Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Science, Technology, And Library Work: Trends And Milestones, Maria Forsman

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Nowadays it is difficult to imagine, what kind of changes research libraries have gone through during the last 40 years. In the 70’s libraries were proud of large collections of printed books and journals. Library automation was mostly in infancy, but some research fields were forerunners in developing library and information services. These fields are those that are economically useful in society. The first and most qualified international databases were in sciences like chemistry and physics, medicine, education and economics. Other sciences – like humanities and most of social sciences – were followers. Databases and different e-services were developed in …

The Future Librarian: A Diverse And Complex Professional, Gunilla Widén, Maria Kronqvist-Berg

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The library professional is an active actor in the information society and the professional identity is affected by societal and cultural phenomena as well as technological changes. The library users’ changing information behavior, different forms of information, and information overload challenge the professional perspective; what is the core expertise of the library profession and what new skills are needed in the future? The library profession meets a growing complexity in its role and it becomes difficult to balance the generalist and expertise level of the profession (Stover 2004). Desirable future skills are related to operating and navigating on the Internet, …

Coming Out: Making The Virtual Library Visible In Today's World, Grace Saw, Janine Schmidt

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

This is the age of the virtual customer. A silent virtual revolution has led to tumultuous and disruptive changes in environmental, financial, educational, and information environments. As the Library becomes increasingly virtual, it is becoming virtually invisible – as are library customers. Libraries are redefining their roles, managing their migration from the print past to an online future in a time of spiralling costs and declining incomes, redefining their products and services and refocusing on their customers, many of whom they rarely if ever see. How do we position the Library in the marketplace? What is the message to be …

Change Management In Libraries: An Essential Competency For Leadership, Catherine B. Soehner

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

In this era of shrinking budgets and advancing technology, libraries inevitably need to change to keep up with the times. This is especially true in regards to changes in the Information Technology (IT) services provided by libraries. Some traditional services are no longer used and others must be rearranged so that the library remains a vital component of the campus. Reorganization of personnel often takes place to accommodate these changes. Organizational change may initially appear overwhelming, especially if it involves many people with strongly held opinions and beliefs about maintaining traditional library services. However, a structured process, transparency, and effective …

Problem Lah! Learning To Tell The Story Of Continuous Assessment And Improvement, Tamera Hanken

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

To succeed organizations rely on the purposeful application of the management functions, planning, organizing, leading and controlling, i.e., assessment. Assessment involves the collection and analysis of service and performance data to inform planning, organizing and leading-- opening the door to a culture of assessment and continuous improvement. Like other organizations responding to ever challenging economies and ever changing customer expectations, libraries are examining continuous improvement methods such as Lean, or Six Sigma, to ensure operations and services are customer focused and can be continuously assessed and improved with limited resources. Librarians though, often lack a general understanding of assessment and …

Measuring (And Increasing) The Value Of Library Services, Carol Tenopir

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The value of the university library to faculty, students, and administrators has long been assumed. In an era of increasing choices (and sometimes decreasing resources), academic librarians all over the world are faced with finding the best ways to measure and demonstrate the value of the library to all stakeholders, and to gather evidence that helps libraries make the best choices about new directions for the future that will sustain and increase the value. This talk will both describe some methods for measuring value and outcomes and summarize results that measure value to users.

How Does The Information Team Today Become The Information Team Of Tomorrow, Carlo Iacono

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

As the delivery of universities’ information services becomes increasingly virtual and time-honoured library practices are deemed to add less value, literature abounds with discussions about the future of the profession. Academic librarians are generally finding technical and technological expertise is a must and that they need to be aware of emerging learning and research practises to ensure their place and value remains. These new demands create new opportunities and require new skills to be acquired.

In this complex and rapidly changing environment, managers need to remain on top of the requirement for new skill sets. The starting point is understanding …

Organisational Changes And A New Media Policy: Meeting User Demands At The Royal Institute Of Technology, Cecilia Heyman Widmark

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

This paper discusses why there is a need for organisational changes and a new policy for acquisitions within an academic library when 96.5 % of the media budget is spent on electronic resources related to the 3.5 % spent on print. At the Library of The Royal Institute of Technology the acquisitions and handling of printed material involved more time and personnel compared to that of licensing and administering electronic resources. Given the economic relation between the two expenditures it was clear that this should be reflected in the organisation.

