NVivo Training

You might remember that YSJ purchased a license for NVivo software last March, which you can access from the virtual desktop. Leah will be offering some introductions to NVivo over the summer. Click a date to register (via EventBrite).

Monday 30  June 2014, 9:00-10:30, FT112

Monday 7 July 2014, 10:30-12:00, FT112

Tuesday 15 July 2014, 13:00-14:30, FT210

Thursday 07 August 2014, 13:00-14:30, FT214

Monday 18 August 2014, 14:00-15:30, FT114

This will be a brief introduction to a powerful software. 90 minutes will allow you to see what the software offers, how it might be relevant to your research, and whether NVivo’s 2 day official training would be right for you. There will be about 30-45 minutes for you to experiment with your data in NVivo, so please make some data available to yourself on the S drive or bring it on a USB stick. Data can be text, audio, video, pictures and data sets. A complete list of file formats for NVivo can be found here. If you can’t bring data to the workshop, you can access NVivo’s sample data.

If none of these times work for you, please be in touchwith times/days that work better. Feel free to pass this information along to others at YSJ.

If you have 9 minutes, here’s a YouTube introduction to NVivo

Pardon the noise (and dust!)

Summer is a busy time for libraries. If you've come to Fountains in the last week, you may have seen new shelves being built, books and furniture being moved and carpets being refreshed. There have also been some book stock moves, so if you can't find the books where you are accoustomed to seeing them, you're not going crazy, we have indeed moved them. At the end of this month, we'll also begin placing RFID tags in each book and soundproofing the second floor. Not to mention the digital upgrades you can't see!

We know it's also a busy time for you, and apologise for the noise, dust and changes which may be inconvenient for those of you trying to access Fountains throughout the summer. If you are having trouble finding the books you need or a quiet place to work, please come down to Question Point for guidance.

Copyright changes: good news for researchers

You may be aware that new exceptions to copyright legislation came into effect on 1 June 2014.  We won't go into all of them in detail here, but we are happy to report a couple of key improvements for researchers.

Text and data mining

If you already have legal access to a piece of research (e.g. access to a journal article via a YSJ ILS subscription), you now have the right to use the data within for your own, non-commercial research (e.g. for computational analysis), without seeking permission from the rights holder.  This is only if you have legal access to the published research and if it is for non-commercial purposes, but it is a good step forward in data sharing.

Extension of works allowed to be copied

There have previously been restrictions on the types of work that one is allowed to copy for research.  These have been extended, so you can now copy, for example, limited passages from sound recordings or films, for non-commercial research purposes.  As long as this is considered a fair amount to use and the original source is accredited, this means you are able to use a much wider range of resources in your studies.

We will be updating our copyright guidance on the ILS website very soon, to reflect these exceptions.  We have a new librarian starting at YSJ this month and part of her remit is to focus on copyright issues, so we are sure she will have lots of ideas for dialogue with the research community here on these topics.  In the meantime, here is the official guide for researchers from the Intellectual Property Office.  We also recommend the resources specifically about these new exceptions on the Jisc Legal website and the advice from the London School of Economics.

Please remember that ILS can help with copyright and intellectual property advice, but we are not legal experts!  We very much recommend checking out the official guidance from the Intellectual Property Office listed above and getting individual advice if this doesn't answer your specific questions.




Copyright Symbol by David Wees. Used under CC BY 2.0.  Available from https://flic.kr/p/bD6e8F

EndNote License

We just sent you and your supervisors an email to let you know that EndNote have changed their license terms in such a way that Endnote can only be accessed on YSJ’s university PCs and we can no longer provide access to the software via the virtual desktop.

This could have quite an impact on your work if you're an EndNote user and accustomed to using the virtual desktop from home or from De Grey.

If you'd like to take this opportunity to copy your EndNote library into RefWorks, your academic liaison librarian would be happy to give support individually or to do a group workshop on this process. Copying EndNote libraries and importing them into RefWorks has gone smoothly thus far! If you'd like to give it a try on your own, RefWorks have an online guide to transferring your references across.

For those of you who have begun using EndNote for your dissertation and have already written Word documents with EndNote citations embedded, we understand that switching to RefWorks at this point might cause significant challenges. Please let us know who you are so we can reach an individual solution.

If you haven't yet started using software to manage your reference library and create bibliographies, consider doing so over the summer. Here's a bit more information on RefWorks at YSJ, including links to help pages and YouTube tutorials.

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!