Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from all at ILS. The University closes down over Christmas, but you will still be able to access all of our online resources and self-service will be available in Fountains. Our opening times are available on the ILS website.




Merry Christmas by Tom Gill. Used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Available from https://flic.kr/p/qv8j8K

Measuring research impact with Altmetric

YSJ offers a new way to measure research impact through a subscription to Altmetric. This service is designed to offer an alternative to journal impact factors (impact factors measure importance by quantifying how many times and where in the scholarly literature research has been cited). Altmetric looks at where research is mentioned in grey literature like government reports, popular media, social media, online and elsewhere. It is particularly good for getting a quick early snapshot of who is talking about research and where.

Altmetric will automatically analyse all research outputs uploaded to RaY and there are a number of different ways to explore the data. More information on how Altmetric works is available on the ILS website.

Please send us your NVivo issues

We are aware that a number of researchers using NVivo software for qualitative data management are experiencing issues. We are discovering that it's not just one quick fix to solve these issues but, because the software itself relies on a complex database, there are likely a number of different problems going on.

If you are indeed experiencing issues, please email either Clare McCluskey-Dean or Leah Emary a detailed description of your problem.We're aware that these issues may have occurred in the past and so you won't necessarily be able to screenshot or resurrect the exact problems you encounter but the types of details we're interested in hearing about are as follows:

• Where are you accessing NVivo (grad centre, home, other YSJ location)?
• Are you using the virtual desktop or do you have a local copy of NVivo installed on a personal machine?
• If you have a local copy of NVivo, which version is installed and what type of machine are you using (Mac, PC, operating system etc.)?
• If you are using a USB stick or cloud storage (Drop Box, Google Drive etc) to import and/or save your data, what type of USB stick are you using or which cloud-based storage medium are you using?
• Are you experiencing storage issues because files are exceeding your storage capabilities? If so, where are you saving your project files?
• Do you ever have trouble locating your project files or the NVivo sample project?
• Screenshots of error messages or other failures are very helpful.
• Any other details about your context or issues are greatly appreciated.

Joint sessions with Academic Development Directorate this week

This week, we are contributing to two of the sessions in the ADD calendar of research support events.  On Thursday, Clare will be joining Phil from the Technology Enhanced Learning team to look at Social Media for Research Dissemination.  On Friday, Victoria and Clare will be running Literature Searching for Researchers.  More information on these sessions, and the others offered by ADD for researchers, can be found on their website. Also, don't forget that ILS offers a range of bite-sized introductions to a number of research topics, including Keeping Track of Your Reading and and introduction to the issues surrounding Open Access.  These are in the calendar on the ILS blog for researchers.

Keeping track of your reading

We will be running a drop in session on Wednesday describing some tools for keeping track of your reading. We'll be talking about keeping track of what you have already read, what you'd like to read, and how to stay on top of relevant authors and topics as they're published. Please come by DG103 at 10:00 if you would like to join in.

More on what we've covered in the past can be found here.

For those of you who haven't attended the ILS researcher support sessions, we usually spend about 30 minutes talking about some tools or strategies we recommend based on the needs of researchers in the room. We'll stick around for another 30 minutes afterwards in case there are individual questions about your research or if you'd like to get stuck in with the tools we've demoed. The full roster of workshops is available in the Google calendar on the right of your screen or here.

Newspaper archives - what is available here?

Increasingly researchers are able to use online archives of newspapers, recent and more historic, as part of their resource searches.  Having recently added some new services to our portfolio in ILS, we thought it was worth rounding up what is now available to you. All of these are accessible via the databases page on the ILS website.

17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers

The newspapers, pamphlets and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media.

19th Century British Library Newspapers

19th Century British Library Newspapers contains full runs of influential national and regional newspapers, representing different political and cultural segments.

British Newspapers 1600-1900

A combined search tool for the two collections above.

FT.com

FT.com interative provides access to the full text of the global editions of the Financial Times to search and browse the archives, including interactive features and extra reports on industry sectors and companies.

Historical Newspapers

Searchable full text, full page, and article-level images from the archives of The Guardian, The Observer and The New York Times, 1791-2003.

