EMALINK Supporting Researchers Event

Several of us attended this event on the 13^th April 2011. Sorry for the rather delayed write-up!

Emalink photos

View more presentations from Jenny Delasalle

The bulk of the session revolved around the idea of the “information arc” that a researcher would work through, going from a consumer to a producer (see embedded slideshow). We all thought about what researchers might want at different points in their research and how we can fulfil those needs.

Literature Search

• Defining research topic, Concept mapping, Search Strategies
• Types of information required & how to access them
• Time management
• Reading strategies, decoding academic language
• Alert services – as literature search evolves, is refined and is reviewed  later in research

Information Management

• Reference management strategies & software, bookmarking tools
• RSS tools
• Note taking
• How to structure writing  a literature search, thesis, journal article
• Critical Analysis

Writing

• Academic writing style
• Proof reading & grammar skills
• Summarising, paraphrasing, citing

Publication Strategies

• Types of publication
• Copyright issues
• Writing for a specific audience
• Quality measure – impact factors/bibliometrics – what might be required for REF
• Benefits of collaboration
• Publication fees – OA ‘vs’ traditional publishing
• Publication trends
• Responding to feedback and/or Handling rejection
• Tips for becoming highly cited & reviewed
• Corrections and retractions

Publicising Work/Publications

• Open Access (Institutional Repository)
• Online research profiles (and being professional online)
• Social Networks and blogs
• Google Juice

Most of the institutions represented at the event felt that they offered training or services that could help with all these areas but:

• Not clear who offers what – Library, Student Development/Support/Study Skills, Staff Development, Research Support Team.
• No clear advertising/promotion or route through the training available from different places.

Other points that arose from discussion were:

• Researchers often need/want one to one support as have specific needs.
• Useful to talk to staff before they go on sabbaticals to see if they need any research support.
• Good to get research supervisors on-side and clued-up on training on offer.
• How can we get involved in the research process and be there at the right time to offer support?
• Important to share expertise between staff.
• Look at collaborative project e.g. EMRSG who are creating online tutorials for supporting researchers.
• Online tutorials – there for staff that cannot access face to face services, access at the time right for them.
• Need to market libraries better and ensure buying the right resources for researchers.

We are lucky at Leicester to have a couple of specialist posts to support researchers and work alongside Information Librarians:

• Bibliometrician
• Research Forum Facilitator & Graduate Media Zoo

Open Access: the impact for libraries and librarians (RSP Event)

As a special Monday treat – here’s the third guest post from my team, this time from Valérie Spezi.
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I went to a very interesting conference last Friday on Open Access and its impact on libraries and librarians, organised by the Repository Support Project (RSP). As usual with RSP events the conference was very well organised, including venue and catering, and the selection of speakers was of great quality.

The conference was well-attended, mostly by librarians from all over the UK and across sectors, which wasn’t really surprising given the title of the conference. Librarians from the Higher Education sector formed the bulk of the audience; but it was nice to see that there were also a few publisher and funding agency representatives, as well as information and library consultants.

The conference objective was to provide librarians with greater knowledge of Open Access, what it is and what it isn’t, how it is currently developing and shaping scholarly communication systems and what impact it’s having on libraries. Far from preaching Open Access at any costs, the selection of speakers offered a balanced view of what is achievable within Open Access and what isn’t.

Bill Hubbard started off the conference day with a presentation setting out the background to Open Access (OA), i.e. what OA is and what it isn’t, and what the rationale supporting OA and the drivers are. Open Access for most of us simply means ‘open to read’ (including cache, save and print), and most materials available today on Open Access are open in this way. But it was interesting to learn that the original idea in the Budapest vision started out with a more unifying view of an open world where material would be open to read and re-use. However the reality proved to be much more complex and made it difficult to achieve this ideal of a total open information world. Then, Bill presented the usual drivers for OA (serial crisis, moral case, financial rationale and academic need to have speedy access to scholarship). More importantly, Bill added an additional driver: ‘because we can!’, meaning that we are witnessing major changes in the information environment, and Open Access is one of these major changes taking place and it can’t be ignored as we have the technology and all the good reasons to do it. Finally, Bill went through the usual misconceptions about OA (subversion of peer review, replacement for publication, invitation to plagiarism and an attack on copyright) and explained why these arguments against OA were erroneous or even sometimes illogical. In conclusion, it was suggested that what is needed to build OA are systems and workflows to support researchers, institutions and funders, who all seem to be favour of Open Access but are facing great challenges individually.

The second speaker was Alma Swan, from Key Perspectives Ltd, who has done a great deal of work on scholarly communication and Open Access (it is only fair to note that she and her business partner pioneered key research studies on researchers’ attitudes towards Open Access in 2004/05). Alma’s talk was about the economics of OA. The aim of her talk was to present the costs and savings at system levels (Houghton et al. report [2009]) and at university level (Swan [2010]). She presented first, in great details, the results of the Houghton et al. report, which looks at costs and savings in three different OA scenarios (self-archiving or green access; repository archiving with overlay services; open access journal or gold OA). She then moved on to her own work which builds upon the Houghton report as she used the Houghton methodology to build a limited number of case studies looking at costs and savings at institutional level.

