Discontinuities and Best Practices in Virtual Research Collaboration

Research collaboration has become increasingly global, as collaboration technologies continue to advance and as research problems become more interdisciplinary and global. Virtual research teams have processes and challenges that are unique from a typical virtual team, and we need a better understanding of how such teams can utilize virtual research environments to their advantage. We examine this question from a review of the relevant literature and an analysis of experiences and reflections from a doctoral seminar that studied and experienced the process of virtual research collaboration

Towards E-science: Scientific Communication on the Verge of Paradigm Change

Information and communication technology (ICT) has a great influence on scientific communication and work of scientists. Globally, scientists are experiencing changes in ways in which they create, find, share, process, store and use scientific information. They communicate in electronic environment with their colleagues, publish their works in electronic journals and store them in digital repositories and create virtual scientific communities. However, all aspects of scientific communication on the Internet are still not known, and require additional research. This paper offers an insight into number of aspects of communication between scientists at the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities in Zagreb

Comparison of Researcher’s Reference Management Software: Refworks, Mendeley, and EndNote

This paper aimed to present a comparison of researcher’s reference management software such as RefWorks, Mendeley, and EndNote. This aim was achieved by comparing three software. The main results of this paper were concluded by comparing three software based on the experiment. The novelty of this paper is the comparison of researcher’s reference management software and it has showed that Mendeley reference management software can import more data from the Google Scholar for researchers. This finding could help to know researchers to use the reference management software

How user-friendly are user interfaces of open access digital repositories?

Digital information resources available on the Internet have become conditio sine qua non of modern research and teaching. In the last decade and a half the Internet and especially the Web had introduced many types of online information resources that emerged and vanished. Only those that were closely associated with important institutions in society (such as libraries and universities) and proved usable survived. Until recently, libraries have been places where university staff seeks quality information for research and teaching, and students for learning. With the proliferation of the Web, students have replaced libraries with search engines and are now using them as primary tools for discovery of information necessary for completion of their written exams, term papers, presentations etc. In their effort to provide researchers, teachers and students with quality content, universities and libraries started development of digital repositories, digital archives of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff, and students of an institution. Digital repositories contain research data, journal articles, preprints, technical reports, books, theses and dissertations and other material used in research and educational process. The diverse content of digital repositories represents rich resources for research and teaching, In addition to the diversity and quality of the content, another issue – user interfaces – attracted attention of computer specialists because user interfaces are means of successful use of digital repositories. The research of top 20 open access digital repositories showed that the biggest repositories share common characteristics which help their users in their daily access to the content of repositories. Despite helpful similarities, some of these digital repositories should improve their design to become more attractive and attract younger generations of users seeking knowledge elsewhere on the Internet

Reference management software (RMS) in an academic environment: a survey at a research university in Malaysia

Reference Management Software is used by researchers in academics to manage the bibliographic citations they encounter in their research. With these tools, scholars keep track of the scientific literature they read, and to facilitate the editing of the scientific papers they write. This study presents the results of a quantitative survey performed at a research university in Malaysia. The aims of the survey were to observe how much these softwares are used by the scientific community, to see which softwares are most known and used, and to find out the reasons and the approaches behind their usage. Manually questionnaire was distributed to the Master and PhD students at all faculties in Jun 2014. The data collected were analysed through a constant comparative analysis, and the following categories were drawn: a basic practical approach to the instrument, the heavy impact of the time factor, the force of habit in scholars, economic issues, the importance of training and literacy, and the role that the library can have in this stage. Describing the present situation, the study gives final directions to the libraries to better perform effective tasks about the matter. This study presented here is the first survey of the actual distribution and usage of Reference Management Software in a research university in Malaysia. This picture can give an important glance to Reference Management Software as one of the elements in the academic digital librarie