InfoTrac Custom Newspapers

Full text, up to the present day, of UK newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent.

UK Press Online (ON CAMPUS ACCESS ONLY)

A British tabloid newspaper archive, covering the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star and other major titles.

Posting to Academia.edu & ResearchGate

It's been a while since we've talked about either ResearchGate or Academia.edu, though we know many of you use these services, both as readers and contributers (we do too). If you haven't yet stumbled across these two, they are online platforms on which researchers can post their papers. Academia.edu tends to be more humanities-focussed and is based in San Francisco and ResearchGate tends to be more STEM-focussed and is based in Berlin, but both of them host papers from all over the world and across all disciplines. These platforms position themselves somewhere between a research repository (other examples would be YSJ's RaY, SSRN, or arXiv) and a social networking site like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Though these services give users the ability to publicize and download articles without paying a subscription or article charge, they're not providing open access in a responsible, sustainable manner.  As we pointed out before, these platforms are owned by private companies and their goal is to create good financial returns for their investors. Mendeley, a socially-oriented citation management service, was purchased by Elsevier a few years back, and so it's possible that ResearchGate and Academia.edu will be sold to a similar (or the same) buyer in future. Another likely scenario is that they will sell onwards to marketers or R&D companies information about networks, research trends and other data you upload.

Providing open access to your research outputs is best practice, as well as making you compliant for the next REF. There are a number of accepted methods of making your work open access --YSJ's policy is to upload them to RaY -- but uploading to ResearchGate and Academia.edu are not acceptable for REF. You can continue to upload to either or both platforms, just remember to upload to RaY as well.

If you're interested in reading up on this, this blog posting by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is a good place to start.

Focus on Box of Broadcasts

Did you know that we have access to a large archive of television and radio programmes via our subscription to Box of Broadcasts?  And that they come with complete transcripts?

It can be tempting to use our ILS database list just when we need journal or newspaper articles, but there are tools which provide access to lots of other types of resources too.  One of the most useful is this tool, which provides an archive of Freeview channels, including some in other languages.  If you teach classes, you may be able to find a good film or television programme to use.  Or you may be interested in analysing news programmes for their coverage of a specific event or policy.  Further to this, it offers the chance to create clips of part of a programme, or playlists of clips or whole programmes.

If you would like to explore this further, Box of Broadcasts is on the ILS databases page.

Celebrate open access week by retaining your copyright

It’s Open Access Week and here in ILS we’ve been discussing the merits of licensing your research when you upload it to an institutional or subject repository, such as RaY.

Creative Commons licences are a straightforward way of making your work available for others to utilise,. There are six licences with different conditions attached. The most permissive licence, CC BY, allows anybody to copy and use your work, including for commercial purposes, so long as they credit you as the owner. The most restrictive licence is CC BY-NC-ND, which only allows others to download and share your work, so long as they credit you.

Copyright is a crucial factor when it comes to making your work open access. Uploading your work to a repository is an act of copying. If you haven’t retained the copyright in the work, for example when you signed a publishing agreement, then you will need permission to do this. Permission can be in the form of written agreement from the copyright owner, or a licence which allows you to make that work available.

In ILS we encourage all researchers to retain the copyright in their work whenever possible to do so – do not be afraid to negotiate your publishing terms!

If you don’t own the copyright to your work and you would like to make it available under licence, then again you will require permission to do this.

Different funding bodies have different requirements regarding licences. For more information about these requirements, and using a licence for your work, see our Guide to RaY and Open Access. For more information about copyright, see our copyright webpages.

Researcher support workshops from ILS

Researcher support sessions from ILS have now been scheduled through to next Spring. Workshops on Word for long documents, the YSJ research repository, open access, tools for keeping track of reading and much more on offer. Hope to see you there!

Electronic delivery of articles and book chapters through the Inter-Library Loans Service

The British Library are now offering the electronic delivery of Inter-Library Loans, and we are implementing the service at York St John in the coming months. Unless you've signed up for the pilot scheme (more on that below), you won't notice any changes yet but will before the end of the year. Our colleague in inter-library loans, Katherine Hughes, has highlighted below some aspects of the new service that will be of interest to researchers.

How do electronic inter-library loans work?