In conclusion, the main idea from Alma’s talk was that universities differ greatly and therefore results differ greatly from one institution to another: whereas the Houghton report indicated that the UK scholarly communication system as a whole could enjoy substantial savings across the sector, Alma’s work indicate that research-intensive institutions may end up yielding negative savings (i.e. paying a cost) in the move towards Open Access, and therefore the national OA savings case needs to be managed so that some universities are not individually disadvantaged.

Following on was the interesting talk from Wim van der Stelt, Executive Vice President Corporate Strategy at Springer, one of the biggest STM publishing houses. Beside the presentation of the various open access options offered by Springer, Wim made a few interesting points:

• Firstly, Springer has adopted the strong Open Access position, meaning that all their open access content is open to read and to re-use as in the Budapest initiative, save for commercial purposes. The main reason for this was according to Wim the fact that it seems that end-users generally don’t care about copyright and hence Springer’s decision to go strong OA in order to simplify copyright policies. Wim emphasised the fact that Springer leaves the copyright to authors and is generally happy with just a licence to publish.
• Secondly, Wim bluntly took on the role of publishers in today’s scholarly communication system. If publishers’ role in distributing or disseminating scholarship was acknowledged as a thing of the past, it was however said that publishers create value-added services to their authors – though what exactly those value-added services consisted of was not really debated.  In short, Wim reminded the audience that publishers are in the scholarly communication market to make money first and foremost, thus the legitimacy of open access embargoes enabling publishers to ‘rightly’ monetise on content. So, yes to Open Access as long as there is a business model, and BMC, recently acquired by Springer, has certainly proved that Open Access can be extremely lucrative. But Wim also insisted on the fact that publishers are equally eager to please their customers, i.e. the research community, and thus Springer wouldn’t go down the open access route if it was felt that there was no demand for this from the research community they serve.
• Thirdly, Wim talked about the difficulty to introduce new OA journals as they often bear huge fees whereas they still have not yet yield any impact factors.

Wim concluded his speech by saying that it was believed that OA would stay as a complementary business model; a conclusion I understood was also shared by some of the speakers present at the conference. As Bill repeated several times, Open Access is not THE solution to today’s scholarly communication failures; it’s only one of the components of the changes scholarly communication is going through.

Susan Ashworth, Assistant director for Research and Learning Support services, presented the development of Enlighten, the University of Glasgow’s research repository holding just over 35,000 records (but only 3,600 full-text items). Susan talked about the organisational/staff structure of Enlighten, and it was interesting to see that the University of Glasgow went for a manager-less unit but with a very strong support team consisting of cataloguers, a service development manager and an advocacy manager. From the many common drivers listed by Susan, one specific driver stood out: the imperative need for research management the RAE brought about in Higher Education and Enlighten seems to fulfil this role just fine. Other interesting aspects of Susan’s talk were the excellent work the Library has done on author disambiguation using Glasgow Unique identifier (GUID), the delivery of subject feeds from Twitter, and the hot-linking to publications of all that valuable information when it comes to research management that are grant funding and funder names.

Dave Carr, the Open Access Adviser from the Wellcome Trust (WT), was the next speaker. The OA policy was introduced in 2005 and made mandatory in 2006, requiring WT-funded researchers to make their publications available within 6 months of publication. Dave estimated the compliance rate to the policy to be close to 50%. But the WT is aiming high, and raising the compliance rate is one of the top priorities of the trust. Therefore Dave’s talk was all about how the WT can persuade researchers of the benefits of Open Access and how the WT can help their researchers to make their publications available on OA. Dave’s talk was focused on the need to establish communication with researchers. Too many researchers are still unaware of OA funds or self-archiving practice, this is why the WT is working hard in getting the message across to researchers. In conclusion, it was felt that sanctioning non-compliant researchers was not the way to go for now, and the WT would strive to persuade researchers rather than adopting a punitive approach.

Chris Middleton, from the University of Nottingham, presented a case study on institutional funding for OA publishing. The main driver for setting up the OA fund was the looming REF. Some figures were provided: 353 OA fund requests were made over 4 years, whereof 140 were made in 2009/10, representing circa £171,179. The average cost per article at the University of Nottingham, was estimated at £1,317, but the payments were wide-spread, ranging from £277 to £2,990. The message Chris tried to pass across to the audience was the paramount importance of budgeting those OA costs (where is the break-even point?), but also that this is a very difficult task a University/library sets for itself. Chris used a slightly modified version of Alma Swan’s economic model to base her calculations on OA costs and savings.

Jackie Wickham, the RSP Open Access Adviser, reported on a survey of repository staff she conducted over the summer 2010. The survey was distributed via the UKCoRR list. Beside some useful data on repository staffing, such as 76.2% work part-time, 73.8% work as part of a team or that repository staff tend to be highly educated, Jackie also offered a summary of the skills repository staff (managers and administrators) thought were important, and this included communication (getting the message across), interpersonal skills, project management, determination, perseverance and patience .

Finally, the conference day came to an end with Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services at UCL and President of LIBER, who presented a selection of Open Access projects he’s involved in such as:

• DART-Europe, the principal gateway for discovery and retrieval of OA European theses, and how the EThOS project fits into this.
• Europeana libraries, some sort of Google-equivalent (which in itself is an already ambitious endeavour…) for European quality-assured research content.
• LERU (League of European Research Universities) – a consortium of 22 research-intensive universities in Europe lobbying at the European level for the promotion of research.

