Étiquette : academic libraries

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Playing games at the Library: Seriously?

Authors: Cécile Swiatek, Myriam Gorsse

During the past ten years, libraries have been developing gaming activities from library board games to mystery games and immersive roleplaying games.

This article aims at giving a general overview of gaming issues in French academic libraries. General gaming theories are quickly reviewed, basic keys are given about how and why to set up a gaming service and department at the academic library, concrete and recent initiatives are presented.

This article focuses on non-virtual and public-oriented games that were already organised in and by libraries. More generally, it underlines how to use gaming activities for promoting organisational innovation.

It concludes on the necessity to settle a strategy for gaming activities, to enforce management practices, and on the importance to publicise the initiatives by establishing a public gaming policy and programme, and by formalising communication plans, staff training and knowledge management.

The results of this fact study highlight how gaming activities are becoming a new reality for libraries, which requires a proper management perspective.

URL : https://www.liberquarterly.eu/article/10.18352/lq.10161/

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Économie et bibliothèques : Une dialectique au long cours numérique

Auteurs/Authors : Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Sami Mabrak

Économie et bibliothèques », «  Économie des bibliothèques », «  Économie en bibliothèques » sont autant d’expressions utilisées pour qualifier les travaux qui posent à la bibliothèque la question de sa valeur économique.

La réponse à cette question a varié et varie encore selon les contextes et les époques. Le web a projeté les bibliothèques dans un univers où elles doivent composer avec de nouvelles régulations.

Notre propos s’attachera à aborder cette question sous l’angle des bibliothèques académiques qui, plus que toutes autres, rencontrent le défi d’un univers de plus en plus ouvert, soumis aux régulations de l’économie numérique.

Les bibliothèques, dans la pluralité de leur typologie, ont accompagné et participé à la transition de nos sociétés vers le numérique.

Par l’intégration des contenus numériques dans leurs collections, par la formation des usagers, par la transformation de leurs bâtiments et de leurs espaces de travail et d’enseignement, par leur engagement dans le mouvement du libre accès, et plus récemment par leur implication dans les données de la recherche, elles ont été d’infatigables chevilles ouvrières de cette transition.

Ce faisant, elles ont participé à des initiatives, des expérimentations et/ou des projets de recherche qui ont contribué à faire évoluer leurs équipes et leurs missions.

Il serait d’ailleurs intéressant qu’un travail de recherche et d’analyse puisse un jour se pencher sur cette période extraordinaire qui a vu des organisations séculaires se transformer et se réinventer de manière si significative en si peu de temps.

Pour les bibliothèques académiques, qui sont au centre de notre propos, les transformations qu’elles ont connues (et qu’elles connaissent encore) sont intimement liées à celles de la communication scientifique sur le web et de l’édition scientifique.

Leur défi aujourd’hui consiste à continuer à exister dans un univers numérique, de plus en plus ouvert, où le nombre et la nature des intermédiaires n’ont jamais été aussi diversifiés.

Plus fondamentalement, la question de leur valeur et de leur poids économique, qui leur a été posée dès les années 1970 par leurs tutelles, se réactive aujourd’hui dans une économie numérique de l’accès.

Aux côtés des tutelles, les usagers, par leurs pratiques culturelles et sociales, posent indirectement la question de la valeur économique de la bibliothèque.

URL : http://bbf.enssib.fr/consulter/bbf-2016-08-0034-004

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Looking for the Impact of Open Access on Interlibrary Loan

Authors : Collette Mak, Tina Baich

The purpose of this paper is to analyze interlibrary loan (ILL) article requests for evidence of a decrease that could be attributed to the spread of open access. The authors collected and analyzed the interlibrary loan data of two Indiana academic libraries for requests submitted during October and November (peak ILL months) from 2006-2015.

The requests were assigned to one of four categories: general, humanities, social sciences, and sciences based on Library of Congress classification, and the relative age of each article was calculated, where the relative age is the difference between year of publication and year of request.

Assuming an embargo period of 12-18 months for traditional publications, a change in articles of relative age 0-2 would suggest that scholars were obtaining that material from other sources.

The authors then looked for trends that might indicate the impact of open access on interlibrary loan requests. This paper will present the results and discuss the other environmental factors that may influence the number of requests placed within a field of study.

URL : Looking for the Impact of Open Access on Interlibrary Loan

Alternative location : http://library.ifla.org/1358/1/095-mak-en.pdf

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Revisiting the Data Lifecycle with Big Data Curation

Author : Line Pouchard

As science becomes more data-intensive and collaborative, researchers increasingly use larger and more complex data to answer research questions.

