What’s happening..

After two long weekends in May, these five day work weeks in June are rough. June is looking busy though, with some big repository decisions coming up here, and then I’m out and about a couple of times. Next week, on the 12th June is the UKeIG Annual Seminar where I’m doing a session on Web 2.0 in academia : what works and why. I’ll put my slides on slideshare soon.
The week after, the RSP are holding their summer school again, this time in Thornton Manor in the Wirral.
I ranted about the beautiful location last year, at Dartington Hall near Totnes – someone is doing really well picking these summer school locations! After speaking with Stephanie yesterday, I think I’ll be giving a short ‘graduate’ talk.
Then, the week after that is the UC&R seminar at UWE on Web 2.0 (can’t find a link for this one at the moment).

We were in Cambridge last week and stayed at a FarmStay in NE Essex called Rockells Farm – it’s a lovely spot, and for the fishing enthuasists, they have their own stocked lake.. We strolled to Arkesden for dinner at the Ax and Crosses – excellent food, get there early.

Top 100 Tools for Learning

This is a great list from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies – http://www.janeknight.com/downloads/top100S08.pdf

Publishing – a snapshot for potential OA funding

Food for thought, possible mathematical fumblings following…
Snapshot of publications: January – February 2008 – Web of Science Alerts

•176 articles listed with University of Bath affiliated authors
•119 articles published with publishers offering an Open Access payment
• Therefore 67% of articles published are with publishers offering an OA payment option.

• Average cost of OA options = seems to be around £1000 – £1500
• Various publishers embargo articles for 6 – 24 months (ie. Taylor & Francis, OUP, Blackwells..).
• Of the snapshot total, 67 articles were with publishers who allow for immediate deposit of a post-print or publisher version of an article in an OA repository.

Therefore OA payment most useful to those who wish to get their material viewed quickly rather than for open access purposes?

Open Repositories conference – OR08

A few weeks back I attended the Open Repositories conference in Southampton, UK. I’ve written up a few of what I took to be the main themes to come out of the conference below.

I enjoyed the poster sessions, and also the RSP Repository Managers meeting on the Wednesday evening. Although I had to cut and run to catch a train home, it was a great opportunity to meet with other repository managers from around the world. I would have loved to stayed and caught up with a few more people, but will have to wait until the next UKCoRR meeting I guess.
So, my thoughts on the conference:

From my perspective, main themes to come from the conference included:

o Capturing material to place in repositories (how to be part of the researchers’ workflow, to the extent of actually developing systems for writing up research)

o Integration of repositories within other services such as personalised scholarly profiles.

o Collaborative tools, and functions for adding comments, tagging or annotations to repository items featured in a number of presentations, with interesting work being done by the Linnean Society.

o Usage based evaluations of research (specifically a report from the MESUR project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, US) – investigation into whether usage statistics can provide similar metrics to citation statistics.

o Copyright issues for academic authors – what are the concerns, practical steps to address these (presentation by QUT Law Professor, Brian Fitzgerald).

o Open science and open data – particularly the technical aspects of extracting data from PDF documents such as e-theses.

Other reflections on the conference include thoughts from Pete Johnson, from Eduserve, Peter Murray-Rust has blogged a few of his thoughts, and added a postscript here, some notes from NoStuff here, some twittering here, and here.

Closure of the A36 out of Bath means diversion through the village of Hinton Charterhouse, where some clever soul is entertaining those of us stuck in the queues – the tiny blue sign says ‘Queue here for Portsmouth ferry’.. last week it was ‘Hinton Charterhouse – twinned with Detroit, motor city’. Very amusing..em>

VERSIONS toolkit.. again

I’ve just written a quick email to the Versions toolkit team to say what a great document they’ve produced – possibly the best, most practical thing I’ve read all year. It’s just so common-sensical. It lays out some useful milestone versions, and provides guidance on identifying versions, including an author checklist of information to include in a document that might be placed on open access.

This is something to keep at the forefront of our submission interface design and I’ll be adding it to our repository information pages..

The VERSIONS toolkit.

Publish or perish

This is a desktop tool Brian Kelly has pointed me to – I’ve yet to have a good look at it, so I’m leaving it here to trip over later.
http://www.harzing.com/resources.htm#/pop.htm

Versions

Version One of the Versions toolkit is out – http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/versions/VERSIONS_Toolkit_v1_final.pdf
I’m keen to add something like this to my repository info, especially after today’s ruptions re e-theses (don’t ask..)..

