CONUL Research Support Task and Finish Group

The Group’s remit was to prepare a three year strategy to develop the research support capacity of CONUL libraries. The group identified key areas around which a tool kit was to be developed in the form of briefing documents. The briefing documents are collated together in thechapters and appendices of this report

How to Catch a Digital Speed Goat: A Web Archiving Case Study at the University of Wyoming

In an effort to keep current with trends in how people connect with information, the University of Wyoming (UW), like many institutions and companies, has elected to become as paperless as possible. Whether electronic or analog, records are essential in documenting the history, culture, and governance of an organization, and records retention schedules in archives are commonly used to ensure vital records are kept and maintained according to best practices and state laws. Much like the speed goat—the fastest land animal in North America and found throughout Wyoming—websites are hard to capture before they disappear. The high possibility of vanishing online records makes implementing a records retention schedule particularly challenging in the ever-changing digital world. In order to capture vital records before they disappear, archivists must be proactive. The American Heritage Center (AHC) at UW has initiated a web-archiving project and created access points to these digital assets to capture permanent records of the University, promote these resources, and educate and empower donors about the importance of online records. This paper will discuss implementation of Archive-It to capture websites, strategies for increasing discoverability and accessibility to the archived websites, and tactics for positive and transparent donor relations

From Passive to Pervasive: Changing Perceptions of the Library‟s Role through Intra-Campus Partnerships

Traditional views of librarianship, and of academic libraries, have focused on the library‟s role as a collector of external resources for student and faculty use. As this role is increasingly challenged by the explosion of openly available online content, however, academic libraries must move beyond this limited perception of our utility and expand our role to become partners in a broader range of scholarly activities at our institutions. At Pacific University (Oregon), the University Library has developed a series of partnerships and services (many supported by our institutional repository platform) that extend the Library‟s reach and that lend needed support to our faculty and students‟ scholarly pursuits. In taking on a much more active role in the creation, dissemination and preservation of internally produced scholarship, the Library has demonstrated its value to faculty and administrators and has opened the door to new partnerships which will not only strengthen the University, but also the Library‟s place within it

LIBER 41st Annual Conference : Mobilising the Knowledge Economy for Europe

Conference Programme. 27–30 June 2012, Tart

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

CHAIN-REDS DART Challenge

CHAIN-REDS (Coordination and Harmonisation of Advanced e-infrastructure for Research and Education Data Sharing) is EU project focused on promoting and supporting technological and scientific collaboration across different communities established in various continents. Nowadays, one of the most challenging scenarios scientist and scientific communities are facing is huge amount of data emerging from vast networks of sensors and form computational simulations performed in a diversity of computing architectures and e-infrastructure. The new knowledge coming out from the interpretation of these datasets, reported on the scholar literature, is increasingly problematic to be reproducible due to the difficulty to access measured data repositories and/or computational applications that generate synthetic data through computer simulations. This paper presents CHAIN REDS approach, several tools and services, based on the adoption of standards, aimed at providing easy/seamless access to datasets, data repositories, open access document repositories and to the applications that could make use of them. All these tools and services are enclosed in what we have called the Data Accessibility, Reproducibility and Trustworthiness (DART) challenge. This initiative allows researchers to easily find data of his interest and directly use them in a code running by means of a Science Gateway (SG) that provides access to cluster, Grid and Cloud infrastructure worldwide. In this scenario, the datasets are found by means of either the CHAIN-REDS Knowledge Base (KB) or the Semantic Search Engine (SSE), the applications ran on the CHAIN-REDS SG, accessible through an Identity Federation. The datasets can be both identified by Persistent Identifier (PID) and assigned unique number ID. Scientists can then access the data and the corresponding application in order to either reproduce and extend the results of a given study or start a new investigation. The new data (and the new paper if any) are stored on the Data Infrastructure and can be easily found by the people belonging to the same domain making possible to start the cycle again.Repositório de dados científicos.Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC

International conference "Information technologies in education in the 21st century": Conference proceedings.

Proceedings of a conference which concluded TEMPUS project JEP 25008_200

ADOPTING A LOGIC FRAMEWORK FOR THE EVALUATION OF THE OPERATIONAL PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES OF KNUSTSpace ON RESEARCH, LEARNING AND TEACHING: A CASE OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH OUTPUT BY ACADEMIC STAFFS AND STUDENTS

The study evaluates the status quo, significance and impact of KNUSTSpace on the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) academic community. The Logic Framework was adopted and adapted to measure the operational processes and service delivery of the KNUSTSpace with regards to research, learning and teaching activities. The study is based on descriptive analysis; and, it engaged a sample size (n) of 35 lecturers and 141 postgraduate students from the Faculty of Art in KNUST. Results indicated that KNUST has invested considerable resources in warranting the comprehensive operations of the KNUSTSpace. The study also revealed that the KNUSTSpace has had a significant impact on the quality of scholarly outputs of its users in terms of developing novel research skills, empowering and increasing access to myriad scholarly materials, and advancement in knowledge for learning and teaching efficacy. The Logic Framework identified some challenges that KNUSTSpace staffs encounter; recommendations were made to improve and develop better KNUSTSpace operational processes and service delivery to its users’ community