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

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.

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.

Wiley-Blackwell Library Newsletter: May 2008

Keep abreast with the latest Wiley-Blackwell News (May 2008)

* Latest News in Select Subject Areas featuring:

Life Science Medicine & Health Environmental SciencePsychiatry Business & Economics Literature

* View New Titles Online From Wiley-Blackwell

- Journals - First issues of new journals now online

- Journal Backfiles - Blackwell backfiles reach 5.3 million pages

- Online Books - Spotlight on Life Science and Earth Science

- Reference Works - New works and sample content
* Platform Update - July 1, 2008.
All journal content on Blackwell Synergy merges into Wiley InterScience:

As of July 1, 2008, all Blackwell journal content—including all full-text HTML and PDF versions of articles from current issues, backfiles, and issues published online before print—will be incorporated into Wiley InterScience.
Over the weekend of June 28th and 29th, 2008, there will be a period when both Blackwell Synergy and Wiley InterScience will be unavailable while we transition and re-index data.

After July 1, 2008, Blackwell Synergy will no longer be available online.

Some important things to remember:
Subscriptions for Blackwell journals on Synergy will migrate to Wiley InterScience, with the terms of all existing licenses honored

- These access options will continue to function seamlessly:

• IP authentication

• Athens authentication

• Username and password access
- These access options will not be supported by Wiley InterScience in 2008 (support for these is in development for 2009):

• Shibboleth

• Third-party federated access management systems
From August 2008 onwards, usage data for Blackwell journals will be available on Wiley InterScience, presented in a separate report but in the same format as that offered for Wiley journals. For complete details, go to: interscience.wiley.com/transition
The Newsletter is AVAILABLE ONLINE AT: www.wiley.com/go/wiley-blackwell/librarynews

* Conference Schedule - For the Americas, Europe, and Asia

Get started with Social Networking in your Library

"Five Weeks to a Social Library" is the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. It was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software.
I have found this post through the Social Networking Librarian blog.

clipped from www.sociallibraries.com About Five Weeks to a Social Library Submitted by meredithfarkas on Sat, 2006-09-30 16:32. About the Course From the administrators Five Weeks to a Social Library is the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. It was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software.

OvidSP New Interface: Now @ UJ

Finally we have the new Ovid/SilverPlatter (OvidSP) interface.
The following Bibliographic databases are available on OvidSP platform:
- Analytical Abstracts (1 user at the time), Coverage: 1980 - 2008
- Parasitology (1 user at the time), Coverage: 1973 - 2008

- The Philosopher's Index, Coverage: 1940 to June 2007

- Wison Index to Legal Periodicals, Coverage: 1983 - 2008

- Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, Coverage: 1985 - 2008
Access is available through the UJ Library Databases

Interface characteristics:

* Basic Search:
OvidSP's Basic Search is a natural language search. Enter your search terms and click the Search button. OvidSP posts results to your search history. In addition, OvidSP's Basic Search tab makes it easy for you to apply limit criteria to your searches.

* Advanced Search:

When you select the Advanced Ovid Search tab, keyword searching is the default search type of the command line. The Advanced Ovid Search tab offers these search types: Keyword Author Title Journal

* Find Citation:
OvidSP's Find Citation tab lets you submit fielded data to retrieve specific journal article citations.
* Search Fields:
From the Search Fields tab, you can view all indexed fields of a database. You can also browse for other fields to search in the index display. OvidSP displays the fielded index with the term you entered.

* Search Tools:
OvidSP provides tools that let you discover more about the relationship between terms and subjects within the context of the database in which you are searching.
* Search History
Under each search option, there is an Search History tab. It keeps you aware of all searches you have done during that session.
* Saved Searches/Alerts
You need to create your personal account
* Help Options:
You have three options to learn more about the databases:
- Help (if you are, for example on the Basic Search screen and have problem, click on Help for instructions)
- Database Field Guide - provide information on the database you currently search
- Display Knowledge - a list of 347 available answers (RSS feed programs compatible with OvidSP; Is there a way to enter multiple email addresses for eTOC email alerts?; Setting up eTOCs for other users, etc.)

