Digital Scholarship Blog

Becoming a Networked Researcher, 2014

2014-03-20T14:06:00.001+00:00

The Library works with the Researcher Development Team here at York, to deliver training on the aspects of Web 2.0 that impact on academia most. There's a whole suite of workshops around the idea of becoming a networked researcher - Russ Grant in RDT runs an introduction to social media, a session on enhancing your online reputation, and one on social networks for researchers (e.g ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and LinkedIn). I run the sessions on Blogs and Blogging, and Twitter.

Here are the slides from my sessions this term (the handouts we used are linked to at the relevant point in the slides):

Twitter for Researchers from University of York Library

(If you're interested in the teaching side of using Twitter, see our previous blog post on the subject!)

Blogs and Blogging: Becoming a Networked Researcher from University of York Library

If you're interested in these, we're running the whole suite again next term - all the details are available via the Support for Researchers webpages:

In case you're still not sold, here are some comments from this term's feedback forms:

Great. Ready to conquer the blogging world! Thanks
Excellent session, well presented and very friendly.
I finally understand what Twitter is, well done Ned!
Totally recommended
It saved me so much time, since I now know exactly the options I'm interested in… THANKS!

Hope to see some of you next term!

Using Twitter in Academic Teaching

2014-02-06T14:43:00.000+00:00

Last week we ran a workshop for academics on behalf of the Learning & Teaching Forum.

It was all about using Twitter in teaching; there's a huge amount written about using it for research, for communications, for myriad aspects of HE. But teaching is a much trickier issue, for all sorts of reasons.

The slides below give an introduction to what Twitter is, how it works, and why you might want to use it. It then goes onto to explore specific uses for Twitter in an academic teaching context, and showcases various examples from York and elsewhere. Particular thanks go to Sara Perry for allowing me to use her as a case study!

The handout we used is also linked to, from the slides, at the appropriate place. This includes a guide to embedding a Twitter widget in a module on BlackBoard.

Using Twitter in Academic Teaching from University of York Library

Clearly this is a popular subject as the slides have already been viewed several thousand times on Slideshare! Any questions, leave them in the comments.

A guide to social media for Music Students

2013-12-19T10:27:00.002+00:00

We recently went into the Music Department to run a short workshop on the advantages social media might give musicians in building their professional reputations. A lot of the content applies to non-musicians too! Anyone in the Arts wanting to use social media in their career may find this useful.

You can see all of our Prezis here.

Student Guide to Social Media

2013-11-14T12:32:00.000+00:00

The Student Guide to Social Media an interactive online resource, giving information on various social media platforms, and on tasks you can accomplish using social media - developed by the Libraries of the Universities of York, Leeds and Manchester.

Bookmark this link now: http://libassets.manchester.ac.uk/social-media-guide/ - it's really useful!

Increasingly the worlds of social media and academia are coming together. You probably use some social media already for personal (social) use, but it can have application in your University life - for helping you with your work, or boosting your profile and employability. The guide above lets you explore by platform (want to know more about Goolge+? Click the Google+ icon and you'll be told what it is, why it might be useful, how to get started with it) OR by task, by what you want to achieve - so if you want to keep up to date online, click the icon and the guide will tell you which tools will be helpful.

There's also a glossary of terms, some dos and don'ts - it's full of valuable information. Let us know what you think!

A guide to using Twitter, for Researchers

2013-07-10T11:47:00.000+01:00

Here's the final part of the Becoming a Networked Researcher workshop suite, this time on Twitter - a vital tool in scholarly communication these days.

Twitter for Researchers from University of York Library

You can see Part 1 of the suite (Blogs) here, and Part 2 of the suite (Collaboration and Dissemination) here.

Collaboration and Dissemination: Prezi, Slideshare, LinkedIn and Academia.edu

2013-07-03T09:38:00.001+01:00

The Library recently teamed up with the Researcher Development Team to deliver a suite of workshops entitled Becoming a Networked Researcher. Last week we published the materials from the first session, blogs and blogging.

