Coming to grips with data as an asset

The week before last we had Research Week at ECU.

For me the highlight was the Three Minute thesis competition and the winner this year was Matthew Bambach. He goes onto the finals later this year at UWA.

I gave a presentation: Research data as an asset: taking the long term view.

Here are the PowerPoints which have been loaded to our institutional repository, Research Online

Library life day two

Yesterday I neglected to include a link to what the Library Day in the Life Project is all about:

The Library Day in the Life Project is coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.

This site includes links to all the other people involved in the project:

http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/libday7
http://www.netvibes.com/librarianbyday#Round_6_Library_Day_in_the_Life_Project

I started the day conducting a data interview with one of our researchers in computer security.
This involved discussing several datasets the research centre holds that could possibly be shared with other researchers outside the centre. One dataset I heard about is what they call “honeypot” data that reveal patterns in security attacks. It was fascinating and I came away just a little bit worried about how secure any of us are online. Going by the laws of probability, despite our best efforts some malware will get through and do damage.

The data interview is one of the key roles of a research data librarian. The idea of the data interview is to gather as much information as possible about a research project and associated research dataset or data collection. This information (in our case) then gets written up and described and added to Research Data Australia (RDA) Australia's research data portal. The metadata schema used to described data in RDA is RIF-CS.

There are several elements to this work: one is using the skills a research or faculty librarian would have whereby you learn to understand the client’s research area. Another is having a sound understanding of research data and how that may differ across disciplines. Another is more a cataloguing/metadata librarian role whereby you use a defined metadata schema to describe the data.

I have been working on some research data training and seminars which I will talk about tomorrow…

Day in the life of a research data librarian

I had a late night last night, sitting up watching the conclusion of the Tour de France, witnessing history being made when Cadel Evans became the first ever Australian to win..…yeah go Cadel. It was so inspiring to see him cycling into Paris in the yellow jersey, with the BCM team all in red. With the 8 hour time difference between Europe and Western Australia the event finished after midnight our time. Then at 5am someone rang on my mobile…wrong number from someone in another time zone across the other side of the country. Still, I managed to start the day with a visit to the Joondalup Arena 50 metre indoor pool for a great swim. It’s winter here, so the pool is pretty quiet. At one stage there were just three of us with a lane to ourselves…bliss. The pool is about one kilometre from work, so I bring my breakfast and change of clothes and then head straight on to work.

At work the main activity today revolves around finish off the Seeding the Commons project. This is a national research data project funded by the ANDS (Australian National Data Service). The details about the project at Edith Cowan University (ECU) are here. There are similar projects running at most Australian universities and major research institutions.

This time last year I was getting ready to attend research data management training at the ANDS BootCamp which was held in Canberra in August 2010. Later on I was seconded to work on the project as a research data librarian. It has been a steep learning curve, but lot of fun. I have left my substantive job as the Faculty librarian for Education and Arts at ECU to become a research data librarian. Now, a year later, the project is winding up. We are at Week 25 of a 32 week project and the 3rd progress report is due on 12 August. More on this project and the work involved tomorrow.

The Woman in White

First of all a confession… I am not, strictly speaking, “reading” this book, but listening to an audio version. Audio books provide a really convenient way to increase your amount of reading, if you commute or spend time at the gym you can listen to the audio. Fortunately there are more and more excellent audio titles available through the public libraries in Perth and they are narrated by some fine actors.

At the moment I am “reading” The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Incredibly, The Woman in White has never been out of print since it first appeared in serial form in Victorian England (1860) and it still has readers in its thrall.

The narrative hook draws you into the story right in the beginning when the hero, Walter Hartright, comes across the mysterious woman in white late at night on a lonely road north of London. She stops him, appears agitated and asks strange questions. Later on our hero comes across some men who are searching for the woman, claiming has escaped from an asylum. Then the story moves to another location where Walter meets another woman in white. Is this a doppelganger? As the story develops, Hartright becomes a type of Victorian detective as he follows clues along the way to discover the truth about this mysterious woman: who is she and why was she so agitated, why is she on the run?

