Archives des mots-clés : research library

Research libraries’ new role in research data management…

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Research libraries’ new role in research data management, current trends and visions in Denmark :

“The amount of research data is growing constantly, due to new technology with new potentials for collecting and analysing both digital data and research objects. This growth creates a demand for a coherent IT-infrastructure. Such an infrastructure must be able to provide facilities for storage, preservation and a more open access to data in order to fulfil the demands from the researchers themselves, the research councils and research foundations.
This paper presents the findings of a research project carried out under the auspices of DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek — Denmark’s Electronic Research Library) to analyse how the Danish universities store, preserve and provide access to research data. It shows that they do not have a common IT-infrastructure for research data management. This paper describes the various paths chosen by individual universities and research institutions, and the background for their strategies of research data management. Among the main reasons for the uneven practices are the lack of a national policy in this field, the different scientific traditions and cultures and the differences in the use and organization of IT-services.
This development contains several perspectives that are of particular relevance to research libraries. As they already curate digital collections and are active in establishing web archives, the research libraries become involved in research and dissemination of knowledge in new ways. This paper gives examples of how The State and University Library’s services facilitate research data management with special regard to digitization of research objects, storage, preservation and sharing of research data.
This paper concludes that the experience and skills of research libraries make the libraries important partners in a research data management infrastructure.”

URL : Research libraries’ new role in research data management, current trends and visions in Denmark
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/9173

Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2012 Key…

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Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2012 :

“Key Findings :
••The role of internet search engines in facilitating discovery of scholarly resources has continued to increase. The perceived decline in the role of the library catalog noted in previous cycles of this survey has been arrested and even modestly reversed, driven perhaps to some degree by significant strategic shifts in library discovery tools and services.
•• Respondents are generally satisfied with their ability to access the scholarly literature, not least because freely available materials have come to play a significant role in meeting their needs.
•• While respondents continued to trend overall towards greater acceptance of a print to electronic transition for scholarly journals, they grew modestly less comfortable with replacing print subscriptions with electronic access. Monographs, although widely used in electronic form, present a mixed picture for any possible format transition. While some monograph use cases are quite strong for electronic versions, others – especially long-form reading – are seen to favor print by a decisive share. Even so, a growing share of respondents expects substantial change in library collecting practices for monographs in the next five years.
•• Respondents’ personal interests are the primary factor in selecting research topics, but junior faculty members report that tenure considerations play an important role, as well. Collaboration models vary significantly across scholarly fields. While humanists are less likely than scientists or social scientists
to conduct quantitative analyses, nevertheless some 25% of humanists report gathering their own data for this purpose.
•• Small but non-trivial shares of respondents use technology in their undergraduate teaching. But while most recognize the availability of resources to help them do so, many respondents do not draw upon resources beyond their own ideas or feel strongly motivated to seek out opportunities to use more technology in their teaching.
•• Respondents tend to value established scholarly dissemination methods, prioritizing audiences in their sub-discipline and discipline, and those of lay professionals, more so than undergraduates or the general public. Similarly, they continue to select journals in which to publish based on characteristics such as topical coverage, readership, and impact factor. Finally, respondents tend to value existing publisher services, such as peer review, branding, copy-editing, while expressing less widespread agreement about the value of newer dissemination support services offered by libraries that are intended to maximize access and impact.
•• Respondents perceive less value from many functions of the academic library than they did in the last cycle of this survey. One notable exception is the gateway function, which experienced a modest resurgence in perceived value. A minority of respondents sees the library as primarily responsible for teaching research skills to undergraduates. And, though still a clear minority, the share of respondents who wish to see substantial change to library staff and buildings has increased. There are large differences in perceptions between disciplinary groups: for example, a smaller share of scientists views many
library roles as very important.
•• Conferences remain at the heart of respondents’ perceptions of the role and value of the scholarly societies in which they participate. Conferences are valued for both the formal function of discovering new scholarship and informal role of connecting scholars with peers.”