In conclusion, this RSP Open Access conference was very informative and enlightening and helped to understand the debate, the drivers but also the challenges of Open Access. And, in the words of Bill, the conclusion would be that OA enables publishers and librarians to channel the huge changes currently taking place and ensure quality control of the research made freely available to anyone. Far from delivering anarchy in scholarly communication, OA helps stakeholders to organise and channel the mass of open research content.

FIL @British Library St.Pancras – Nov 2010

On the 26th November I travelled down to London to attend, and participate, in the Forum for Interlending’s (FIL) biannual British Library event.

The day started with Graham Titley, current FIL Chair, providing the introduction welcome and overview of the day. One of the things that struck me was the costs to FIL of organising the event at the BL and the newsletter. One thing that was clear is that FIL needs engagement for and with its members, something that resonates with my recent engagement with CILIP.

First on the programme was Richard Scobie from the BL sound and music collections, who gave an overview of one of the many collections and services within the BL that a lot of people might not have used. As we don’t have a music dept of Leicester this wasn’t of immediate practical use. However, one could easily foresee some of our depts (e.g. Media and Communications) having some call on these materials. I think I was most interested as to practicalities of how one of our readers might get hold of one of these recordings – the formats etc.

Richard talked us through their acquisitions policy, everything from legal deposit through to collecting representative samples from around the world such as sending representatives to record events like WOMAD themselves. A lot of access to materials is through the reading rooms (aka listening rooms), although print and manuscript music can only be read in the Rare Books and Music rooms. SoundServer exists to provide access to digitised materials. Access to archival sound recordings is via a subscription, which is free to HE and FE libraries (unsure about public libraries mind you). I was quite interested to hear about Petrucci music library which appears wiki for music scores, although for the largest part within copyright.

I was a bit frustrated as Richard didn’t show us any of these services or various links he alluded to during the session; which given music support isn’t especially in my remit I’m unlikely to follow up after the fact.

Following this session the group broke in half, one set to tour the BL and the other to take part in a discussion workshop looking at the challenges facing inter-lending, how to overcome them and to generally share experiences with the delegates. This seemed to go down well (so well that we re-ran the workshop in the afternoon with the other half of the delegates).

After lunch Elizabeth Newbold from the Science, Technology & Med Collections at BL talked about her part of the BL. Like Richard, her overview was ripe with detail but thin on demonstration and I confess that I found it a little hard to pick out particular value from her session. One point she made raised my eyebrows – she commented that generally universities are more clued up in the delivery of digital content and materials than the BL; and that the BL aspires to offer the levels of service that we HE/FE librarians do as a matter of course. I was deeply complimented, if not a little concerned that our national library should feel it wasn’t leading the way on these things.

After the workshop re-run the afternoon was concluded with Jason Murray giving a highly entertaining, and hands on demonstration of the BL’s technology for dealing with disabled readers. This was by and far the best of the BL sessions in the day, with Jason’s delivery alone raising the slightly flagging attention of the audience. He raised some valid points about supporting disabled readers and included some interesting points about dealing with students with mental health issues as well. He explained that mentioning a disability scares some staff, but that with proper training and plenty of patience it is possible to offer them excellent service levels

One other thing I did take away from the day was the sheer cost of holding an event at the British Library, close to £8,000 for the day, which meant that even with close to fifty delegates that FIL made a loss on the day. I suspect future events may need to relocate to another cheaper location in London, and include visits to the BL as an add on to the programme. A shame as the BL venue is nice, but sadly the return on the group’s investment doesn’t really seem enough.

Due to my organisational hat wearing role for the day, I wasn’t able to tour the BL, but I’m pleased to hear from Lyn (my accompanying team member) that it was well worth the trip! Hopefully FIL will be able to arrange something along the same lines as this next year (there’s already a March 2011 event going up to Yorkshire), although perhaps at a less costly venue!  Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve outputs from the workshop to type up and try and turn into a useful resource for those folks who couldn’t make it to the meeting!

The complexities of Chemical Information

In May I visited the London headquarters of the Royal Chemistry Society in Burlington House to attend an event entitled ‘Chemical Information for the Chemist and Non-Chemist’. As I’m new to the world of Chemical Information (albeit armed with my knowledge of information resources and an A level in Chemistry) I’d been looking out for a session to expand my knowledge and this seemed perfect. For those interested, the slides are available on the CICAG (Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group) website – just click on ‘previous meetings’, but here I wanted to talk a little bit about what I learnt about chemical information in general at the event.

Since I started getting up to speed with Chemical Information resources I’ve been fascinated by the unique search mechanism of molecular structure. The majority of chemistry-focused databases cross-reference the literature with  molecular structures.. This means you can draw a molecule, and then search for articles referring to it. As David Walsh (whose presentation has informed much of my thoughts in this particular post) noted at the event, the naming of chemicals changes constantly according to fashion, the property of the chemical that a particular scientists wants to emphasise, and according to commercial concerns (for example, using trade names, or local laboratory numbers). Drawing the chemical allows you to by-pass a large number of these problems.

Molecular structure of phenylethylamine, used under Creative Commons licence, courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/ideonexus/

This seems like  the perfect search tool! Surely a mechanism allowing such exact searching means that the core information professional’s toolkit – define your keywords, perform the search, alter keywords, perform your search, iterate until satisfied or exhausted – seems almost redundant? Well, unfortunately for simplicity, but luckily for making information professionals feel useful, this isn’t the case. A lot of the time there’s reason to search for something that’s either more or less specific than a molecular structure.