In many ways Wilkie Collins' novels were forerunners of contemporary crime fiction and they certainly influenced many current writers of crime and mystery. Collins most famous novel is The Moonstone (published 1868) which Dorothy L Sayers considered "probably the very finest detective story ever written". I plan to read The Moonstone next and I already have downloaded a free ebook copy onto my Kindle.

As an aside, Wilkie Collins was a great friend of Charles Dickens and he lead quite a sensational life for Victorian times.

My post for the July readit2001 Twitter #whodoneit

Searching the online library for known items

One of the findings of our user studies of Summon was that students struggled with finding "known items". Where they had been given an exact citation of, for example, a journal article they did not know where to start. This is probably not surprising ... "twas ever thus". Providing some basic sessions on recognising citation elements and referencing would help students in this area.

Another symptom of the searching known item problem at our library is that increasingly higher percentages of requests that come through our document delivery system are for items the library already holds.

A recent study from University of Nevada looked into this phenomenon in more detail. This appeared in a journal article in New Library World and is worth reading.

It's at DOI 10.1108/03074801111117050

Kress, N., Del Bosque, D & Ipri, T (2011). User failure to find known library items, New Library World, Vol. 112, 3/4, 150 - 170.

"Findings – Participants in the study failed to locate known items for multiple reasons, but from the usability testing and analysis three major areas emerged: finding the correct starting-point for the search, information not indexed for a selected search, and clicking on the call number link. The complexity of library resources was the main contributor to these failures. Participants expected library searching to behave like their other search experiences."

Social Media Competencies for Librarians

On Stephen Abrams' blog last year he wrote about the Top Ten Social Media Competencies for Librarians (& Teachers).

What are these competencies? Where have they come from? Have they been widely adopted?

Dean Giustini writing on The Search principle blog gives some more information: Top ten (10) social media competencies for librarians.

Murphy & Moulaison are advocating that “social media competencies” be recognised as a new set of literacies required for librarians who work in the Web 2.0 environment. They presented a paper at the ACRL 14th National Conference, Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend, Seattle, 2009. The PDF to the full paper is here.

The draft list of these social media competencies is:

• understand, explain and teach others about the main principles and trends of Web 2.0 (and Library 2.0)

• list major tools, categories and affordances of social networking

• apply social media to solve information problems, and communicate digitally with users

• use social networking sites for promotional, reference and instructional services in libraries

• navigate, evaluate and create content on social networking sites

• follow netiquette, conform to ethical standards, and interact appropriately with others online

• explain copyright, security and privacy issues on social media sites to colleagues and user communities

• understand the importance of identity and reputation management using social media

• explain related terminology such as collaboration 2.0, remix and open source

• renew social media competencies, advocate for institutional strategies and policies, and build an evidence base in social media

Murphy and Moulaison are advocating that we go beyond just gaining knowledge of how to use particular Web 2.0 technologies to gain an understanding of the changing information landscape in which librarians operate.

I think these are really useful competencies and have been thinking about how they can be applied. I'll like to see them more widely discussed.

My olive curing recipe

Olive Pickling Instructions

There are two stages in preparing olives. The first stage is all about getting rid of the bitterness and this takes about two months, less for the darker, black olives, while the second stage is where you start adding flavour.

First stage, involves soaking olives in water for a week and then brine for 6-8 weeks. Some people use caustic soda on the green olives, but I do the old fashioned recipe which uses salt only.

Here's what you do from woe to go:

Pick olives when the fruit begins to turn from plain green to pink and purplish black. After picking treat them straight away while they are still fresh and hard. Remove any soft or damaged olives and rinse in clean water in a bucket. Make a fine slit in the side of each olive, using a very sharp knife. This cutting will draw out the bitterness and will allow the water and salt soaking brine to penetrate the olive.

Place all olives in bowl with fresh water and make sure they are under the liquid. You can place a plate on top to keep the olives submerged. Pour the liquid away each day and replace with fresh water. After a week alter this routine so that the soaking liquid consists of 10% salt. To make this solution and ensure the salt is dissolved, bring the salt and water mixture to the boil and allow to cool before adding to the olives. I cook up a few litres of this solution and store it. The amount you need will depend on how many olives you have. Use this salt solution for soaking the olives and every three days or so change the salt water. Do this until the olives are no longer too bitter, which may take 6 to 8 weeks. Then the olives are ready for the second stage.

