Good planning and agile adjustments prevent car crashes, so I wouldn’t worry too much about a serious crash! As for a wrong turn here and there, or a path worth exploring but that ultimately leads to a dead end, this is expected and encouraged in innovative environments, so again I wouldn’t worry.

Of course, at the end of the day, I would take responsibility for directions that I have given, as we all would I think. I do strive toward giving direction that is mostly facilitative and supportive in nature. I don’t expect professional colleagues to simply follow direction, but to seek and consider input when needed, think about possibilities, etc.

Blog usage is tracked by NMG and the records are kept in LMM Month Reports with a range of indicators namely Visitors, Visits, Visits via Singapore domain, Time on site, Average time, Page Views and Pages/Visits. I did not actively track or check the usage after implementing collaborative blogging with fellow Science Librarians.

Collaborative blogging was implemented in April 2014. I tried comparing the visitors figures this year with those last year. The figures are Feb 2013 (138); Mar 2013 (286); Apr 2013 (221); May 2013 (508). For 2014, the figures are Feb 2014 (441); Mar 2014 (531); Apr 2014 (368); May 2014 (396). If we compare month to month, there seems to be a drop, however, if we compare with the same period last year, there are both higher and lower visitorship. I therefore cannot draw any conclusion from the statistics collected.

Overall, collaborative blogging is a way for Science Librarians to manage new/additional tasks such as OA Blitz, faculty survey while still maintaining some presence in social media. We are on the whole spending less time blogging so logically we cannot expect higher visitorship because we are indeed posting fewer posts/stories.

I think a small road show or promotion with clear target users would be helpful. For example, a small promotion booth outside a NTU hosted conference.

The Library collects FYPs and adds into our collection in DR-NTU. Doing this display is to promote the use of our collection, just like why we do book displays.

This FYP display can be said as a special service for the next batches of FYP students. At the same time, we also remind these current FYP students that us librarians are available to provide research assistance, etc.

Doing this allows us to build and maintain a working relationship with school administrators, such as the Admin staff, the FYP Supervisors, the Chair of Undergraduate Studies, and the Communications Manager.

Personally, for me, it’s an opportunity for professional development – a chance to curate an exhibition beyond a listing of all their projects. It’s a chance to get to know what students are up to, what they are interested in, in short, to better know our users.

The school is welcome to do it if they want to commit the time and effort to do so. From CMIL’s point-of-view, we will be happy to play the supporting role if the school wants to take the lead role.

Phoebe started this project in 2009, and the school has been appreciative of our initiative and effort each time.

The video plays a song called “Happy” I wanted tell you the things which made me happy rather than focusing on work achievements. Although the video seems like a short effortless video, there was alot of hard work put into making the video. As with many things done by LPD, there is alot of hard work and months of work put in, but what people see is that 1 hour of the event. The “S” are the work which people don’t see. The video is illustrative, not literal.

There is no new process. The CMIL and LPD case was illustrative how we jointly came up with a solution which seems to be more efficient. We are always happy to explore new ways of working but essentially the process is the same; LPD is a central support service.

Here you go!

http://www.hss.ntu.edu.sg/Documents/Artifacts and Ideas_A Student Exhibit.pdf

This link is featured on the main HSS page – http://www.hss.ntu.edu.sg/Pages/Home.aspx.

The planning started around three months before the event. It took quite a while because we had several different groups involved and rather a lot of objectives! We invited 6 keynote speakers, the student drama group Epiphany and Prof Koh Tai Ann to participate as well as inviting the school in general to share their works in an open mike session.

The components to the event were:

• A multi-media display (created by Lena Sam) and poster promoting the Singapore lit biblio
• Six key note speakers to liaise with
• Registration for open mike session for students / faculty to share their writings
• Window display made up of giant posters of the speakers and their works, and an exhibition of contemporary Singapore literature
• An exhibition of works of poetry from the English division creative writing class, our SA mounted the poems and created a display in our meeting room
• Food and drinks.
• Publicity posters.

As the event planning went on at the same time as we completed work on the bibliography, one of the biggest obstacles was getting the biblio ready for the launch. There were technical difficulties and a lot of inputting to do for the biblio at a time when SAs were in short supply as they had work deadlines. We also needed a lot of design work for the window exhibition and creative works display.

The title of my brief talk was “Linking academic rigour with industry relevance”. It discusses the ongoing debate on rigour vs relevance and basic vs applied research amongst academics and practitioners and the proposition for use-inspired basic research based on Pasteur’s Quadrant. It concluded with a look at publishing opportunities for researchers and academics to reach to the wider audience.

