Tuesday 27 January 2009

Scholarly information practices

I came across this recent OCLC publication today which aims to synthesize the wealth of dispersed information on this area into something more easily digestible. That said it's quite long so obviously I haven't read it all but along with reaffirming what we already know (they want everything online) it looks like there is some interesting data and visual representations about how researchers from different field go about their research and how we can better tailor our support.

Scholarly information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development

http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2009-02.pdf

Friday 23 January 2009

Flickr Commons

The Library of Congress have been using Flickr for a while now to increase the accessibility of some of their enormous collection of historically interesting and out of copyright photographs as part of the Flickr Commons project. many other cultural institutions are also participating, including the State Library of NSW.

Last october the Library of Congress issued a report that gave the experiment a thumbs up:

"In the first 24 hours after launch, Flickr reported 1.1 million total views on our account; a little over a week later, the account had received 3.6 million page views and 1.9 million total visits. That included over 2 million views of the photos, and over 1 million views of the photostream. By early October, LC photos were averaging approximately 500,000 views a month and had crossed the 10 million mark in total views and the 6 million mark for visits. Interestingly, 82% of this traffic was referred from within Flickr; only 3% came from search engines"

So, could UTAS Libraries be increasing the accessibility of some of our digital collections by using Flickr Commons? I would suggest it makes a lot of sense.

Full PDF Report(http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf)

Flickr Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons)

Wednesday 14 January 2009

"BlueNet"

I came across this by accident, but it is an interesting development that UTAS is leading. There has been quite a bit of talk about the role of the Library in curating eScience research data, I am curious as to whether anyone at UTAS Library has heard of this project?

"The BlueNet project will establish a national distributed marine science data network linking universities to the AODCJF, to support the long term data curation requirements, and data access needs of Australia’s marine science researchers.

BlueNet will build infrastructure to enable the discovery, access and online integration of multi-disciplinary marine science data on a very large scale, to support current and future marine science and climate change research, ecosystem management and government decision making."

Bluenet.org.au

Search interface "MEST"

Friday 9 January 2009

Australia's most cited paper for 2008

I came across this via Stephen Abram's blog, from Science watch comes a list of the most cited countries (Australia is 9th), and each country's most cited paper. It's more of a curiousity than anything, unless you are the author of one of the papers I suppose, but interesting anyway. So (drum roll) the most cited paper is:

Most-cited paper from Clinical Medicine with 2,634 citations:
Title: "THE BCL-2 PROTEIN FAMILY: ARBITERS OF CELL SURVIVAL"
Authors: ADAMS JM; CORY S
Source: SCIENCE, 281 (5381): 1322-1326 AUG 28 1998

Unsurprisingly all the most cited papers are science or medical research. Full list here (http://sciencewatch.com/dr/cou/2009/09janALLPAPRS/)