Second stage
Pour off and measure the last lot of water so that you will know the volume of salt brine that will be required. Measure that quantity of fresh, warm water into a pan and dissolve the salt, this time at the rate of 1/2 cup of salt to 10 cups of water. Place olives in clean sterilised bottles with some dried garlic, some chillies and a teaspoon of lemon juice per litre. Then pour the salt water brine over the olives they are completely submerged. Top up bottles with up to one centimetre of olive oil to stop air getting to the fruit and seal the lids on. No further preparation is required and the bottled olives will store for at least 12 months in a cool cupboard.

When you are ready to eat your olives, pour out the strong preserving solution and fill the jar with clean, cool water. Leave in the refrigerator for a further 24 hours. (The plain water leaches some of the salt back out of the olives.) At this stage you can also add any or all of the following flavourings: grated garlic, basil, oregano, chopped onion, red capsicum, lemon juice and lemon pieces. You can also use the olives just as they are, along with other things as a pizza topping.

Curing your own olives

Perth's Mediterranean climate makes olive growing ideal and many varieties of olive trees are grown in gardens here. But I am always amazed that many olives go unpicked. Do people just grow them for the lovely foliage? Probably. Well maybe it's not that surprising garden olives get left on the tree as the first time I tried to cure my garden olives, it was a total disaster. They were so bitter and ended up being thrown out. Back then I made two mistakes: (1) I was impatient and didn't wait long enough for the bitterness to go out of the olives and (2) I tried to do the green olives, which are more difficult to cure.




By the way green olives are NOT a different variety, but just unripe olives and they need special treatment. They are harder and more bitter. If you are a newbie/wannabee olive curer and want to give this a go, try first with the black ones, or with olives that are just turning pinkish dark, like the ones in the top photo. I actually picked these from someone's verge tree. I will post my olive curing recipe tomorrow.

Coasting is not an option

I'm reading Jonathan Raban's wonderful travel book "Coasting", which is about Raban's voyage sailing solo around the British Isles in the 1980s. Early on in the book Raban goes off on a diversion about the various meanings of the word "coasting" and says he was hauled over the coals at school for "coasting". His school report said he was not using his talents, not exerting himself, and was just sailing along.

Then I came across Michael Stephens' heretical thoughts on transforming library science education, set out recently in some of his slides posted on Stephens' Tame the Web blog. The slides are from a presentation at the Future of Academic Libraries Symposium.

One of the slides struck a chord with me. It was entitled : "coasting is not an option".

I think Raban's school teacher and Michael Stephens are making the same point and it's a familiar point, made by many: use your talents, make the most of your opportunities, step out of you comfort zone and take a few risks. Libraries are changing so fast that we can't afford to coast.

If you want to be inspired by a group of librarians who are NOT coasting read some of the posts on the SLA Future Ready 365 blog 2011 http://futureready365.sla.org/

Our webinar experience

Today Lutie Sheridan and I presented our webinar on Summon: “Web-scale discovery: the user experience brought” which was organised by Richard Levy from Serials Solutions. The subject of the webinar was the findings of our user studies on Serials Solutions' Summon conducted at Edith Cowan University Library during 2010 and 2011.

We had about 33 people online from all around the place, mainly in Australia. I think it went quite well, but it is a somewhat unreal experience talking into the phone to 30+ people.

You need to be skilled at multitasking to do one of these things. The speaker-phone did not work, so we had to pass the phone back and forth to present the slides, and then later to answer questions. The questions appeared as text in the chat box and Richard repeated them to us as well.

Lutie commented that it was like talking on the phone when you get no "ah-ha" comments coming back at you...no verbal or visual cues. Another colleague mentioned having once done a phone job interview with a panel of interviewers firing questions and you have no visual cues.

Later I found out that some people were unable to log in. It’s always tricky with the technology in these events.

Richard Levy of Serials Solutions recorded the whole presentation including questions and responses. I believe he will be making it available at some stage.

My advice if you decide to do a webinar as presenter: prepare, check out the technology before hand and try to RELAX and have fun with it!!

