Big bunch of items from various sources

Most of these are articles, but this one is a presentation.

“A Very Embedded Librarian: Using Captive Audiences (and a Bus) to Build Collaborative Relationships” by Alexander J. Carroll

The first step to creating collaboration opportunities is building relationships with faculty. For science librarians at major research universities, this poses a significant challenge as research faculty often work at research sites far from campus. This talk will highlight the experiences of a science librarian who, along with several other new faculty hires, embarked on a statewide bus tour of a number of university affiliated research sites. The talk will demonstrate how taking advantage of captive audience opportunities can give a librarian access to faculty who otherwise might never open their doors to collaboration.

“Collaboration Success in the Dataverse Libraries as Digital Humanities Research Partners” by Sue Owen, Deb Verhoeven, Anne Horn, and Sabina Robertson

At Deakin, the Humanities Networked Infrastructure project (HuNI), has paved new ground for facilitating the effective use and re-use of humanities research data. HuNI is one of the first large-scale eResearch infrastructure projects for the humanities in Australia and the first national, cross-disciplinary Virtual Laboratory (VL) worldwide.

And, here are some IFLA papers.

“Reparation through reading: a collaborative approach to adult and family literacy in Western Australian prisons” by Jane Jones.

An estimated 70% of adult prisoners in Western Australia have literacy issues to some extent. Poor literacy is generational – parents with low literacy skills struggle to support their children in attaining the experiences they need to develop good reading habits and school readiness skills. Therefore supporting the literacy needs of prisoners gives them a better chance of finding a job or continuing their education on release and can contribute to breaking the cycle of generational illiteracy.

“Literacies for academic and professional purposes: Two collaboration projects with the University Library” by Ika Jorum, Maria Eklund Heinonen

Academic literacies among high school students and university students have been a highly discussed topic for several years in Sweden as well as other countries. Results of PISA show that high school students’ reading skills deteriorate and university teachers have given alarming reports on students’ decreasing abilities on the critical assessment of sources and academic writing.

“Collaboration for school library legislation and school library development in Sweden” by Maud Hell

The importance of school libraries in Sweden has varied. For a long time, they were mentioned in the Library Act, but they were not mandatory. Over the last decade, important stakeholders collaborated in the effort to change the legislation. In 2011, the Swedish Education Act made access to school libraries mandatory for all types of schools. Advocacy engagement led to this change in legislation. Advocacy is still needed, for defining development and refining the legislation.

Qualitative Study on Research Collaboration

LIBER Quarterly published an article on research collaboration in UK academic libraries  in its recent issue. The article discusess the results of a qualitative study undertaken by Sheila Corrall from the University of Pittsburgh to explore how libraries are organizing resources and services to support research endeavors.

Full Citation:
Corrall, S. (2014). Designing libraries for research collaboration in the network world: An exploratory study. LIBER Quarterly, 24 (1). ISSN 2213-056X

The full text of the article is available here.

British Library teams with scholars and archivists to create Voices of Science,

“A major oral history project to gather the life stories of British scientists has culminated today in the launch of a new online archive by the British Library. Voices of Science is drawn from a National Life Stories programme ‘An Oral History of British Science’, and features interviews with 100 leading UK scientists and engineers, telling the stories of some of the most remarkable scientific and engineering discoveries of the past century as well as the personal stories of each individual.”

Read more at http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/Voices-of-Science-The-lives-of-British-scientists-recorded-in-full-for-the-first-time-in-a-new-Brit-66e.aspx

The Darwin project collaborated with the Cambridge Digital Library

The Darwin Project collaborated with the Cambridge Digital Library to publish images of about 1,200 letters exchanged between Charles Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker. There are more than 5,000 images in the collection.

No single set of letters was more important to Darwin than those exchanged with the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911). Their letters account for around 10% of Darwin’s surviving correspondence and provide a structure within which all the other letters can be explored.  They are a connecting thread that spans forty years of Darwin’s mature working life from 1843 until his death in 1882, and bring into sharp focus every aspect of Darwin’s scientific work throughout that period. They illuminate the mutual friendships he and Hooker shared with other scientists, but they also provide a window of unparalleled intimacy into the personal lives of the two men.