A new media plan was developed to form a foundation …

Positioning Academic Libraries For The Future: A Process And Strategy For Organizational Transformation, Erin L. Ellis, Brian Rosenblum, John Stratton, Kathleen Ames-Stratton

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Seeking to more effectively respond to campus initiatives and user expectations, the University of Kansas (KU) Libraries underwent a process of significant organizational review and transformation. Guided by a purposeful, open process, a diverse and representative group was elected to serve on the Libraries Organizational Review Team (ORT) to assess the existing organizational structure, determine major functions and cross-functional areas therein, and identify new and vital activities and positions essential for achieving our strategic priorities. Recognizing, too, the trends and challenges occurring within higher education and academic libraries, ORT sought to redefine professional roles and functions to strategically position the …

Unlocking The Potential Of Library Generated Data To Assess Value, Impact, And Influence, Margie Jantti, Brian Cox

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The University of Wollongong Library (UWL) has initiated an innovative and collaborative research project to unambiguously demonstrate the value that can be provided by academic libraries. The project centres on the integration and interrogation of a series of discrete datasets, e.g. student performance, student attrition, student demographic data, and borrowing and electronic resources usage data. The project has enabled UWL to identify whether a correlation exists between usage of Library resources and academic performance (e.g. grades). Findings reveal a strong and sustained correlation; providing a new facet through which to view and understand the student academic experience.The project is different …

Author Impact Factor: Tracking The Dynamics Of Individual Scientific Impact, Santo Fortunato

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The impact factor (IF) of scientific journals has acquired a major role in the evaluations of the output of scholars, departments and whole institutions. Typically papers appearing in journals with large values of the IF receive a high weight in such evaluations. However, at the end of the day one is interested in assessing the impact of individuals, rather than papers. Here we introduce Author Impact Factor (AIF), which is the extension of the IF to authors. The AIF of an author A in year {\it t} is the average number of citations given by papers published in year {\it …

Measuring The World With Scientometrics Challenges And Limitations, Rafael Ball

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The quantification of the world is in full swing. With Big Data everyone will be convinced that in the future the truth will be based on correlations, not causality. This, however, will succeed only with a new understanding of data, its quality and precision. Will bibliometrics be able to comply?

Qualitative Scientometrics, Gustaf Nelhans

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

When scientometricians are asked about the relationship between citations and quality, they often argue along the lines that citations could be seen as indicators of use and that that this implies usefulness and impact on other research, which in turn is an argument for using them as indicators of quality. This paper questions the implicit linearity of such a ‘one-dimensional model’ of representing quality by quantity from a number of standpoints. First, the use of citations as well as any indicator that is used is performative in the sense that those getting measured by them, i.e. researchers or university administrators, …

The Meaning Of Altmetrics, Kim Holmberg

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

A range of quantitative methods are today widely used in research evaluation (e.g. Moed et al., 1985; Moed et al., 1995). Recently, with the increasing popularity of social media, and especially the increasing use of social media in scholarly activities, a new field of research has been introduced, namely altmetrics, to investigate the use of social media in research evaluation (Priem & Hemminger, 2010). Although altmetrics does not yet have a widely accepted definition, the idea with altmetrics is that the mentions and other indicators of visibility and awareness a research article and other research products get in social media …

What Would Be The Future Of The Integrated Library Systems?, Xiaohua (Cindy) Li

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Since the advent of Integrated Library Systems (ILSs) in 1970s, they have gone from being innovative to stagnant. In recent years, the rapid advancement of web technologies and the exponential growth of electronic resources and digital contents have increasingly exposed the weakness of traditional ILSs. The lack of flexibility, interoperability, and efficiency makes the ILSs hardly meet the needs of both internal and external library users. Meanwhile Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Drupal and open source ILSs have gotten much attention due to their technological and economic advantages, and cloud computing has allowed libraries to focus on bigger pictures. …

Implementing A Next Generation Library System, Peter Green

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Only a few years ago most library management systems were considered stable and mature and the focus of effort by library vendors and academic libraries was on developing and implementing client facing, web scale, discovery layers. These are now ubiquitous. However the rise and rise of electronic content and the growing complexity of managing that electronic content with systems developed last century has led to the current focus on developing and implementing next generation library management systems. These new library systems are being built from the ground up, encompassing all forms of content and subsuming more recently developed products, such …

