Sunday 15 June 2008

Elsevier Library Connect Newsletter: Vol.6, no. 2, 2008

This "Library Connect" issue explores how libraries and publishers are seeking to understand and serve upcoming generations — in particular Millennials, the generation born from about 1979 to 1994. This generation includes Net natives — people who’ve always known the digital world and embrace its latest offerings.
Features
- Commons, chat and collaboration: How we’re connecting with Millennials at Murdoch University Library
- The future of the undergraduate library: Asking questions with too many answers and too many opportunities
- Millennial disconnects with publishers and libraries
- Undergrads’ research habits, motivators and attitudes:What studies tell us:

The 2006 study revealed key findings:
1: Today’s undergrads are achievement-oriented
- Of students interviewed, only 40% proactively conducted course-related research, but 100% engaged in online study daily or a few times per week.
- “The mean frequency was 4 or 5 times per week and the mean duration was 1.5 hours per search session, implying about 6.7 hours per week spent searching [for course-related information].”
2: Today’s undergrads are selective and like to control their time
- 100% of students interviewed in 2006 used Google and listed it in their top three starting points. Recent research (CIBER, 2008) commissioned by the British Library and JISC states that search engines have become the primary brand Millennials associate with the Internet and are ubiquitously used by this generation.
- But all students interviewed by Elsevier also used their university library websites or catalogs, and they didn’t feel overly positive towards Google.
3: Today’s undergrads are practical
When asked what constitutes a good source of information, students interviewed in 2006 gave the following answers, listed by popularity:
> Recommended by friends
> Its reputation
> Prior personal experience
> Ease of use
> Provides links to other reliable sources

4: Today’s undergrads spend time in libraries
- Regarding their use of the university library, 100% of 2006 interviewees reported visiting the library and 80% reported doing so more than once a week. The majority reported consulting librarians but “only to retrieve books or for inter library loans” and did not consider them a source of recommendations for information sources
5: Today's undergrads are social but prefer to do research at home
Of students interviewed in 2006, 60% preferred to do research from home. When asked to rank their reasons for being on campus, after “to attend a seminar or lecture and studying for exams,” the second and third most popular reasons given were socializing with friends and playing sports.
In conclusion, the research illustrated that today’s undergrads may exhibit a different persona than preceding generations, yet are displaying rather traditional information-seeking behavior. Just as social applications like Facebook don’t make people genuinely more social, the availability of tools such as Google doesn't make today’s undergrads more adept researchers or equip them to skip the very real and challenging work required to earn a degree.
More interesting articles:
* How we're moving to a primarily digital library
* How we’re redesigning academic libraries to keep them as the center of campus
* How we're transforming our library spaces and mindset
* Librarians Speak Up:How is your library innovating to support Millennials?
* Looking to help researchers stay connected?
Try TopCited (
www.topcited.com) and 2collab (www.2collab.com)
* Q: Why does Elsevier request transfer of copyright?

If you have missed Elsevier "Library Connect" previous issues got to:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/librariansinfo.librarians/lc_home

Sunday 8 June 2008

What's new @ JSTOR

The latest (4th June, 2008) from JSTOR Publishers:
* The first journal to be released on the new JSTOR platform is available now, The Willson Bulletin, Life Sciences Collection; Release content: Vol.1-116, 1889-2004 (full-text through the UJ Databases)
* Platform updates during the week of 9th June:
- The "Page of First Match" will be restored. Selecting this option will once again take users to the first page upon which a search term appears, rather than the first page of the article.
- The ability to jump to search term locations by page will be restored. Users will see the "Your search term occurs on ..." indicator at the top of each article page.
- Tumbnail images on the "Images in JSTOR" tab will be restored.
- An error that caused dificulties with the Adobe Reader Find and Search functionality in downloaded PDFs will be corrected.
- Several bugs with searching Author names, Phrase searching, Wildcard searching, and Fuzzy searching will be corrected.
* Future updates:
- PDFs with OCR errors: Approximately 5-10% of PDF versions of articles in the JSTOR archives are currently missing supporting OCR coordinates and await reprocessing on the new platform.
- Terms & Conditions pop-up boxes
- EZPoxy Reminder