Today's post is from the 2nd session, which covered collaboration and mainly dissemination of research - we focused on two presentation formats and two social networks.. The presentation is below.

A guide to blogging in academia

2013-06-28T14:18:00.001+01:00

The Library recently teamed up with the Researcher Development Team to deliver a suite of workshops entitled Becoming a Networked Researcher.

The first of these was all about blogs and blogging. Here's the presentation:

And if you're really keen, here's the handout we used for the practical activities...

Blogs for researchers: workshop handout by University of York Information

We'll put the presentations up for parts 2 and 3 of the suite later on.

#Edtech: 9 useful online tools in the academic environment

2013-06-03T11:33:00.000+01:00

We seem to have reached a tipping point, where the academic community is now really interested in the utility of web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. The recent Learning & Teaching Forum workshop on YouTube and Twitter, led by Professor David Smith, was completely oversubscribed and had to be moved to a larger room; it also spawned a couple of follow-up sessions on related topics.

One of these was the EdTech (or Educational Technology) session I ran a couple of weeks ago, to act as a 'taster menu' to 9 potentially useful online tools. We covered social media such as blogs, Twitter, and Academia.edu, and teaching tools such as Prezi and Padlet. Once again the number of attendees meant we had to move to a bigger room, and there was a lot of questions and audience engagement, which was great to see.

If you're interested in the potential academic application of these online tools, here's the presentation:

We also recorded the session; here's where you can watch the presentation and hear my talk at the same time.

How are academics using digital publications?

2013-05-22T12:31:00.000+01:00

The recently published 2012 Survey of UK Academics, carried out by Ithaka S+R, JISC, and RLUK gives some help in answering this question:

http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/5209/1/UK_Survey_of_Academics_2012_FINAL.pdf

Possibly the first question should be are UK academics using digital publications?

The answer is emphatically yes. When starting out a research project the vast majority of academics interviewed would go straight online with 40% going first to a general purpose search engine like Google and about a third opting for a specific online database or research resource. Only 2% of those interviewed would head out to the library building when they first start their research.

When trying to find resources further on in their research the interviewed academics also tended to favour online search tools; with those in STM disciplines most often using specialist research databases and those in the HSS often seeing the library’s online catalogue as their first port of call.

So what sort of resources are people looking for? And where?

What is ultimately shown is that researchers rely on a variety of different resource types and various ways of getting them. But there are some interesting trends and they tend to differ depending on which discipline academics work in.

It’s not surprising to learn that for those interviewed the peer-reviewed journal article remains the primary mode of research dissemination. This is true across subject areas. Second place, however, does vary by discipline. Those in STM disciplines tend to view not-yet-published preprints and working papers to be the second most important source of information whereas colleagues in HSS disciples are more likely to view monographs and edited volumes as their second most valuable resource.

The survey also shows that most researchers are happy to use electronic journals article with a majority of those interviewed not too perturbed by the thought of the digital format completely replacing the physical. Most academics interviewed also see an important role for ebooks in the research landscape but, unlike with journals, these are seen as a complement to the physical book, not a replacement. There is a little disciplinary variation with those in the arts and humanities less likely to fully embrace digital formats than colleagues in the sciences.

The library--with its physical collections and subscriptions to journals and databases--is still seen as the most important source for these resources. However, free online content is, if this survey is to be believed, becoming an increasingly important part of the research landscape with over 60% of respondents describing these as a very important resource for their research.

Can researchers always get the resources they want?

No. Around half of the respondents agreed that they are often not able to get the resources that they are looking for.

And what do researchers do when they are initially unable to get a resource?

Often they give up, at least according to this survey. Over 60% of respondents said that if a resource was not immediately available they will often just give up and move on to a resource that is available. Interlibrary loan is a next resort and over 30% of researchers say that they will often purchase a resource themselves if it is not available through their library.

