Stock moves 5-9 June, 2014

ILS will be shifting book collections between floors in Fountains Learning Centre from Thursday 5 June until Monday 9 June. If you need books or access to a PC on the first or second floors during those times, please go to Question Point and a member of staff will bring the books you need to you or find you a PC to use. Obviously, it will be a bit more time consuming for you and so we thank you in advance for your patience. Any questions or comments about this or any ILS project? Talk to your academic liaison librarian.

Finding open access publications

Those of you who have been to our research support session on getting published will have heard us talk about the Open Access debate:

Research, social media and getting published from Clare McCluskey

We also blogged a little on this topic back in March.  One of the consequences of more people ensuring that their research is available without a subscription is the increased use of institutional repositories.  Basically, lots of researchers are now making their conference slides, pre-prints of journal articles and other research reports available to the general public via websites at their universities (where their agreement with their publishers allows).  You can go to individual examples, e.g. University of Huddersfield, University of Leicester, Institute of Education.  However, if you want to do a search across the different collections available, the Directory of Open Access Repositories is the place to go.

Your Librarians as Researchers

We were busy over the Easter holidays. Not only is it the deadline for spending on new books (we love new books!) but we (Leah and Clare) attended an excellent conference on Information Literacy. We were presenting at the conference and thought you might be interested in some of what we  do as researchers.

For the presentation, we hypothesized that several benefits might come from teaching information literacy skills -- like how to find, evaluate and synthesize scholarly resources -- frequently and quickly, as opposed to the traditional longer, one-off instruction session. After an investigation of some of the relevant psychological and pedagogic literature, we showed how bite-size instruction in two courses at YSJ has correlated with increased NSS scores and positive tutor feedback. We also discussed how we might assess our bite-size instruction and demonstrated some 60 second videos (ILS Shorts) we have developed to support basic skills, which we hope to pursue in a flipped-library approach. 

Some of what we have been doing with your 30 minute drop-in researcher sessions relates to this as well, so depending on how our research develops and ethical review, we may be using these sessions to assess whether a short, frequent approach to information literacy can be useful. Slides below!

Reminder - unlimited interlibrary loans

As a researcher at York St John, you are entitled to unlimited inter-library loan requests.  Our team is here to help you access information that isn't immediately available and will search the country for a library willing to supply.  Along with the SCONUL Access scheme for borrowing from other university libraries and the British Library Reading Room services, this means you should have access to the information you need for your research.

For more information on inter-library loans, check out our guide.

ILS open over the Easter vacation

The Spring Term may have finished, but ILS continues to offer access throughout the vacation.  For more information on our opening hours over Easter, head to our website. We'll be offering more research support sessions and opportunities for you to give feedback during the Summer Term.  Keep an eye on the blog for details of these.

By Donar Reiskoffer (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

NVivo software now available at YSJ

Are you using qualitative research? YSJ now offers you access to NVivo software, which might help with the floods of data you're managing. NVivo is designed to assist with many aspects of the qualitative research process, specifically note-taking, interview transcription, memoing, and file management. It’s recently been improved to allow analysis of data generated by social media such as Twitter and Facebook and also allows more seamless integration between a variety of mobile devices.

More on NVivo can be found here http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo_features-and-benefits.aspx

Dan Troke from ILS will be offering training to interested researchers shortly. Leave a comment or send us an email if you'd like to be on the list.

Altmetrics for YSJ Researchers

In our Research, Social Media, and Getting Published workshop this term, we discussed shaping and enhancing your online presence in line with standard academic publishing. One of the traditional - and problematic - measures of a journal's visibility, reputation, and overall impact is the 'impact factor' (others metrics include the Hirsch Index and the Eigenfactor).

But what if your research is tweeted, blogged about, frequently uploaded to Mendeley, liked on Facebook, captured with CiteULike etc.? Increasingly, these 'impact factors,' commonly called 'Altmetrics,' are tracked and taken seriously by the academy and academic publishers. Altmetrics are calculated based on an article's (or preprint's) DOI.

As ever, popular interest in research and academic interest in research are different from one another. High volume for social media likely points to a piece of research being controversial (issues regarding gender, climate change, stem cell research etc.), or to it making good headline material, or possibly that it involves sneezing pandas or a puppy wearing a hat. It's important, therefore, to see the location and quality of the buzz. Is the research discussed on academic blogs, uploaded and downloaded frequently from Data Dryad, Mendeley or your institutional repository? That's a good sign.

Interested in more?
#altmetrics on Twitter
A guide to Altmetrics from University of Newcastle library
An Altmetrics bibliography by Charles W. Bailey Jr.