* Log off - don't forget to "log off" each time you finish your search. Keep in mind that we have an 1 users licence.

Open Source PDF Creator

PDF Creator: Instead of paying for a program that can generate PDF files: use this convenient tool instead. It easily creates PDFs from any Windows program ( Power Points, Publisher, Word, etc.)
I have found this Open Source PDF Creator on Monday and decided to download it. I always have the need to convert documents in PDF and every time I run to our IT for assistance. But, now I can do it myself and it is very convenient to have it.
To download starts with the following steps:
* Click on the "green" Download PDF Creator
* Scroll down the page and Click on: Download (PDF Creator - Dec 2007 release)
* Then select the file to download from the Table
Once downloaded the PDF Creator will appear as a PRINT option. Once you click on PRINT (the original document), select "PDF Creator" option to convert the document in PDF. It will ask you to save the new document and then the conversion will start. It tooks seconds for the document to be converted. It is very easily done and will save you a lot of memory space, if your document is originally big.
I hope this will be a good solution to those who do not have PDF option on their computers.

Lumifi Research Widget

Search Lumifi on any research topic

Open Source Software in Education

Interesting article on Open Source Software in Education was introduced in "iLibrarian" blog (7/5/08)

Shaheen E. Lakhan and Kavita Jhunjhunwala write about open source software in online learning for the April-June 2008 issue of Educause Quarterly. They discuss the history of open source, its implementations in the educational sector including virtual universities and education portals, and its impact on learning.

8 Top Alternative Search Engines

"iLibrarian" blog posted on 7th of May information on 8 alternative Search Engine:

Looking to go beyond Google for Web search? If so, you’ll want to check out these eight search engines listed by Web Worker Daily as viable alternatives to the search heavyweight including interfaces which allow you to search web forums, video, images, and people. Here are their suggestions:
* Addict-o-matic
* Redzee
* Omgili
* Dogpile
* Truveo
* Blinkx
* QnA search
* ZabaSearch

RSS Awareness Day

1st of May has been named RSS Awareness Day. A good initiative, as many people still don't know "What is RSS" and "How to use the RSS feeds" to keep up with the latest information, such as news feeds, journals' table of content, newsletters feeds, websites of interest, etc.
What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.The main benefit of RSS is that it enables people to stay connected with their favorite websites without having to visit them. Once you subscribe to a particular RSS feed, you will automatically receive updates from the website that publishes the feed, whenever they release new content.
To read more CLICK on the TITLE of this post.

iLibrarian Blog

Have a look at the latest posts from "iLibrarian Blog". Direct link is also available under "Useful Blogs". This blog is one of my favourites, as it provides very useful tips to new and exciting developments over the web.

* 10 Gmail Tips and Time-Savers

* State of America’s Libraries 2008 The ALA has published the 2008 State of America’s Libraries report. (Click on Academic Libraries)

* Seven Ways to Get the Most from Your RSS Reader

* Why do people participate in social applications?

* CIL2008 Presentations
CIL 2008 presentations (Computers in Libraries conference 7-9 April )(http://www.infotoday.com/CIL2008/0

Keep an eye on Slideshare for more:
Transparency, Planning & Change: See-Through Libraries - Michael Stephens and Michael Casey
Technology Training for Library Staff: Creativity Works! - Sarah Houghton-Jan Harnessing New Data Visualization Tools - Darlene Fichter

SAOUG Conference: 3-5 June 2008

Most of you have heard that the SAOUG conference will be on 3-5 June 2008. The registration is now on. Visit http://www.saoug.org.za/ to register and view the prelimenary details of papers and workshops.

The keynote speakers are:

* Derek Law - Head of the Information Resources Directorate, University of Strathclyde.

