teach information literacy.  At Leicester we have had Summon since the summer of 2011, you can see it in action on the University of Leicester library website. 

 The big message of the day was that discovery systems allow us to give up teaching complicated and arcane interfaces and focus on the higher level information literacy skills such as selection, evaluation, context, appropriateness, and synthesis.

Many libraries use their discovery search and subject pages as their twin tools.  Some are abandoning their library catalogues completely (for example the University of the West of England) and at many others they are much less prominent.  No one is teaching ‘the catalogue’. 

I’ve reported the things that stood out to me the most.  The first section of the day was dedicated to presenters from Sheffield Hallam: 

• Rod Aitken amused me with his comparison of Google (ideal search interface with clean screen) with the typical library website (completely cluttered). 
• Alison Lahlafi emphasised how her teaching has shifted in focus from ‘the tools’ to ‘the process’. 
• Sandy Buchanan pointed out that these higher level skills are in fact the more usefully transferable and generic skills, and how he focuses enabling building students confidence using academic resources.
• Matt Borg pointed out that discovery systems are in line with the focus on the student experience and how they facilitated learning simply by making things easier. 

 The presenters from Huddersfield: 

• Andrew Walsh amused us with the giving us an example of the information literacy lesson from hell, which included telling students that they will go blind and develop hairy palms if they dared to use Google.  He contrasted to how he can teach now, which is focus on the thinking about, context and application of information.  The students can teach themselves the basics of the interface, and he can facilitate to make sure they don’t miss anything. 
• Bryony Ramsden raised some interesting questions about the dilemma that many health librarians have about whether to teach this as well as or instead of NHS Evidence (we do both here at Leicester). 
• Alison Sharman pointed out that students often don’t find the facets (or tools to refine by subject / year / publication type) for themselves.  She had also devised an effective method for reaching students quickly at the relevant time in their course by getting 10 minutes slots in lectures and simply talking through the discovery search and relevant points.  She doesn’t prepare but gets the students to suggest the topics and works with what they give her at the time.  This is a quick way to reach students and incorporates an endorsement from the lecturer too.    

Finally Dave Pattern, also from Huddersfield, reminded us that the ideal interface is one you don’t have to teach.  If we insist on making it difficult for students they will simply go elsewhere. 

I realised I could be doing more with Summon than I do currently (which is to use it at induction level before moving onto the other resources in more detailed teaching sessions), and I’m going to investigate the possibilities of those 10 minute lecture slots.

EMALINK – Bibliometrics & Research Visibility

A rather belated report on this May Emalink event:

What are Bibliometrics and why should I care?  Ian Rowlands (University of Leicester)

• Bibliometrics can be very sterile & specialist so they must be used in a context that makes sense.
• Citation data – indicates relationships of influence, deference & usage – a bit like social media networks.
• Bibliometrics have to help the institution or individual in the research process.
• BUT bibliometrics just one small par of the puzzle and tools available.
• How much information is there really out there about research inputs & outputs?
• Data can be variable e.g. to pick up on Univerisity of Leicester citations then authors need to put University of Leicester in their address.
• Currently it is difficult to deal with the variety of research outputs e.g. data, software, plays…
• New tools emerging e.g. Readermeter from Mendely to see if your papers have been socially bookmarked.
• IMPACT of research – very important for REF but citations do not always translate to real world impact – need to go beyond bibliometrics.
• Some types of citations have greater ‘weight’ in terms of impact e.g. citation in a NICE guideline directly impacts how healthcare is provided.

Enhancing research visibility at Loughborough (Lizzie Gadd)

• In 2011 Loughborough found it had slid down the THE World rankings and needed to improve their citations count.
• The Plan to improve citations = library to run sessions on publishing & promoting research, VC commissioned Academic Champion for bibliometris, promote visibility of good research in high impact journals, recruit & retain good researchers, ciations taken into account when promoting, use ResearcherID and Google Scholar profiles to improve citations & impact & use research repository.
• Training Implementation = publish or perish sessions for new academics, lunchtime bibliometrics seminars in Depts/Research groups, 1to1 appointments ion request and online tutorials on citation tools and impact tools.
• Plus provide bibliometric data to support staff and promote bibliometrics training through staff conferences, webpages, blogs & newsletters.
• The Vision for the future = joined-up thinking (work with research office, IT service etc), research visibility focus (databases of research kit, data and publications).
• Already seeing improved citations.

Some good ideas that could be implemented elsewhere.

Research training will be high on our agenda once we get our Library Research Services team fully in place, headed up by our own bibliometrician Ian Rowlands. I’ll be moving over into that team later this year.

Contrasting Search Engine Returns and Indexing of the LRA

Repository metrics are upper most in my mind at the moment, as I’ve co-authored a paper for Open Repositories 2012 on the subject.  But they’re also in my mind due to some work I’ve been doing with the LRA lately.