Information Resources: Options and Opportunities for end-user

Bianca Saporiti, Ovid's Regional Sales Manager was invited to the UJ Library to present a talk on "Information Resources: Options and Opportunities Available for the End-user Today". Librarians and lecturers from the UJ Humanities Departments were present on Friday, 6th of June.
What a better way to start a presentation if not to look back at where the Universities has started:
* Kant, the German 18th century philosopher who established the tradition of critical analysis, influenced thought so extensively that he is regarded as the founder of the University of Reason. Critical thought - consists of mental processes of discernment, analysis and evaluation
* Humboldt and the German Idealists gave us the modern university, replacing the University of Reason with the University of Culture – an institution whose purpose was jointly teaching and intense research. Culture meaning the patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance. The purpose of the University of Culture was to form ‘citizens’, provide them with national self-knowledge, i.e. national culture.
* Internationally the University of Culture has given way to the University of Excellence – with each of its various parts functioning excellently and all divisions of the university being asked to demonstrate their excellence. Excellence is demonstrated by ratings or rankings which are overseen by university management. The University of Excellence is connected with professionalisation –the professional is judged by his/her peers. The purpose of the University of Excellence is to provide ‘cultural literacy’, common information to its students.
Over the past two decades global culture and society has moved from the Gutenberg galaxy – read print - into the world of cyberspace. Academia is now caught up in the fast-changing and dynamic world where e-information and e-learning is altering and evolving not only the role of the university, but its professionals/professors and how they impart knowledge to the students.
Most university students, aka the users - don’t care where their information comes from as long as it is useful and easy to get to. The appeal of the open web is its simple, integrated ‘one search’ solution. Users have increasingly become ‘googlized’ in their pursuit of easy and ‘good enough’ information rather than searching out traditional and authoritative references as suggested and/or recommended by instructors/professors.
The primary mission of an academic library is the provision of content for research and teaching. Academic libraries make resource decisions with an eye to optimizing access to content that is relevant to the curricula of their particular institutions thus, aiding and abetting the core efforts of the faculty to educate. The introduction of e-resources in the mainstream of the learning culture in universities has exposed end-users to more sources of information than ever before.
The information resources and tools the Academic Libraries provide to their users are :
- Library catalogue, OPAC
- Print books and e-books
- Print journals and e-journals
- Abstract & Index Databases, e-only access
- Full text Databases – e-only
- Open Access full text – both e-books and e-journals
- Course reserve packs
- Federated search engines for single access point to all e-information
Some points of discussion were:
* Researchers have developed an intense demand for published information.
* There is too much information for faculty and researchers to chose from.
* Demand for information has become more urgent – younger generation of researchers reared and nurtured by the Internet.
* The scale of international, multidisciplinary research dictates greater cooperation amongst researchers, the result of which is a greater exchange of ideas, and published papers.
* Fragmentation in disciplines has resulted in an increase of interest in specialised sub-discipline monograms.
What we had to say?
From the discussion it came out that students need to be trained on the importance of the library and the sources of information which are made available to them; The Library need to adapt and change to the needs of its users; The Library need to teach students how to evaluate information from the Internet and how to find through the Library peer-review sources. The Faculties needs also be introduced to the latest developments in the library and its resources. Collaboration between Faculty and Library should be a common practice.
P.S. Thank to Ronel Smit for organising this interesting presentation.

Institutional Repositories: The way forward for Libraries?

At the SAOUG conference, there were number of papers on Institutional Repositories (IR). In post dated 6th of June I have some information on IR papers. I have found some additional information "googling" - links to interesting articles and presentations, upcoming workshop on IR, direct links to South African repositories, etc. It is time for us to learn more as it is a reality at UJ and we all will be involved one way or another.

