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? 🙂

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.

LRA Top 10 Items (April 2012)

Here are the most heavily accessed records on the LRA for the month of April 2012. A mix of old and new items as always.

1. Mobile technologies and learning (Naismith, Laura et al)

• Financial Development, Economic Growth and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Nigeria and South Africa (Ndako, Umar Bida)

• Pragmatic randomized trial of antenatal intervention to prevent post-natal depression by reducing psychosocial risk factors (Brugha, Traolach S. et al)

• The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths (Sim, Chow Yen Desmond)

 

• An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment (Cann, Alan James)

 

• 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)

• Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care (Pitchforth, Emma 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)

• The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas (Mercer, Justine)

LRA – Most accessed items March 2012

As usual here are the most popular items on LRA last month.

1. Financial Development, Economic Growth and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Nigeria and South Africa (Ndako, Umar Bida)
2. The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths (Sim, Chow Yen Desmond)
3. Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change (Sandell, Richard)
4. Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care (Pitchforth, Emma et al)
5. 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) 
6. Pragmatic randomized trial of antenatal intervention to prevent post-natal depression by reducing psychosocial risk factors (Brugha, Traolach S. et al) 
7. The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas (Mercer, Justine) 
8. An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment (Cann, Alan James) 
9. The Development of Nurture Groups in Secondary Schools (Colley, David Rodway) 
10. Mobile technologies and learning (Naismith, Laura et al)

Don’t forget if your research publications are on LRA, that they can be accessed by anyone in the world, unlike those behind publisher paywalls.  Simply by sharing the unique identifier (handle) in an email list, on webpage or via social networks you will find that your access rates and citations should climb yet further.

LRA Highly Accessed Articles Feb 2012

Here are the most access articles on the LRA in Feb 2012

1. An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment (Cann, Alan James) (2381/10087)
2. The Impact of Labour Turnover: Theory and Evidence from UK Micro-Data (Garino, Gaia et al) (2381/4441)
3. Astronomy and ancient Greek cult : an application of archaeoastronomy to Greek religious architecture, cosmologies and landscapes (Boutsikas, Efrosyni) (2381/7566)
4. Financial Development, Economic Growth and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Nigeria and South Africa (Ndako, Umar Bida) (2381/8924)
5. The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas (Mercer, Justine) (2381/4677)
6. The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths (Sim, Chow Yen Desmond) (2381/7444)
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. What is land cover? (Comber, Alexis J. et al) (2381/4655)
10. Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care (Pitchforth, Emma et al) (2381/309)

As usual I’ve written to all the authors still working here at Leicester, and our Number One this month Alan has already blogged about his thoughts on the subject.

LRA Top Accessed Items: January 2012

1. Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change (Sandell, Richard) (2381/52)

• Financial Development, Economic Growth and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Nigeria and South Africa (Ndako, Umar Bida) (2381/8924)
• The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths (Sim, Chow Yen Desmond) (2381/7444)
• A Randomised Controlled trial of the effectiveness of pelvic floor therapies for Urodynamic Stress and mixed Incontinence (USI) (Williams, K.S. et al) (2381/2381)
• The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas (Mercer, Justine) (2381/4677)
• Fault Tolerant Sliding Mode Control Schemes With Aerospace Applications (Alwi, Halim) (2381/3957)
• “Careering out of Control”: Decision-Making in Contested Cases under the Licensing Act 2003 (Cammiss, Steven et al) (2381/10013)
• Educational Leadership: an Islamic perspective (Shah, Saeeda J.A.) (2381/1004)
• Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care (Pitchforth, Emma et al) (2381/309)
• The List of Threatening Experiences: a subset of 12 life event categories with considerable long-term contextual threat (Brugha, Traolach S. et al) (2381/261)

JISCrte End of Projects Event Feb 2012

Friday 10th Feb saw me attending this end of project event at the rather nice Nottingham Trent Conference centre.  What follows are my notes from the day (typed whilst at the event) so apologies for any typos!  My thanks to the RSP for facilitating the day.

Balviar Notay gave an overview of the JISCrte programme to start the day.  There are a fair number of projects in this programme, but while I had heard of some of these projects I’d certainly not heard of all of them.,  Is that a flaw in the projects themselves – or perhaps promotion and awareness wasn’t a core part of their agenda.  Certainly looking around the room today there are very few people present whom are not involved directly in these projects – a bit of an echo chamber/silo problem – or should they be all working closer with UKCoRR?  Balviar did flag up the work of UK Repository Net+ project and it’s innovation zone, something that I think everyone in the UK repository community will be working with increasingly over the nest two years.  RIO Extension – mapping the repository metadata requirements  was flagged up; a project about which I went to a very interesting meeting on Weds with the RCUK, JISC and other people.

Next Marie-Therese Gramstadt was up next talking about eNova which worked on enhancing the MePrints tool.  Interestingly this is an EPrints tool; once again in the UK DSpace repositories feel a bit outside the room.  DSpace is the most popular repository platform in the world, but in the UK the Southampton based EPrints dominates the community.  That is not to say that there are not lessons to take away from this, but they aren’t products that we can directly apply at Leicester.

Interestingly this MePrints appears to offer the functionality for individual researchers (a dashboard of sorts) that I would dearly love to introduce on LRA – essentially Staff Profile pages.