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Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation Assessing Current Practices…

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Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation: Assessing Current Practices at Research Libraries :

“In spring 2010, authors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted a national survey on digital preservation of Institutional Repository (IR) materials among Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions. Examining the current practices of digital preservation of IR materials, the survey of 72 research libraries reveals the challenges and opportunities of implementing digital preservation for IRs in a complex environment with rapidly evolving technology, practices, and standards. Findings from this survey will inform libraries about the current state of digital preservation for IRs.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may11/yuanli/05yuanli.html

WattJournals: Towards an Economic and Li…

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WattJournals: Towards an Economic and Lightweight Search Tool Alternative for Libraries To Help Their Students and Researchers Keep Up-To-Date :

“Learn how Heriot-Watt University Library’s WattJournals could be just the search tool your patrons need to efficiently find the content that your library subscribes to. Built on top of a RESTful search API created by the JISC-sponsored JournalTOCs Project, WattJournals is a toolkit for connecting fulltext articles to the people who need them. This article provides a technical overview of the system, showing how it uses citation data pulled from the JournalTOCs table of contents awareness service to provide access to just your library’s subscriptions.”

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4134

Enhancing Institutional Repositories (IR…

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Enhancing Institutional Repositories (IR) in Ghana:

“Academic and Research libraries in Ghana have difficulty accessing research work done in their institutions and in Ghana as a whole. This is a challenge in supporting teaching, learning, research and knowledge dissemination. Therefore, an alternative solution can be to enhance the Open Access Institutional repositories (OA- IR). The technology is currently new in Ghana with only one university hosting it. This article provides an overview of the establishment of OA- IRs in Ghana, the challenges and making a case for key decision makers to consider ways in setting up and enhancing their institutional repositories.”
URL : http://dspace.knust.edu.gh/dspace/handle/123456789/1926

Analysis of Research Support Services at…

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Analysis of Research Support Services at international Best Practice Institutions :

“The following analysis aims to provide an overview and status of the research support services available to university researchers – with a focus on the services provided by university libraries – as well as to propose a strategy for CULIS with respect to research support of researchers at the University of Copenhagen. The analysis starts by defining the term research support service. This definition is used to categorize the national services and is iterated before moving on to the international institutions. We have described the services at 11 international and 8 national university libraries and identified the services that define the best practice institutions. We have found that research support services are often developing more or less organically, and service contents are moving toward becoming more tool-oriented, i.e. with less focus on the traditional information objects, books, journals, manuscripts. E.g. in scholarly publishing the focus is moving from acquiring, cataloging and local dissemination to facilitating the production and publication of books and journals, to supporting the authors on legal issues and to disseminating globally. Competences related to metadata structuring are potentially of great value to the growing field of data-archiving by researchers. The recommendations to CULIS are to conduct a new quantitative survey of researchers’ needs similar to the project “Ph.D. students’ information seeking behavior” in order to paint a clearer picture of what the researchers of The University of Copenhagen needs. Assessment could be made of whether the focus on physical student environments should be matched for researchers. It is a general recommendation to formulate a strategy for the area of providing research support services, formulate clear goals for the institution as well as for the individual services, dedicate resources for running services, dedicate resources to developing services, coordinate existing services, provide overview of goals and services (internally and externally), participate in networking and user activities, position university libraries as part of the research infrastructure. When developing new services, it is our recommendation that special focus be put on primary research data and accompanying metadata – dataverses, environments for generating and sharing research content – VREs, dedicated support of individual researchers, research groups and dedicated information for researchers – researcher information hubs.”

URL : http://hprints.org/hprints-00516997/fr/

Future Leaders’ Views on Organizational …

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Future Leaders’ Views on Organizational Culture :
“Research libraries will continue to be affected by rapid and transformative changes in information technology and the networked environment for the foreseeable future. The pace and direction of these changes will profoundly challenge libraries and their staffs to respond effectively. This paper presents the results of a survey that was designed to discern the perceptions and preferences of future library leaders related to organizational cultures in these times of precipitous change. The study finds that future leaders of academic libraries perceive a significant gap between their current and preferred organizational cultures and that current organizational cultures limit their effectiveness.”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18915/