USEFUL LINKS TO INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES @:
* University of Johannesburg
- UJ Electronic Thesis and Dissertations Database:
http://etd.rau.ac.za/
- UJ Institutional Repositories:
http://ujdigispace.uj.ac.za/
* South Africa

Friday 6 June 2008

SAOUG: Day 2, 5th June 2008

The SAOUG Conference Day 2, 5th June.
Yet another day of interesting presentations from fellow librarians and of course, the Keynote speaker Geoff Hoy from TENET. How librarians view the IT Techies and how they view us - the librarians. Make you think of the stereotypes we all fall victims to. Times change, so we are. Some of us become 2.0 librarians and use these tools to better the services in the library and get closer to the so called "google generation". But the librarians need to start working in partnership with their IT departments, as there are many pitfalls for which we are not trained.
Number of presenters talked about the Open Source Institutional Repositories. World-wide the paradigm is to make research collections available online and improving the access to information, which is of great value for research. Since the facilitation of access to information is a primary function of academic or research libraries, they can take the initiative to implement a digital research repository in order to manage, organise, preserve, distribute and offer access to research conducted by the members of the institution. If an institution supports open access, wants to increase the usage and visibility of research conducted at that institution and want to preserve all research output digitally, an institutional repository (IR) is the answer.
In SA there are currently 12 repositories. How to get started with creating IR?
- Analise the need of your organization (survey-questionnaire; presentations to researchers)
- Compile a plan & proposal
- Evaluate various IR software (DSpace, etc.)
- Develop, Design & Install your repository (management approval)
- Test your repository
- Market and promote your repository
- Develop policies and procedures (preservation, copyright, etc.)
- Sell the idea to the academics ( demonstrations; how easy is to submit material to repository)
- Provide training
- Register your repository
- Communicate, collaborate & share with others; start populating; make it more visible.
Other interesting development comes from CSIR. They are busy building a "Knowledge commons" suite of physical and virtual knowledge spaces. This spaces will be conductive to learning and knowledge transfer through planned sharing - which will enable better practices within the CSIR. What is knowledge commons - tacit knowledge sharing, person-to-person contact, collaboration across organisation boundaries.
A new initiative at this conference was "speed vending". All delegates were divided in groups and allocated to different vendors for a specify time, then the groups moved to the next vendor. The vendors were given exposure and opportunity to market their products and services to a large number of delegates.
At the afternoon session some of the points discussed were:
- E-scholarship strategy (web portals, digitised collections and self-generated e-publications); UPSpace
- Digital scholarship and the role of the University library - The influence of modern information technology in education and research have resulted in digital or e-scholarship. The key focus areas at UP library are: e-Research; e-Learning; e-Resources; Open Scholarship; Digitisation; Web/Library 2.0; Repositories and the Library Web.
- African Journals OnLine (AJOL). Africa needs access to its own scholarly publications, and must also contribute to the international academic community. Primary due to difficulties accessing them, African published research papers have been under-utilised, under-valued and under-cited in the International and African research arenas. The Higher Education needs to provide both the "Y" generation and "non-computer literate" with access to information.
At the closing of the SAOUG Conference, the Chair Dr. Glenda Myers provided a summary of the conference papers and thanked all participating vendors, delegates and the committee for their help to make a success of this conference. Future workshops and groups will reflect the needs specified by the delegates at the "round table topic discussions" held on 4th June.
We have been entertain and inspired at the end by Christof Appel, Fewture Consulting.
Thank you SAOUG, SLIS & OSALL for the interesting and well organised conference. We learned a few new tips; We learned that we are not far from the mark in providing services to clients; We learned that if you can do it we can do it to; we learned that change can be good; We all interacted and share experiences and thoughts, made new friends and connections.