For example, when patents are registered for chemicals they usually use something known as the Markush structure – a molecular diagram which records certain key aspects of a compound, but allows for certain points on that structure to be substituted by a variety of different sub-structures. This indicates that a lot of the time one exact molecular structure can be too specific. On the other hand, sometimes a molecular diagram is not specific enough. For example, the stereochemistry studies at the arrangement of atoms within a compound. When compounds with the same molecular structure are arranged differently, this can give two apparently identical compounds different chemical and physical properties.

These different degrees of specificity have interesting implications for the type of keyword generation that needs to happen in searching for chemical information. In a lot of subject areas I’d advise looking to see what’s available in the literature before deciding how specific to be in search terms: in a little studied area you tend to go quite wide and gather in a lot of related literature; in a widely studied area you can afford to be quite specific. However, in chemical information you can define up-front whether you’re interested  in a wide group of compounds or just a very specific isomer and use this to inform your search. The downside being that the beautifully simple molecular structure search isn’t always the one you want.

Over the summer I’ll be thinking more about how the different kinds of information used in Chemistry affect the way it can be taught, and learning more about the different kinds of notation that are used. I’d highly recommend looking at David Walsh’s slides, entitled ‘What Makes Chemical Information Different?’ from the event to get a good overview of many of the different types of notation used. However, I think cramming all of these into a one hour session might make students cry!

USTLG Spring Meeting Redux (Afternoon)

Following on from my post USTLG Spring Meeting Redux (Morning), here’s few notes on the afternoon.

Theme for afternoon: social networking.

Advocating professional social networking to academics. Paula Anne Beasley and Linda Norbury, University of Birmingham.

• The subject librarians are well placed to advocate Web2.0 tech for gathering information via social networks.
• Found a knowledge gap for those not using Web2.0 or not of the generation to ‘just have a go’ at things & prefer some training.
• Surveyed staff in College of Physical Sciences & Engineering about their use/knowledge of Web2.0 using a free text survey.
• Responses variable, but enough interest to offer training session.
• Major issues from survey were whether Web2.0 tools were secure/stable, whether there was a University policy on using them and a lack of knowledge.
• Anne & Linda managed to get the College Academic Enhancement Group interested in the session, and all invites went out from that group rather than from the Library.
• The training session that was offered was originally going to cover blogging and twitter. However, as Linda got stuck abroad due to the ash cloud it became focused only on blogging on the day.
• 31 attendees for session: academics, admin staff, researchers & Emeritus Professors.
• Got very good feedback and the attendees were enthusiastic about blogging on the day.
• They hope to follow-up with seminars on social networking and social bookmarking, plus a support course in Blackboard.
• No-one else in their University is currently offering training in this area.

‘Do Librarians Dream of Electric Tweets?”, Gareth Johnson, University of Leicester.

The next presentation was from our very own Gareth, who gave a very enthusiastic talk on using Web2.0 technology for networking, and in library services.  Main points were:

• Why use things like twitter & Blogs?
• For professional networking, self-reflection, sharing experiences, staff development, answering enquiries, motivating staff etc.
• Can be very powerful tools.
• Like Gareth, I pick up lots of useful information and links to new reports via twitter now rather than by other routes.
• When using these technologies it is important to be human: respond to people, don’t just broadcast, share things.
• The best use of web2.0 csome when you allow it to overlap your personal, workplace and professional lives, but if you’re not comfortable with this level of engagement it can still be useful when used only in work hours.
• Important to “find the right tools for you”.

Gareth’s full presentation:

Do Librarians Dream of Electric Tweets? Making the most of blogs & microblogging

View more presentations from Gaz Johnson.

USTLG Spring Meeting Redux (Morning)

Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House. Photo by Matt_Fom_London via Flickr Creative Commons.

Gareth had already blogged about this event, but here’s my take on it too.

Theme for the morning: Go to the users, wherever they are online.

Taking your service to scientists: embedding subject-specific resources within VLEs. Jon Fletcher. Nottingham Trent University.

• Talked about embedding library resources & links into the VLE so student “don’t have to remember where to go” to get stuff. Student feedback suggested that they often forget how to use resources between years/terms/f2f sessions.
• University mandate that all courses should have a VLE site.
• Includes links to catalogue, metalib, referencing guidelines, library homepage etc in all science courses.
• 5 step guide to embedding: Consult/design resources using a team approach, get permission/access to VLE course, embed resources, consider sustainability & update when needed.
• Often need to ‘sell’ the resources/need to embed to the academics, but once in a few courses then get a snowball effect due to good student & course team feedback.
• Embeds all his teaching resources as well as core library resources.
• Sustainability: think about time/workload required, timescales and the tools needed. E.g. previous html editor wasn’t up to the job so now uses Wimbacreate. There approach is to use a repository and link all courses to one version of core resources page so easily updated in one place by more than one person.
• Updating: design so it only needs updating once or twice a year.
• This initiative has led to more visibility, embedding of f2f sessions, more liaison with academics and more enquiries.
• Currently a trial and only being done by Science team.
• Just about to start using TalisAspire for reading lists.
• Approx 1-2 weeks of time needed to build resources & embed them.
• Moved subject-based library pages within the VLE and linked out to other types of library pages.
• Stats on what is being accessed via the VLE.

