UWE MSc

Hello to any UWE MSc in Information and Library Management people who may be reading this! Tonight is the first session this semester for the ‘Academic Libraries’ module I’m teaching. I’m looking forward to it, and to meeting the students. I’ve been buried in repositories for so long now that the MSc Academic Libraries module is an opportunity to keep up with library life outside of open access and publications lists.

We’re using Peter Brophy’s ‘Academic Libraries’ as the core text, but I’m slipping in a chapter from Tara Brabazon’s ‘University of Google’ in week 5 when we cover Information Literacy and Educational Technology.

Any suggestions on what should be covered in an academic libraries module for an MSc welcomed.

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Current Research Information Systems

I made an enquiry to the UKCoRR mailing list asking whether anyway was using a CRIS in the UK. The replies were interesting, with a lot of interest in Symplectic. Only one reply from the list used InfoEd. The other options I asked about included PURE from Denmark, and the ProQuest Research Support Suite, which is a bit of a red herring, I don’t think it really performs entirely the work of a CRIS, especially when looking internally at an institution.
It’s quite obvious that in the lead up to the REF there’s a lot of naval gazing going on in terms of how universities are managing their research information. There are discussions over buildiing in-house systems, versus buying in a solution. I do think it’s a niche market here in the UK that Symplectic have jumped into. We’re in the process of considering how to go about this – a few things spring to mind for anything that eventually fills the gap:
Must be able to import our existing information from a legacy system
Should be able to integrate with various university systems (not the least being the repository)
Must be based on CERIF standards (I need to read up more on this).
Any comments on experiences with using a CRIS most useful. I wonder how they do this in Australia and elsewhere abroad..

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REF avalanche of publications

For shame, for shame. The thing I hated most when researching on blogs in libraries: the abandoned blog. I think perhaps it’s been more of a dry spell really. A long time between drinks? A hiatus? And WordPress have moved everything around in here.
We spent the summer collecting and then checking and re-checking publications for the Research Excellence Framework Pilot on Bibliometrics, which was a mammoth task, although now hearing of other larger institutions woes, perhaps we got off quite lightly.
Very busy with Opus, our repository, tidying up records and getting ready for our launch in February. Go and take a look. Can I just say how great Eprints Services have been? They’ve been great. And the silver lining to the REF cloud is that now we have masses of metadata records in our repository.

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