Two articles on different aspects of international collaboration

There are many good new articles that are in the journal, Insights: The UKSG Journal, Volume 26, Number 1, March 2013. (Full text limited to subscribers.) Two of the articles are:

The Finnish National Digital Library: a national service is developed in collaboration with a network of libraries, archives and museums

The National Library Finland (NLF) is responsible for the development of the public interface service Finna, which is part of the NDL and will also act as the national aggregator for Europeana. The NLF has decided to develop this comprehensive service based on open source components, and the development of the software is in the hands of experienced developers. In terms of challenges, the greatest challenge has to be constructing and co-ordinating the mechanisms to enable organizations’ participation.

and Co-operation and collaboration to strengthen the global research cycle

This article provides an update on the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), a development charity working in Africa, Asia and Latin America. INASP’s work with partners helps strengthen the global research communication cycle in all its forms (research availability, access, use, creation and communication). To help activities have the most impact and reach, it establishes effective partnerships and co-operates and collaborates with libraries, library consortia, publishers and policy makers in developing and developed countries. Some of these partnerships will be explored, including INASP’s work with country co-ordination teams, library consortia and international publishers who provide online journal and book access and support resource access, awareness and use through ‘Publishers for Development’. Looking ahead, the emerging ‘Librarians for Development’ will be introduced, with its promise of how a group of librarians from developing and developed countries might help support and enrich the work of each other.

Information Handling in Collaborative Research

From LIBER Quarterly, an article by Ellen Collins and Michael Jubb.

UK public policy makers have a growing interest in collaborative research, where academics work with public, private or third sector partners on a joint project which supports the partner’s aims. This paper reports on the findings of five case studies, looking at how information is sourced, managed, used and shared within collaborative research projects. It finds that researchers within collaborative projects have similar information management issues as are known to exist within academia more broadly, but that the specific conditions which govern research collaborations mean that interventions to improve or support information management must be carefully tailored.

http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8107/8709

Cambridge and Oxford – rivals joining forces to save Jewish history.

Cambridge University Library and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries announced that they will join forces to purchase a collection of 1,700 fragments of Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts from the 9th – 19th century. http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/historic-rivals-join-forces-to-save-1,000-years-of-jewish-history

Europeana opens up data on 20 million cultural items

Excerpt: Europeana “aggregates digitised books, paintings, photographs, recordings and films from over 2,200 contributing cultural heritage organisations across Europe – including major national bodies such as the British Library, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum. Today Europeana is opening up data about all 20 million of the items it holds under the CC0 rights waiver.”

Is the information profession fragmented?

Nicola Franklin notes in her article for Information Outlook, “The Collaboration of the Information Professions,” (subscription required) that “the various information professions appear to be fragmented.  Are efforts to bring them together misguided, or long overdue?”

One of her colleagues, Mark Field, started this discussion topic, the Fragmentation Death of the Information Professions in a private CILIP (UK) LinkedIn group back in 2010.  He defined specialist information workers as including information scientists, librarians, records managers, archivists, and information architects, and more.  This post attracted over 180 comments, and it is clear that the topic is on the minds of many in the information industry.

In short, two meetings were convened to discuss the matter.  Suzanne Burge and Nicola Franklin blog about the two meetings.

Do you dare to share?

If you do, then you might be interested in reading about this conference that took place in London….

Dare to share: long-term collections management
6 September 2010, Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, London

This one day conference examined how libraries and other research institutions can benefit from integrating preservation into broader, long-term collections management strategies, with a particular emphasis on collaborative preservation ventures. Speakers from the UK and abroad presented current thinking on hybrid collections; using collection strengths to inform integrated strategies for resource allocation; how digitisation affects what we keep; protecting investment in digitisation projects; the carbon footprint of preservation; and whether the UK Research Reserve should or could be used as a model for other library materials.