Webinar on Summon this week

This blog post is just a little plug for our upcoming webinar on Thursday 23rd June 2011 at 11am Sydney time.

The topic of the webinar is the findings of our user studies on Serials Solutions' Summon conducted during 2010 and 2011

Web-scale discovery: user experience brought to you by Serials Solutions and Julia Gross and Lutie Sheridan from Edith Cowan University.

This is a free event and you can register at http://tinyurl.com/3tuwq6x

Fingers crossed the technology will work. We have had a few runs though and all is go position.

Singapore cathedral, the story behind the photo

Last time I was in Singapore I did my own self-guided heritage walking tour around the vicinity of the Raffles Hotel and Chijmes Centre. Not far from there, right near Singapore MRT City Hall station is the beautiful St Andrew's Cathedral.

I took some photos at the time and now I am prompted to find out more about this Anglican cathedral.

There was an old church on this site built by Indian convicts as far back as 1837. However the building was struck by lightning and was pulled down, so the cathedral you see now is the building that replaced it in 1852. The building now on the site now was designed by Colonel Ronald MacPherson in the architectural style of English Gothic revival. It is based on the 13th-century Netley Abbey in England. The four paths that lead to the cathedral form the Cross of St. Andrew.

It’s difficult to get a full distance photo of the cathedral now, as the area is in the midst of city buildings. However you can see old picture of St Andrew's Cathedral, here Courtesy of National Archives of Singapore.

The interior walls are plastered with an unusual building material known as Madras Chunam which is a mixture of shell lime, egg white and sugar, and was used to achieve the glossy white walls.

During the Japanese occupation in 1942, the church served as a casualty clearing station where the war wounded were treated.

I did not take any interior photos, but here on Flickr there is a picture of the Stained glass East window.

Read more about the history of St Andrew’s Cathedral here and next time you are in Singapore take some time to visit.

In praise of Downton Abbey

I'm a sucker for costume dramas, I'll admit. When Downton Abbey started on free to air television in Perth three weeks ago I was glued to the screen and haven't been disappointed thus far. Episode 4 Series 1 shows this weekend and I am resisting the temptation to "read-ahead". I am rather miffed than this wasn't picked up by the ABC. Maybe they could not afford it.

It's an Upstairs Downstairs themed story set in a fictitious grand house during the Edwardian era and in the first episode we hear about the sinking of the Titanic (1912) and the heir to Downtown Abbey is one of the casualties.

For me Maggie Smith steals the show right from the first episode. She definitely has the best lines: "I dont like many of my friends" and "what is a weekend" and "I couldn't have electricity in the house, I wouldn't sleep a wink"

What are your favourite Downtown moments?

Birds have their fill of plastic

Anyone who's walked along a beach in a remote area will be appalled by the amount of washed up plastic and other debris you find.

At our local beach people often leave behind plastic buckets, balls, plastic shoes and other rubbish and if the council beach cleaners don't collect it, where does it end up?

Birds Australia have been highlighted the problem of plastic waste on Lord Howe Island where researchers have found that 95% of Flesh-footed Shearwaters have large amounts of plastics in their digestive systems. Plastic breaks down, but then it can be mistaken for food by the birds. To make matters worse the adult birds feed their chicks with the plastic bits.

A recent report in The Age makes you realise that the plastic you throw out today, or the stuff left behind on the beach may end up in the ocean and eventually find its way into the stomachs of vulnerable seabirds as well as fish and animals such as turtles.

Just take a look at this graphic photo, taken by photographer Chris Jordan on Midway Atoll, of a dead seabird with its stomach full of plastic.

The Australian government has information on its Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities website about the whole marine debris problem and what is being done.

Why buy an Android tablet?

I've been thinking about the proliferation of tablets and the competition (or lack of competition) for Apple's iPad.

The question is why would you buy an Android tablet?

This question was posted on the Businessinsider website. Here's a summary of the responses. Android tablet offers:

• Price
• More competition
• More variety
• Openness
• Flash support
• Support for PDF
• No DRM
• Drag and drop via USB like it's another drive
• Avoid Itunes

CNET has looked at the range of current and upcoming tablets and presented them all in a comparative table.