Participants in our pilot scheme, running at the moment and open to staff and PhD students, can receive electronic ILLs. To receive ILLs electronically, you will need to sign up for an account with the British Library. This is a quick process taking around five minutes. You can then order ILLs via the form on the library website, and will receive an email to your university email account with a link to download the article. Once you’ve downloaded the PDF, you will just need to sign in with your new British Library account details to access the article. For PCs and some other devices, it’s possible to ‘remember me on this computer’, so you only have to log in the first time you download an article to that device.

If you’re interested in taking part in the pilot scheme, please email interlibrary@yorksj.ac.uk and the Inter-Library Loans staff will register you for the scheme and send you more information.

What are the advantages of electronic ILLs?

• They’re faster – in the majority of cases, receiving ILLs electronically is much quicker than getting a paper copy. The British Library will send the link to the article directly to you rather than having to wait for it to be printed or posted. Where the item you’ve requested is available electronically at the British Library, they can send it to you very rapidly, within a day or two of your request being placed. Other articles might take a little longer, but are still likely to be sent to you within a working week.
• You can keep multiple copies of the file on multiple devices– It’s possible to save multiple copies of the file onto different devices. The DRM (Digital Rights Management) software on the PDF means that only you can log on to view it, but it doesn’t stop you from making copies.
• You can still print the article – it’s possible to print the article out once while maintaining multiple electronic copies.

Are all items available via electronic ILL?

Electronic ILL is available on any journal article and book chapter requests ordered through the British Library, where we get the majority of our ILLs. It’s not currently available on books, which need to be borrowed on loan.

Sometimes, we are unable to acquire specific items from the British Library and instead need to order them through another university library. Some libraries will only be able to supply the copy in print format, but where possible, we will send these items to you electronically. When available electronically from another library, we will usually be able to send an unencrypted PDF so there will be no need to log in. If only available in print, we will provide a paper copy via your preferred method, collection or postal delivery. Please indicate when completing the ILL form which delivery method you would prefer if the item is unavailable electronically.

New ebook packages

ILS has recently purchased some ebook packages from Palgrave, to enhance our holdings in the areas of Religion and Philosophy, Social Sciences, Education, Literature, and Media and Culture.  Our systems team has been hard at work making these titles searchable in the library catalogue, and you can also can see what is available and access the books at

• http://capitadiscovery.co.uk/yorksj/items/110904  
• 
  
• Any titles which are in the packages we have bought are available to download in full as a PDF, or to send to a Kindle, as well as having a read online option.  We hope these are helpful to you in your research.

ILS at the YSJ Research Reflections conference

Armed with flyers and complimentary, branded beer mats, academic liaison librarians will be available to chat with you during the refreshments breaks at the ILS stand hosted by the YSJ Research Reflections conference this week. We're interested in hearing about your research directions and will have our laptops at the ready for telling you more about how ILS can support your research.

Clare, Liaison Librarian to the Faculty of Education and Theology will be representing ILS' own research excellence with her poster entitled 'Communities of Practice in Information Literacy in Higher Education'. See you there!

New collection available - Historical Texts

Does your research involve accessing texts from 15th-19th Centuries?  If so, our new collection may be just what you need.  ILS has purchased access to the Jisc Historical Texts platform.  This provides YSJ members with access to the following services.

Early English Books Online (EEBO), covering the time period 1473-1700 and over 125000 books.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), covering the time period 1701-1800 and over 180000 titles.

British Library 19th Century collection, covering the time period 1789-1914 and over 65000 digitised editions (more than 25 million pages).

Jisc has produced some introductory materials, if you would like to find out more.

New library catalogue

Summer is a busy time for academic libraries! We've been able to implement a new library management system (behind the scenes system that should improve our efficiency and record-keeping) which comes along with a shiny new library catalogue. Visitors to the ILS homepage should have seen it and used it already but for those of you who haven't, here is a little snapshot:

Isn't it great? You should see improved relevance with books ranked highest in your list of results. Quite a few graduate researchers spent a good chunk of time with us, working out some of the bugs and optimising the look and feel in May of this year, so thanks very much to you for that. For those of you who miss Discover and want to keep searching there, you can still find it from the 'Databases' page, which is linked to from the ILS homepage.