MyLibrary – building a Library dashboard application. Mark Gavillet. University of Newcastle

• Creating a MyLibrary dashboard app using a customisable online tool (JQuery UI). A project which will go live for students to trial in new academic year.
• App draws info from various places e.g. library systems, shibboleth (for authentication, google etc.
• Tracks what resources are being used.
• Wanted to identify 80% of ‘start’ points for 80% of tasks that 80% of users do 80% of the time by asking 130 students where they look for resources.
• Student feedback was that there start points for university work/resources were google, OPAC, reading list, Blackboard VLE, databases, library homepage or student homepage (in that order of preference).
• The first place they go when sitting at a university PC: Uni email, Google, Blackboard, Facebook.
• Key library services: ejournals, renew books, search resources.
• They do not use the library homepage as anything other than a gateway & don’t read library news.
• Happy to use search tools but unsure of finding the right search tools in the first place.
• customer journey mapping of tasks such as finding an article form a reading list showed very convoluted routes to get there! Hope MyLibrary tool will help get them there quicker.
• Can put MyLibrary button in variety of places they use frequently such as Facebook and VLE.
• MyLibrary tool tabs for modules, resources, announcements, eResources/eJournals, MyItems(loans) & more.
• eResources pulled from subject categories on Metalib.
• eJournals via SFX (can search & choose favourites).
• MyItems/MyRecord from Aleph library system & can renew via tool.
• Opening hours & events from Library Google calendars
• TOCs from JISC tic TOCs service.
• GO TO WHERE THE USERS ARE, rather than expecting them to come to the library homepage. If the tool is successful then they will re-evaluate the role of the library homepage.
• Several months work and development.

RSC Publishing beta – Have your say…Richard Blount and Louise Peck, Royal Society of Chemistry

Got a quick overview of the new RSC interface and they are very keen for librarian feedback. Either via their survey or as beta testers. Quick look at ChemSpider, an excellent, free chemical structure resource.

EMALink Event On Subject Librarians Part 2

Developing the information literacy practitioner; the OU’s training needs analysis by Wendy Mears.

• The context of Wendy’s talk was that the OU needed to know what training information literacy librarians needed in order to learn new technology, cut the time needed for course production, and deliver increased return on income for library resources.
• Information literacy integration in OU courses is seen as a key indicator of library success.
• Mary Auckland undertook a training needs analysis based on the current and future demands placed on information literacy librarians.
• This included a literature survey, conversations with key thinkers, anonymous survey of the libs (using survey monkey) and focus groups.
• Some of the skill gaps identified were: influencing & persuasion skills (for use in meetings), making a case for information literacy in pedagogic terms, marketing & advocacy skills, assertiveness and creating generic information literacy materials.
• There were also gaps in technical knowledge with regards to Moodle, Word, Powerpoint, Elluminate, social networking, web2.0 and Excel.
• A development plan was produced with ten recommendations, such as librarians taking OU courses, updating job descriptions, keep a watching brief in new technologies, develop key competencies and research support skills.
• As with anything, budget was a major factor in responding to the training needs so some needs will be met through existing channels e.g. staff developement hour (hour for training every week), appraisal process, visit from external speakers and University internal training events.
• New initiatives included: using internal experts, bringing in external experts to provide tailored training and supporting external events/qualifications.
• Four months in it is difficult to tell if the new training initiatives have had much impact, but it helped define librarian roles as well as training needs.
• It highlighted existing good practice and ways to use internal resources where possible.

Students, Librarians & Marketing the Library by Becky Laing, Loughborough University.

• Becky outlined how the library became in a marketing module that is run by the Department of Information Science for their PG students.
• The library was asked to produce marketing briefs for the students to work on, and the students had to present their marketing pitch to the academic librarians.
• The briefs were for marketing the library journals, subject librarians, information literacy & study skills, Metalib (library portal) and Library space.
• The students were also given a subject librarian they could contact for more information if needed.
• The students came up with some interesting ideas that the library found very useful. (See Becky’s slides for more info).
• For example, they suggested a leaflet and video to advertise the subject librarians, and more targeted marketing to encourage different groups of students to use the journals.
• The library also learnt some things about how students perceived the library services, for example, the library had been thinking about rebranding their study skills sessions with a more exciting name, but the students thought study skills was the best way to get across what it was to other students.
• Overall the module was a big success as the students found it useful to work on real briefs, and the library will be taking some of their suggestion further.
• So, always good to get hold of tame students!

Overall I think the most useful part of the day was the reminder to continually review what we do, where we’re heading and how to show our worth.

EMALink Event On Subject Librarians Part 1

On Wednesday the 17th March, I and several colleagues from Leicester visited the Pilkington Library, Loughborough University, for the EMALink event Subject Librarians…defining their mission, measuring their impact, preparing for the future.

Subject Librarians are feeling a little uneasy about their job security these days.  This is due to events such as those at Bangor University, where several subject librarians lost their jobs, and the more recent events at Warwick University, where subject librarians had to re-apply for their jobs at a lower grade. So, the aim of this event was to look at what we do and how we can show our worth.

“The Impact of Subject Librarians on their academic communities” by Lizzie Gadd, Loughborough University.

