17 Saturday Oct 2009
Two contrasting studies of information-seeking behaviours in higher education, published online in Sept/Oct 09:
Information-Seeking Behavior in the Digital Age: A Multi-disciplinary Study of Academic Researchers
11 Sunday Oct 2009
Posted in Academic search
A list of books for thinking about academic search:—
1) Suitable for undergraduate students:
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
2) Using Engines:
Google Scholar and Its Competitors: Accessing Scholarly Resources on the Web (forthcoming)
Google Scholar and More: New Google Applications and Tools for Libraries and Library Users
Is There A Google Generation? : Are ICT Innovations Changing Information Seeking Behaviour? (forthcoming)
E-Journals Access and Management (Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science)
3) Designing engines:
Search Query Ambiguity: When lists are not enough
4) Findability and re-findability:
Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
5) The deep history of information flows:
Glut: The Deep History of Information Science: Mastering Information Through the Ages
Transmitting Culture (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)
Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West
6) Academic systems of production:
Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship
Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age
31 Friday Jul 2009
Full-text papers and Powerpoints from ELPUB 2009 : 13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing are now freely available online.
Lots of titles that sound interesting, including: ‘Overlay Publications: a functional overview of the concept’; ‘Targeted knowledge: interaction and rich user experience towards a scholarly communication that “lets”‘; ‘Incorporating Semantics and Metadata as Part of the Article Authoring Process’; and ‘Electronic publishing and bibliometrics’.
One short strand of the presentation ‘Electronic publishing and bibliometrics’ (.PPT) is summarised by Moitara’s blog which reposts a D-lib conference report, thus…
“discussed in Moed’s keynote speech was assessment in the area of the humanities where there is a lack of reference indexes such as Scopus or Web of Science, due to the different types of research, outcomes and habits between the humanities and science communities. Moed explored five different options for the creation of a comprehensive database for the humanities and social sciences, including combining a number of existing European special SSH bibliographies, creating a new database from publishers’ archives, stimulating further enhancement of Web of Science and Scopus, exploring the potentialities and limitations of Google Scholar and Google Book Search, and creating a citation index from institutional repositories. Much work must be done in these fields, but the availability of full-text seems to be a key issue.” (My emphasis)
The first part of this presentation also has an interesting graph, showing how the RAE in the UK severely skews the output of academic papers…
from: Moed (2009). “Electronic publishing and bibliometrics” (.PPT)
29 Wednesday Jul 2009
If you couldn’t be at the recent Research Information Network meeting in London, “The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research”, then RIN has kindly provided a 28 minute “edited highlights” podcast for free.
A delicious little snippet…
“Government researchers search the least. They switch off at Friday lunchtime and don’t come back until Monday lunchtime”
29 Wednesday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search
I just found the American Historical Association Directory of History Journals. Apparently it was launched circa October 2007, and it currently has basic titles/links for 390 journals. Sadly, it’s in A-Z form — and doesn’t distinguish free from commercial journals.
29 Wednesday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search
The UK academic service Intute has had a redesign…
Very nice it looks, too. But, unfortunately, the redesign has broken a variety of vital arts & humanities links. Below are the changes, if you’ve been linking via your Web pages to the “Latest Additions” on Intute:—
Direct links:
Was: …/artsandhumanities/latest.html
Is now split into five:
Intute: Humanities latest resources
Intute: Communication and media studies latest resources
Intute: Creative and performing arts latest resources
Intute: Architecture and planning latest resources
Intute: Modern languages and area studies latest resources
RSS feeds:
And if you’ve been following Intute by RSS, the “latest additions” RSS feed is also broken—
Was: …/latest_artsandhumanities.xml
Is now split into five:
Communication and media studies
Modern languages and area studies
And I might suggest the following as a replacement, if you’re used to having a single Intute: Arts & Humanities link on your website:
Intute: | humanities | arts | media | architecture | languages |
You can get the ‘copy & paste’ code for this here.
