Finding Open Access Articles – Tools & Tips
This guide is meant to help individuals, of any background, search more easily for open access articles.[Read More]
“Can’t you just say Yes?” Answering Copyright Questions About Fair Use for Faculty Colleagues
More frequently academic librarians are being sought-out by faculty for assistance in answering copyright questions, and many of these questions are about how the fair use exception found in Section 107 of US copyright law can be utilized when making copies of works for teaching and research purposes. Often times faculty are looking for a quick “yes” or “no” answer to their question “Is this a fair use?” but answering copyright questions are rarely that simple! In this 60-minute webinar we will explore how academic librarians can guide faculty through fair use determinations, empower them to become more confident in making fair use determinations on their own, and walk the fine line between sharing information and giving legal advice. Quality resources that can be used by librarians and faculty to learn more about fair use and US copyright law will also be covered. Read More
Big data, little data, or no data? Scholarship and stewardship to build the UC digital library
The University of California has pioneered digital library services for the last four decades, since the early days of Melvyl and the Division of Library Automation. These services now encompass bibliographic records, digital content, research data, and more. Data stewardship reflects the array of digital library challenges in both theory and practice. While the popularity of “big data” reflects the growth of data-intensive research, “little data” remains the norm in those many fields where evidence is scarce and labor-intensive to acquire. Until recently, data was considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, data have become valuable products to be captured, shared, reused, and stewarded for the long term. They also have become contentious intellectual property to be protected. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely provides the public investment necessary to sustain access. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. Until the larger questions of knowledge infrastructures and stewardship are addressed by research communities, “no data” may become the norm for many fields. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data and implications for policy and practice, drawn from the presenter’s recent book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015). Read More
Scaling Research Data Management Services Along the Maturity Spectrum: Three Institutional Perspectives
Research data services promise to advance many academic libraries’ strategic goals of becoming partners in the research process and integrating library services with modern research workflows. Academic librarians are well positioned to make an impact in this space due to their expertise in managing, curating, and preserving digital information, and a history of engaging with scholarly communications writ large. Some academic libraries have quickly developed infrastructure and support for every activity ranging from data storage and curation to project management and collaboration, while others are just beginning to think about addressing the data needs of their researchers. Regardless of which end of the spectrum they identify with, libraries are still seeking to understand the research landscape and define their role in the process. This article seeks to blend both a general perspective regarding these issues with actual case studies derived from three institutions, University of Cincinnati, Oklahoma State University, and Florida State University, all of which are at different levels of implementation, maturity, and campus involvement. Read More
Breakout Session: How Networking on Campus Can Increase Copyright Education. Presented by Rebel Cummings-Sauls, Director of Center for the Advancement of the Digital Scholarship (CADS), Kansas State University Library and Rachel Miles, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Kansas State University Library.
As online academic interactions continue to become more complex in the digital age, interaction with online copyrighted content inevitably increases. As a result, university faculty, researchers, students, and staff have a responsibility to understand how to legally reuse content to avoid copyright infringement incidents. However, campus community members are often unaware of how copyright pertains to their online activities and the potential risks involved in their misuse. The session presented by librarians Rachel Miles and Rebel Cummings-Sauls discussed their networking and collaboration efforts on campus to extend copyright education to a wider community at Kansas State University, including outreach, education, and consultation from the Center for the Advancement of the Digital Scholarship (CADS). During the session, a hands-on practice was also provided for audiences to identify the common partners on campus and to create partner webs for their own institutions. Read More
Researchers’ participation in and motivations for engaging with research information management systems
This article examined how researchers participated in research information management systems (RIMSs), their motivations for participation, and their priorities for those motivations. Profile maintenance, question-answering, and endorsement activities were used to define three cumulatively increasing levels of participation: Readers, Record Managers, and Community Members. Junior researchers were more engaged in RIMSs than were senior researchers. Postdocs had significantly higher odds of endorsing other researchers for skills and being categorized as Community Members than did full and associate professors. Assistant professors were significantly more likely to be Record Managers than were members of any other seniority categories. Finally, researchers from the life sciences showed a significantly higher propensity for being Community Members than Readers and Record Managers when compared with researchers from engineering and the physical sciences, respectively. Read More
Reimagining the Digital Monograph – Design Thinking to Build New Tools for Researchers
Scholarly books are increasingly available in digital form, but the online interfaces for using these books often allow only for the browsing of portable document format (PDF) files. JSTOR Labs, an experimental product development group within the not-for-profit digital library JSTOR, undertook an ideation and design process to develop new and different ways of showing scholarly books online, with the goal that this new viewing interface be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement for any scholarly book that is already available in PDF form. This paper documents that design process, including the recommendations of a working group of scholars, publishers, and librarians convened by JSTOR Labs and the Columbia University Libraries in October 2016. The prototype monograph viewer developed through this process—called “Topicgraph”—is described herein and is freely available online at https://labs.jstor.org/topicgraph. Read More
Liaisons as Sales Force: Using Sales Techniques to Engage Academic Library Users
Liaison librarians are assuming a wide variety of new roles that serve their institutions’ students, staff, and faculty. An essential foundation of these new roles is the ability to engage with the liaison’s user community. These engagement skills are not necessarily natural or innate, nor are they skills that most liaison librarians have had an opportunity to learn and develop. This article adapts a practical selling framework for the liaison context with examples that demonstrate how this framework can lead to improved communication, engagement, and problem-solving with liaison user communities. Read More
What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools
Workplaces have adopted internal social tools—think stand-alone technologies such as Slack, Yammer, and Chatter, or embedded applications such as Microsoft Teams and JIRA—at a staggering rate. In an ambitious study of 4,200 companies, conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, 72% reported using them to facilitate employee communication… Read More
Path analysis of the relationship between visibility and citation: the mediating roles of save, discussion, and recommendation metrics
This study aimed to assess the mediating role of save, discussion, and recommendation measures in the relationship between visibility and citation in biomedical articles in 2009–2013. Path analysis method was used to assess the causal relationships between the variables in this descriptive correlational study. Systematic and random stratified methods were employed for sampling. Read More