The US' National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) will host a 90-minute webinar on June 20, 2012, from 11:00am – 12:30pm EDST to hear the just-released results of a three-year study on the behaviour of the 'Generation Y' scholar (students born between 1982 -1994) currently studying for a PhD in the UK.
Sponsored by the British Library and JISC and to be released this month, the study will examine students' activities and habits in online and physical research environments, as well as their use of print and digital library information resources.
The webinar will feature Julie Carpenter, Founder and Director of Education for Change, who served as Project Director for the study. She will discuss the results of the study on the issues such as emerging research behaviour trends across diverse subject discipline; how doctoral scholars from Generation Y seek information both on and offline; the relative use of digital resources and physical resources, including research spaces; how Generation Y students search for and use digital content for research; and Generation Y adoption and use of emerging technologies for information access and use.
STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has added a new enhancement to SciVal Strata, a web-based performance evaluation tool that allows users to conduct highly customised performance assessments of research teams and individual researchers.
The new functionality provides the capacity for objective assessment of a specific selection of a researcher's work in addition to their complete publication output. This option is critical when selecting the most impactful papers to be submitted for various government or institutional assessments. In addition the enhanced functionality will prove useful to individuals applying for grants and showing funders the impact of the research they supported.
SciVal Strata is a flexible benchmarking tool providing multi-tier analysis of team and researcher performance such as productivity, citation history, and collaboration activity. The added functionality was developed in global collaboration with users and with Elsevier's online community of research administrators.
The new functionality to SciVal Strata will help administrators and researchers apply for funding by demonstrating the value of research carried out to the supporting funding source; secure tenure in the US through the evaluation of four hand-selected papers; submit four papers per researcher for the UK's Research Excellence Framework national assessment exercise; and assess researchers based upon a selection of their work connected to a specific institution.
Serials Solutions, a ProQuest business, has announced that the first functionality of Intota, a new web-scale management solution, is available to its library development partners. Less than a year after announcing development of the service, the six development partners reflecting a broad spectrum of academic libraries, now have access to the first iteration of Intota in a test environment.
These development partners are actively using and providing feedback on the features to shape the development of Intota. In this first iteration, the partners are experiencing how Intota will seamlessly interoperate with vendors, as part of the critical supply chain for materials in a library management workflow. Partners are also first in market to experience the breadth and depth of the new Serials Solutions knowledgebase, (in development), a single integrated database that supports global print and electronic resources – enabling faster and more comprehensive selection, acquisitions and description.
A demonstration of Intota will be part of an educational session at the American Library Association annual conference in Anaheim, CA. Interested parties may register for this event, 'The Road to Intota: The Journey of Web-scale Development,' by clicking here.
Intota represents a new approach to library collection management. Its linked data architecture provides efficiency and its inherent interoperability enables real-time transfer of data between systems. Since its founding, Serials Solutions has been exclusively dedicated to providing solutions using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model to ensure lower total cost of ownership for the library market.
Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II in Italy has selected EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) as its discovery tool. The library had been looking to increase the usage of electronic resources among researchers and students and they felt that EDS was the perfect fit by creating a unified index of their resources and providing a simplified but powerful search experience.
The EDS Base Index comprises metadata from the world's foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers. Other platform features offered by EDS include 'Breadbox' tracking which enables easy removal of all user refinements, including limiters and expanders, an 'Available in Library' collection limiter as well as many customisation features which Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II also hopes to take advantage of in the near future.
EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box.
The Base Index for EBSCO Discovery Service forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes. It is this combination that allows a single, comprehensive, custom solution for discovering the value of any library's collection.
Kuali OLE, an academic library software collaboration in the US, and JISC, the UK's expert on digital technologies for education and research, have announced a collaboration. The aim is to make data about e-resources - such as publication and licensing information - more easily available. Together, Kuali OLE and JISC will develop an international open data repository that will give academic libraries a broader view of subscribed resources.
The effort, known as the Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) project, is funded in part by a $499,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. North Carolina State University will serve as lead institution for the project.
GOKb will be an open, community-based, international data repository that will provide libraries with publication information about electronic resources. This information will support libraries in providing efficient and effective services to their users and ensure that critical electronic collections are available to their students and researchers.
The GOKb cloud service will provide data for 'subscribed resources' from a higher education perspective. It will include data such as publication information, related organisations, and model licences, and will be accessible across all US and UK academic libraries.
Many of the concerns libraries have in the management of electronic resources are the same across the world. Indeed, there are a number of projects, such as the Kuali OLE (Open library Environment) in the US and the Knowledge Base+ service in the UK, that are exploring community-based solutions.
Kuali OLE is a community of nine research libraries working together to build the first open-source system designed by and for academic and research libraries for managing and delivering intellectual information.
Among JISC's objectives are to provide cost-effective shared national services and resources and to help institutions improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business systems.