A bit of background first.  A couple of months ago we upgraded the LRA and shifted the server and underlying platform it runs on.  There have been a few issues, nothing devastating mind you, that myself and my wonderful techs have been working to resolve.  One issue that’s niggled at me as manager of the service is that the hits we seem to be getting recorded via Google Analytics were ~75% down on where they were before the change.

While we did discover we were missing a bit of code on some the pages which helped restore some of the recorded traffic, we’re still >40% down on where we have been for the past few years.  While I’m still trying to answer the question “Were the readings before abnormally high or are the readings now abnormally low” I’ve been digging around to try and ID where the issue might lie.  Certainly traffic from search engines is the most significantly reduced element.

So today I’ve run an analysis using the most popular items on LRA in recent months and run them through 4 search engines that regularly do point readers to the repository.  The publications were as follows:

• Financial Development, Economic Growth and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Nigeria and South Africa Ndako, Umar Bida
• The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths Sim, Chow Yen Desmond
• Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change Sandell, Richard
• Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care Pitchforth, Emma et al
• 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
• Pragmatic randomized trial of antenatal intervention to prevent post-natal depression by reducing psychosocial risk factors Brugha, Traolach S. et al
• The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas Mercer, Justine
• An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment Cann, Alan James
• The Development of Nurture Groups in Secondary Schools Colley, David Rodway
  Mobile technologies and learning Naismith, Laura et al
• An evaluation of forensic DNA profiling techniques currently used in the United Kingdom. Graham, Eleanor Alison May
• Twitter and Public Reasoning Around Social Contention: The Case of #15ott in Italy Vicari, Stefania

There is a good mix of items in the above selection, including some items that aren’t available any where else.  I performed three basic searches

• The full article title
• The first four significant (non-stop) words of the title and first author’s surname
• Author’s name alone

The results were as below.

Google Scholar aggregates together hits with the same title as one return, normally pointing to the published version.  This means that where this happens unless you open up the other hits, you don’t spot the LRA.  So for example Eleanor Graham’s paper is listed as 1*2 – that is the first hit was this paper, but the LRA link was the second in the sublist.

What have I inferred from this?  Well it seems for the most part these search engines are indexing the LRA still.  Given these are popular papers, I’d expect to see them returned as very highly relevant results.  Some particular observations with respect to searching for Open Access publications on the LRA:

• Google: Appears very good for tracking down OA papers with full title and partial title and author.  Terrible though for searching for an author’s paper by name alone.
• Google Scholar: Okay for searching OA papers with title or title and author name, but not as good as vanilla Google.  Also very good at obfuscating the availability of an OA version of a paper beneath a publisher link.  Surprisingly though better than Google at retrieving an author’s papers with just their name (but given the more focussed collections that Google aims to search, this is perhaps to be expected).
• Scirus.com: Brilliant with title and title plus author name at finding OA papers.  The best of the four I used in tracking down items by author name alone too.  Without a doubt the best of the bunch (in this rough and ready test)
• Bing: intermittently good at times and poor in others in retrieving papers.  Worse than both vanilla Google and Scholar, and much worse than Scirus.  However, had some successes in identifying papers with a high relevance ranking by author name alone at times when the other three search engines could resolve them.

In conclusion if you’re looking for open access publications I would use Scirus.com first and foremost, but avoid Bing unless you’re hitting a total dead end (or just have an author name) and use the Google Family of search engines with care.  As for the LRA, looks like we are indexed by most of these (although I’ve questions about Bing’s totality of coverage).

New month, new roles

Hopefully most of our regular readers will have picked up by now that we’ve undergone a bit of a reorganisation in the library in the past few weeks.  Not the collections or resources, but in the staff and how we support our academics and students.  For myself this has resulted in bidding farewell to managing the copyright and document teams after three years. 

My focus is now exclusively on LRA, although the remit for this is expanding to include work towards the archiving and curation of research data outputs as well.  Work which in the light of the recent EPSRC policy framework announcement, and anticipated moves by other major UK funders, is something that the institution obviously has to consider closely.  You might also spot that we’ve changed the contact telephone numbers for myself and the LRA team.

Hopefully we’ll be able to update you on more of the interesting events and progress we make in this area in the next few months, and as always we welcome your comments and suggestions.

DataCite and the Research Data Challenge

Last Friday (25th May) I took my second trip of the week to London (having been at the Symplectic User Conference on Monday).  This time it was the gentle stroll from St Pancras to the British Library Conference Centre to participate in the first JISC/BL DataCite workshop.  Billed as an introduction to data citation and DataCite, this seemed an ideal follow up to the Research Data Management Forum event in Southampton back in March.  As the role of the LRA Manager migrates to look increasingly at how we will manage, share and curate research data outputs as well as publications it was the sort of thing that I felt I really needed.