And Garner predicts that the gap between Apple & Android tablet market shares will continue to decrease. Apple’s iOS currently has 83.9% market share which is expected to drop to 68.7% later in 2011. But it will stay at a healthy 63.5% in 2012, retaining almost half of the market (47.1%) by 2015.

If you want to follow this topic check out Crave: the gadget blog from CNET.

Frog education on campus

Edith Cowan University (ECU) is providing some exciting "green" initiatives and offering a range of interesting sessions for staff and students. The ECU Green Officer Program recently organised for Johnny Prefumo, the Frog Doctor, to run a lunchtime session about setting up a frog friendly garden.

We used to live near a lake in Perth and would hear the wonderful nightly chorus of frogs during the winter months once the rainy season started. So I was keen to find out more about WA frogs and how difficult it would be to set up a frog friendly habitat in a suburban garden.

What did I learn?

• Most of the local WA frogs are brown, not green.
• Most of them have claws as they burrow down to shelter during summer and to breed.
• There are tree frogs and burrowing frogs, most local ones are the latter.
  
• Frogs can't swim, only the tadpoles swim.
• You need to set up areas for the frogs to hide as well as water zones.
  
• They call loudly in winter, once the rain starts and breeding begins.
• Frog numbers are declining.
  
• Local frogs are named after the sounds of their call, for example: "motorbike frog", "quacking frog", "moaning frog".

The WA Museum is running a tadpole exchange program for those who have the right habitat and are wanting to get started with preparing a frog friendly garden. But read up first as it is not just a matter of putting in a pond. The Museum have a frog garden publication which will tell you what you need to do.

And oh, by the way, I won't be setting up a frog spot at home, as the little blighters are really noisy in winter and the neighbours might object. But if you live in a rural or semi-rural area it would be ideal and would help the survival of native frogs.

Pictured is the local Perth frog species, the moaning frog. Note that it has claws, not sucker pads, so it's a burrowing frog not a tree frog.

Steinbeck revisited

I love reading and re-reading the classics and some years ago had a Steinbeck "fling" and read a whole lot of his novels....East Of Eden, The Pearl, Cannery Row and the Grapes of Wrath. But for some reason I had never read Of Mice and Men until recently.

John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men, was written in 1937 and tells the story of two down-on-their-luck drifters traveling around, looking for work in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. This work was written before the Grapes of Wrath and has some similar themes.

The story starts with the two mates, George and Lennie, back on the road after hurridly leaving their previous job. It seems Lennie did some “bad things” and as we hear parts of their story we realise that the child-like Lennie has a mental disability and is a large, lumbering man who does not know his own strength. George is Lennie’s best mate and his protector who is trying the keep him out of trouble. They arrive at a ranch looking for work and hoping for a better life with dreams of making enough money to buy their own place and raise chickens and rabbits. Lennie loves rabbits. When the mean and aggressive Curly, the boss’s son, appears on the scene you know things are not going to end well and that George will have his work cut out trying to keep Lennie safe from harm. Of Mice and Men has a Greek tragedy air of inevitability about it and it moves relentlessly to its tragic conclusion.

One major criticism I have of the book is the character of Curly's wife, who is the archetypical fallen woman and temptress, Eve. You know when you meet her that she will play an important role in Lennie and George's downfall.

Steinbeck’s novels are published here by Penguin Australia

Learning about photonics

I am working on an ANDS Seeding the Commons project along with a team of staff at ECU. One of the exciting aspects of this project is actually going out and interviewing our university researchers, asking them about their research and their research data. Recently we spoke with Professor Kamal Alameh, the director of the Electron Science Research Institute (ESRI), about ECU's research in photonics and microelectronics. Professor Alameh was incredibly hospitable and took us on a tour around the ESRI research facility and explained in layman's terms their diverse and exciting projects. We will be contributing metadata about an ESRI dataset into Research Data Australia.

This Youtube video shows Professor Alameh talking about ESRI and was released in the ECU YouTube Channel this week.