The Discovery Collection is a unique collection, as compared to the other subject libraries collection, as it does not contain materials that serve the specific teaching or course needs of any individual school. The Discovery Collection is a general collection supporting the broad, multidisciplinary learning goals of the University community. The collection will be made up of materials that cover an array of topics from within the NTU curriculum and beyond. This is to support lifelong learning by fostering independent and critical thinking, as well as to discover and develop one’s own interests and values. The collection should evoke a sense of curiosity in students, as well as supporting the philosophy behind NTU Education – one of learning and building communication skills, character, civic mindedness, creativity and competence. Most importantly the collection should attract the students’ to explore subjects beyond their disciplines to get a well-round education which will prepare them for the challenges in out diverse and globalized world.

Probably not, because I’m not a big fan of flash mobs.

We (Karryl and I) got a lot of help from other Librarians taking charge of the different “things”. So the time commitment is about 2-3 hours per week where 1 to 1 1/2 hours is for the regular Saturday morning online convo session and the 1/2 to 1 hour on editing the invited Librarian’s postings to make sure there is a good balance of examples from both Singapore and Philippines. This is a shared responsibilities between myself and Karryl.

We do not have the statistics on how many users come to our e-books via Google but the general feeling is that many users, especially undergradute students, use Google as first point of search.

All items in our LMS for which we update holdings in WorldCat will be retrieved in Google search. Google indexes the library holdings in WorldCat and so it depends on how and when the indexing is done.

All NTU staff and users have access to both edveNTUre (old system) and NTULearn (new system) using NTU network account. However, in order to add ‘Library Resources’ tab for a course in NTULearn, subject librarians will need to seek permission from the faculty, it could be verbally or via email.

If faculty are interested in having a ‘Library Resources’ tab in NTULearn, subject librarians can send the content (in plain text) with course details to Mr Chia Yew Boon and he will assist you in adding the tab.

Here are some screenshot:

Will be happy to do so!
Make sure you have a Google account first, so we can join the Hangout created.

Using the Library Data Generator, it takes about 20 minutes per user upload.

• 5 min to retrieve new staff records (ASD)
• 5 min to upload dataset into Sirsi Server (LTG)
• 10 min to populate user records in Sirsi Server (ASD)

Yes.

Yes, we think so. So far nobody has complained about our monthly newsletter.

In addition, we have faculty replying to us regarding some questions about either our postings or the newsletter reminded them about something they wanted to ask the library.

Those faculty who are around in the office agreed to my request to speak with them regarding Reaxys. Though some of them looked surprised at first, they were quick to warm up to me and shared their views on Reaxys with me.

The student or staff from the Chinese Division is in charge of recording. After that, they will send us a copy. So far, the editing is done by us.

According to the Ranking of Institutional Repositories, DR-NTU is ranked 319.

This Ranking is managed by the Cybermetrics Lab (Spain) and they consider the following indicators in deriving the rank :

1. size : number of web pages extracted from google
2. visibility : The total number of external links received (backlinks) by the number of referring domains for such links obtained from specific resources
3. rich files : pdfs etc
4. scholar : using Google scholar they calculate the normalised number of papers between 2007 and 2011.

In May 2012 we were ranked 398.

Thanks for the question.

We are not copyright lawyers and hence I don’t see ourselves “handling copyright issues” if the colleague who is asking this question is referring to disputes here. However, if “issues” here refers to questions, then yes, the copyright librarian in SCG would be glad to help. It is true that not having a law background would make it challenging at times. However, in this current tight manpower situation when it is almost impossible to get replacement headcount, it would be even more inconceivable to engage librarians with law background. In NTU, there is a Legal and Secretariat Office. We have been consulting the experts there and are likely to continue to leverage on their expertise. We are also continuously building our knowledge and expertise as we work on questions that we receive from colleagues, learning designers and faculty. We also learn through e-learning, reading, environmental scanning of best practices.

According to Library Copyright Alliance,
“Copyright and related intellectual property laws have important and substantial effects on the nature and extent of information services libraries provide to their users.”

Libraries have been and still are working closely with publishers on licensing matters. Educating our users about copyright would be a natural extension of this service. This is even more essential in today’s digital world where online materials are heavily consulted and used. These materials could be copyrighted, in the public domain, creative commons licensed or orphaned works. Including topics like fair use, public domain, permissions and licenses in information literacy programs would be an apt move. Copyright is also about ethics. Librarians have been educating users about the importance of citation and citation styles in information literacy classes. Raising awareness about legal requirement to make attributions especially for certain types of licenses would be valuable too.

It is true that some universities have formal expertise infrastructures like copyright offices or copyright lawyers. Even though NTU may not have such similar system in place (yet?), this should not limit how librarians would want to advance in our services to meet the current and future needs of students and researchers in the scholarly world. I would say that this is so even during manpower crunch times.

As Hobbes (2010) states, “copyright confusion affects the spread of innovative instructional practices, limits access to high-quality teaching materials, and perpetuates misinformation”. The Library’s mission is to enable staff and students in NTU to engage optimally with the every changing information environment in order to succeed in their research, learning and teaching goals. Our copyright literacy aspirations for NTU would be in good alignment with the Library’s mission.