825 research outputs found
Understanding patterns of library use among undergraduate students from different disciplines
Objective
The objective of this study was to test whether routinely-generated library usage data could be linked with information about students to understand patterns of library use among students from different disciplines at the University of Huddersfield. This information is important for librarians seeking to demonstrate the value of the library, and to ensure that they are providing services which meet user needs. The study seeks to join two strands of library user research which until now have been kept rather separate – an interest in disciplinary differences in usage, and a methodology which involves large-scale routinely-generated data.
Methods
The study uses anonymised data about individual students derived from two sources: routinely-generated data on various dimensions of physical and electronic library resource usage, and information from the student registry on the course studied by each student. Courses were aggregated at a subject and then disciplinary level. Kruskal-Wallis and Mann Whitney tests were used to identify statistically significant differences between the high-level disciplinary groups, and within each disciplinary group at the subject level.
Results
The study identifies a number of statistically significant differences on various dimensions of usage between both high-level disciplinary groupings and lower subject-level groupings. In some cases, differences are not the same as those observed in earlier studies, reflecting distinctive usage patterns and differences in the way that disciplines or subjects are defined and organised. Arts students at Huddersfield use library resources less than those in social science disciplines, contradicting findings from studies at other institutions, although music students are high users within the arts subject-level grouping. Computing and engineering students were relatively similar, although computing students were more likely to download PDFs, and engineering students were more likely to use the physical library.
Conclusions
The technique introduced in this study represents an effective way of understanding distinctive usage patterns at an individual institution. There may be potential to aggregate findings across several institutions to help universities benchmark their own performance and usage; this would require a degree of collaboration and standardisation. This study found that students in certain disciplines at Huddersfield use the library in different ways to students in those same disciplines at other institutions: further investigation is needed to understand exactly why these differences exist, but some hypotheses are offered
Guide to Creative Commons for Humanities and Social Science monograph authors
An output of the OAPEN-UK project, this guide explores concerns expressed in public evidence given by researchers, learned societies and publishers to inquiries in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and also concerns expressed by researchers working with the OAPEN-UK project. We have also identified a number of common questions and have drafted answers, which have been checked by experts including Creative Commons. The guide has been edited by active researchers, to make sure that it is relevant and useful to academics faced with making decisions about publishing.
This guide is made available in open access using a CC BY licence
OAPEN-UK: An open access business model for scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences
This paper presents the initial findings of OAPEN-UK, a UK research project gathering evidence on the social and technological impacts of an open access business model for scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences
Guide to open access monograph publishing for arts, humanities and social science researchers
This guide has been produced to assist arts, humanities and social sciences researchers in understanding the state of play with regards to open access in the UK and what it means to them as current and future authors of scholarly monographs
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Linkage and the case of political deliberalization in Morocco
Many scholars of democratization posit that increased linkage between a hybrid regime and the West will lead to increased democratization. In Morocco during the past decade, however, authoritarianism continued to flourish despite increased linkage with both the United States and European Union. This project seeks to explain the source of this contradiction, arguing that increased linkage actually created a favorable environment for the deliberalization of Moroccan politics.Middle Eastern Studie
What happens when you make a book open access? New business models are emerging, but challenges still remain.
Initial studies into the effect of open access monographs suggest little to no impact on sales, but an increase in discoverability and online usage. But there are still many hurdles to overcome before OA books become a routine option for scholars. Ellen Collins and Caren Milloy present an overview of how the OAPEN-UK research project is exploring disciplinary norms and emerging models in monograph publishing
An Axiomatic Analysis of Diversity Evaluation Metrics: Introducing the Rank-Biased Utility Metric
Many evaluation metrics have been defined to evaluate the effectiveness
ad-hoc retrieval and search result diversification systems. However, it is
often unclear which evaluation metric should be used to analyze the performance
of retrieval systems given a specific task. Axiomatic analysis is an
informative mechanism to understand the fundamentals of metrics and their
suitability for particular scenarios. In this paper, we define a
constraint-based axiomatic framework to study the suitability of existing
metrics in search result diversification scenarios. The analysis informed the
definition of Rank-Biased Utility (RBU) -- an adaptation of the well-known
Rank-Biased Precision metric -- that takes into account redundancy and the user
effort associated to the inspection of documents in the ranking. Our
experiments over standard diversity evaluation campaigns show that the proposed
metric captures quality criteria reflected by different metrics, being suitable
in the absence of knowledge about particular features of the scenario under
study.Comment: Original version: 10 pages. Preprint of full paper to appear at
SIGIR'18: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research &
Development in Information Retrieval, July 8-12, 2018, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
ACM, New York, NY, US
Guide to Creative Commons for humanities and social science monograph authors
A booklet for authors in the humanities and social sciences specifically designed to help them understand the Creative Commons licenses
Use and Impact of UK Research Data Centres
UK data centres are an important part of efforts to gain maximum value from research data. However, if they are to operate effectively, the services that they provide must be based upon an understanding of researchers' practices and needs. Furthermore, in order to build a case for ongoing funding, data centres must be able to demonstrate their value to researchers work and, increasingly, their contribution to wider political "impact" agendas. This paper presents the findings of a survey of users of five UK data centres. It suggests that research data centres are highly valued by their users. Benefits appear to be particularly strong around improving research efficiency, especially access to data. Data centres are less important in terms of stimulating novel research questions. Despite a few interesting cases of observable impact, in the main it remains difficult to understand the wider reach of research which draws upon data centre resources
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