• Loughborough did a survey of academics in the Departments of Civil & Building Engineering, English & Drama, and Materials Engineering to assess the impact subject librarians have on their communities.
• They got a 27% return rate and felt that they were probably preaching to the converted, as the respondents were generally those already known to library staff.
• 25 out of 29 respondents knew they had a subject librarian and 22 could name their subject librarian.
• What was interesting was the difference in how academics rated the skills they thought subject libs should have, compared with how subject libs themselves rated the same skills.
• Subject knowledge (not just information resources knowledge) was rated highly by academics, as was the ability to keep up to date, whereas subject libs rated subject knowledge high but not as high and thought presentation skills were pretty important.
• When asked which services subject libs should be able to help with the academics rated the top three as copyright advice, putting content into the institutional repository and finding journal impact factors.
• Copyright came as a surprise as the University has a copyright officer who is not based in the library.
• What also surprised the subject libs was the glowing testimonials that accompanied the surveys,a nd which they hope to use in marketing their services at a later date.  Comments such as “Invaluable”, “Important” and “Skilled Professionals”.
• They tried to do some social network analysis based on the responses (i.e. how the academics and subject libs were related, who knew who etc), but the sample was too small.
• They hope to further the research with a new bid for funding and would look at widening the survey to non-users, measure departmental use of the library management system and analyse subject libs communications with academics.
• From the findings of this initial survey they are looking at the issue of offering copyright advice, offering research impact training to Depts (which has raised the usage of JCR), and marketing the subject libs better to the academics.

“What are we here for? Developing a mission statement for Subject Librarians” facilitated by Chris Martindale, Derby University.

• Chris did a short introduction to this session musing on what is a subject librarian?
• Are we there to improve services? As experts in our field? As a gateway to collections?
• Are we endangered? Should we have functional skills or subject skills? Do we suffer from poor job definitions (Pinfield, S, 2001)? 
• We should be positive in response to change/challenges.
• What do we do? are we moving into new roles? Do we need new ways of working (Roberts & Levy, 2005)? How do we demonstrate value?
• We then split into groups to try to write a subject librarian mission statement (see photos). Our group got distracted by talking about the differences in what we did, whether we taught and how we supported research.
• One of the things we identified with in Chris’ talk was  being compared to “middleware”, as we sat between the library and the department, and had to represent the views both to each other.

We then broke for a speed-dating lunch, but I was too busy chatting to people to do any speed-dating!

Social web experiences

I realise it has been a few days since the last post on the blog, but then as term has picked up it’s been a busy time for everyone at the library.  As we approach the Easter break I’m hopeful that there will be time for more posts from myself and my various compatriots on what they’ve been up to in recent weeks.

For my own part I’ve had my head down dealing with the various elements that make up the section I manage, along with a couple of things I’ll be able to talk more about next week.  I did enjoy  making a (brief) visit to the UoL tweetup last Friday.  Being in a such a disparate group of  academics, librarians, administrators and even a visitor from DMU with such a shared interest made for some lively discussion.  Really helps once in a while to push the virtual away and move into the physical.

This morning I’ve been thinking back to that meet up, as I’ve been asked to go and talk about Web 2 here at Leicester from my library perspective next week in Nottingham, on behalf of UKOLN.  Short notice, but as I was one of their interviewees a year ago there seems to be thankfully quite a bit there I can draw on.  I’m trying to avoid the temptation to go to down the preaching route and try and base my talk around the more concrete elements that Web 2 has developed here at Leicester; along with a few life lessons on good netiquette that have evolved along the way.

To kick off writing the presentation yesterday I made a sketch map of my own, personal, Web 2 presence and how it all interacts.  After a few minutes my piece of paper was covered in red ink (my prefered working medium).  I’m not sure if this picture will make it into the final presentation (a version of it anyway) but it did rather neatly illustrate the different roles the different social web services play in my professional and personal life.

I’m looking forward to hearing what other people in LIS services have been doing, and what’s worked for them and perhaps more importantly what hasn’t and why.  These shared experiences are always invaluable for thinking about what we could try next, or even what we should hold back from trying.

Repositories and the Cloud – conference report

Yesterday I travelled (via a slightly circuitous route) to London and the Magic Circle Headquarters to attend the JISC/Eduserve event Repositories and the Cloud.  Billed as a technical and policy event I was a little concerned that it would be too high level, but as things turned out it seems my understanding of such things is better than I thought.  I can only capture my main thoughts on the day, as 10 minutes in my netbook power died and I had to drop back onto my HTC Magic to continue my Web 2 participation.

The day was split into three main chunks.

In the first session Michele Kimpton (DuraSpace Foundation), Alex Wade (Microsoft Research) and Les Carr (EPrints) talked about their repository platforms, and how they are looking to engage with the cloud.  I was especially interested in what Michele had to say; since DSPace and Fedora are now under one umbrella corporation I anticipate big changes in what we use currently as our repository platform.  Talking to other delegates at the event it seems the smart money is backing Fedora to emerge as the sole winner, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.  I have to confess I’d never even heard of Windows Azure before today, and as it turns out I wasn’t the only one.  That Microsoft are making a play into the repository market is fairly significant, as increasingly it seems that proprietory software platforms may be in all repository manager’s futures.

A lot of what they focussed on (from my P.O.V.) was the using of off-site cloud storage for large chunks of repository contents; for preservation, for reasons of perceived economic savings and maintenance of access.  I was quite surprised as well to hear just what a big player Amazon are in this market; it seems their ambitions in the library and information sphere goes far beyond the supply of cheap books.