(My blog post 13 for blog every day of June 2011)

An architectural treasure south of Perth

I came across this book recently - "The Fairbridge Chapel : Sir Herbert Baker's labour of love" by David Dolan and Christine Lewis and it reminded me that I was intrigued by this chapel when I saw it for the first time last year on a visit to Fairbridge Farm. The architecture looks so unusual compared to the style of most Australian colonial church architecture (not that I am an expert at all). It certainly has a Cape, as in Cape Town, look about it.

The Fairbridge Chapel is known as the Chapel of the Holy Innocents and was designed by the famous architect Sir Herbert Baker who also designed buildings all over South Africa.

"Baker was a great believer in Kingsley Fairbridge and his work at Fairbridge Farm that when the Child Emigration Society approached him in 1928 about designing a chapel for the Farm School, he was more than happy to oblige. In his autobiography Architecture and Personalities (1994) Baker explained, " I have such admiration for the work of Kingsley Fairbridge, inspired by Rhodes and a Rhodes Scholar, in his farm schools that I gave designs of a chapel for the first Farm School at Pinjarra in Western Australia."

More about Herbert Baker architecture in South Africa here

Baker designed the Union Buildings, the official seat of the South African government in Pretoria, South Africa.

It is well worth a visit to Fairbridge Farm just to see the chapel. It is less than a 60 minute drive south of Perth, near Pinjarra.

Fly in fly out

I won't be posting for a few days as I am off on a whistle stop trip to Sydney to attend a research data management forum.

It is the 2011 Research Data Management Policy Summit, hosted by the University of Sydney.

We are participating in an ANDS Seeding the Commons project that requires our university to draft a range of policies and procedures around research data management, so this summit will be really useful.

My aim is to resume the Blog Every Day of June when I get back on the weekend. Happy blogging to y'all and keep up the posts.

International Year of Forests my forest photos

Western Australia has precious few forests and all are in the South West of the state. Here’s my photo album tribute for 2011 the International Year of Forests. These photos were taken around Perth, Pemberton, on the Cape to Cape trail, Yallingup and Dwellingup.


Walkers in the forest


Flowers after forest fire



Walking the dog through the Karri forest



Burnt out Marri tree covered with moss




Coastal Melaleuca trees



Catspaw Flower



Karri forest



Marri and grass trees


Kangaroos on the edge of the forest

At the movies

I have seen quite a few movies over the last month of so and here are some of my recommendations and links to other sources of information.

OF GODS AND MEN Wonderful, highly recommended. It is based on a true story, set in the early 1990s about a group of French Trappist monks living under the threat of hostile elements in the Algerian community where the monastery is located. 5 stars

GET LOW I found this very slow moving, but it has some wonderful acting from Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek. 3 stars

SNOWTOWN Oh dear I can't rate this, other than saying it is horrid and I felt quite traumatised after some scenes. In fact we walked out after 45 minutes. I agreed to see it without really finding out what it was about…silly me.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS oh yeah, it is a bit Hollywood but a good 1930s Depression time period piece and I did not mind that it was quite changed from the book. Austrian actor Christoph Waltz steals the show. 4 stars.

INCENDIES a very grim story of war and its impact in Lebanon, but well done. There are some excellent French Canadian films around. 4 1/2 stars

HERE I AM I can really recommend this - a great new Aussie film, well told story of indigenous woman's struggle coming out of gaol and moving into a women’s refuge in North Adelaide to get her life together. It’s sad but also inspirational, battling against the odds, with some wonderful funny moments and great music. The Aboriginal cast are wonderful and include some experienced actors and some new faces. Warwick Thornton (of Samson and Delilah) is the cinematographer. The film premiered to a standing ovation at the Adelaide Film Festival earlier this year and I can see why. 5 stars.

Students use of Summon, article in New Library World

My colleague and I have had an article published in the Emerald journal New Library World. This is based on a study we did where we observed students using the Serials Solutions webscale discovery tool, Summon.

Gross, J. & Sheridan, L. (2011). Web scale discovery: the user experience. New Library World, 112 (5/6) 236-247.

The DOI is: 10.1108/03074801111136275

Purpose – This study aims to look at how a small group of university students used the new library web scale search discovery tool, “Summon”, and whether they encountered any difficulties pertaining to navigation, ease of use and the quality of the search results.

Design/methodology/approach – Researchers conducted a series of usability studies in which students were observed as they conducted some typical library resource searches using the new discovery search platform.

