Vine is a Twitter app which allows short, looping videos to be created quickly and easily. There are a number of reasons for making videos and sharing. Antony Groves describes how the University of Sussex Library use Vine for teaching basic skills, promoting events, and advertising opening hours. Here he also provides a helpful five-step guide to creating and sharing a […]
Category: Libraries
Science Boot Camp West
Last week Stanford Libraries hosted the third annual Science Boot Camp West (SBCW 2015), “… building on the great Science Boot Camp events held at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2013 and at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2014. Started in Massachusetts and spreading throughout the USA, science boot camps for librarians are […]
How can universities increase Green Open Access? Article deposit rates soar after direct solicitation from library.
Universities have struggled to increase article deposit rates for their institutional repositories. Regardless of personal benefits and top-down mandates, getting faculty to change their publishing workflows does not happen overnight. At their institution, Michael Boock and Hui Zhang found that direct solicitation of author manuscripts has been the most effective method of reaching a higher deposit rate. Authors who wish to provide open […]
Does Your Library Delight You?
In a recent opinion piece in Forbes, Steve Denning provocatively asks, “Do we need libraries?” As a digital librarian, my short answer is “Yes, of course we need libraries!” But, Denning makes many excellent points in cautioning that the same disruptive threats faced by many industries — think taxis and Uber, or hotels and AirBnB, […]
Beyond Beall’s List: We need a better understanding of predatory publishing without overstating its size and danger.
Although predatory publishers predate open access, their recent explosion was expedited by the emergence of fee-charging OA journals. Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella argue that librarians can play an important role in helping researchers to avoid becoming prey. But there remains ambiguity over what makes a publisher predatory. Librarians can help to counteract the misconceptions and alarmism that stymie the acceptance of […]
Self-archived articles receive higher citation counts than non-OA articles from same political science journals.
The low level of research funding for the social sciences in the US is likely to have a direct and negative effect on researchers’ ability to pay the article processing charges associated with the most common Gold OA business model. But there are other options. Amy Atchison and Jonathan Bull look at the benefits of Green Open Access. Their research indicates self-archived/ Green OA […]
Faculty Learning Communities are a positive way for libraries to engage academic staff in scholarly communication.
The stakes and politics of research and scholarship are different depending on discipline, department, and institution, and as such, increasing awareness of scholarly communication is fraught with difficulty. Librarians Jennifer Bazeley and Jen Waller share their experience developing a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) in order to address the issues. Cultivating awareness of the entire scholarly communication landscape created stronger faculty advocates for change, but […]
Public libraries play a central role in providing access to data and ensuring the freedom of digital knowledge.
Data connectivity is intrinsic to most of our daily lives. The place which exists in almost every community large or small, rural or urban, is the public library. Ben Lee argues that not only do libraries provide free access to data, but they do so in an environment which is trustworthy and neutral, geared to learning. Access to digital technology […]
Mobile website or an app? Looking ahead to strategic mobile library development in Higher Education.
With more and more users accessing library websites via smartphones, what is the best mobile platform to facilitate access to the diverse collections? Ros Pan and Josh Clark report back from an extensive study into library website development. They conclude that at present time, the best strategic solution is a hybrid approach where a platform-independent web app is created that can be […]
The First UC Libraries Code Camp
This post was co-authored by Stephen Abrams. So 30 coders walk into a conference center in Oakland… No, it’s not a bad joke in need of a punch line, it instead describes the start of the first UC Libraries Code Camp, which took place in downtown Oakland last week. These coders were all from the University of California system (8 out […]