EVI-LINHD : A Virtual Research Environment for the Spanish-speaking Community

Although Digital Humanities have been defined from a discipline perspective in many ways, it is surely a field still looking for its own objects, practices and methodologies. Their development in the Spanish-speaking countries is no exception to this process and, even it is complex to trace a unique genealogy to give account for the evolving field in Spain and Latin America (Gonzalez-Blanco, 2013; Spence and Gonzalez-Blanco, 2014; Rio Riande 2014a, 2014b), the emergence of various associations in Mexico (RedDH), Spain (HDH) and Argentina (AAHD) that seek for a constant dialogue (Galina, González-Blanco and Rio Riande, 2015), and academic lab and DH center initiatives such as LINHD (Spain and Argentina), GRINUGR (Spain), Medialab USAL, LABTEC (Argentina), TadeoLab (Colombia), Elabora HD (Mexico), among others, make it clear that research has become increasingly “global, multipolar and networked” (Llewellyn Smith, et al., 2011) and that the academic field is looking for a global outreach and aims to open spaces of shared virtual work. Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) are a consequence of these changes. (Párrafo extraído a modo de resumen)Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET

EVI-LINHD, a virtual research environment for digital scholarly editing

This poster presents the structure and design of the VRE (VIRTUAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT)of LINHD, the Digital Innovation Lab at UNED (http://linhd.uned.es) and the first Digital Humanities Center in Spain. It focuses on the possibilities of a collaborative environment focused on a very realistic type of research: a non-English speaker, relatively new in DH technologies, which is keen on working in his project with his team, but has not a uniform team of researchers (that means, they have different levels of understanding DH technologies)Taking into account the language barrier that English may suppose for a Spanish-speaker scholar or student and the distance they may encounter with the data and organization of the interface (in terms of computational knowledge) while facing a scholarly digital edition or collection, LINHD?s VRE comes as a solution for the virtual research Spanish speaking community interested in scholarly digital work.Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET

Information resource development and “collection” in the digital age: Conceptual frameworks and new definitions for the network world.

This paper describes some of the challenges in defining the terms “collection” and “collection development and management” in the digital age. It uses a four-phase framework to explore the impact of information technology on library collections over the last half-century. It also draws on current doctoral research to explore definitions of “collection” from a wide range of stakeholder perspectives. The paper argues for the continuing importance of libraries’ core functions of collection development and collection management, and of the value of the term “collection”. It also advocates a collaborative network-based approach to developing and managing globally accessible collections in the digital world

Usage of Reference Management Software at the University of Torino

The present research, originally a master thesis, aims to investigate the popularity and usage of Reference Management Softwares among researchers and scholars of the University of Torino, Italy, and the role that university libraries can assume about the subject.This study, based upon a qualitative approach, is a descriptive survey composed of an online questionnaire and direct interviews addressed to the population of professors and researchers of the STM areas at the University of Torino. A qualitative analysis was made across the 187 responses from the questionnaire and the 13 interviews performed. 7 key concepts were outlined and discussed.The knowledge of Reference Manage Softwares is high among the respondents, but their adoption is not. EndNote is the most known and used software, while other alternatives are more scarcely considered. Scholars, hindered by time issues, rely on old habits and are very unlikely to discover new ways to manage the literature they need. Virtual collaboration is absent from the common research practice.The research gives light on the users' behaviour in a large Italian university, confirming the results provided by the literature. Librarians should assist scholars by providing informations and support about the proper tools to improve the research process.Il saggio, frutto di una tesi di master, si propone di indagare la popolarità e l'utilizzo del Reference Management Softwares tra i ricercatori e gli studiosi dell'Università di Torino, Italia, e il ruolo che le biblioteche universitarie possono assumere al riguardo. Lo studio, basato su un approccio qualitativo, è un'indagine descrittiva composta da un questionario online e da interviste dirette e rivolte alla comunità dei professori e ricercatori dell’area STM dell’Università di Torino. Questa ricerca evidenzia il comportamento degli utenti in una grande università italiana, confermando i risultati forniti dalla letteratura: abitudinarietà dei comportamenti che si esprime nello scarso utilizzo di Reference Management Softwares nella pratica di studio e di ricerca. Si sottolinea infine il ruolo che potrebbero rivestire i bibliotecari nell’assistere gli studiosi, fornendo loro informazioni e strumenti appropriati per migliorare il processo di ricerca

The concept of collection development in the digital world

Examines definitions of the library as a collection to demonstrate the centrality of collection development to library and information professionals, before moving on to the issue of collection development as a concept, showing how professional discourse on the subject has suffered from confused terminology. Uses a four-phase framework to review the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on libraries, concentrating on its effects on collections and their development. The final part of the chapter returns to academic and practitioner conceptions of collection development in digital environments, concluding with a set of questions for reflection on the future of collection development