Findings – The paper analyses the data, describes and reports the findings of the usability tests. The study found that the new homepage design of providing a single search box was an effective interface for users. The students found a single search box discovery solution was simple to use, and seemed to deliver satisfactory results on a selection of typical library search tasks. The study confirms some of the promise for web scale discovery, but points to new lines of enquiry in relation to the nature of assistance that students will need in the future, particularly in relation to their need to evaluate information.

Originality/value – Web scale discovery searching is an innovation in the online searching of library collections. The study revealed how a small sample of end-users experienced the new type of searching and serendipitously identified a new issue that warrants further investigation

Report: The value of libraries for research and researchers

One of the most interesting reports to come out in recent months is the UK report on libraries and research which is a must read for all academic library managers.

The value of libraries for research and researchers

The report was jointly commissioned by RIN and RLUK in the U.K. and it presents the findings of a systematic study of the value of the services that libraries provide to researchers, and of the contributions that libraries from a wide range of institutions make to institutional research performance.

The key points are compelling and clearly state the benefits of libraries for research:

1. Good libraries help institutions to recruit and retain top researchers

2. Libraries help researchers win research grants and contracts

3. Libraries promote and exploit new technologies and new models of scholarly communications

4. Repositories increase the visibility of the institution and raise its research profile

5. Outward-facing libraries contribute to institution-wide initiatives

6. Specialist staff work in partnership with academic departments

7. Connecting with researchers enhances the value of the library's services

8. Dedicated spaces provide a better work environment for researchers

9. Easy access to high-quality content is a key foundation for good research

10. Libraries are a physical manifestation of the values of the academy and of scholarship

Books read so far, in 2011

I'm trying to read more this year. Here's a list with comments on the books I have read so far in 2011.

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
a classic that has stood the test of time

Burying the Bones by Hilary Spurling
a biography of Pearl Buck's life in early 20th Century China

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban
I had not read JR before and was blown away by his erudition and wonderful descriptions of sailing the inside passage, from Seattle to Juneau

Coasting by Jonathan Raban
an earlier book by JR, about sailing around the British Isles

Larry’s Party by Carol Shields
my expectations on hearing positive reports about this book from friends when it first came out, were not quite met

Enchantment and Sorrow by Gabrielle Roy
Gabrielle Roy is not well known in Australia at all, but is one of the most famous French Canadian writers. She wrote in French and this is a translation of the first part of her autobiography, set in Manitoba in the 1920-1940s. If the French Canadians had it rough in Quebec, those in the isolated French communities were even worse off.

Flashman Papers by Macdonald Fraser
well what can I say. Politically incorrect, but very flashy in a boy's own adventure way!

The Resurrectionist by James Bradley
a strange dark tale about "body snatchers" in 19th Century London. It is based on the story of the Burke and Hare murders. I will seek out some more of James Bradley.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
you must read this post-colonial classic from Nigerian writer

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Must read some more of CMcC have seen the film of The Road and the book is equally stark and grim

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
terrific

Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
short stories, set in Ireland, all around this theme, each quite different.

Dancing Backwards by Salley Vickers
one of her latest, but not as good and her previous books such as Miss Garnet's Angel and The Other Side of You

Ruby in her navel by Barry Unsworth
Forget the silly title, this is a terrific well researched historical novel set in Sicily in the 12th Century, when Sicily had a Norman king (Roger) and Saracens and Christians worked along side and shared power for one brief period in history. Very informative and enjoyable. I am an Unsworth fan.

Barry Unsworth by Pascali’s Island
this is one of Unsworth's earlier books set in pre- WW1 in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Good read

Five Bells by Gail Jones
this is the first book of Gail Jones that I have read. It's set in Sydney on one bright summer day and tracks the intertwining lives of four adults and a child. The title comes from classic Australian poem Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor which I have also been delving into. A wonderful book. The various story lines propel you forward and the language is beautiful and poetic. The subject of the poem, Five Bells, is echoed in the novel as well.

The Angel and the Octopus by Simon Leys
some great essays here and I especially enjoyed the ones about China under Mao.