After a lot of lunch time discussions we moved onto the second session with Terry Harmer (Belfast eScience Centre).  Terry’s presentation seemed more technical, and so I must confess some of the finer points were probably lost on me.  However, he did raise a point about trans-national data storage and security that interested me.  The fact that under British law it’s not permissable to just host any data about people off-shore is a definite challenge to moving into the cloud.  Then again, how many of us are already doing such a thing if only in a small way.  He touched on the need to use either EU based servers, or ensure that (for example) US hosts had signed up to safe harbour (or harbor I imagine) agreements, whereby they would agree to respect key elements of UK and EU data protection laws, where they would otherwise not apply.

He also touched on the risks involved with using a major host (for example once again) Amazon – by being a bigger target as such there was a greater risk from griefers or hackers in general for DDoS attacks (taking out access to your data) or worse.  As he pointed out, most IRs are far too small to bother with; although I know that this doesn’t make them invisible or inviolate from assault.

The third part of the day broke out into two discussion sessions – one technical and one policy.  Paul Miller facilitated the policy one I attended, and there followed two hours of wide ranging discussions about using cloud resources for repositories.  A straw poll in the room revealed that most participants were using cloud resources already on a daily or regular basis, and a sizable number were doing this for work based activities and even with the blessing of their management.  However, a lot of the group noted a certain corporate or personal reservation about trusting to the cloud to the Nth degree.  One point that particularly resonated for me was the comment that “We’ve been spending a lot of time and energy advocating local repositories as something controllable, accessible locally mounted to placate certain academic worries – to suddenly shift to trans-national locations might well start ringing alarm bells for many of them.”  A feeling that was expressed by some in the meeting, and in the discussions that followed, that while cloud computing options were certainly exciting the repository field itself is still insufficiently mature to go for them wholesale just yet.

The event concluded with a reception where the discussion continued into the evening, or until the Magic Circle threw us out.  I spent some of the time planning some possible collaborative work with the RSP team in among sharing experiences and feedback on the day.

Overall this was a challenging day of thought and discussion.  Am I convinced that cloud computing is the saviour of repositories? No.  Do I think real economic savings can be made with them?  Not yet.  Do I think they’re relevant to the future of the repository community?  Almost certainly.  It will be a field well worth the watching, and doubtless there will be more about it in the months or years to come.

A twitter stream from the event is available.

[Edit: Presentations from the event can be found here]

UKCoRR Meeting – University of Leicester

Today we’re hosting repository managers from across the UK, and I’m going to attempt to keep up with the key points of the event here as the day goes on.

10.30: Jen Delasalle (Warwick) and Louise Jones (Leicester) opening the event.

10.40: Jen is standing down as UKCoRR Chair, oh no.  Wonder if I should run? Or maybe I should let someone else go for it.

10.42: RCUK looking to set up a central system to record their research outputs.  So does this mean we need a CRIS as well or is this taking over from local recording of research?

10.45: Discussing remit of group and membership criteria, and the elephant in the room of funding the longer term development of UKCoRR.  Should we pass the hat round each meeting?  Always tricky – once you have funding you are beholden to your funders, be they members or institutional and can be called to account.  Would this change the organisation too much?

10.50: Looking more at the RCUK outputs and capture, and the role of the repository.

10.55: Journal TOCs project – an API drawing on 13,000 journal outputs.  Nick Shephard (aka @MrNick on twitter) will be talking about a project related to this later on this morning.  Idea is to allow searching for publications for local authors, which is useful – but you need to build a tool to exploit the API, we’d ned someone else to build us the tool.  Perhaps this is what Mr Nick will be going to do for us all?

10.58: Role of publishers and repository managers working together with authors.  And the idea of publishers selling us metadata - erm, no thanks.

11.00 Nicky Cashman (Aber) now talking about her work at CADIR and Aberystwyth. Her main role is advocacy around the university.  Noted that UKCoRR now has 182 members, impressive – when’s our three day conference in Hastings then?  She’s gone on to give us an idea of how much stuff they now have in their repository.  first mention for Webometrics – which is interesting as Nicky and I were discussing this last night; how much do we really trust their data – even if senior management love it when we rise up the tables.

11.15: Talking about Bartrum and the Seals in Medieval Wales (SiMeW) project.  Interesting that Aber and CADIR are more embedded within their departments – is this due to the size of the institution being smaller than Leicester?  I’ve heard this comment from other unis with smaller academic numbers that it has been easier for them to work together with their academics directly.

11.20: Talking Ethos and mandates for theses.  Something I’ll be talking about here at Leicester later on this morning.  Currently the’re an opt in institution for thesis deposits, so I can understand the difficulties they must face.  They are a first requester pays organisation for theses, which I think is going to an increasingly popular choice for institutions, and increasingly unpopular choice for readers.

11.25: Aber is doing a survey on ethesis deposit mandates, comment from Southampton that they (like Leicester) are an opt-out mandate institution.

11.30: Breaking for tea.  After this Nick Shepard and then me are on. Not quite sure I can present and blog at the same time so might have to fill that bit in post-hoc.

