I have started a new Blog to keep primarily ISU faculty, staff, and students up-to-date with the latest tools related to bibliographic management applications, primarily EndNote, EndNote Web, and Zotero. Anyone using these tools may benefit from the information shared. I will try to tag those items that exclusivly related to Iowa State University such as upcoming workshops.
The address is http://citehelp.blogspot.com/
Thanks -- Stephen
The Accessibility Paradox | Peer to Peer Review - 10/29/2009 - Library Journal
"Interesting article in Library Journal ... 1st paragraph here for more wander over to LJ" -- HSM
The Accessibility Paradox -- Library Journal, 10/29/2009
The book world has been harrumphing about a battle among big box stores to sell the season's biggest books at the cheapest price. In order to draw customer into their stores, Target and Wal-Mart are making ten bestselling author's books available for under ten bucks. (Wisconsin is missing all the excitementthey have a law against dumping goods below wholesale prices but Amazon has joined in the fray, so Wisconsinites can still go online and pre-order bestsellers at low-low prices.) The American Booksellers Association has even asked the Department of Justice to intervene. I'm somewhat bemused to see a Barbara Kingsolver book among the discounted booksattention shoppers! Critique of corporate greed and US imperialism on sale in aisle three! But I'm also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they're being used as bait to draw in shoppers. Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?
The Accessibility Paradox | Peer to Peer Review - 10/29/2009 - Library Journal
"Research Literate -- so much better than information literacy -- IMHO -- HSM"
FIRST PERSON
Not Enough Time in the Library
Just because your students are computer-literate doesn't mean they are research-literate
As an academic librarian, I hear an awful lot of hype about using technology to enhance instruction in colleges and universities. While the very word "technology" — not to mention the jargon that crops up around it, like "interactive whiteboards" and "smart classrooms" — sounds exciting and impressive, what it boils down to is really just a set of tools. They're useful tools, but they don't offer content beyond what the users put into them.
Today we have hardware and software that facilitate communication, resource-sharing, and organization. We have computers attached to projection systems for lectures and demonstrations; social-networking and messaging sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter; virtual spaces like blogs and wikis in which to collaborate; course-management software like Blackboard/WebCT, Sakai, and Angel to supplement or even take the place of the physical classroom; and programs such as RefWorks, Endnote, and Zotero to keep track of and format bibliographies.
Oldsters tend to associate those tools with youngsters. Many faculty members, especially senior ones, believe they are less adept at using those tools than their students are. While that much may be true, the assumption that follows — that when it comes to technology, today's students need no faculty guidance — most certainly is not.
While college students may be computer-literate, they are not, as a rule, research-literate. And there's a huge difference between the two.
The fact that some professors do not recognize the distinction means they effectively assume that their students find themselves as much at home in the complex and daunting world of information as when they upload 25 photos from their iPhone to Facebook and text their friends to announce the latest "pics."
Academic librarians are eager to offer sessions for students on what we call "research education." But the mistaken assumption that students don't need it means that many professors don't ask us to meet with their students, or even respond to our enthusiastic offers to lead such sessions. Students don't need to be taught anything about working online, because they were practically born digital, right?
Research education is not tools education. Research education involves getting students to understand how information is organized physically in libraries, as well as electronically in library catalogs and in powerful, sometimes highly specialized commercial databases. It means teaching students to search effectively online to identify the most relevant and highest-quality books, articles, microform sets, databases, even free Web resources.
Students do not come to college armed with those skills, nor are they likely to be acquired without guidance. Yet students desperately need such skills if they hope to function effectively in our information-driven economy. As Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams opine in The Craft of Research: The "vast majority of students will have careers in which, if they do not do their own research, they will have to evaluate and depend on the research of others. We know of no way to prepare for that responsibility better than to do research of one's own."
Professors may need to be reminded that online searching requires a set of skills that are the strong suit of academic librarians — and that we are eager to impart those skills to students. Faculty members may also need to be reminded that developing those skills takes practice. Would professors assume that students possess the critical-thinking skills necessary to make sense of an early-17th-century document related to the Plymouth Bay Colony just because they grew up in Massachusetts?
Here, then, are some tips for faculty members on how to augment students' research skills.
Spend a class period on search strategies. Show students how to find their way around the library's electronic catalog (for books) and a few general databases such as Academic Search Premier, those in the WilsonWeb platform, and LexisNexis Academic (for articles). A librarian can conduct a session with your students on those sources and, more important, demonstrate effective search strategies to avoid frustration and wasted time. Make the session mandatory, hold it during class, and be sure to attend it, to show you mean business. Even better, teach the session with the librarian, or at least chime in to stress key points.
Take a tour. Introduce students to the physical spaces of the library, especially the reference desk, the reference collection and its contents, the periodical reading room, and the stacks — including how to read a call number. Believe it or not, many students' familiarity with their college or university library stops at the study spaces.