Great Expectations: Results From A Faculty Survey Of Students' Information Literacy Proficiency, Brian Jackson, Margy Macmillan, Michelle Sinotte

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

In the fall of 2012, our library surveyed teaching faculty to gauge their expectations around students’ use of information. We asked instructors what they thought was important for students to know in each year of study, how proficient they felt students were in performing tasks associated with research, how they expected students to acquire that proficiency, and how they assessed students’ skills. The survey also polled faculty on the types of resources they felt were important for each year of study. The results of the study are informing the development of the library’s strategic plan and the inclusion of information …

Beyond Inspec - Building A Semantic Enrichment Service To Explore How The Iet Can Better Support Academic And Commercial Researchers, Allison Haggar, Richard Hollis

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

As the amount of content in the engineering space is constantly growing it is becoming more and more difficult to retrieve relevant information. In this context the IET has commissioned a project to evaluate the feasibility of providing a semantic enrichment service based on the terms contained in the Inspec Thesaurus. The possibility of automated tagging of a variety of content types including traditional academic publishing data (e.g. journal abstracts), commercial product information (e.g. product catalogues) and social media (e.g. twitter feeds) has been explored as well as the auto generation of new terms for the Inspec thesaurus. We have …

Altmetrics Is An Indication Of Quality Research Or Just Hot Topics, Chia Yew Boon, Joan Wee Jee Foon

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

With the widespread use of social media tools in the discovery, dissemination and discussion of research output, altmetric measurements are fast gaining popularity and they supplement the traditional research metrics by tracking the number of social mentions of research articles. In recent years, there a few such tools and they adopt different models and have different coverage. Publishers such as Scopus and PLoS have already incorporated altmetrics in their websites. This paper seeks to make sense of these available tools and evaluate their effectiveness. Do they identify quality research or just HOT topics? This paper also analyses most cited papers …

Assessing The Impact Of Publications Saved By Mendeley Users: Is There Any Different Pattern Among Users?, Zohreh Zahedi, Rodrigo Costas, Paul Wouters

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact of publications read (saved) by the different users in Mendeley in order to explore the extent to which their readership counts correlate with their citation indicators. The potential of filtering highly cited papers by Mendeley readerships and its different users have been also explored. For the analysis of the users, we have considered the information of the top three Mendeley ‘users’ reported by the Mendeley. Our results show that publications with Mendeley readerships tend to have higher citation and journal citation scores than publications without readerships. ‘Biomedical & health …

Metrics, Altmetrics, Data Visualization, Tuija Sonkkila

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

With examples from past, present and future in the making, we look how altmetrics visualizations are positioned into different visualization categories.

Mendeley As A Source Of Readership By Students And Postdocs? Evaluating Article Usage By Academic Status, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

This paper explores readership counts provided by the social reference manager Mendeley as a source for usage statistics for scientific papers, based on a sample of 1.2 million documents published in journals from the four disciplines Biomedical Research, Clinical Medicine, Health and Psychology. It is shown that the percentage of papers with at least one user on Mendeley (65.9%) as well as the average number of readers per document (9.6) is quite high compared to the uptake and average activity on other social media platforms. The majority of users are PhD and postgraduate students as well as postdocs. Correlations with …

Determining Return On Investment: The Importance And Development Of Statistics Collection For Information Literacy Training At Cput Libraries, Janine Lockhart, Deborah Becker

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Academic libraries are increasingly required to prove their value as university management is demanding evidence of return on investment. The Information Literacy (IL) programme at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) Libraries has undergone a process of development over many years from the initial random training sessions to the development and approval of a certified short course.

With these developments came the need for more relevant and detailed statistics. In a parallel process, the recording of the statistics for IL and other training done by library staff have therefore also evolved over the past few years.

This paper outlines the …

It-Based Solutions For Users And Library Staff: Case Study Of The Tallinn University Of Technology Library, Jüri Järs

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The new building of the Tallinn University of Technology (TUT) Library was opened in 2009. It has open stacks of about 210 000 volumes, which are located on 4 floors. The library has 32 study rooms and about 1 500 visits per day. In this paper some unique solutions are introduced, which have been worked out in cooperation between TUT librarians and library IT staff.