11.55: Nick and Wendy Luker from Leeds Met talking about the Bibliosight Project (querying Web of Science from the desktop).  JISC RI project .  Uses Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science Web Services (WSLite/WoSAPI) – sadly live demo hasn’t worked out for today, but thankfully Nick has a back up to show us.  Idea is to down load and autopopulate the repository with data from the WoS.  They aim to use it to promote deposit from and tie this into the REF.

12.10: Distracted by sorting out network keys, so will have to look at Nick’s presentation later.  However, he’s now giving us a screen capture demo of how the queries work, which I assume we’ll be able to view later as well.  Plan is to take the data out (as XML) and convert using SWORD into repository ingest.

12.13: Readiness for REF, looking at the wider issue of data capture (R4R), from) Les Carr of Southampton.  Questions about how this works into the workflows of the repository e.g. with so many records downloaded how do you get them in, authenticated and cleanly.

12.15: Some questions still outstanding – see Nick’s presentation.

12.20: Off to do my talk….

12.55: And I’m done.  Got some laughs in the right place, which was good.  Interesting comment from Gill Hall (Herts) that I could have just as easily have been telling her story as a repository manager.  That’s the good thing from UKCoRR, it really is the best community to belong to (well along with FIL) – everyone seems to share the same sort of problems and issues.

12.57: Dominic Tate is now up talking about the RSP, and their new series of events.  Sounds promising I hope I can get to some of those, as they’re good networking and training days.  There will be an event based on the forthcoming economics of open access report written by Alma Swann (June 17th probably).  Aimed at senior university management, rather than repository workers.

13.03: Talking about his work representing UKCoRR as well.  Including the JISC Persistent Identifier Working Group.

13.05: Important for repository mangers to work more closely with their research staff.

14.14: Post lunch and after a whistle-stop tour around the multi-awarding David Wilson Library, Hannah Payne from the Welsh Repository Network talked about their work.  They are launching two new objects on metadata use in repositories.  Also comments about non-standard collections (e.g. ceramics) and how to get them into repository, like UWIC has.  National Library of Wales looking to expand role in terms of collecting and storing digital items like theses, but question about how that relates to Ethos.

14.25: Integrating repositories with the REF and satisfying their requirements is something they still looking at; not a big surprise.  WRN is planning a repository and CRIS event, which will be held at Leeds Met University and will be open to all.

14.30: Question about a cross searching tool, stemming from WRN Google custom search tool.

14.31: Jane Smith now on talking Advanced SHERPA/RoMEO.  Demonstrating the new features of the search tool and the new output, that allows you to add in funder name.  Also records now no longer list all the funders automatically, can opt for none, 1 or all.  Remember DOAJ open access journals don’t all support archiving in a repository, and as these are now listed on RoMEO important to go and check their actually policies.

14.37: Jane now showing all publisher lists and the information you can garner from them.  It is now possible to even generate list of payments needed to make items open access.  S/RoMEO’s monthly updates are displayed on a regular webpage.

14.47: Peter Millington from SHERPA is now speaking about the RoMEO API.  Journals may appear in one or more data sources (Zetoc, DOAJ and the RoMEO journals database).  Different sources may list different publishers, and this can be a problem to identify which is the right one to use.  Who is the publisher, and who counts for copyright and whose’s policy takes priority?  There are some clear cut cases, but where two publishers appear to have the rights, then they may not be compatible.

14.55: Difference between current RoMEO and trial RoMEO being illustrated, I think right now though this looks like muddying the water until things roll out for use.

15.06: Moving onto coffee and copyright.

16.54: Finally back at my desk after cleaning up the room and sorting out the leftovers.  The copyright session was good, but I think we really needed a couple of hours to dig into some of the issues.  But useful all the same.  And with that UKCoRR is over again, which is a shame – I could have done with two more days to really get round and talk to all the people I needed to, and indeed wanted to.  Sorry if you were one of the ones I had to rush by today – I really would have loved to have time to talk to you all – but it’s been a hectic day.  More like this UKCoRR please.

Thanks to the committee and everyone involved in running today’s event – it was highly stimulating!  A twitter stream of comments on the day can be found here.

Open Access Week: UoL OA Event 28th October

While it’s not falling within open access week there is still a chance for University of Leicester academics, researchers and postgraduates to find out more about the current developments in open access and scholarly publishing.  The Research Office (RSO) and the University Library are presenting an Open Access Information Event, Wednesday 28th October 1pm onwards (that’s a week today). 

The afternoon is broken into two sessions:

Session 1 is suitable for staff and research students in all disciplines.  Speakers include Christine Fyfe (UoL), Astrid Wissenburg (ESRC) and myself.  The focus is on the requirements of the UK HE funding councils and the Leicester open access perspective.

Session 2 is aimed at staff and research students working in disciplines covered by UK Pub Med Central (principally biosciences, health and medicine).  Margaret Hurley and Alison Henning (Wellcome Trust) will be speaking about their specific funding policies and the new UKMPC grant reporting services.  Finally Juliet Bailey (RSO) will talk about the Wellcome Trust OA fund at Leicester.

There will be a break for refreshments in the middle, as well as a chance for formal and informal questions to all the delegates.  The LRA team will be there in force, so it’ll be a really good chance to talk with us about what we can do to help you fulfil the various institutional, funding and theses mandates here at Leicester; as well as making sure your publications are read as widely as possible.

To reserve a place and for a full programme contact Laura Roberts