The University of Google – my information skills rant of the week.

I’m currently reading “The University of Google: education in the [post] education age” by Tara Brabazon. It’s absolutely fascinating, highly recommended for anyone interested in higher education and information skills in the digital age. I need to buy a copy myself, because as I’m reading I feel the need to highlight passages all the way, I’m nodding my head in agreement whilst I read..

I love this quote on page 45 – ‘Everything can be learnt from the web, except how to use it’. Brabazon notes Google Scholar as a welcome intervention to tertiary information seeking, as Scholar places the refereed literature amongst search results. Maybe I’m getting old, but it seems bizarre to me that higher education can function without the specialisation and expertise that comes from advanced information seeking – moving beyond Google and Google Scholar, which are great starting places, to the specialised databases and indexes. I think I’m finding Tara Brabazon’s book refreshing because after beating the infomation literacy /information skils drum for so long, especially *here*, it’s great to find an academic with the same beliefs.

I remember working on the reference desk at QUT, and one cohort of students arrived saying that their lecturer had set an assignment with a compulsory component of using at least three refereed journal articles. ‘What’s a refereed article?’ ‘What’s peer-review?’ It’s a convention particular to scholarly, academic literature, I guess, but it confers a value based on evaluation and quality control. We have sophisticated (maybe overly so) databases in which to search for this type of literature – I wouldn’t expect first year undergraduates to use these, but final year students who scrape by without them – are they cheating themselves out of really understanding their discipline?

So if we take Google Scholar, with its inclusion of refereed literature, as a step in the right direction, the problem of access remains. The commodification of information by international publishers placing tolls on access – a familar argument to those in libraries and repository circles. Interesting to see this coming from the perspective of information location, evalution and use.

Tara Brabazon is a key note speaker at the LILAC conference. I’ve been to the last two LILACs, they are the Kylie Mingoue’s of conferences – small but perfectly formed! Really enjoyable with a great mix of practitioners and researchers. I hope Tara Brabazon’s presentation goes online afterwards.

DSpace installed against Oracle 10?

Apparently this isn’t as straightforward as the DSpace documentation might suggest, and further problems may arise when installing patches/plugins etc as most are designed with a PostgreSQL database in mind. This is a problem as it negates one of the main reasons for choosing DSpace, that of being able to use and feed back into community developments.

The web team are think-tanking this to work out a solution. We’d like to be able to extend our repository to also work with a publications database, so that’s an additional issue to take into consideration.

Any comments or suggestions appreciated..

Snapped at home – you can just about make out a pheasant strolling through the brambles.. This little guy has really been making himself at home around our place lately. Caught him strutting along the patio the other morning. I wouldn’t be bothered except pheasants are so pea-brained! As long as he doesn’t try any ‘why did the pheasant cross the road’ type stuff because pheasants don’t seem to be very successful at that…

Training repository administrators

I’ve been doing a number of training sessions lately, for a number of different, err, stakeholders in the repository. Today I have my first session with the five librarians that will be helping to administer the collections, and perform the mediation on deposits.

I’ve split the sessions up, ostensibly into three meetings over three weeks. The first will cover the basics – open access, institutional repositories, copyright and permissions (plus licences and terms and conditions – exciting!) and versions. We’ll also go over the main features of our DSpace installation, from an end-user perspective. I’ll ask them to log in, then before our next session I’ll add them as administrators to their particular area of responsibility.

I’m aiming to give them all a chance to reflect on what they’ve covered between one session and the next. It really is a lot to take in, and I remember back to the three days I spent at the RSP Summer School in June 2007 and the breadth of information we took in – quite a lot to get your head around.

It will really help to have extra hands to check submissions – not because I’m flat out but because it provides a continuity of service (so I can go on hols over Easter!). Also I’m rolling out the promotion for the repository over the next few weeks, in a fairly understated kind of way. This week it’s e-theses, to coincide with the university ‘Innovations Week’, where e-theses get a stand in the Claverton Rooms cafeteria. The week after it’s ‘Meet the new Research Publications Librarian’ (me!) announced on the internal news pages. Finally, around, or maybe just after Easter it’s a ‘Know your Author rights’ campaign. *That* should be interesting…

Well, better sign off here. Almost time for the training session number one.