The capacity of storage infrastructure, the increased sophistication and deployment of sensors, the ubiquitous availability of computer clusters, the development of new analysis techniques, and larger collaborations allow researchers to address grand societal challenges in a way that is unprecedented.

In parallel, research data repositories have been built to host research data in response to the requirements of sponsors that research data be publicly available. Libraries are re-inventing themselves to respond to a growing demand to manage, store, curate and preserve the data produced in the course of publicly funded research.

As librarians and data managers are developing the tools and knowledge they need to meet these new expectations, they inevitably encounter conversations around Big Data. This paper explores definitions of Big Data that have coalesced in the last decade around four commonly mentioned characteristics: volume, variety, velocity, and veracity.

We highlight the issues associated with each characteristic, particularly their impact on data management and curation. We use the methodological framework of the data life cycle model, assessing two models developed in the context of Big Data projects and find them lacking.

We propose a Big Data life cycle model that includes activities focused on Big Data and more closely integrates curation with the research life cycle. These activities include planning, acquiring, preparing, analyzing, preserving, and discovering, with describing the data and assuring quality being an integral part of each activity.

We discuss the relationship between institutional data curation repositories and new long-term data resources associated with high performance computing centers, and reproducibility in computational science.

We apply this model by mapping the four characteristics of Big Data outlined above to each of the activities in the model. This mapping produces a set of questions that practitioners should be asking in a Big Data project

URL : Revisiting the Data Lifecycle with Big Data Curation

Alternative location : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/10.2.176

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The role of “open” in strategic library planning

Academic libraries are undergoing evolutionary change as emerging technologies and new philosophies about how information is created, distributed, and shared have disrupted traditional operations and services.

Additionally, the population that the academic library serves is increasingly distributed due to distance learning opportunities and new models of teaching and learning.  

This article, the first in this special issue, suggests that in today’s increasingly networked and distributed information environment, the strategic integration of open curation and collection development practices can serve as a useful means for organizing and providing structure to the diverse mass of available digital information, so that individual users of the library have access to coherent contexts for meaningful engagement with that information.

Building on insights from extant research and practice, this article proposes that colleges and universities recognize a more inclusive open access environment, including the integration of resources outside of those owned or created by the institution, and a shift toward policies that consider open access research and open educational resources as part of the library’s formal curatorial workflow and collection building.

At the conclusion on this article, authors Lisa Petrides and Cynthia Jimes offer a commentary on the six remaining articles that comprise this special issue on Models of Open Education in Higher Education, discussing the significant role that “open” policy and practice play in shaping teaching, learning, and scholarship in the global context of higher education.

URL : The role of “open” in strategic library planning

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.24.2478

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The Library as Publishing House

The academic library has taken on the new role of institutional publishing house, using institutional repository (IR) services to enable journal publishing and manage conference planning. Librarians taking on this new role as publisher must know the journal publishing work flow, including online article submission, peer review, publishing, marketing, and assessment.

They must understand international identifiers such as the electronic International Standard Serial Number (eISSN) and Digital Object Identifier (DOI). To manage conference planning functions, librarians need to understand event functions such as presentation submission, program scheduling, registration and third-party payment systems, proceedings publishing, and archiving.

In general, they need to be technologically savvy enough to configure and manage a specialized content management system, the institutional repository.

URL : http://commons.erau.edu/publication/141/

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Big data et bibliothèques : traitement et analyse informatiques des collections numériques

Cette étude s’attache à présenter sous quels aspects les collections numériques des bibliothèques relèvent des problématiques propres aux données massives, et en quoi les techniques de fouille de données (text and data mining) représentent désormais une nécessité pour l’appropriation par les chercheurs des résultats de la littérature scientifique.

Ce travail, qui met au centre de son propos les techniques de fouille de données comme moyens de maîtriser la masse documentaire, identifie trois problématiques distinctes concernant les bibliothèques numériques et ces dispositifs de lecture algorithmiques : sont ainsi abordées successivement les démarches à mettre en oeuvre pour aider les chercheurs à faire usage de ces nouvelles méthodes de lecture, puis l’emploi de techniques de fouille de données sur les collections pour constituer de nouvelles formes d’instruments de recherche, et enfin l’usage de la fouille pour assister le traitement documentaire.

L’étude se conclut sur le détail des questions juridiques soulevées actuellement par la fouille de données, en rapport avec le droit de la propriété intellectuelle.

URL : Big data et bibliothèques : traitement et analyse informatiques des collections numériques

Alternative location : http://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/66017-big-data-et-bibliotheques-traitement-et-analyse-informatiques-des-collections-numeriques