random musings from a serialist
I spoke at the VIVA User Group meeting on some of the workflow and tools I use to gather information about our faculty’s scholarly output for an annual reception co-hosted by the Libraries and the Provost’s office. If you were there and want the slides/details of what I said, they’re now up on Slideshare with speaker’s notes. If you weren’t there and are curious, I hope you find it interesting/useful.
Speaker: Krista Godfrey
She isn’t going to show how to create LibX or Zotero access, but rather how to use them to create life-long learners. Rather than teaching students how to use proprietary tools like Refworks, teaching them tools they can use after graduation will help support their continued research needs.
LibX works in IE and Firefox. They are working on a Chrome version as well. It fits into the search and discovery modules in the research cycle. The toolbar connects to the library catalog and other tools, and right-click menu search options are available on any webpage. It will also embed icons in places like Amazon that will link to catalog searches, and any page with a document identifier (DOI, ISSN) will now present that identifier as a link to the catalog search.
Zotero is only in Firefox, unfortunately. It’s a records management tool that allows you to collect, manage, cite, and share, which fill in the rest of the modules in the research cycle. It will collect anything, archive anything, and store any attached documents. You can add notes, tags, and enhance the metadata. The citation process works in Word, Open Office, and Google Docs, with a program similar to Write-N-Cite that can be done by dragging and dropping the citation where you want it to go.
One of the down-sides to Zotero when it first came out was that it lived only in one browser on one machine, but the new version comes with server space that you can sync your data to, which allows you to access your data on other browsers/machines. You can create groups and share documents within them, which would be great for a class project.
Why aren’t we teaching Zotero/LibX more? Well, partially because we’ve spent money on other stuff, and we tend to push those more. Also, we might be worried that if we give our users tools to access our content without going through our doors, they may never come back. But, it’s about creating life-long learners, and they won’t be coming through our doors when they graduate. So, we need to teach them tools like these.
This is the session that I co-presented with Cindi Trainor (Eastern Kentucky University). The slides don’t convey all of the points we were trying to make, so I’ve also included a cleaned-up version of those notes.
Libraries that have implemented commercial electronic resource management systems (ERMS) have spent many staff hours entering data from old storage systems, or recording those data for the first time, and few, if any, have filled out each data element listed in the report. But that is reasonable, since not every resource will have relevant data attached to it that would need to be captured in an ERMS.
However, since most libraries do not have an infinite number of staff to focus on this level of data entry, the emphasis should instead be placed upon capturing data that is neccessary for managing the resources as well as information that will enhance the user experience.
(You’ve got your ERM in my discovery interface! No, you got your discovery interface in my ERM! Er… guess that doesn’t quite translate.)