Information kiosk. One single access point for searching in e-catalogue ESTER and ISE database, topographic Open Stack Guide (OSG), study rooms reservation system. OSG is integrated with ESTER item records. There are two ways to …

Bibliometric Services In Research Evaluation: A New Task Area Strengthening The Jurisdiction Of Academic Librarians, Sabrina Petersohn

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Science policy framed by audit culture relies heavily on performance measurement. This changing research environment affects higher education institutions and their scientific libraries. As service providers for research and teaching libraries need to demonstrate their added-value in front of various stakeholders. Some Library and Information Science (LIS) scholars and practitioners thus promote evaluative bibliometric services as a new service area. The question rises whether this trend to engage in evaluative bibliometrics will consolidate into a recognized professional task area in academic librarianship. Using Abbott’s theoretical framework the paper asks whether academic librarians claim a professional jurisdiction on bibliometric expertise in …

The Effect Of Open Access On Citation Rates Of Self-Archived Articles At Chalmers, Lars Kullman

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Open Access (OA) proponents argue that OA increases the visibility and accessibility of research articles, and therefore increases the citation rate of these works. During the last decade numerous studies have been made on the possible citation advantage of OA on scholarly publications. At Chalmers University of Technology (Göteborg, Sweden) an OA policy was adopted in 2010, mandating all of its publications to be self-archived in the university repository Chalmers Publication Library (CPL). One of the arguments of the then vice chancellor was that OA would increase citations. In this study, a possible OA citation advantage of articles self-archived in …

'Access As A Service' - Reframing The Service Catalogue And Measures Of Success For Information Resources, Maureen Kattau

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

As collection development and the management of information resources have shifted from ownership to access or to ownership as access (in perpetual access models) the traditional distinction between collections and services - as the basis for thinking about service delivery - is no longer a tenable model. This turn towards "access as a service" has also meant that information resources have come more to resemble 'soft services' in their attendant issues of measurement and value demonstration.

Previous input, or infrastructure, measures (volume counts, usage, etc), if not unproblematic in terms of demonstrating their contribution to University outcomes, were at least …

Integrated Decision Support System – Idss For Library Holistic Evaluation, Lorena Siguenza-Guzman, Victor Saquicela, Dirk Cattrysse

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The decision-making process in academic libraries is paramount; however highly complicated due to the large number of data sources, processes and high volumes of data to be analyzed. Academic libraries are accustomed to producing and gathering a vast amount of statistics about their collection and services. Typical data sources include integrated library systems, library portals and online catalogues, systems of consortiums, quality surveys and university management. Unfortunately, these heterogeneous data sources are only partially used for decision-making processes due to the wide variety of formats, standards and technologies, as well as the lack of efficient methods of integration. This article …

Correlation Between Information Needs And The Library Collection: A Citation Analysis Study Of Doctoral Theses At Universidade Federal De Santa Catarina Library, Maria Bernardete Martin Alves, Karyn Munyk Lehmkuhl, Liliane Vieira Pinheiro, Dirce Maris Nunes Da Silva

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

This study aims at measuring the correlation between information needs of patrons and the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) Library collection. The survey was carried out targeting students from a doctoral course in Scientific and Technological Education especially, analyzing the listing of sources and literature of UFSC doctoral theses submitted in 2012. The postgraduate program was selected for its multidisciplinary nature. Theses were chosen for analysis because they are original studies and represent an innovative contribution. Also, they are available at the library collection and general public can access them both in printed or online format. The goal of …

Role Of Libraries In Promoting The Use Of Open Education Resources (Oer) In India: A Study Of Nptel Resources And Major Technology Libraries, Tukaram S. Kumbar, Amruth Sherikar

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The number of higher educational Institutions in India is growing steadily. Institutions imparting higher education in science and technology, particularly the ones setup up by Government of India as Institutes of national importance has almost doubled during last one decade. This development is a part of the national strategy to increase the capacity building in the S & T area. In order to support this major initiative, the eight major Institutes of national importance viz Indian Institute of Technology located in different parts of country and the Indian Institute of Science with support from Ministry of Human Resources and Development, …