Reinforce the lesson with an assignment. Devise a for-credit assignment that echoes what you and the librarian have shown the students. It should emphasize key distinctions that they often forget, such as the need to search the online catalog for books but library databases for articles. You might also incorporate a component that challenges students to evaluate the quality of information they find, such as comparing the top results returned by a keyword search in Google with those returned in Academic Search Premier with the peer-reviewed box checked. Which results are more authoritative, and how can students tell?
Take it a step further. Perhaps you want to do more than require a single assignment, such as encouraging students to use library materials in support of arguments in their term papers. It would be good to assign them Chapter 3 (pp. 40 to 55) of the second edition of The Craft of Research (available for library purchase as an e-book, so students don't have to shell out extra). The chapter covers how to turn interest in a topic into a research question that's worth trying to answer. It should reduce the likelihood that students will set out to write a paper on "the history of rowing on U.S. college campuses" and move them instead toward an argument supported by convincing data about, say, "the role that athletics plays in U.S. college admissions."
In an ideal world, students should have multiple encounters with librarians, not just the standard 60-to-90-minute session that is most common now.
Faculty members in Yale's English department clearly recognize the growing importance of research education: They have just agreed to increase fivefold the number of undergraduates who will attend library sessions as an integral part of their introductory writing and literature courses (from 350 to roughly 1,900). Add to that our new "personal librarian" program, which pairs every Yale freshman with a Yale librarian, and you see the students themselves begin to be repositioned to value learning the craft of research. Let's hope this example encourages others to follow suit.
The more time students spend with us, the further they can go beyond the basics into larger conceptual issues. Once they have determined what makes a good research question in the first place, they can move on to ask themselves (and the librarian) what is needed to answer specific questions they want to explore, developing the confidence that comes from knowing they are looking in all the right places for answers, and actually finding what they seek.
Todd Gilman is the librarian for literature in English at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library.
The integration of open access journals in the scholarly communication system: three science fields
(2008)
The greatest number of open access journals (OAJs) is found in the sciences and their influence is growing. However, there are only a few studies on the acceptance and thereby integration of these OAJs in the scholarly communication system. Even fewer studies provide insight into the differences across disciplines. This study is an analysis of the citing behaviour in journals within three science fields: biology, mathematics, and pharmacy and pharmacology. It is a statistical analysis of OAJs as well as non-OAJs including both the citing and cited side of the journal to journal citations. The multivariate linear regression reveals many similarities in citing behaviour across fields and media. But it also points to great differences in the integration of OAJs. The integration of OAJs in the scholarly communication system varies considerably across fields. The implications for bibliometric research are discussed.
1: Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS)
oa-interaction.pdf (186.8 KB)
hprints-00326285, version 1
http://www.hprints.org/hprints-00326285/en/
oai:hal.archives-ouvertes.fr:hprints-00326285_v1
From: Tove Faber Frandsen < tff@db.dk>
Thursday, 2 October 2008 14:22:12
For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries
By JENNIFER HOWARD
"Rapidly changing" is the term most often used these days to describe the landscape of scholarly communication. Scholars have to clear new and higher hurdles as they bump up against copyright and fair-use issues, open-access mandates, and a baffling array of publication and dissemination models.
How much of his own published work can a scholar post on a personal Web site without raising his publisher's ire? How much of someone else's work can he use in his course pack without trampling on fair use and risking a fine or legal action? How does a researcher upload her work to her institution's repository, and are there consequences if she opts out? Those are just some of the questions that professors may find themselves tripping over.
Where can researchers find a guide to lead them through this 21st-century obstacle course?
The library, of course.
More institutions are creating or beefing up offices and programs in scholarly communication or hiring librarians with expertise in copyright and intellectual property.
Services vary wildly from place to place. But Karla Hahn, who directs the Office of Scholarly Communication for the Association of Research Libraries, has seen some major themes emerge. Faculty outreach — making sure that faculty members understand their rights and responsibilities and the options available to them — "is pretty universally a component," she says. Other common elements include helping academics figure out copyright issues and how to navigate institutional repositories. Offering publishing services outside of university presses is another large and growing area.
Over the past three years, Ms. Hahn says, many new programs have sprung up. Before that, research libraries held workshops or symposia on scholarly communication, but "we were not finding a lot of real established programs," she says. "The majority of our members now have some kind of programmatic emphasis."
She points to the interest generated by the association's Institute on Scholarly Communication, run jointly with the Association of College and Research Libraries. The institute holds periodic gatherings of library personnel assigned to scholarly-communication roles. For its first meeting, in 2005, "we had way more applications than we could accommodate in our 100 seats," Ms. Hahn told The Chronicle, and demand continues to be high.
The Chronicle talked with several people on the front lines about their enhanced roles. All of them are affiliated, loosely or closely, with research libraries, and their jobs reflect the wide array of services that now fall under the umbrella of scholarly communication programming.