* Geoff Hoy - Geoff has been associated with UCT libraries for many years, and is now involved with TENET, the tertiary education network which is used by all tertiary academic institutions in South Africa.

* Christof Appel - Christof has presented in the UK, USA, Dubai and South Africa. He has wowed audiences with his entertaining and thought provoking business presentations.

The following workshops will be presented on 3rd of June:

- EVIDENCE-BASED LIBRARY AND INFORMATION PRACTICE (EBLIP): The Basics: What, Why, How, Who and Where

- Practical Presentation Skills for trainers

- THE DEEP END: PLANNING A DIGITAL STRATEGY FOR YOURSELF

These are some of the papers that will be presented on 4-5th June:

- Changing Users: Have They or Should we?

- Training End Users in the Mining Industry

- The Training Monster

- Changing Roles of Libraries and Librarians with Emphasis on the Technology (Working Title)

- Getting Executive Buy-In: The Value of Technology Demonstrators

- Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater: A Case Study Regarding a News Alerting Service in the Engineering Industry

- Establishing an Online Reference Service

- Life after Graduation Day: The Reality of the Information Industry

- The Institutional Repository Toolbox: How to Successfully Implement an Institutional Repository

- Databases, Institutional Repositories (IR) and Organizational Workflows

- Establishing a Knowledge Commons at the CSIR

- African Journal OnLine: The Journey towards African Learning Translating into African Development

- Digital Scholarship and the Role of the University Library

Other interesting initiative is: ROUND TABLE DISCUSSSION BOX LUNCHES. The topics are:
- Patent Searching Support Group (Facilitator: Louise Mitchell)
- End User Training: Best Practice
- Institutional Repositories
- EBLIP (Evidence Based Library and Information Practice)
- Life after Graduation: the Gap between Theory and Practice
- Mentoring
- Library 2.0

The social event:

Wednesday evening – 4th June : 17:00 – 22:30

Barnyard, Menlyn Shopping Mall for the following show: The Musical tribute to the King – Elvis Presley. “Put on your Blue Suede Shoes, get ready to Shake Rattle and Roll because this show promises to rock both young and old in true Elvis spirit.”

As a member of the SAOUG committee, I hope you will come and have an experience of a lifetime.

UKSG Serials-eNews

Some of the topics in the UKSG Searials-eNews in the latest, 18 April 2008 Newsletter are:

UKSG Conference, 7-9 April 2008 (official webpage: http://www.uksg.org.uk/events/conference08)

Catch up with what has been going on at the UKSG 2008 conference via Serials-eNews, the UKSG website and blog. Main reports of plenaries are on the blog, available via the hyperlinks in the introductions. This issue covers the six plenary sessions, with links to reports and comment on the conference blog. You can read about one of the breakout sessions, and others will be featured in the next couple of issues.

In Plenary Session 3, three speakers covered different aspects of usage data and user behaviour. David Nicholas posed the question that we are still working as if content is king, when we should be looking at the consumer as king - their behaviour is very different depending on who they are. Access is no longer the outcome - we need to go beyond making sure that access is easy and quick, rather we should be profiling behaviours in order to find best practice and see what works and what does not. This point was picked up by Ian Bannerman in his presentation which urged caution about the current state of, and reliance on, usage statistics and his concerns about the proposed usage factor work.......Herbert van der Sompel (LANL) gave an excellent presentation on the work they are doing in the MESUR project - a systematic effort to define, validate and cross-validate a range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact by creating a semantic model of the scholarly communication process.

The focus of Plenary Session 4 was firmly on the challenges of large-scale digitisation in the third plenary.

The Plenary Session 5 addressed innovation and the challenges that confront us when technology enables new behaviours that require business models adapt to trends. Geoffrey Bilder at CrossRef highlighted the potential for the web to function as a database, linking related items such as an author on Amazon and a concept on Wikipedia. Peter Murray-Rust on the faculty at the University of Cambridge pointed out the issues inherent when publishers attempt to package data sets as if they were print journals.

