Just Curious: How Can Academic Libraries Incite Curiosity to Promote Science Literacy?

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Author : Siu Hong Yu

Based on a Bright Young Minds webinar given on February 7, 2017, this paper shows the importance of nurturing curiosity in students as an integral part of information literacy (IL) and science literacy. There are obvious parallels between “Research as Inquiry,” as described in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) and scientific inquiry.

In both cases, curiosity is the fuel that drives information gathering and the pursuit of new knowledge. This paper discusses three pedagogical strategies to help information literacy librarians incite curiosity in students and promote scientific literacy.

Bright Young Minds is a webinar series hosted by the Ontario Library Association’s Education Institute. It provides a platform for MLIS students and recent graduates to share their research and to foster connections between academic schools and information professionals.

The webinar and this subsequent article grew out of an MLIS project exploring the concept of curiosity and its application in promoting scientific literacy in academic libraries. I draw on my dual experiences as both a Chemistry graduate student and participant in IL sessions, and as a recent MLIS graduate and IL instructor.

URL : Just Curious: How Can Academic Libraries Incite Curiosity to Promote Science Literacy?

Alternative location : https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/3954

 

What do computer scientists tweet? Analyzing the link-sharing practice on Twitter

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Authors : Marco Schmitt, Robert Jäschke

Twitter communication has permeated every sphere of society. To highlight and share small pieces of information with possibly vast audiences or small circles of the interested has some value in almost any aspect of social life.

But what is the value exactly for a scientific field? We perform a comprehensive study of computer scientists using Twitter and their tweeting behavior concerning the sharing of web links.

Discerning the domains, hosts and individual web pages being tweeted and the differences between computer scientists and a Twitter sample enables us to look in depth at the Twitter-based information sharing practices of a scientific community.

Additionally, we aim at providing a deeper understanding of the role and impact of altmetrics in computer science and give a glance at the publications mentioned on Twitter that are most relevant for the computer science community.

Our results show a link sharing culture that concentrates more heavily on public and professional quality information than the Twitter sample does. The results also show a broad variety in linked sources and especially in linked publications with some publications clearly related to community-specific interests of computer scientists, while others with a strong relation to attention mechanisms in social media.

This refers to the observation that Twitter is a hybrid form of social media between an information service and a social network service.

Overall the computer scientists’ style of usage seems to be more on the information-oriented side and to some degree also on professional usage. Therefore, altmetrics are of considerable use in analyzing computer science.

URL : What do computer scientists tweet? Analyzing the link-sharing practice on Twitter

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179630

Quels choix juridiques pour la médiation culturelle et scientifique dans l’environnement numérique ?

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Auteur/Author : Lionel Maurel

La dimension juridique n’est pas forcément celle à laquelle on songe en premier lorsque l’on envisage les «enjeux numériques pour la médiation scientifique et culturelle du passé».

Pourtant, tout autant que la technique, le droit est devenu aujourd’hui un facteur essentiel d’interopérabilité dans l’environnement numérique. Tout projet culturel ou scientifique produisant des données et/ou des contenus doit s’interroger sur les conditions juridiques de mise à disposition de ces objets, sous peine que ces questions ne se posent ensuite a posteriori, en provoquant alors souvent difficultés et blocages pour ne pas avoir été suffisamment anticipées.

Cette dimension juridique est néanmoins de plus en plus importante pour les institutions culturelles (archives, bibliothèques, musées, etc.), ainsi que pour les équipes de chercheurs à mesure que la démarche du Linked Open Data (LOD) se développe et place les porteurs de projets devant des choix souvent complexes à effectuer.

L’ouverture des données implique en effet d’être en mesure de choisir entre plusieurs licences parmi le panel d’outils contractuels existants pour les appliquer à différents objets, sachant que leurs effets varient sensiblement et ne sont pas neutres pour les réutilisateurs en aval.

La visibilité des projets, leur capacité à nouer des relations avec d’autres initiatives et les formes même de médiation qui pourront être mis en oeuvre auprès de différents publics découlent en partie des décisions qui auront été prises à propos des conditions d’utilisation des données et contenus.