Open Access and Research Council Policy

2013-04-22T16:10:00.004+01:00

RCUK Policy on Open Access

From this month the new and much debated Research Councils UK (RCUK) Policy on Open Access comes into effect:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/outputs.aspx

RCUK is a partnership of the seven UK Research Councils and the policy will affect any research funded by any one of the Councils: AHRC; BBSRC; EPSRC; ESRC; MRC; NERC; and STFC.

Open Access is about ensuring that the results of research, especially publicly-funded research, are available as soon as possible to anyone with an internet connection. It allows these results to be reproduced and re-used in a way which is free from most copyright and licensing restrictions.

The RCUK policy means that anyone whose research is funded in whole or in part by one or more of the research councils must try to make the results of their research available as Open Access - freely available online - as soon as possible after publication. There are two ‘routes’ to achieving this, the ‘gold route’ and the ‘green route’ and it is up to individual researchers to decide which route to take:

The gold route...

...involves making a publication Open Access on the publisher’s website as soon as it is published. Usually this will involve the payment of an article processing charge (APC) and RCUK-funded researchers from York may be able to apply to the York Open Access Fund (YOAF) to cover these costs.
http://www.york.ac.uk/library/informationfor/researchers/openaccess/york/

The green route...

...involves depositing the final, peer-reviewed manuscript to a suitable repository – this will usually mean the White Rose Research Online (WRRO) repository. Publishers will usually require an embargo period before published papers can be made available online and these can be set in WRRO. RCUK policy requires an embargo period of no more than 6 months for sciences or 12 months for social sciences, arts and humanities.
http://www.york.ac.uk/library/collections/whiteroseresearchonline/

Making your work Open Access

RCUK describe their policy as “a journey, not an event” and anticipate a 5-year transition period before 100% compliance is reached. For the first year they are expecting 45% of RCUK-funded papers to be made Open Access and will not penalise those that do not make there work Open Access.

However, we would like to see as many York research results as possible made Open Access, whether you are funded by RCUK or not. Making work Open Access is a great way to promote both you as a researcher and the University as a whole. There is evidence to suggest that making work Open Access can greatly increase the amount of citations it gets.

The Library can give advice and support to help you make your work Open Access and to comply with funder policies.

Visit the Open Access webpages:
http://www.york.ac.uk/library/informationfor/researchers/openaccess/

or email us at openaccesspublishing@york.ac.uk

Using Twitter in the academic environment

2013-02-07T12:13:00.001+00:00

The Library has published a guide to using Twitter for research, which you can read below.

There is more about using Web 2.0 tools in the research sphere, including workshops you can sign up for if you're a researcher, on the Library's Support for Researchers pages at bit.ly/networkedresearch.

You can read the guide full-screen by clicking the full-screen button in the bottom right-hand corner, below.

Twitter for research by University of York Information

9 fabulous sources of copyright-cleared multimedia

2012-11-14T10:31:00.001+00:00

Useful digital media

Want some good quality images, or videos, or other digital media to enhance your presentations and essays? Look no further. Here are some top places to find free stuff you can use for educational purposes, without breaking any copyright laws…

Creative Commons image from Cobalt123; hover over to get the Flickr URL

Images

There are loads of high quality images available via Creative Commons (or CC) copyright licences. There are various versions of the Creative Commons licence (such as being limited to non-commercial use, for example), but the one thing all of them have in common is that you can use something, without paying for it, as long as you correctly attribute it to its creator. In other words, if you use a picture in an essay, put a caption underneath it saying “Image by [name here], available via Creative Commons.”

Good places to look for images:

· Flickrhas hundreds of thousands of them – here’s the screen to start from: www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

· Blue Mountains is a site which seems to filter out a lot of the dross and just find higher-quality Flickr CC images: flickrcc.bluemountains.net/flickrCC/index.php

· Compfightis a great search engine for high quality images – just make sure you select the ‘Creative Commons’ option down the left-hand side: http://compfight.com/

· For a different selection of really interesting and arty pictures, try Art Stor. You’ll need to do it from campus so the site knows you are from York – it’s something we’ve paid for on your behalf. Or you can search the Multicolor Search Engine for images by colour, if you really need something exact to match the colour scheme of your presentation...

