Author: Library Staff

Digital Scholarship: Officially Summer, READ!

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beach-book-coffee-mug2The promise of summer is time to read!

Wherever you may be reading this summer, here are some lists to ignite your reading imagination:

With this post we heartily encourage you to take time to read this summer.

If you are worried about reading habits, here are two articles – discuss!

Kaufman, Geoff, and Mary Flanagan. “High-Low Split: Divergent Cognitive Construal Levels Triggered by Digital and Non-digital Platforms.” In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2773-2777. ACM, 2016. doi:10.1145/2858036.2858550

Mangen, A. (2016), The Digitization of Literary Reading. Orbis Litterarum, 71: 240–262. doi: 10.1111/oli.12095

 

— Kimberly Hoffman

Digital Scholarship: Have Your Say on Altmetrics!

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The National Information Standards Organization NISO has been working under an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to “explore, identify, and advance standards and/or best practices related to a new suite of potential metrics” in scholarly publishing. This work focuses on “new assessment metrics, which include usage-based metrics, social media references, and network behavioral analysis. In addition, this project will explore potential assessment criteria for non-traditional research outputs, such as data sets, visualizations, software, and other applications.”  Read more about the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Initiative.

If your university of library is involved in research data services, this draft provides guidelines at every level. It explains the relationship between an article CrossRef DOI, a dataset DataCite DOI, and the scholar responsible with an ORCID ID. NEW! Alternative Outputs in Scholarly Communications: Data Metrics – Draft for Public Comment May 13 – June 11, 2016

Our university has just become a member of ORCID. This draft will lead to discussion of the importance of machine readable persistent identifiers. NEW! Persistent Identifiers in Scholarly Communications – Draft for Public Comment May 13 – June 11, 2016

As universities and libraries have discussions about digital humanities, this draft provides lists of alternative scholarly output. NEW!  Alternative Outputs in Scholarly Communications – Draft for Public Comment May 13 – June 11, 2016

 

— Kimberly Hoffman

Digital Scholarship: Are You Following the News?

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If you are following the news and understand what is going on in the world of scholarly publishing and libraries – you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din!¹ It gets curiouser and curiouser. ²

In early May, CrossRef announced Members will soon be able to assign Crossref DOIs to preprints . This is seen as a positive step in Open Access. Scholarly publication that has been peer reviewed, but is not the final published version is known as a preprint. Many researchers have their preprint publications available, often on web sites or in repositories. One example of a preprint repository is arXiv.org e-Print archive.

Today, we learn that SSRN — a leading social science and humanities repository and online community — joins Elsevier.

And, from Nature Social-sciences preprint server snapped up by publishing giant Elsevier.

Scholarly communications and science communication is a puzzlement!³

Can John Oliver set us straight? See: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Scientific Studies (HBO) 

 

— Kimberly Hoffman

[1] “Gunga Din (Lit.) Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Gunga Din’ (1892) tells of an Indian water-carrier who is killed bringing water to a wounded English officer in the battlefield. The poem ends with the famous lines:

Tho’ I’ve belted you an flayed you, By the livin’ Gawd that made you, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”

The phrase ‘you’re a better man than I,  Gunga Din!’ is used in admiration for someone’s daring, courage and selflessness.

Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion, Third Edition, 2012: p162

[2] Ibid. Curiouser and curiouser: A phrase used repeatedly by *Alice in Lewis Carroll’s children’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…

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[3] Puzzlement: As a mass noun: the fact or condition of being puzzled; perplexity, bewilderment, confusion. Oxford English Dictionary (online).

Digital Scholarship @ CUA: If Librarians Were Honest

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Happy end of your semester, academic year, or college experience from your CUA Librarians! Happy summer and visit a library!

No one spends time here without being changed.

From “If Librarians Were Honest” by Joseph Mills

“… a book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work….”!!!!
– Benjamin Franklin
–
If librarians were honest,
they wouldn’t smile, or act
welcoming. They would say,
You need to be careful. Here
be monsters.
They would say,
These rooms house heathens
and heretics, murderers and
maniacs, the deluded, desperate,
and dissolute.
They would say,
These books contain knowledge
of death, desire, and decay,
betrayal, blood, and more blood;
each is a Pandora’s box, so why
would you want to open one.
They would post danger
signs warning that contact
might result in mood swings,
severe changes in vision,
and mind-altering effects.
–
Read the whole poem in The Artist’s Library by Erinn Batykefer and Laura Damon-Moore: p54
— Kimberly Hoffman
–

Digital Scholarship @ CUA: Rushing to the End of the Semester?

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Image of a brain Last week, CUA Research Day had interesting research on mindfulness. As we all gear up (pay heed to that motion metaphor!) for the end of an academic semester, here are some readings on note taking and attention; mind mapping; and the art of slow!

Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away

And there are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, “the processing that occurs” will improve “learning and retention.” The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people. [Source: Mueller, Pam A. and Oppenheimer,  Daniel M. 2014. “The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard:
Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.” Psychological Science OnlineFirst,. doi:10.1177/0956797614524581. ]

Thinking through Comics with Nick Sousanis’s Grids & Gestures

Having briefly thought about this, I want you to take a single sheet of paper (any size, shape will do) and drawing with a pencil or pen, carve it up in some grid-esque fashion that represents the shape of your day. It can be this day, a recent day, a memorable day, or a typical/amalgamation day. And then inhabit these spaces you’ve drawn on the page with lines, marks, or gestures that represent your activity or emotional state during those times represented. The emphasis here is to do your best to not draw things. (You can always do that later!) And also, you can leave space blank on your page – but that has to mean something. This isn’t writing where you can finish a final sentence mid-page. Every inch of the composition is important in comics – so be aware of that as well. Finally, when I do this in class or with groups, I give people about 5-10 minutes to do it, so they have to make decisions quickly. Try to give yourself a similar limit. [Source: Salter, Anastasia. 2016. Thinking through Comics with Nick Sousanis’s Grids & Gestures. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/thinking-through-comics-with-nick-sousaniss-grids-gestures ]

‘Slow Professor’: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

In a corporate university, argues Slow Professor, “power is transferred from faculty to managers, economic justifications dominate, and the familiar ‘bottom line’ eclipses pedagogical and intellectual concerns.” But slow professors nevertheless “advocate deliberation over acceleration” because they “need time to think, and so do our students. Time for reflection and open-ended inquiry is not a luxury but is crucial to what we do.” [Source: Berg, Maggie and Barbara Karolina Seeber. 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. And, Flaherty, Colleen. “‘The Slow Professor’.” https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/19/book-argues-faculty-members-should-actively-resist-culture-speed-modern-academe, accessed April 19, 2016.]

 

— Kimberly Hoffman

Digital Scholarship @ CUA: Research & Libraries

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2016RESEARCHDAYPROGRAM-1Join us on Friday, April 15 for the inaugural CUA Research Day!

What do all the CUA Research Day presenters and poster participants have in common? They started with a question and they did research!

The recently published Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2015 findings include that while the discovery process has many access points, faculty still rely heavily on the library web site and catalog; faculty need more information about data management and repositories; monographs are favored over ebooks; and traditional scholarly outputs – journal articles and books – still reign supreme.

The most important finding for libraries may be:

Interest in supporting students and their competencies and learning outcomes shows signs of surging. Since the previous cycle of the survey, there has been an increase in the share of faculty members who believe that their undergraduate students have poor research skills and a substantial increase in the perceived importance of the role of the library in helping undergraduate students develop research, critical analysis, and information literacy skills.

We will see you Friday, April 15 at CUA Research Day! Look for these poster presentations from the library:

Comparing Religious Studies and Theology Faculty Citations and Library Holdings, 2002-2012: an Update

Digital Toolkit: Essentials for the Researcher of Today and Tomorrow: What we can learn from #HamiltonMusical!

 

— Kimberly Hoffman

Digital Scholarship @ CUA: Academic Research in the News!

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ComplexityAcademic research publishing may be at a tipping point (the critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place.) A new Slate (daily web magazine) article asks, Why Is It So Expensive to Read Academic Research? If nothing else, the article has a readable explanation of the “serials pricing crisis.”

The article expounds on the controversy around Sci-Hub : “[T]he effect of long-term operation of Sci-Hub will be that publishers change their publishing models to support Open Access, because closed access will make no sense anymore.” It is a reminder that the scholarly ecosystem is a complex organism.

What should academic researchers do? Math might help!

Seven Things Every Researcher Should Know About Scholarly Publishing

Scholars, funders, libraries, and publishers, including scholarly societies, have different positions within this system and often very different agendas; as Joe Esposito notes “where you stand depends on where you sit.” Scholars want their work to be reviewed and circulated, though they may have different ideas about how this should happen. Funders want to encourage research and demonstrate its use. Libraries want to circulate good scholarship, though they may have different perspectives on how good work is created and how it should be discovered by researchers and then made available. Publishers want to facilitate the production of good scholarship, and make it available. While all stakeholders have much in common, often the focus is on the differences. Again, researchers don’t need to understand each and every approach, but to appreciate that there is a broader context that contains a range of perspectives.

Nine things you need to know about copyright: A good practice guide for administrators, librarians and academics

[About licenses…] Although the licences described above mostly involve payment and are relatively restrictive, the open and shared nature of the internet has led to development of a range of ‘open’ licences which promote permissive use of copyright works. The most famous of these are the Creative Commons licences conceived by American lawyer and activist Laurence Lessig. These licences are described in more detail in the FAQ section, but works made available under Creative Commons licences provide a hugely valuable resource and all of them are available free of charge under clear re-use terms. At the time of writing, there were over 1 billion works licensed under Creative Commons, including thousands of educational resources, millions of Flickr photos, and the entirety of Wikipedia.

 

— Kimberly Hoffman

Digital Scholarship @ CUA: Predictive Analytics, it’s a Rap by Dr. Data!

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A new title this month at Mullen Library is Mathematics Without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation by Michael Harris. No apologies here if your vocation is data  – Dr. Data drops first choreographed rap video about predictive analytics. Thanks, Eric Siegel, Ph.D.!

Predictive analytics learns from the data you supply,
and predicts if you will click, buy, lie, or die.
It ain’t astrological – it’s math, it’s methodological.
So better pay attention cause my flow is pedagogical. [Full lyrics]

 

— Kimberly Hoffman