Next Beth Lunt from DMU talked about the EXPLORER project – starting off by talking to their academics and discovering that many of them were unaware of the repository (something I’ve found sadly familiar).  The project then went on to bring about a number of developments for their DSpace repository – although adapting EPrints code isn’t possible as the two systems are not compatible at all.  Part of the upgrade is to KULTERise the repository.  DORA now has a UI that is much nicer than the out of the box DSpace.  Bitstreams in DORA also now have thumb prints of the objects within them, hence you can even see the front page of the PDF.

Interestingly they have improved name authorities but in a way that sounds like it wouldn’t work with a CRIS like we have.  This is a shame as standardising name authorities has long been a holy grail for the LRA.  Indeed one of the things that is clear is that being linked to a CRIS brings with it new advantages in terms of population, but it also introduces considerable limitations in terms of how much development and customisation you can do with the repository.  Given a lot of the projects that I’ve heard about today are talking about repos as single objects not as part of an integrated institutional information infrastructure; this is a bit of a concern.

After tea Jackie Wickham spoke about the RSP Embedding repositories guide and self assessment tool, stressing the importance of sharing the research with the world and raising the Universities’ profile globally.  There are three main ways in which they looked at embedding repositories.  The first one is where it acts as a publication database (e.g. where you don’t have a CRIS like IRIS), the second is like Leicester where a link with the CRIS  exists and finally a third option where the repository is embedded as part of the CRIS (not a satellite system).

Richard Green spoke next about Hydra in Hull, a spin off from the Hydrangea demonstrator project.  The plan was to use this to develop a successor to their Fedora based eDocs repository; which was enabled to be interactive with other systems.  It was launched in Sept 2011 and other unis are taking up the use of the code.  The codebase allows the,m to restrict access across multiple levels (so students, or local or academics or open access) – if unable to access you can’t see it.

William Nixon from Glasgow closed the morning off with an exemplar of embedding repositories with the Enlighten experience.  Noted there’s always a gap between funding the projects and getting the outputs of projects embedded and taken up within repositories workflows.  He stressed getting embedded is about getting stitched into the fabric of the institution culturally, technically and holistically. Embedding seems to be very much about working with administrators, academics, marketing, HR and researchers as a regular activity, not a one off.  Having these relationships is crucial, because it means you are “in the room” when important decisions are made.

Once again William demonstrated a repository that has the author at it’s heart with their own pages, and the ability to retrieve information on their available publications and usage.  Looking at Enlightened journey to being embedded it is easy to pick out the things we’ve done with LRA, but also the things we’re missing still – funding information, feeding profile pages and author disambiguation being key among them IMHO.  William commented that no repository can be supremely successful with only library staff involved on a daily basis; and I can well appreciate that – though there is the daily challenge of getting/keeping other members of the institutions engaged and onboard.

After lunch Robin Burgess was sadly not appearing so no sing-a-long a presentation, but Laurian Williamson filled in talking about RADAR. No, not that radar but the project at the Glasgow School of Art.

“He” was followed by Xiaohong Gao talking about MIRAGE which focussed on archiving of 3D medical images, in two phases – creation to archiving and then from archiving to creation.  This looks like a very interesting project, specially when you consider the potential not just for storing but locating and retrieving three dimensional data constructs from medicine and other disciplines; especially I’m thinking of Physics and Genetics.

Finally Miggie Pickton from Nectar came on to talk about her repository and embedding activity.  She noted she’d made great strides in making the repository the definitive location for research outputs.  One of the highlights of the improvements is to have the KULTURised version of the front page of the repository.  Another key point was that policy is driven by research committee, not the library – for advocacy and academic buy in this is essential.  Interestingly the VC for Northampton has offered the use of his University residence as a venue for the next Open Access week event – something I was awed by, such engagement from such a senior level is simply incredible.

The day finished with a breakout discussion session on embedding where we all exchanged our ideas and reflected on some of the points of the day.

Top 10 LRA Items for December 2011

Here are the most accessed articles on the LRA for the month of December 2011.

1. The BIOMASS mission: Mapping global forest biomass to better understand the terrestrial carbon cycle (Le Toan, T. et al)
2. The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths (Sim, Chow Yen Desmond)
3. Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change (Sandell, Richard)
4. Financial Development, Economic Growth and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Nigeria and South Africa (Ndako, Umar Bida)
5. Optimal Number of Response Categories in Rating Scales: Reliability, Validity, Discriminating Power, and Respondent Preferences (Preston, Carolyn C. et al)
6. The List of Threatening Experiences: a subset of 12 life event categories with considerable long-term contextual threat (Brugha, Traolach S. et al)
7. Measuring the efficiency of European airlines: an application of DEA and Tobit Analysis (Fethi, Meryem Duygun et al)
8. The Introduction of Virtual Learning Environment e-Learning Technology at a Sixth Form College: A Case Study (Osadiya, Taye Timothy)
9. Educational Leadership: an Islamic perspective (Shah, Saeeda J.A.)
10. 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)

Deposit to LRA now via IRIS

As many readers will be aware over the past year the LRA team has been working with the Research Office and ITS to integrate Leicester Research Archive more closely with central systems; in particular the IRIS research information management platform.  As of late December this has now gone live – which means all non-thesis deposits of publications now need to go via IRIS; rather than being emailed to the LRA team as in the past.

Hopefully this will make it much easier for authors to check what they have/haven’t deposited as of yet; as well as for the LRA team too.  There is a guide to the process available from the Library webpages, which we’ll be updating over the coming weeks with answers to any FAQs that we receive.

If you do have any particular questions – either comment here or drop a line to me or my team and we’ll do our best to answer!