26 Sunday Jul 2009
Fancy having a 720-page table that lists all humanities journals in the two major commercial subscription databases, and tells you which journal is to be found in which database?…
The June 2009 “A Comparative International Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities” (PDF link, 2.8Mb) by Michele Dassa and Christine Kosmopoulos is just that. Amazingly, it seems to be the first time such a table has been compiled…
“Presented here for the first time in a comparative table are the contents of the databases … in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, of the Web of Science (published by Thomson Reuters) and of Scopus (published by Elsevier), as well as of the biographical lists European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH) … and of the French Agence d’Evaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Superieur (AERES). With some 20,000 entries, this is an almost exhaustive overview of the wealth of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities …”
This might be read in combination with a May 2009 Gale Reference Review review of three major academic search-engines, which took a sceptical look at both Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus…
“I looked at the widely touted figures in the promotional materials [ of WoS and Scopus and found ] they should not be taken for granted. Many of these are incorrect and exaggerated. Their compilation has been fast and loose, sometimes making them fiction rather than fact.”
“The coverage of arts & humanities [ in Scopus ] is extremely poor (representing barely 1% of the database) [ and by comparison ] Web of Science has about […] 10 times as many for arts & humanities.” [ and even if Scopus gets a boost, as proposed, it would still only have ] about 1/6th of what Web of Science has for these disciplines”
“It is one thing that Scopus has no cited references in records for papers published before 1996, but it adds insult to injury that the pre-1996 papers are ignored. This results in absurdly low h-index for many of the senior teaching and research faculty members and independent researchers who published papers well before 1996 which have been widely cited in the past 25-35 years […] Lazy administrators and bureaucrats stop here and ignore [ worthy people ] for some lifetime award”
24 Friday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search
“Teaching information skills to large groups with limited time and resources” (abstract + PDF) is an article from British educational researchers, published in the new June 2009 issue of Journal of Information Literacy. You have to wade through some educational psychology cruft in the early pages. But there is the interesting early snippet that…
“students training to be teachers are more receptive to the lecture based interactive teaching methods than students studying Arts and Humanities subjects.”
After the early sections it’s an interesting read — it asks how best to give practical lessons in search literacy to UK undergraduates, when (as seems usual in the UK) the only real opportunity for…
“librarians to engage with students will be to large groups in lecture theatres […] containing over 200 students.”
Search literacy is vital at this stage because U.K. schools and further education colleges turn out large numbers of people who don’t even know simple search techniques such as… “find a phrase” -spam.
Now, I can understand university management thinking: “the F.E. colleges must have drilled search literacy into the students, so they only need a quick refresher and an outline of the library resources”. But in my experience they’re wrong — and delivery of one or two 60 minute lectures, in a packed and sweaty lecture theatre, must send a subliminal message to students that these are matters that are not deemed to be overly important. The students think: “I wasn’t taught this in F.E. college, it only gets a couple of mass induction lectures at the start of university — so it can’t be that important, right?” And such a thought is no doubt compounded by the fact that they know how to navigate their little bits of the web very well indeed.
Universities shouldn’t have to mop up the mess left by schools and F.E. colleges, but let’s assume they do in this case. I’m thinking that one option would be to have a 6-week online ‘summer school’ course in search literacy, the passing of which would be a pre-requisite for entry into the first year.
Related on JURN: Students’ Use of Research Content in Teaching and Learning.
23 Thursday Jul 2009
The Scholarly Kitchen blog fisks a new ‘study’ that purports to show that developing countries with free access to scientific information experienced a six-fold increase in article output since 2002…
“the present analysis simply cannot adequately evaluate the effect of these free literature programs on research output”
22 Wednesday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search
Lynn Dierking, talking in the context of a July 2009 podcast discussion on museum visitor research and how visitors might interface with online tools and personal online research…
“the social media world is still very underused and unexplored by many museums — in fact there’s a tremendous fear of them, and we’ve been visiting some institutions that are afraid they’re going to be critiqued by the public…”
“there’s also a tendency to think ‘we need interactive [exhibits]’, but pretty much across the board, even talking to youth about it — they will talk about the fact that they sit at a computer all the time, or that they can do that at home…”
Although it seems that most don’t do that at home. John Falk, in the same podcast…
“what little data there is suggests that … despite the desire to drive people back to the web and other sources after a visit, it’s still pretty abysmal — less than ten per cent of the public are following up experiences [after visiting a museum] by going back to the web.”
Fear is an interesting addition (one I’d not really considered before) to sloth and funding issues, in terms of the factors preventing the humanities from finding additional/popular audiences online — and thus generating much-needed public support and understanding — during a time of crisis.