Le présent article vise à décrire les principes de base à partir desquels ces choix peuvent être effectués dans de bonnes conditions. En particulier, cet article s’attachera à montrer que faire le choix de l’ouverture par le biais de licences adaptées constitue un atout pour le développement de la médiation autour des données de la recherche.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01577998/

 

Information in the ecosystem: Against the “information ecosystem”

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Authors : Timothy B. Norris, Todd Suomela

The “information ecosystem” metaphor is widely used in academic libraries and has become nearly ubiquitous when speaking of the information systems that support scholarly communication and varied forms of data sharing and publication.

The trending use of this language arises from non-academic applications — for example in big data (the Hadoop ecosystem) or software development (the node.js ecosystem) — and there remains little critical examination of the use of this metaphor.

Indeed, the definition of ecosystem as the set of relations between living organisms and their surrounding non-living environment is apparently not directly a part of the metaphor.

This paper first describes the emergence of ecological thinking and how it was influenced by early information science and then explores how different “ecologies” are used within the academy, including in the emergent field of information ecology.

A short critique of the metaphor is then posed and the paper concludes that the information ecosystem metaphor is useful, yet at the same time there are dangerous elements that render aspects of human societies and natural ecosystems invisible.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6847

The interactive library as a virtual working space

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Author : Andreas Degkwitz

The internet and the new digital media are challenging the traditional business model of academic libraries and enable new capabilities of information provisioning and new shapes of collaborations between the librarians and the users.

To pick up the demands and the expectations of the many users, whose information behavior is heavily influenced by the internet, a new business model for academic libraries has to be designed urgently.

The aim of the project is to analyze and to identify the organizational and technical requirements of a business model for the future library, which is based on the potential of the internet and the new media.

The result is a pilot study about the interactive, multi-user driven library as the future business model for libraries.

URL : The interactive library as a virtual working space

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10214

Academics’ behaviors and attitudes towards open access publishing in scholarly journals

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Authors : Jennifer Rowley, Frances Johnson, Laura Sbaffi, Will Frass, Elaine Devine

While there is significant progress with policy and a lively debate regarding the potential impact of open access publishing, few studies have examined academics’ behavior and attitudes to open access publishing (OAP) in scholarly journals.

This article seeks to address this gap through an international and interdisciplinary survey of academics. Issues covered include: use of and intentions regarding OAP, and perceptions regarding advantages and disadvantages of OAP, journal article publication services, peer review, and reuse.

Despite reporting engagement in OAP, academics were unsure about their future intentions regarding OAP. Broadly, academics identified the potential for wider circulation as the key advantage of OAP, and were more positive about its benefits than they were negative about its disadvantages. As regards services, rigorous peer review, followed by rapid publication were most valued.

Academics reported strong views on reuse of their work; they were relatively happy with noncommercial reuse, but not in favor of commercial reuse, adaptations, and inclusion in anthologies. Comparing science, technology, and medicine with arts, humanities, and social sciences showed a significant difference in attitude on a number of questions, but, in general, the effect size was small, suggesting that attitudes are relatively consistent across the academic community.

URL : http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/114578/

How quickly do publications get read? The evolution of Mendeley reader counts for new articles

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Authors : Nabeil Maflahi, Mike Thelwall

Within science, citation counts are widely used to estimate research impact but publication delays mean that they are not useful for recent research. This gap can be filled by Mendeley reader counts, which are valuable early impact indicators for academic articles because they appear before citations and correlate strongly with them.

Nevertheless, it is not known how Mendeley readership counts accumulate within the year of publication, and so it is unclear how soon they can be used. In response, this paper reports a longitudinal weekly study of the Mendeley readers of articles in six library and information science journals from 2016.

The results suggest that Mendeley readers accrue from when articles are first available online and continue to steadily build. For journals with large publication delays, articles can already have substantial numbers of readers by their publication date.

Thus, Mendeley reader counts may even be useful as early impact indicators for articles before they have been officially published in a journal issue. If field normalised indicators are needed, then these can be generated when journal issues are published using the online first date.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/2436/620522