Data Citation

Following the house keeping and welcome from the BL’s Lee-Ann Coleman and JISC’s Simon Hodson (owner of the finest waxed moustache I’ve seen in many a moon), Lee-Ann kicked off with an overview of Data Citation; what it is and why is it important.  The fact that there is an expectation from the RCUK that research data will be shared, to assist in validation of research conducted by their funded investigators, is perhaps the most major driver.  At the same HEIs want oversight on their research outputs, and as such the curation of their organisations data resource is important to them for building on earlier work and enabling collaborative research to organically evolve.  Given that many academics in adjoining offices are often unaware of what colleagues are producing, increasing this transparency and accessibility to a rich, queriable and reusable research resource is believed to be of value in not only progressing collaboration but enabling genuine novel research from preexisting work.

Lee-Ann cited some examples included the importance of data sharing in speeding up the sequencing and generation of a vaccine for the African strain of Avian flu.  Her other examples were also in the STEM field which slightly concerned me, given that two-thirds of research here at Leicester is in disciplines outside this domain; whom in my experience often need a greater assistance in capturing and sharing technological resource.  Lee-Ann stressed that one question that needed to be addressed by HEIs was what is critical/worthy data to curate?  A microbiologist might see all the raw data output from an instrument as worthy of this, and yet for many other people it would be the processed data given context and analysis that would be of value.

What is DataCite?

Next  up was Elizabeth Newbold (British Library) who gave an overview of what is DataCite.  Founded in 2009 it is a registration agency, effectively an allocating agent for DOIs (which I had never realised are based on the Handle system that I use daily in the LRA).  However, it was made very plain that DataCite does not work directly with researchers, they are expected to deposit their data (in whatever way possible) to an appririate data centre, and then come to DataCite to “mint” a DOI.  Minting of DOIs was new phrase for me, but clearly one that I can see slipping into my regular conversations about this subject here at Leicester.

It was noted that the UK Data Archive had a strong definition of what was data (termed data collections) as groups of all outputs from a single project source.  Commented that other data centres across the country were working along similar lines and methodologies.

DataCite Infrastructure & Working with DataCite

After an excellent lunch (BL London catering never fails to delight) Ed Zukowski (British Library) gave a very useful, if in part quite detailed and technical, overview of both DataCite and DOIs.  Handles being the technology that underpins them, where DOI is actually a trademarked derivative.  DOIs importantly point to landing pages not to the objects themselves (akin to our implementation of Handles on the LRA), and in practice using the DataCite front-end take around a minute to mint.  He went on to detail how DataCite resolves contents from DOIs minted via them, but I think I’ll wait and link to the slides once available rather than try and make sense of my slightly confused notes.  I was content to see that the service worked, rather than worry about the technicality.

Following this Elizabeth Newbold returned to talk briefly about working with DataCite and the data client responsibilities.  In terms of their metadata schemea there were only 4 required elements needed to make it work.  However, locally people may well augment this with many more fields as they felt appropriate for discovery and description.  I confess one nagging worry I have is whom will create this metadata?  Is it a task we will anticipate a PI will perform at the conclusion of a project?  Personally I have concerns over the quality, accuracy, uniformity and standardisation of such input; going on my experience of manually created records submitted to the LRA via IRIS.  From the academics’ perspective I can see the challenge being that this will be seen as yet another piece of administration trivia that they are expected to deal with, and achieving the cultural change to embeded this into their standard workflows will be challenging with some serious and time-consuming carrot-whipping.  Given the struggle to work deposit of publications into our open access repository into their routine over the past four years, it is a serious challenge and the scale of this should not be underestimated!

Elizabeth noted that metadata created must be shared under a Creative Commons Zero licence, noting that for example the British Library OPAC makes data available for sharing and reuse in this way.  There were some concerns from those present in the room that this might cause problems in cases where institutions, funders or even publishers made claim over such data.  Another speaker also highlighted the problem of having data (with a minted DOI) then having a third party mint a different DOI to it which could interfere with metrics of access as well as uniformity of reference.  There didn’t appear to be a clear consensus or answer to these concerns, and the discussions broke up over tea.

Challenges Around Managing Research Data

The final session of the day was a workshop format where we were broken into small groups, and then smaller groups, an then finally into pairs (!) to discuss and document what we perceived as the challenges around managing research data.  I think it was a shame we were so subdivided, since while I had a valuable chat with my counterpart I would have relished a broader chat with a slightly larger group.  Given that there was a wide disparity between the role of delegates (from publishers to project manages to editors to directors of service through to repository managers) I feel we lost some of the benefit that we could have achieved through putting more of these diverse heads together.  I also sensed a slight bias in the broader discussion when each pair’s issues were categorised and resolutions discussed – it did feel like the expectation was that the answer to “How do we solve this problem?” was intimated to be “DataCite”.  It wasn’t in our room, although in at least one of the other two larger groups DataCite seemed ready to answer more of their challenges.