Thursday 5 June 2008

SAOUG: UJ staff

Geoff Hoy & members of UJ Library
Thuli and Zanele
Front: A. Liebenberg
Behind: Ebsco representatives
Sophie, Zelda and Henrietta
Retha and Lizette

Wednesday 4 June 2008

SAOUG: Meet some of the vendors

This year, 28 vendors and publishers are represented at the SAOUG. The delegates have an opportunity to talk and learn about new developments and implementations.
Above: Nature Publihing
Below: Market IQ

Colleen Mills from Ebsco Publishing

Petro van der Berg from Ebsco, Christa Forie from SA Online Information Services & Pavlinka Kovatcheva from University of Johannesburg

SAOUG: Day 1, 4th of June 2008




Today, 4th of June is the 1st SAOUG Conference day.
The highlights of the day were:

Keynote speaker: Derek Law, University of Strathclyde talked about "Changing Users: Have they or Should we?". The Librarians need to build systems around users behaviour, especially power browsing. The "google generation" expect libraries to change and embrace the technological challenges. The options for libraries are:
- Building e-Research Collections and contributing to the Virtual Research environment;
- Managing Institutional Repositories
- Provide value added content
- Trainings, etc.

The "Teleporting from Boring to Cool" presentation from University of Pretoria, provided the innovative way in which the librarians reached to their users by creating virtual world of "avatars" on Second Life; Creating Facebook profiles, etc. They are trying to reach to their users on all possible levels.
the overall discussions today were on trainings in the libraries - "Training end-users in the Mining industry","The training monster" - WITS Health Library experience; the "Changing roles of the libraries and librarians with emphasis on the technology".
Lunch time we had a "Round table discussion lunches" on various topics - Library 2.0, End user training, Institutional Repositories, Life after Graduation, Mentoring, etc. People with similar interest discussed what is the way forward and the need for SAOUG to facilitate future workshops or discussions groups.
Afternoon sessions were on topics such as: Alerting & Reference services; How do you make a computer think like a human?; Legal practice bill and its impact on the profession and SA Legal Information Institute.
We had such an exiting day and looking forward the next.

Tuesday 3 June 2008

SAOUG events in pictures

Delegates at the SAOUG during tea break

Workshop in progress

Dr. Glenda Myers, WITS, Prof. Derek Law, University of Strathclyde &
Geoff Hoy from TENET


Pavlinka Kovatcheva, University of Johannesburg & Susan Scheepers, University of Pretoria - the two bloggers

Welcome at the SAOUG/ SLIS/ OSALL Conference




Welcome to the Ninth Southern African Online User Group Conference, 3-5 June 2008, CSIR, Pretoria.


Today, 3rd of June is the Pre-Conference day.

Workshop A: Evidence-based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP) has just finished. Dr. Glenda Myers, from WITS Health Sciences Library presented a very interesting and interactive session on: EBLIP- "What, Why, How, Who & Where".
What is the Evidence-Based Librarianship? The A. Booth definition was accepted as the one that represent the best emphasis on users: 'Evidence-based information practice is an approach that promotes the collection, interpretation and integration of valid, important and applicable user-reported, librarian observed, and research-derived evidence. The best available evidence, moderated by user needs and preferences, is applied to improve the quality of professional judgements". The focus is on the USER. We should remember that the same evidence can be used differently depending on circumstances and the user population.
Why should librarians care about the Evidence-Based Practice? We care, because how do we know that we are right?
Are the librarians still relevant to the Google generation? The librarians need to adapt and learn new skills: Leadership competencies, Technological competencies, Managerial Competencies and Research competencies; to have knowledge of Information resources and Information access.
The Evidence-Based Practice process involve: define problem (formulate question), find evidence, appraise evidence, apply results of appraisal, evaluate change and redefine problem.
We completed the workshop with reading two different research articles and evaluating them.
To follow the progress of the Conference go to SAOUG blog: http://saougnews.blogspot.com/
I'm off to the next workshop. Will keep you posted.