Communicating knowledge: how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings

Hot off the press, ie Sept. 2009, this report is a joint publication between RIN and JISC. I cannot boast a thorough reading of it yet but, at first glance, it appears to have some interesting data about what motivates UK researchers in diverse disciplines to publish or to present at conferences; what influences their choice of publications; how they collaborate, when and with whom; and what or whom they cite. There's also a "response" to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

You might beat many of us to a close examination of this report, in which case we'd love to hear your comments.

Festival of Dangerous Ideas

The Festival of Dangerous Ideas is on this weekend at the Sydney Opera House. Amongst many other varied topics, Susan Greenfield will be discussing the implications of Online Networking on developing brains. Hopefully there will be some information about discussions available online after the event, as some of the topics sound very interesting and certainly controversial. As the festival overview reads: The Festival will almost certainly cause moments of outrage, but will hopefully push the boundaries enough to stimulate, provoke and engage people in wider discussion.

Advocacy

ALA's ACRL has put out some information about advocacy. Specifically in bringing issues of concern to academic libraries to the people who make the decisions.

Obviously is US focused but there is some interesting information and ideas about intellectual property and copyright; public access to federally-funded research; network neutrality; government information; and intellectual freedom....

http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/washingtonwatch/washingtonwatch.cfm#agenda

Information literacy in the age of Youtube

This is an interesting little slide show that looks at image literacy, particularly the need to evaluate images as information. Also that visual culture is in its infancy compared to book culture.

http://www.slideshare.net/mjdelia/information-literacy-in-the-age-of-youtube

Memex (sounds futuristic)

I just stumbled across this rather interesting little ICT history lesson while doing some reading on ebooks...

"In 1945, Vannevar Bush's concept of Memex (or memory extender) was described as a computer device linked to a library archive able to display books (and multimedia) and enabled users to link to other works or ideas as they went through materials.

His ideas greatly influenced generations of technologists in the development of both hypertext for linking terms and ideas, as well as developing tools to augment or enhance human intelligence and memory. For its time, memex was a revolutionary concept for using technology to enhance human performance and experience using computer devices."

Here is the full article:
The Ebook Reader Is Not the Future of Ebooks

Best library practice wiki

Having trouble keeping up with all the library blogs you subscribe to?

Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki may be the answer because it aims to bring together all the best ideas on managing libraries in one place. Lots of information!

Another potentially interesting thing I came across are Instant Instruction Feedback Forms. I haven't had a tinker with them yet but I thought they may turn out to be an alternative to Survey Monkey as an online feedback tool.

According to the site blurb they are ' web-based surveys that are designed to offer librarians a simple way to evaluate their information literacy/bibliographic instruction sessions. The best thing about them is that they're open source, which means that everytime someone downloads them Bill Gates gets a chill through his bones.'

Library champions

Here's Xiaoguang Yang, director of Beihang university library, Beijing, on advocacy as quoted in the latest Australian Library News...

'Two strategies key to successful lobbying for academic library funding are: communicating
clearly with the library’s funding body, and deploying library champions. Our practice is to make the key professor of each discipline responsible for helping spread the good word, university-wide, about the library.’

While liaison librarians don't communicate directly with the library's funding body, almost everything we do in the liaison role has an impact on how the library is perceived and hence the support we receive from the schools and wider university community. The subscription cancellation project is an example directly related to funding that hopefully will have a' trickle up' effect in that the message will travel upwards to those who make funding decisions not just from the library but also from schools.

Our school based library champions could be our LOs, but this is not always the case. While I'm not really a fan of military style verbs like 'deploy' the term 'library champion' is kind of catchy and fits in with the terminology currently in use in schools eg Criterion referenced assessment champions

Thanks to Karmen for helping us keep up to date with what's happening in libraries across Australia with Australian Library News

Kathryn Greenhill - Why learning about Emerging Technologies is part of every librarian's Job

In the context of librarians and Web 2.0, Kathryn Greenhill's name has popped up a number of times recently. My interest piqued, I decided to look into her work.

This particular presentation is very straightforward and concise, presenting solutions to the challenges the library and information profession faces in the digital age. Without being simplistic, Greenhill presents practical suggestions to issues such as finding time to investigate Web 2.0 technologies and why this is an imperative facet of our professional development obligations.

Entertaining, informative, and well worth setting aside 1/2 an hour to watch.

http://www.slideshare.net/sirexkat/why-learning-about-emerging-technologies-is-part-of-every-librarians-job

Future of Bibliographic Control

Research Information Network (www.rin.ac.uk) has just published a report about current UK cataloguing practices Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world. They point to a need to partner more effectively with other organisations in the 'supply chain' to make the bibliographic data in library catalogues more relevant to users in the age of Google. One interesting proposition was a union catalogue for all UK higher education institutions with enormous cost saving benefits and streamlined access for users.

Last year the Library of Congress published their own take on the subject of bibliographic control. I haven't read it but here is the link-
On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

Scopus expand coverage of Arts and Humanities

Scopus claim to have expanded their coverage of Arts and Humanities by up to a whopping 50%! Which has to be good news for academic libraries - especially since there is no extra charge for current subscribers. Perhaps they got wind of our cancellation project and thought they'd better pull out all the stops?!