Archives des catégories : Non classé

Open Textbooks at Oregon State University: A Case Study of New Opportunities for Academic Libraries and University Presses

Statut

“INTRODUCTION. This article describes a joint open textbook publishing initiative begun in 2013 between Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries and Press and the Open Educational Resources and Emerging Technologies unit of Oregon State University’s Extended Campus.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM. This initiative combines the Open Access values and project management resources of OSU Libraries, the book production (peer review, editing, design, marketing) expertise of OSU
Press, and the technological development skills of the Open Educational Resources and Emerging Technologies unit. Authored by OSU faculty and focused across some of the University’s signature areas, the initiative seeks to establish a sustainable model for research libraries and university presses to collaborate with each other and other partners to publish open textbooks that will benefit students on both economic and educational levels. The article analyzes how open textbooks fit within the emerging library publishing movement, examines the implementation of the OSU open textbook publishing initiative, and conveys some lessons learned for other libraries to consider as they entertain the possibility of similar collaborations.

Next Steps. A description of next steps includes tracking course adoptions of the textbooks as well as establishing sustainable digital publishing platforms and business models.”

URL : Open Textbooks at Oregon State University: A Case Study of New Opportunities for Academic Libraries and University Presses

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1174

E-book Reading and its Impact on Academic Status of Students at Payame Noor University, Iran

Statut

“The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of taking advantage of electronic books on the academic progress of students at Payame Noor University, Iran. This research is of descriptive and survey methodology. The statistical population includes the students of public administration in Shiraz Payame Noor University, who are studying in the academic year 2013-2014. 142 students have been chosen by simple random sampling. Results indicated that use of electronic resources causes a meaningful difference to be created in several contexts such as academic progress, variety of learning resources, flexibility while learning, and learning effectiveness between the students of virtual and conventional programs.”

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/1170/

Access to Information and Implications for Healthy Ageing in Africa: Challenges and Strategies for Public Libraries

Statut

“The elderly people are of intrinsic value to societies. Their health is Africa’s wealth. Unfortunately, Africa has serious health burden raging from diseases, poverty ignorance that hardly support healthy ageing. Development indicators from World Health Organization and the World Bank provide glaring evidence that Africa countries are far behind other regions of the world in health conditions of the citizens. This paper discusses the benefits that accrue from having a healthy old age population. Such includes poverty reduction, stress free ageing, assisting in taking care of young ones. It examines the role of information in enhancing healthy ageing in Africa. The paper identified public libraries as very important institutions to take up the challenges of provision of adequate and timely health information for the elderly citizen in Africa. While it acknowledges the challenges public libraries in many African countries face, it also provided strategies the libraries could adopt to perform this onerous task. Several recommendations were made; namely, adequate funding of public libraries, employment of librarians with translations skills, ICT application in public libraries, among others. The paper concludes that African countries should reposition their public libraries to facilitate the provision of relevant information that would support healthy ageing.”

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/1157/

Enriching the local catalog with bibliographic data exposed online: interaction with the national catalog via web services

Statut

“Interoperability efforts represent a significant part within the fieldwork of documentary engineering. The enhancement of its catalog is one of its primary objectives. From that preoccupation came the idea of using a web service of the ABES in order to offer a functionality such as “Get more information about this author” accessible from a view on the authority record, usable during the consultation of the OPAC. This web service brings back directly pieces of information coming from IdRef, the authority database reference of the SUDOC and displays the abbreviated forms of the different records linked to a given authority, classified by relator code. The response in XML or in JSON is elaborated in order to be in compliance with the graphic charter of the ILS and to not create any disruption through the chain of information. A general problematic assumption shows the high stakes and the context in which this web service was imagined and designed. A global expertise of the general outline of the ABES network is useful when trying to understand this functionality; the collaborative structure is briefly described. The articulation between the local and the national bases is made possible with the mediation of a PHP script whose major steps are detailed. Finally, as this project is aimed at being an experiment to reach further and operate other interactions of this kind, it is also important to apprehend the perspectives for the future that such new methods of accessing information can open. The implementation of this functionality has contributed to explore and stabilize new methods of project developments, but also to question the opening of the catalog on the universe of knowledge and to its potential use as a discovery tool. It questions again the interdependence between the local catalog and the SUDOC and has the virtue to set the issues according to a user-centered design.”

URL : Enriching the local catalog with bibliographic data exposed online: interaction with the national catalog via web services

Alternative URL : http://library.ifla.org/815/

 

Can the impact of non-Western academic books be measured? An investigation of Google Books and Google Scholar for Malaysia

Statut

“Citation indicators are increasingly used in book-based disciplines to support peer review in the evaluation of authors and to gauge the prestige of publishers. However, because global citation databases seem to offer weak coverage of books outside the West, it is not clear whether the influence of non-Western books can be assessed with citations. To investigate this, citations were extracted from Google Books and Google Scholar to 1,357 arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS) books published by 5 university presses during 1961–2012 in 1 non-Western nation, Malaysia. A significant minority of the books (23% in Google Books and 37% in Google Scholar, 45% in total) had been cited, with a higher proportion cited if they were older or in English. The combination of Google Books and Google Scholar is therefore recommended, with some provisos, for non-Western countries seeking to differentiate between books with some impact and books with no impact, to identify the highly-cited works or to develop an indicator of academic publisher prestige.”

URL : http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/papers/Univ_Press_Books_preprintx.pdf

“The sum of all human knowledge”: A systematic review of scholarly research on the content of Wikipedia

Statut

“Wikipedia might possibly be the best-developed attempt thus far of the enduring quest to gather all human knowledge in one place. Its accomplishments in this regard have made it an irresistible point of inquiry for researchers from various fields of knowledge. A decade of research has thrown light on many aspects of the Wikipedia community, its processes, and content. However, due to the variety of the fields inquiring about Wikipedia and the limited synthesis of the extensive research, there is little consensus on many aspects of Wikipedia’s content as an encyclopedic collection of human knowledge. This study addresses the issue by systematically reviewing 110 peer-reviewed publications on Wikipedia content, summarizing the current findings, and highlighting the major research trends. Two major streams of research are identified: the quality of Wikipedia content (including comprehensiveness, currency, readability and reliability) and the size of Wikipedia. Moreover, we present the key research trends in terms of the domains of inquiry, research design, data source, and data gathering methods. This review synthesizes scholarly understanding of Wikipedia content and paves the way for future studies.”

URL : http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/978652/

The Battle for Open : How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory

Statut

“With the success of open access publishing, Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open education practices, the open approach to education has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. This marks a moment of victory for the open education movement, but at the same time the real battle for the direction of openness begins. As with the green movement, openness now has a market value and is subject to new tensions, such as venture capitalists funding MOOC companies. This is a crucial time for determining the future direction of open education.
In this volume, Martin Weller examines four key areas that have been central to the developments within open education: open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship. Exploring the tensions within these key arenas, he argues that ownership over the future direction of openness is significant to all of those with an interest in education.”

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/weller.pdf

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bam