Other NEWS:

* CrossRef and Plagiarism detection service

CrossRef and iParadigms, LLC are launching the CrossCheck service to which can be used to help verify the originality of scholarly content. Following the recent pilot of CrossCheck, the service is scheduled to go live in June. For more detail, read Key issue by Amy Brand, Director of Business and Product Development, CrossRef, in the March issue of Serials.

* CAB eBooks goes live

CAB International's (CABI) book collection can now be purchased digitally with the launch of CAB eBooks. By developing its own web-based portal, CABI can now provide customers with digital copies of its publications dating from 2000 to 2008. More than 140 titles in the applied life sciences are now available in the front-file collection (2005 - 2008), growing to 200 titles by the end of 2008. In addition, CAB eBooks is fully integrated with CAB Abstracts, the online bibliographic database. Each chapter is indexed and abstracted individually to ensure that specific slices of information can be easily retrieved. The e-books are available as a complete package or in six separate subject collections: agriculture; animal and veterinary sciences; environmental sciences; human health, food, and nutrition; leisure and tourism; and plant sciences.

* OCLC releases EZproxy 5.0

OCLC has released a new version of EZproxy, the software solution for serving library users remotely, that offers new features. More than 2,500 institutions in over 60 countries have purchased EZproxy software to provide libraries a solution for authenticating remote user access to licensed databases

* The Library of Congress Experience

The Library of Congress has launched a new project called the Library of Congress Experience, putting more exclusive Library of Congress content online and making material accessible in new ways, both in person and online. Touchscreen kiosks giving access to the digitised content are situated throughout the halls of the Library of Congress for visitors to use. This new content is also available online. To use the 'Interactives' online, it is necessary to download a free version of Silverlight, the Microsoft technology that enables the zooming and other exploratory activities. A companion website features the same interactive exhibitions with additional educational resources that teachers and librarians can use with young people.

Click on the TITLE to view the newsletter

Bates latest InfoTips: April 2008

I have received yesterday this April Newsletter alert from Mary Ellen Bates/Bates Information Service. This is what tips for searching she gave:

Yahoo:

"In an act of faith that Yahoo! will survive its possible absorption into The Borg, otherwise known as Microsoft, I'll mention one interesting Yahoo! search tip. If you enclose your search terms in [square brackets], you will only retrieve pages that have those words in that order. Mind you, this isn't a phrase search -- those two words may be anywhere in the page, but the first term must appear before the second. So, for example, the search [subprime crisis] will retrieve pages with "subprime mortgage crisis", "subprime lending crisis" "the subprime mortgage industry is in crisis right now" and so on. It will not retrieve "there is a crisis in subprime mortgages", however".

Conference Tagging

"I mentioned Technorati.com in my March 2008 InfoTip, but I had one of those epiphanies today and thought up another use for this blog-search tool. When bloggers attend a professional conference, they often talk about the sessions they find particularly noteworthy. In fact, they will sometimes transcribe the speaker's PowerPoint presentation along with their own thoughts. Conference organizers are now encouraging bloggers to use a standard tag to identify blog posts about the conference, so that anyone can search for blogs about that conference. What that means is, if you can identify the appropriate tag, you can search for all blogs with that conference tag, and get at least a sense of the key themes and most thought-provoking sessions. See, for example, the blog entries that were tagged with CIL2008, the agreed-upon tag for the Computers in Libraries conference"

Click on the TITLE to read more about this and the previous Bates Newsletters.

Scirus.com Updates

Scirus.com New Interface

For those of you who are still not familiar with Scirus.com - this is the Best Science & Technology Search Engine, an Elsevier product.

The Scirus development team worked closely with Elsevier's User-Centered Design Group to create a new user interface design. The clean, refreshed interface will enable you to find the precise scientific, scholarly, technical and medical data you need more quickly and easily than ever before.

One of the main aims of the re-design was to take powerful, but less frequently used features from the Scirus Advanced Search page and make them more accessible as post-search refinement options. This change will give Scirus users the power of Advanced Search, without the complexity, in a single click.