At the moment, we're still working on a few aspects relating to article search (or 'search everything' as it appears in the catalogue). You may well find that the catalogue is not a great place for you to look for articles, and in that case, we would encourage you to go to straight to your discipline-specific scholarly databases. Though there are some advantages of searching with a federated search tool like our catalogue (looking across disciplinary lines, saving a bit of time by searching from all providers at once), there are many more advantages of searching in the correct databases. You will get much more precise search results and be able to search in discipline-appropriate ways; things that can be eroded when databases are merged into one interface.

Search strategies and high-quality databases are just the type of thing that make your academic liaison librarian's eyes glow with joy. Please book a tutorial  if you'd like to make sure you're getting the most out of the resources we subscribe to.

Masculinity in Literature

In an effort to bring added value to their scholarly articles, Routledge have created a cross-journal collection of articles which address 'masculinity in literature'. The publisher describes it thus:

This collection looks at the construction of manhood alongside sexual orientation, race and class, and within specific historical situations. The featured articles explore a range of media, regions and time periods as the authors contend with the concept of masculinity and how it has been defined in popular culture.

 All articles in the collection are free to access until October 2015 and might be of interest to those of you whose research addresses gender. Enjoy!

Open access and institutional repository requirements

HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) recently announced changes regarding deposit of research outputs for eligibility in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) excercise in 2020.

Rest assured, however, that YSJ's policy on depositing in RaY has not changed!

Google Scholar Button for your browser

Looking up a highlighted citation with the Google Scholar button

In April of 2015, Google released a Google Scholar plug-in for an internet browser. After a few months of testing, I think it seems stable and useful for looking up citations without necessarily needing to leave the webpage you're currently looking at or opening a new tab.

If you decide to install the button in your browser, you should be able to highlight text on a page (either a citation in an online bibliography or text from an actual article), click the button and instantly see where the full text might be available open access or via the library. Scholar is far from failsafe when checking our collections, so if it doesn't find it at YSJ, it's always best to double check from the library's website (or with your librarian) whether we may have the item in our collection.

Looking up a highlighted quote the Google Scholar button

You can also type into the button a snippet of text from an article or book you'd like to cite, and then see results of articles where those words appear. This might be useful if you handwrite a quote into a notebook but fail to take the full citation at the time (not that any YSJ scholar would fall prey to such bad habits).


The browser button is available for Chrome and Firefox. Happy searching!

Upcoming research support session: Capturing audio and video for research

The next research support session will be run by Ian from our Digital Training Team and will focus on some options available to you in capturing audio and video when collecting data for your research. ILS has a bank of 50 iPad Minis, which are available to borrow, and he will use these to introduce some of the features that could be useful to you.

It will take place on Wednesday 5th August, 2pm, FT114.

For more information about the Digital Training Team and the work they do, check out their blog.



Lego Photographer by Nathan Rupert. Used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Available from https://flic.kr/p/f6oFCx

Upcoming research support session: Keeping Track of Your Reading

This week, Clare will be running a session on keeping track of your reading for researchers.  Would you like to know more about the tools that different search services offer to make it easier to be alerted when research articles are published in specific journal titles?  Or to receive an email when a key author has written another piece of work?  Or are you struggling to keep effective records of what you have read or found? These issues and more will be covered.  Pop along to DG102 at 11am on Friday 24th July.

Keeping track of your reading from Information Learning Services, York St John University

Creating a researcher profile on RaY

Not only is it possible to track downloads and 'top authors' using RaY's statistics page, as we wrote about last week, it's also possible to create an author profile page on RaY, which allows a YSJ author to display all their research outputs in one place, alongside an author photo. It looks pretty nice, doesn't it?

An author's view of her MePrints page on RaY

To create a profile page, first log in to your RaY account (your normal YSJ login will work). Your MePrints page has automatically become your RaY homepage. Click the 'Edit Profile' button to add any professional biographical information that you'd like along with a photo. Not only will you be able to upload your work easily from this page, you can track which of your outputs is most viewed and see your latest additions.

This page is an automatically updated public research showcase, and it will eliminate the need to manage and add to other publication lists you might maintain on other websites.