Sound

It’s harder to weave sound into academic work, but in case you can think of a way, try the British Library Archival Sound Recordings at http://sounds.bl.uk/

Video

Many YouTube videos (www.youtube.com) are available under Creative Commons licences (although you need to be careful that it is definitely the original copyright-holder who has granted this – someone uploading a pirated copy of Titanic and making it available via Creative Commons doesn’t mean it’s actually copyright-free…).

Also worth a look is Film and Sound Online – film and video free for use in research and education: http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/

Avoiding the Filter Bubble in academic search

2012-11-08T15:21:00.001+00:00

As you may have read, everything online is becoming personalised. The big-hitters of the internet (like Google, and Amazon, and Facebook) use algorithms to learn what you’re into, and provide more content just like it. This is great when you want song recommendations, but less good when you’re doing academic research – because it stops you finding anything new.

This is a really complicated subject but the short version is this: every time you search Google, it learns a little bit more about you and attempts to personalise your results. So over time the same search will bring back different results as it learns what it thinks you find useful and what you don’t. The result of this is you see the web through a filter – and get stuck in a bubble, only being shown results that are like the results you’ve seen before. This filter is invisible, so you won’t know it’s happening. (And it’s worth bearing in mind, this applies even if you’re logged out of Google – results are still ‘personalised’ based on location, type of computer and so on.)

So to take an extreme example, let’s say you’re a history student, researching World War II. If you keep following links about Hitler and Mussolini, eventually Google will mistake this for you being of an extremely right-wing persuasion, and start filtering out results which are left-leaning! This applies to your general searching that you do from then on – not just for your searching about World War II. So you no longer have the same access to search results as the person sitting at the PC next to you. The internet thinks it knows best what you need, when of course it doesn’t.

So what can you do about this to ensure a neutral, filter-free online research experience? Here are some tips:

· Log out of your Google account before beginning a search

· Erase your web-history each time you begin a new day of online searching

· Delete your cookies (in your browser settings) and disable tracking cookies

· If you’re a Facebook user, turn off personalisation and keep your data private

You can also search with duckduckgo, a completely filter-free search engine, when you're doing academic search.

The term ‘filter bubble’ was coined by Eli Pariser – he’s written a whole book about it. He did a TED talk on the subject – have a watch and see what you think.

Further reading: check out Pariser’s filter-bubble website: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/.

Any questions about the filter bubble? Leave them below in a comment and we’ll get back to you.

Freely available resources at York

2012-10-29T09:00:00.000+00:00

Ever wondered why you have to login to access Library resources? It’s because the Library pays for an awful lot of resources that you would not be able to access otherwise such as e-journals and e-book collections. It is a good idea to use these resources because they contain high quality, often peer-reviewed content that you can cite with confidence in your academic studies.

Of course, it is inevitable that you will also want to use the web and search engines such as Google to complement your academic research but if you do you need to be aware that anyone can place information online and therefore you need to exercise caution when deciding which resources and websites that you might choose to use.

There are also what’s known as Open Access Resources available online and you may find some of these very useful to bear in mind as alternative sources of information. Why is this different to any other information that you might find online? It’s different because these resources are also high quality resources that libraries have often had to pay for, except they are being made freely available for people to access because a publisher or institution has chosen to do so. So, what are the best and how do you recognise them?

One of the best open access sites for accessing journals is the Directory of Open Access Journals. This directory contains freely available journals but will only index journals that are either peer-reviewed or have some other editorial quality control in place. All the journals are freely available and, at the last check, has 8023 journals available to search.