A new integration for using digital learning content from John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, with the learning management system (LMS) from Blackboard Inc., US, is now available to students and faculty worldwide, the companies announced.
The solution gives students and faculty access to a collection of learning content and tools from Wiley's research-based, online teaching and learning environment, WileyPLUS, directly within the Blackboard Learn platform. Thousands of students and instructors across multiple disciplines participated in a full semester limited field trial and provided feedback to shape the integration, ensuring the highest quality experience for system administrators, faculty and students.
The solution seeks to create a seamless user experience that gives instructors the flexibility to search for and select pieces of content and embed them into their course workflow and automatically synchronise grades and data. Designed to meet varying levels of digital usage, the integration reportedly provides instructors with greater flexibility in course design and gives their students an easy to use, singular experience for navigating learning materials.
With the single sign-on, students can interact with digital content directly within their courses, moving from Wiley content and assignments to LMS tools like journals or discussions in a seamless workflow. The integration of Wiley's eTextbook, media resources and interactive assignments in Blackboard Learn allows instructors to better sequence their course using the activities and resources found in both WileyPLUS and Blackboard Learn. Students who participated in the field trial agreed that the integrated solution made them more likely to complete assignments, helped them learn and improved their grade.
In addition to single sign-on, deep linking and grade book synchronisation, the Blackboard Learn and WileyPLUS integration is said to provide unique tools that support several levels of content integration, ultimately yielding a more personalised experience than existing approaches, and further increasing the potential to positively impact the overall learning process.
The solution relies on the open education standard IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (Basic LTI) and is built on the Blackboard Learn 9.1 platform, an open, extensible platform with an active development community and open APIs.
Nearly 2,000 institutions have reportedly adopted Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1, Blackboard's flagship learning management platform, to take advantage of its improved stability, greater workflow efficiencies for instructors and administrators and social learning tools. Blackboard Learn has a wide range of integrations that incorporate the company's approach to digital content integration with the LMS that enables instructors to easily find, adopt and share all types of content within their customised courses.
WileyPLUS is a research-based, online environment for effective teaching and learning that is offered with over 300 Wiley titles and is used in over 20 countries globally. It is said to incorporate the entire digital textbook with learning resources, practice and assessment for a personalised student learning experience that is proven to improve learning outcomes.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a YouTube video of the ARL Statistics Webcast, held on June 5, 2012. The Webcast is part of the 2012 ARL Statistics & Assessment Webcast Series.
The webcast informs survey coordinators and library staff about the nature of descriptive research library statistics, demonstrates how ARL members and non-member libraries can access the ARL Statistics data, and shares how data can be used to make a case for your library. The webcast also unveils some of the upcoming changes to the ARL annual surveys and discusses the benefits of these changes.
Martha Kyrillidou (ARL) hosts the event, provides context for ARL Statistics®, and presents the survey revisions. Shaneka Morris (ARL) provides details on the capabilities of the ARL Statistics website and the Analytics tool. Steve Hiller (Washington) and Jim Self (Virginia) present case studies on applying ARL Statistics data at their institutions for budget justification. Q&A is interspersed throughout the webcast.
McGraw-Hill School Education has announced that two of its digital solutions have taken home several awards – including one of the highest distinctions in educational publishing – at the 2012 Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) Awards. Announced at a special awards banquet and gala earlier this week, these awards further validate McGraw-Hill's leadership in education innovation and the company's commitment to developing engaging solutions to support teachers and drive student achievement.
McGraw-Hill Education won four awards across three categories. The Distinguished Achievement Awards honour the best in a range of product types and resources used by teachers, parents and students. In the category of Whole Curriculum Program – which includes individual awards for Reading, Mathematics, Social Studies, among other programs – McGraw-Hill networks' Discovering Our Past: A History of the United States & United States History and Geography won for Social Studies.
The Golden Lamp Awards, known to be one of the most prestigious honours in the education industry, highlight the 'best of the best' products for teaching and learning each year in four categories - Periodicals, Professional Development, Supplemental Resources, and Whole Curriculum Programs. McGraw-Hill networks' Discovering Our Past: A History of the United States & United States History and Geography won the Golden Lamp Award for best Whole Curriculum Program.
The Beacon Awards recognise outstanding marketing of educational products. McGraw-Hill iScience Fact or Fool Videos won across two categories: The Gold Beacon and Digital Marketing awards for outstanding Marketing.
Honoring excellence and innovation in the education community, the awards represent the longest-running and most highly regarded recognition programme in the industry. Products were judged in a three-tier process (educator review, professional review, and certification) with only the best materials advancing to the higher rounds. Having products judged first and foremost by educators is critically important because they know best which products will succeed or fail directly in the classroom and ensures that the winners are truly leaders in the field.
NFAIS webinar to discuss results of three-year study on the behaviour of the 'Generation Y' scholar
Elsevier announces new enhancement to SciVal Strata
Kuali OLE-JISC project to help libraries manage their e-resources