Features of the re-design include:
* Visibility: More search results are immediately visible ''above the fold'', by improving the use of screen real estate
* Intuitiveness: Highly appreciated features are moved to areas of the screen most suitable for the human eye, following accepted HCI guidelines
* Exposure: The full range of content sources is further exposed and highlighted through the use of new navigator functionality
* Ease of use: Batch selection of items for export, print or saving has been greatly simplified

Scirus Topic Pages continue to grow
Scirus Topic Pages is a freely accessible wiki-like platform where topic experts, upon invitation, create synopses of the state of research around particular topics and also recommend links to relevant reading material. The Scirus search index complements these recommendations by suggesting relevant articles and web pages based on topic-title keyword analysis.
Examples of the latest Topic Pages include:

- "Obesity and the Brain" by Dr. Angelo Del Parigi

- "Laboratory determination of Listeria monocytogenes virulence" by Dr. Dongyou Liu
After implementing the Editorial Policy for the management of the Scirus Topic Pages platform in January, the Scirus team has now finalized a Creative Commons license, which allows users to share and adapt the information on the Topic Pages freely for non-commercial purposes. Both the Editorial Policy and the licence can be viewed from links at the bottom of the Scirus Topic Pages homepage.

ScienceDirect Database News: March/April 2008

Read about the latest on ScienceDirect Database:

* New functionality added to ScienceDirect to meet researchers' needs!

New to ScienceDirect are features that make the platform more user friendly and deliver better, clearer results in fewer clicks.

Preview tabs

Researchers like to quickly evaluate articles before reading them. They will find preview tabs that provide quick access to the important article assessment components: the abstract, figures/tables and references. These tabs are on the results page, the Table of Contents page and the Article page.

Reference information

Before researchers have to scroll to the foot of articles to view reference information, which hinders reading.
Now it is possible for researchers to view reference information within the body of a paper when their cursor moves over a reference marker.

Article Toolbox

Once a researcher has evaluated and read an article, they often want to email it to their peers. A new article toolbox brings together all of the article-related functionality including "Cited By", "E-mail Article", "Save as Citation Alert", "Citation Feed", "Export Citation", Add to My Quick Links", "Add 2Collab" , etc., into one easy-to-find location. Researchers can now take further action quickly and easily with little extra effort.

New Navigation options

Looking for something specific? A new navigation pane on the left of the screen will make that easier by allowing you to refine results using four filters: “content type”; “source title”, “date” and “topics”. By enabling filtering you will be able to refine your search results without having to return to the search form.

Ratings

Researchers are interested to know how other experts rate articles they read. Due to be launched in phases over the coming months, the integration of article comments and ratings from Elsevier's social collaboration site, 2collab enables researchers to evaluate papers according to colleague-driven comments and ratings of articles right on the article page.

For more information visit the ScienceDirect Info site.

* New Major Reference Works available on ScienceDirect

New and available Reference Works visit theScienceDirect Info site.

ScinceDirect database have received a number of new functionality since 2007 and I would like to say that all of them brought an improved look and feel. ScienceDirect has been updated with the latest technological innovation to help researchers find the information quickly and successfully.

Enjoy the latest improved features. Tell us how you feel about them. Make a comment.

Elsevier: Library Connect Seminar in SA

Elsevier is delighted to announce the upcoming Library Connect Seminars in South Africa!

When: Wednesday, 29th October, 2008: Pretoria

The programme will include:

- International speakers as well as Elsevier participants to discuss issues of concern for information specialists.

- You will also hear about new developments of ScienceDirect and Scopus.

Start of programme: 10.00 am
End of programme: 17.00 pm
Audience: Library staff
The One-day participation fee including lunch and refreshments are free of charge!

We will send you the invitation with the Agenda and the registration form in order to secure your attendance at a later date. Your Elsevier team look forward very much to welcome you.