The Copyright Czar
Kevin L. Smith, scholarly-communications officer at Duke University, has a staff of one: himself. Duke hired him two and a half years ago. He works out of the Duke University Libraries and maintains a blog, Scholarly Communications @ Duke, where he tracks and comments on major issues and developments. The blog is also designed to educate the university community about its rights and responsibilities.
"I'm supposed to be a resource for the whole university," he says. "I've been very, very busy from almost my first day." With a law degree as well as library expertise — a handy combination that is becoming more common among research librarians — Mr. Smith is particularly well equipped to handle questions about intellectual property and copyright as well as to help authors navigate the legal arcana of publishing contracts. He will even sometimes negotiate with a publisher on an author's behalf.
"Probably 65 to 70 percent of my time is dealing with the intellectual-property questions," he says. "Another 10 percent is spent trying to keep myself aware of national issues — legislation, litigation, things like the Google book settlement — and trying to figure out how they impact the university. Probably the remaining quarter of my time is spent dealing with publishing issues, author contracts, that kind of thing."
What he hears most often is a variation on the question "Can I use this particular piece of copyrighted material for whatever purpose I have in mind?" Maybe a graduate student wants to turn a journal article into a dissertation chapter. Perhaps a professor wants to post a chapter from her book on her Web site or pull a chapter of somebody else's for a course she's teaching.
Such concerns "take extraordinarily various forms, of course," Mr. Smith says. "Most often it's that they want to use somebody else's material."
He enjoys a good relationship with the university counsel's office, he says, but its work rarely overlaps with his. University lawyers "make the best decisions about how to reduce risk," he says. They're not there to answer copyright questions. For researchers, "I'm the person on whose door they can knock."
A High-Profile Mandate
Faculty outreach is also front and center in one of the most recent and most publicized experiments in scholarly communication. Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in February to adopt an open-access requirement, requiring faculty members to deposit copies of journal articles in a new university repository.
To help scholars navigate the new requirement, the university established a dedicated Office for Scholarly Communication. It lives in the domain of Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, and is run by Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science and a prime mover behind the open-access decision.
The new repository, called Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, or DASH, is now in beta testing. Mr. Shieber told The Chronicle in an e-mail interview that the university hopes it will be fully online early in the spring.
Mr. Shieber describes faculty interaction as "extremely important" to his office's mission. His staff has concentrated on getting the word out about the open-access policy, how to comply with it, and the mechanics of how to move work into DASH. The office is meeting with individual departments, and has staff members and student assistants who will help transfer articles and metadata into the repository.
Mr. Shieber told The Chronicle that just about all of Harvard's dozen or so faculties are considering open-access policies. "Each school has its own characteristics, and the policies need to be responsive to the differences among the schools," he says. "The process has to be faculty-based and consensual. But the office can help by advising and serving as a source for information."
Ambitions don't stop there. Mr. Shieber expects the office to evolve as "a laboratory for expanding and evolving scholarly communication practices." Perhaps its most important objective focuses on something of concern to librarians and scholars alike: figuring out a system to support authors who want to publish in open-access journals "by underwriting reasonable publication charges for those journals."
Paying to Publish
High publication costs are also much on the mind of David Stern, associate university librarian for scholarly resources at Brown University. Collection development is his primary charge. But that job now includes a portfolio of scholarly communication responsibilities, which he handles along with a team of other librarians. "It was recognized that the university needed to focus on accountability, return on investment, and compliance with new regulations," he told The Chronicle.
For Mr. Stern and his colleagues, that means raising "campus awareness" among faculty members and students. "That covers far more than just copyright," he says. "We talk about fair use and crediting and critical thinking and mashing, posting to the Web."
He and his colleagues contact every Brown researcher with a grant from the National Institutes of Health to make sure they know how to comply with the agency's public-access policy. It requires that research papers based on NIH-supported work be made freely available through the institutes' PubMed Central repository no later than 12 months after publication. That policy went into effect in April.
His job calls on him to sit down with authors to sort out their publishing choices, particularly with an eye to how much the different options cost. "At this point, what we're saying is 'Let's talk about the various business models, your roles in the process, and how your behaviors will influence the long-term solutions,'" Mr. Stern says.
Before he has that conversation with authors, Mr. Stern does the math. "We recommend that they select the highest-quality journal with the largest distribution, which is what they want," he says. But some journals charge higher authors' fees or have pricier subscription models than the university feels it can pay for. For instance, Mr. Stern ran the numbers and concluded that the library should not subsidize the Public Library of Science, an open-access science-publishing project that sustains its journals by charging authors (or their employers) $1,300 per article; it offers institutional memberships that reduce those fees. "We strongly support the idea of open access," Mr. Stern says. "We just have a problem with that particular business model."
"When we explain the financials" to authors, he says, "they understand it's not a matter of the money, it's a matter of the long-term viability. Many libraries don't do the analysis and just pay the bill. I'm here to do the analysis."
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 55, Issue 13, Page A8