It’s not only e-journals that available through open access, e-books are also available in this way too. There is a Directory of Open Access Books which if you browse, you will see contains books across all disciplines. Although not strictly open access, two of the best sites for freely available e-books are Project Gutenberg and the Online books pagealthough these are by no means the only sites available.

Finally, a quick word about open access repositories. These repositories house research outputs from various institutions that can be accessed for free by those who search them. There are literally hundreds of repositories out there and a quick Google search for “online repositories” will show you how many there are. However, we would like to draw your attention to White Rose Research Online. This is the repository for the White Rose Consortium of the Universities of York, Leeds and Sheffield. Researchers at these institutions are encouraged to deposit copies of their work in this repository which means that you can search the repository and potentially get access to information you would not be able to find other wise.

We are not recommending these resources as replacements to our subscription resources but they are worth knowing about because they may occasionally provide you with access to high quality academic information that you might not have been able to access otherwise. So, next time you are tempted to do your standard search on Google, give these a go too!

Want another perspective? Here's a nice video from PhD Comics, all about Open Access:

Using Evernote to streamline your academic notes

2012-10-22T10:15:00.000+01:00

Evernote is a really useful note-taking application that runs on lots of platforms at once, and syncs between them. So for example, you can have Evernote on your laptop, your PC at home or in halls, on your iPad and on your phone. When you make notes on any one of those they'll automatically sync to all the others, meaning you have all your lecture notes etc in one place, wherever you are.

We'd recommend giving it a go (and no, we're not on commission; it's free anyhow...) and you can download it in the app store, and via Evernote's website: http://evernote.com/.

Four ways to get the most out of Evernote:

1. Take notes at events, lectures, seminars..
You can of course take notes on Word etc but then you may have to save them to a USB stick or email them to other devices later; with Evernote, the basic Word Proccessor it contains is fine for notes and it means as soon as you leave the lecture theatre they'll be waiting for you on your PC at home.

2. Use the camera
Evernote also allows you to use the camera on your phone or tablet as part of a note - so you can photograph diagrams, images, graphs etc during a lecture. You can even photograph text with it and, if its legible, Evernote will turn it into searchable text. So let's say you've photographed a room plan, or a handout, or a URL you don't have time to write down - later on you can just type in any word that appears in that photo into Evernote's searchbox, and it'll find the relevant image.

3. Combine it with Twitter
If you allow Evernote to access your Twitter account, you can then create notes in Evernote by putting @MyEn in a tweet, or Direct Messaging @MyEn. So if you want to check a link when you get home or read an article later (or just write yourself a to-do list on the fly) you do so using Twitter and the relevant information appears in a note. (A note on your desktop PC, your phone etc etc - you get the idea...)

4. Use it for really key info that you might need later
No one wants to laboriously copy out registration information, or timetables, or train ticket reference numbers, or any kind of detailed instructions, onto their phone - but it is useful to have them on your phone because you know you'll have that with you at all times. So copy that info into Evernote, press sync, and you're away.

Got any more tips for using Evernote? Let us know in a comment...

Info tips for York students, BY York students...

2012-10-15T10:58:00.000+01:00

Last week we asked our Twitter followers (we're @UoYLibrary - follow us now! We promise to tweet useful stuff...) what advice they'd give to the new crop of students joining the University. The replies were really useful - here's what was suggested:

View the story "New students at York, this is what you need to know..." on StorifyNew students at York, this is what you need to know...Storified by Uni of York Library · Fri, Oct 12 2012 08:41:07Returning students, what advice would you give to the brand new students starting on Monday..?Uni of York LibraryIt started with the tweet above, and we got a deluge of really useful resources. From the resource-related...@UoYLibrary JSTOR becomes your new best friendRobert Hempsall@UoYLibrary learn End Note referencing ASAP, BEFORE writing essays. Makes life so much easier!Duck@UoYLibrary spend a couple of hours getting to grips with the meta-lib resources such as oxford reference and JSTOR. Well worth it!Jennifer Bayjoo@UoYLibrary Google Calendar Web App as an easy way to check your timetable. #lifesaverRachel Heap@UoYLibrary look for Twitter journal clubs, helps to find new angles on your discipline with range of people. #PHTwitJC for Public Health.Duck@UoYLibrary Advice for brand new students - establish an online presence, use Zotero, network http://www.zotero.org/ http://ivrytwr.com/digital-humanities-how-to-links/Ryan Hunt@UoYLibrary look at recommended reading before term starts, and get those books before they're snapped up!Sophie Collerton... to the health and well-being related...@UoYLibrary exercise. Keeps your brain healthy too.Duck@BFYork @UoYLibrary Bring things that contain vitamin c.Carly Wright@UoYLibrary check up to date on MMR, flu vaccines, wash your hands esp after using computers. Can you tell I'm studying public health?Duck@UoYLibrary the chairs in the harry fairhurst are made for 48 hour exams, and don't dare sit on a bean bag, you won't get up #comfyDanny.. to, finally, the Chinese restaurant / karoke bar related...@UoYLibrary Go to Willow as much as you can. It all goes down hill after first year :-)Rav

So just to pick up on some of those things mentioned and give you some links: you can find more about Endnote here. It's a referencing tool that will save you a HUGE amount of time if you learn to use it early on, and IT-Services can help you with that. Here's some more info on Zotero, which serves a similar purpose, and was also mentioned above.

JSTOR came up a couple of times - it's a huge collection of online journals which people in the Arts & Humanities particularly end up using all the time. Here's a link to it; this is a special link which tells JSTOR you're from York (once you log-in with your IT username and password) so it doesn't charge you - we've already paid for it on your behalf. (If you go in via Google, JSTOR won't know you're a York student.) Another tweet mentioned Metalib and JSTOR - Metalib is a way to access loads of our online materials, but we're phasing it out; from now on, the best way to find what you need is via our E-resources guide. You can see all the resources listed A-Z, or pick by subject.

The other way to access electronic materials for your subject is via the Subject Guides homepage - just pick your department from the list, and explore the materials your Academic Liaison Librarian has put together.

(Oh, and here's the website for the Willow...)

A brand new blog full of tips and techniques to help you study in the digital age

2012-10-12T16:20:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the Digital Learning blog, written by the Information Department at the University of York. The point of this is to make you aware of tools and techniques useful for academic study in the Web 2.0 world.

Posts lined up for this coming term include finding high quality, copyright-free multimedia for use in your assignments, getting on Twitter and using it in the academic environment, making amazing presentations, using Evernote to sync your lecture notes to all your devices, and avoiding the Filter Bubble when using Google for academic search.

We'll get started properly next time out, but in the meantime we'd like to make sure you know about some really useful resources the Library provides at York.

Videos from the Library and IT

We have a YouTube channel which has loads of videos in the '1 minute on...' series - just a minute on things like how to connect to the wifi, how to take out books on the self-issue machines, how to get help in the Library and so on. You can visit the channel here.

Here's a Virtual Tour of the Library, currently featured on our YouTube channel:

Online resources from the Library

At York we have Subject Guides - useful information about the resources for each subject, written by the specialist for that area in the Library. Each department has an Academic Liaison Librarian who looks after them and provides a point of contact between the department and the Library - there's a list of them here. They're the ones who make the guides.

As well as providing useful information on how to find books and journals, how to reference stuff, how Key Texts works and so on, these Subject Guides also provide access to high quality academic resources online - stuff Google can't find, and which we've paid for on your behalf. We spend literally millions of pounds on these resources each year, and they'll be really useful to your academic experience.

To find an A-Z list of all the resources we subscribe to online, and to browse the Subject Guides by department, go to subjectguides.york.ac.uk.

Social media from the Library and IT

As well as this blog, and the YouTube Channel mentioned above, the Library are also on Facebook and on Twitter - IT Services are on Facebook and on Twitter too - follow us to keep up to date with what's happening, and to get links to useful resources elsewhere.