Hue Thi Pham and Kerry Tanner Influences of technology on collaboration between academics and librarians
Interrelationships between collaboration, institutional structure, and technology.
Things like Google Apps tend to be used within departments – less use on smaller campuses because more casual face-to-face interaction. Level of use varies by discipline, faculty, campus.
Social technologies like Twitter used in lectures
Learning management system (eg Moodle) most important technology mentioned in interviews.
Institutional repository common space for depositing resources
Technology facilitating transition from traditional to digital library – more electronic resources, communicating over telephone, email, Skype. But purely online interaction means a reduced mutual understanding of partners’ contributions, and an old perception of librarians’ roles.
Divide between library system and learning management system leads to a divide between the two communities around these. Librarians complain they can’t do a workshop about an assignment without Moodle access to see the assignment. Academics say they think librarians could have a role but they don’t understand why they would need access or what they would do with it. Lack of coordination can be a problem – means LMS people and library people make decisions that each other isn’t aware of. Siloisation.
Library staff need to consider roles of interpersonal interaction with technology – value of tech, value of face-to-face interaction, importance of space design / architecture. Get automatic access to learning management system but avoid resulting workload. Need to find ways to integrate library management system with learning management system.
Audience comment: Involvement of librarian in discussion boards can be useful – some topics the academics are relieved to leave to librarian. But important to have awareness of mutual roles.
Lisa Ogle and Kai Jin Chen Just accept it! Increasing researcher input into the business of research outputs
Implementing Symplectic Elements at UoNewcastle. (37,000 students, 1000 academics plus 1500 professional staff) HERDC is reporting exercise to Australian government to secure funding – sounds similar to New Zealand’s PBRF. Work managed by research division but most data entry done by admin folk. Issues include duplicate data entry, variance in data quality, many publications never reported – funding missed out on. Library asked to assist from 2005 – centralised model addresses many issues.
Various identification mechanisms: scholarly databases, researchers, conference lists, uni website, library orders. All put manually into Endnote library, then manually copy/pasted into Callista database. Labour-intensive and would often be a 2-6 month delay for researchers, very frustrating.
Getting Elements. Loved harvesting from databases (based on search settings: “We think this is your publication, please log in to claim or reject it”). Originally not keen on opening up to researchers, but after demos got convinced researchers could add manual entry without compromising data quality as library/research staff can verify and lock it.
Benefits: database searches can be customised to minimise false positives/negatives. Can delegate others to act on researchers’ behalf. Publications appear on profile within 48 hours. Can upload Endnote libraries. Can include ‘in press’ publications without messing up workflow. Easily generate publication lists. Capture of bibliometric data. Pretty graphs on user’s dashboard.
Have been running 4 months, 2 thirds of publishing academics have logged in and interacted with system. (800 in first two weeks, and a lull over summer). 2900 publications in the system from current collection year (usually 3500).
Challenges: early adopter in Australian market. Development module took longer than expected – learned that everyone does HERDC differently.
Most negative feedback so far is from people who haven’t yet logged into the system. Someone complaining it was too hard – talked her through it over the phone and now fine.
Need to investigate further repository integration.
Malcolm Wolski and Joanna Richardson Terra Nova: a new land for librarians?
Big issues emerging around vast amounts of data and trying to connect it. Global connectedness another impact.
Researchers needing a “dry lab” to work with data instead of hands-on wet-lab. Seeing this in many areas.
Researchers can’t afford to work solo any more. Much infrastructure costs beyond reach of individual researcher or individual centre. Problems are too much for one person.
Can get storage and computing power – but may need to work with data for ten years so need to be able to retain it and keep working on it through changing technology. Lots of outputs are governmental reports not journal articles.
Most large research projects these days involve communities – even incorporated bodies.
80% of papers in the EU are of people collaborating with people outside their institution.
NeCTAR have invested heavily in virtual laboratories because it’s not just about creating data but using it – of course this creates more data.
In theory nothing stops a researcher going to Research Data Storage Infrastructure for storage without their university knowing.
Various community solutions like Tropical Data Hub, Australian National Corpus – slide lists a pile and he points out that for each of these, some institution has put their hand up to take responsibility for maintenance.
Approach of institutions keeping their own data but having to share metadata. Requires lots of discussion around data schemas – what you expect to find in data descriptions. Eg Research Data Australia from 85 participating organisations and growing. Goal to get more data, better connected data, more findable/usable.
Two impacts around:
Research tools: New suite from NeCTAR and ANDS eg virtual laboratories, discipline-specific tools. Need to choose which we’ll support, which data collection schemes we’ll be involved in. May need to develop our own tools for specific disciplines.
Library/research collaboration: Moving more to a partnership model.
Libraries provide support for data management plans and citing data, but there’s huge demand for archiving/preserving data.
Impact on university libraries:
- New jobs coming out for the “databrarian”.
- Need research services to help develop common data structures
- Participation in cross-disciplinary teams bringing librarian skills
- Development of legal frameworks for acquiring, generating, storing and sharing data
- Assisting with development of tools – lots of disciplines have different ways of exploring/analysing data so national collections/communities may have specific search (eg maps, chemical structure, vs facets) or visualisation tools.
- Archiving and preservation services
Librarian support roles
- Sourcing relevant data sets
- Consultancy – identify faculty needs, refer back to experts
- Targeted outreach services re data citation or data repositories
- New support service tools and processes
Want to be able to offer a service to researchers and them not have to worry about where it’s stored, whether on campus or Amazon Web Services or whatever.
