Amazed by a special library developed by a scholar using Zotero that currently has more than 20,000 items. More amazed by the the tiered classification scheme created particularly for the library.

The photos below showcase the newly opened faculty publication gallery at my previous institution in China. Actually, several university libraries I’ve visited in the past years have developed similar galleries to centralize scholarly publications by their own faculty and sometimes alumni as well. But this one at SYSU Library looks much more attractive in appearance. At the opening ceremony, the University President gave a keynote speech, in which he highly regarded the library’s endeavor.

To me, there are at least three advantages for library to build such kind of faculty publication gallery, including –

• systematically and sustainably collecting and preserving generations of campus research output, which is of course one of the traditional missions of an academic library
• making these local research output more visible to the public and increasing various stakeholders’ awareness of the excellence of local research over time
• building a stronger relationship between the library and the campus research community, and hopefully encouraging more scholarly activities

 

I’ve just read two recent papers and am thinking that that they might be useful to us. My immediate thoughts after reading them are (1) whether should we develop a plan to collect undergraduate honor theses?  (2) where is the long-for mega-search engine for library resources — EBSCO Discovery, OCLC WorldShare, or something else? and (3) how can we embed subject expertise in the curation process of digital collections and in a more effective way?

1. Who is Citing Undergraduate Theses in Institutional Digital Repositories? Implications for Scholarship and Information Literacy

SM Stone, MS Lowe – College & Undergraduate Libraries, 2014

Undergraduate theses are available through open access institutional repositories. Is undergraduate work being integrated into the larger body of academic research, and, if so, how? Institutional repositories containing undergraduate theses were selected and titles were searched using the forward citation feature in Google Scholar to determine if and where undergraduate scholarship is being cited. Results show that 24 percent of citations to senior theses were in peer-reviewed or refereed journals and 33 percent in dissertations and theses. This article addresses citation source and the potential value of undergraduate scholarship as well as the implications for information literacy instruction to senior thesis students.

2. Beyond the Scanned Image: A Needs Assessment of Scholarly Users of Digital Collections

HE Green, A Courtney – College & Research Libraries, 2014

This paper presents an analysis of how humanities scholars utilize digital collections in their research and the ways in which digital collections could be enhanced for scholarly use. The authors surveyed and interviewed humanities faculty from twelve research universities about their research practices with digital collections and present analysis of the resulting responses. The paper also analyzes a sample of qualitative responses from the Bamboo Technology Project’s workshops with faculty, librarians, and technologists about the use and functionalities of digital materials for humanities research. This paper synthesizes these data analyses to propose the critical need for interoperability and data curation in digital collections to increase their scholarly use, and the importance of user engagement in development of digital collections

According to the research, humanities researchers’ top needs are —

• Better search functionality
• Need for annotation and editing tools
• Improvement in user interface design
• Expanded completeness of the collection’s content.

Went UCLA Young Research Libary last Friday for UCEAB/EAALC meeting, and learned many new things, including these two at UCLA library.

First, the new UL Ginny Steel

Second, the newly opened Cafe 451 on the first floor of the Young Research Library, right facing the entrance. Here is the photo i took. Isn’t it cool?

Recently, I traveled to North China to attend three conferences, including:

1. 2013 International Conference on Chinese Digital Publishing and Digital Libraries (Dunhuang)
2. The Second Sino-American Academic Library Forum for Cooperation and Development (Lanzhou)
3. Forum on Northwest Regional Resources and SuperStar Discovery Tool (Urumuqi).

The three cities, all on the ancient Silk Road, are definitely worth visiting. As for the conferences, I learned some recent advancement in our library counterparts in China that you, as non-Chinese library professionals, might also be interested. Here they are–

• A cool mega-search (meta-search, federated-search, cross-search…) and knowledge discovery tool (i.e., SuperStar Discover Tool). It allows not only a simultaneous scross-search in different types of databases (book, journal, news…), like MetaLib does, but it also supports visualization of data/information/knowledge.  This type of  visualization can be used in citation analysis, documentation analysis, scholarly communication trend analysis, and beyond. The current version is for Chinese resources only; however, the good news is that Stanford University just signed a contract with the company in late June 2013 for developing an enhanced discovery tool for both Western and Eastern language resources.  The anticipated beta version release date would be the end of this year. So, stay tuned.
• Smart mobile libraries become popular now in China. User authentication is no more needed as long as mobile phone numbers are registered. See this library instruction (sorry the texts are in Chinese. But you ask Google Translation for help:) )
• Libraries in China are now setting up large-size touchscreen stations inside library and other locations on-campus for making library and its online e-resources more visible and accessible. Below is a sample touchscreen. Maybe our library could get a few for the library lobbies, main classroom building  hallways, campus cafeteria…?