Conclusion

My slight concerns over the value of the final session aside, this was an eye-opening and valuable day.  It has for me perhaps opened up more questions than answers, although some of those were provided as well.  Importantly what I think it offered was a chance to gauge where other people are on the research data management question and more importantly it gave shape to the bigger operational and strategic questions that we need to be asking ourselves within our organisations.  As such the day was most certainly worthwhile, and my thanks to all the speakers, organisers and delegates for a thought-provoking day.

Further reading

• Liz Lyon (2007) Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships: Consultancy Report
• Ball, A. & Duke, M. (2011). How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications. DCC How-to Guides
• Garfield, E. “When to Cite ,” Library Quarterly, 66 (4) p.449-458, 1996.

A twitter archive of discussions around the day is also available.

BLA Financial Databases Training Day – 14 May 2012

I attended the Business Librarians Association Financial Databases Training event at the University of Birmingham on 14 May 2012.   We received presentations about 7 financial databases – delivered by academic business librarians (not sales representatives!). 

Fame and Amadeus by Emma Craggs (University of Warwick)

Fame (UK and Irish) and Amadeus (European) are company financial information databases provided by Bureau van Dijk.  Both products (indeed all BvD products) run across the same platform and user interface.   The user interface appears to be very intuitative – especially to a non-business librarian.  The company reports were well laid out, and I liked the peer report option, whereby you can compare a company to it’s competitors, and the ability to create tailor-made reports.  With Fame, you can also download orginal documents as submitted to Companies House. 

PI Navigator by Anastasia Kelly (Sheffield Hallam University)

PI Navigator is an international company and markets financial information database provided by Perfect Information.  PI Navigator is used widely in law firms – providing company reports and mergers and acqusitions information.  The user interface involves building a search from options on the side-menu, with search criteria displayed at the foot of the screen.  It’s supposed to be easy and user-friendly; however I was not convinced by the demonstration.  One of the key features included the ability to download original company reports and documents.  The presenter had experienced problems setting up ezproxy access to the database; but praised PI Navigator technical support, and online training tutorials.

Bloomberg and WRDS by Carolyn Smith (Cass Business School)

Bloomberg is a leading international financial markets information database.  It is used widely in banking and trading – less so in education (prohibitive cost).  I was impressed by the look and feel of the Bloomberg terminal – a double black screen, a colour coded keyboard and dos-style command language.  Indeed, the Bloomberg training suite is one of Cass Business School’s best marketing tools.  Bloomberg provides more than stocks and shares information – there is business news and company / director profiles.  I particularly liked POSH – eBay for the super-wealthy!  Bloomberg is not a user-friendly database, but it comes with a vast range of tutorials and a 24 hour support line.

WRDS (Wharton Research Data Services) is a business, finance and economics database for researchers provided by the Wharton Business School.  WRDS is only the user-interface, you need to purchase data sets at additional cost.  The presenter talked only briefly about the service: their only support is to administer user accounts and guide researchers to WRDS help services. 

Datastream and Thomson One Banker by Steven Bull (University of Birmingham)

Datastream and Thomson One Banker (product replaced by T1.Com) are financial information databases provided by Thomson Reuters.  The presentation was beset by technical problems connecting to data terminals - not helping to convince me that Datastream is entirely user-friendly.  Datastream provides international public company, financial markets and macroeconomic data.  The presenter, and many of the delegates, preferred to use Datastream via the Excel Add-in, rather than the Datastream client.  I was pleased to recognise some of the research techniques demostrated by our own Andrew Dunn at internal UoL Datastream training earlier this month.  Thomson One Banker ( T1.Com) is an UK and international comapny financial information database.  It is unique because it harmonises data across regions, and enables direct comparisom. 

Thomson Reuters were praised for their customer support, including support guides, online training videos available via Thomson Reuters Knowledge Network, and telephone/email help services.  Delegates had mixed experiences with getting Thomson Reuters trainers onto Campus to deliver training direct to students.  There was success in London (Cass) and Birmingham, but not further North. 

Vendor backed training and certification schemes were a recurring theme during the day.  Databases (financial and legal) are increasingly provide online training tutorials, and associated tests, leading to a certificate of competency.  The certification schemes are popular with students as they add to employability. 

The University of Birmingham proved to be excellent hosts: the training was held in a state-of-the-art group study room in the iconic Muirhead Tower (if you like the Rotunda!).  Our welcome packs included a University of Birmingham Library Services branded note-paper, pen, pencil, ruler and drinks coaster.  Coffee and pastries were served upon arrival; with a nice sandwich spread for lunch, and chocolate brownies for dessert.  We also received a tour of the library during the lunch break – which is reassuringly full-to-the-rafters in this pre-exam period.