What a MePrints page looks like to the public on RaY

ILS will be offering further drop in workshops on RaY in the Autumn (schedule coming shortly!) but we're also available to do bespoke training at the departmental, program or individual level. Please be in touch if this might be useful to you. If you would prefer to get started on your own, we've created a few 60 second video tutorials and a handbook.

Altmetrics session cancelled

Sorry to say that, due to staff illness, the session on Altmetrics due to be run at 11am on Tuesday 14th July has had to be cancelled.  It will run again later in the year.  If you were planning to attend and would like an update in the meantime, please contact your Academic Liaison Librarian. Clare and Leah can offer 1-1 appointments to go through this.

RaY - a place to show off your research

You can find out more about RaY, which is the York St John research repository, on the ILS website. It is the place where PhD theses from here will be stored and made available, now we have research degree awarding powers. Furthermore, it is where nearly all research outputs (journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and lots more) for any academic at the University will need to be stored from 2016 onwards, if they want it to be eligible for the next REF.

Just last week, we enabled a new feature on RaY. This allows you to interrogate the statistics linked to the research in RaY. So, you could look up the number of hits that a particular piece of research has received, and when those hits occurred.

If you are interested in finding out more about how RaY works, or the open access policies which underlie the introduction of institutional repositories, please ask us! Your Academic Liaison Librarian will be happy to talk it through with you.  Also, there is a general introduction to Open Access run by Clare McCluskey Dean (one of the ALLs) in DG120 on Thursday 9 July, 3.00-3.30pm.

Getting theses from EthOS

Electronic Theses Online (EThOs), provided by the British Library, is the UK's national thesis service, aiming to provide access to as many of the UK's doctoral research theses as possible. 

The database hosts the full text of many theses online without a fee for downloading. Of those not available online, many are available to be ordered for scanning for a fee. If you find a thesis that you would like to have scanned, please be in touch with your Academic Liaison Librarian, because the library will pay to have that thesis digitzed on your behalf. Scanning usually takes around 3 weeks and you'll get an email when the full text is available to download.

The best part is that EThOs then makes that copy you requested available to all, free of charge.

One-to-one help with software and systems

Earlier this week, Ian from our digital training team ran a session on using Word for long documents, specifically for researchers. Future courses from this part of our department include Excel for large data sets (25th June at 11am) and using the SelectSurvey software (6th July at 1pm). You are all, of course, welcome to attend these. But did you know that Ian and Annette from digital training are also available for one-to-one help, just like your Academic Liaison Librarians? You can book an individual appointment, tailored to your own needs, be they related to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or a number of other software packages. If you think you would benefit from this opportunity, or would like to book on a workshop, drop them an email at digitaltraining@yorksj.ac.uk  - they are waiting for your messages!

Literature searching for researchers

Today, we (Victoria and Clare) ran a session as part of the Academic Development Directorate's programme of support for researchers. It was a very productive couple of hours and it was great to learn more about the research that our staff and students are engaged with.  Here's the presentation we used. As ever, please contact your Academic Liaison Librarian if you would like one-to-one advice on drawing up a plan for literature searching, organising and awareness.

Literature searching for research from Information Learning Services, York St John University

International survey on scholarly communication

Our colleague Ruth recently received this email about a survey on scholarly communications and we thought it would be useful to offer our research community the chance to take part. Here's what the email said...

How do open (access) publication strategies fit into a research workflow? Do researchers use Google Drive instead of Word? Papers instead of Endnote? Google Scholar instead of Scopus? Megajournals instead of topical journals? ResearchGate instead of repositories? We are engaged in an ongoing effort to chart the evolving landscape of scholarly communication (http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1286826). New tools are constantly being developed, as reflected in our list of 400+ scholarly communication tools (http://bit.ly/innoscholcomm-list). Researchers vote with their feet on these changes by adopting or rejecting new modes of working. With an international survey we intend to investigate how tool usage varies by field, country and position. The survey will run until February 2016.