Blog every day of June 2011

Last year a group of librarians on Twitter brought together by @flexnib embarked upon a blogging challenge and set themselves the goal of posting one blog post a day throughout June.

It's on again and starting today and I've decided to give it a go and see if I can maintain the pace and write something interesting.

I hope to also revive my blogging enthusiasm which I have to admit has flagged since I started devoting more time to Twitter.

Here's the getting started post from Libraries Interact, the Australian Library group blog, where all the participants names are listed.

Best of luck to all those who have decided to join in, it will be fun to see how we go. I imagine half way thorough the 2nd week will be the time we strike writer's block!

The Twitter tag for this is #blogeverydayofjune

CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia presentation on Summon

Many of the presentations from the recent CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia Sydney conference are now on the Conference program website.

The full list of presentations, posters and so forth is here

We gave a presentation on the usability studies conducted during 2010 and 2011 of the Serials Solutions Web scale discovery product, Summon. One key finding was that although students found the product easy to use, their skills at sifting through the results screens were not so good.

There is no full paper of the Summon presentation, however an article will be published this month's New Library World. More of that soon.

Discovering Scholarly Resources

View more presentations from Julia Gross

Anzac Day post

It's Anzac Day here so I was reminded of the photos I have and that I must get around to contacting the Australian War Memorial to see if they are interested in seeing them.

Here's a photo from the family archives of two unknown Aussie soldiers taken around the time of the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. All I know about them is they were part of the Australian Ninth Division which I wrote about previously. Here they were obviously enjoying a day off.

Early birds for CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia conference 2011

CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia conference is on again in Sydney this year: 3-6 April 2011 at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour. CCA-EDUCAUSE conference is organised by CAUDIT, CAUL and ACODE and the focus is on information technology in higher education.

This conference is attended by a range of professionals working in the higher education sector:

• IT practitioners and managers
• Teaching and learning technology practitioners and managers
• Librarians and knowledge managers
• Developers of information technologies and services for higher education

Theme for 2011 is: The game has changed

"The game has changed for information technology in higher education. Fundamental shifts in learning and teaching, research, resources, and technology mean we’re not using the same rules or playing fields anymore. According to some leading thinkers, the very survival of the university is on the line if we're not able to adapt.

What game changers do you see in your organisation? What are the new rules and who are the players? What do we need to do to adapt? And what things remain constant, no matter what the external appearances of transformation?"


Early Bird registrations close on 3 March.

Keynote speakers include:

Bryan Alexander – Director of Research at NITLE. Emerging technologies, mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, social media.

Shirley Alexander – Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Teaching, Learning and Equity) at the University of Technology, Sydney. Professor of Learning Technologies.

Richard Katz – Consults on strategy, technology, and assessment issues with universities, governments, and corporations worldwide.

Diana Oblinger – President and CEO of EDUCAUSE. Co-author of What Business Wants from Higher Education. Co-editor of The Learning Revolution.

McKenzie Wark – Author of Gamer Theory and A Hacker Manifesto. Chair of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York.

Brad Wheeler – CIO, Indiana University. Co-founder of the Sakai Project and Kuali. Transformative software and service collaborations.

Follow @ccaeducause on Twitter for news and updates

Perth Library Unconference goes national

The Perth Library Unconference is going national for 2011.

The annual Perth Library Camp or Library UnConference has been going for a number of years, due to the enthusiasm of the "unorganisers" and the support of some local institutions.

This year it will be held to coincide with a number of national conferences happening in Perth:

The ALIA 5th New Librarians Symposium (2011) Friday 16 – Sunday 18 September 2011 and the ALIA National Library & Information Technicians Conference (Libtech) 12 - Friday 16 September 2011.

Library Camp Australia will be held in Perth on 19 September 2011, 9am to 4pm at the State Library of Western Australia:

"This will be an unconference for anyone who works in, researches, uses or is interested in libraries, following the principles that session topics are set on the day and that everyone contributes in some way. It is being organised by volunteers and so far is being supported by our generous sponsors the State Library of Western Australia and Public Libraries Western Australia.

There's also a competition to design a logo for Library Camp Australia. Check out this librariesinteract blog post.

The Twitter hashtag for Library Camp Australia is #libcampoz