A SURVEY.  WHERE? HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE?
If you have not yet done so, please take this graphical survey:
https://innoscholcomm.typeform.com/to/Csvr7b?source=ML
People tell us it is easy and fun to fill it out by just clicking the tools you use. It takes 8-12 minutes to complete and you can opt to receive a visual characterization of your workflow compared to that of your peer group.

FOR WHOM?
Anyone carrying out research (from Master's students to professors), or supporting research (such as librarians, publishers and funders) can participate.

HOW CAN I HELP?
Kind of you to ask!  If you want to help make this a success please consider passing it along to people not on this list (researchers, librarians etc.). And yes, feel free to share the link on your website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc..
More specifically, do you represent an institution/society that wishes to promote this survey among its members? Then please contact us. We can arrange a special URL that will enable us to provide you with resulting data for just your organization. That way you can see what tools your members are using, compared to overall usage patterns. We do the work, you get the (anonymized) data.

PRELIMINARY RESULTS
We will post preliminary results here: https://101innovations.wordpress.com/
On this site, you can also find background information on the survey. Eventually we will share our (thoroughly anonymized) data. Would you like to work with those data? We are interested to hear what kind of analyses you would like to carry out or see carried out! There are many hypotheses that can be tested with the data that comes from this survey. In the field of Open Access I can think of many:

-       Do researchers choose either Gold or Green OA or do they combine these approaches?

-       Are researchers that share in an early phase (workflows, data, posters) more likely to also publish OA or archive their papers in repositories?

-       Do researchers use search tools that have an option to restrict to publications that are OA available?

-       etc.
The data also allows to discern between different positions, affiliation countries and career lengths.

Please support this research by taking the survey or promoting it.

Many thanks!

CONTACT
Bianca Kramer @MsPhelps b.m.r.kramer@uu.nl<mailto:b.m.r.kramer@uu.nl>
Jeroen Bosman @jeroenbosman j.bosman@uu.nl<mailto:j.bosman@uu.nl>
(both at Utrecht University Library in The Netherlands)

Summer researcher support sessions

We've got a new block of researcher support sessions coming up this summer and we're really excited about some new workshops. You'll find the full list of workshops in the calendar on this blog, you can have a look at the picture below or be in touch to get a pdf or hard copy sent to you. Please join us if you can and share the invitation widely.

Fountains Summer Opening Hours

Summer holidays are not far off. Even if you, as an academic, may well see summer holidays as a prime time to buckle down on your research, many YSJ students will be off campus for the summer. For that reason, Fountains Learning Centre will have different opening hours starting from Monday 1 June. The most significant difference is that floors 1 and 2 will shut at 5PM on a Friday and the ground floor will remain open til 7PM on a Friday for self-service use.

Complete information on what bits of the building are open when can be found on ILS' website.

Remember, your Academic Liaison Librarian will also be around for most of the summer and it's a great time to catch up with us. Come in for a tutorial so we can tell you about new resources in your discipline, changes to search tools, reference management ideas or anything else you might need.

Do you need to just write?

ILS' researcher support sessions fit in nicely with the new Research Skills Development programme run by the Academic Development Directorate. The following guest post, about a new programme offered by the ADD to help you get writing, is by post-graduate researcher Charlotte Haines-Lyon.

Writing is often argued to be at the heart of research but it rarely comes easily, especially when there are so many other things to do.

York St John’s is trying a Just Write session. This is a quiet hour in which you can come along and get writing – it might be writing up notes after reading or fieldwork, finishing off that chapter, or getting to grips with an abstract. Whatever it is come along to Room FT113 at 12 noon with your writing implements – or just use one of the many computers provided.

If you are facing a bit of writers block, then we will also be running “Bring a Thing” sessions. Again they will last one hour, but these will include short exercises to get you writing. Bring a blank page, a pencil, typing fingers, something you are stuck on, a single word. . . just come along with some lunch and enjoy.

Hope to see you there!

Just Write

• Dates: 11^th May, 1^st June, 6^th July
• Time: 12:00 – 13:00
• Room: FT113

Bring a Thing

• Dates: 18^th May, 15^th June
• Time: 12:00 – 13:00 
• Room: FT113

For further information please contact:

• Dr. Victoria Carpenter
• Charlotte Haines Lyon (c.haineslyon@yorksj.ac.uk)