Customer service
UConn Discovers What Students Want From Their Library – too complex for a pull quote, follow the link for a summary.
Two solutions for increasing the usability of that blasted Article Linker page:
- simple and sweet
- more complex and risky (if you’re not a code geek, skip the discussion/coding examples and just scroll to the bottom for the “after” screenshot)
Open Access
JQ at the University of Oregon writes about High-impact open access journals and includes some invaluable tables of OA journals ranked by SJR, SciMago, and Eigenfactor impact factors. These (sorted by subject) could be useful for promoting OA to departments and to students graduating from university who still want to keep up with research.
Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking looks at OA journals in the library science field:
This research uses the h-index to rank the quality of library and information science journals between 2004 and 2008. Selected open access (OA) journals are included in the ranking to assess current OA development in support of scholarly communication. It is found that OA journals have gained momentum supporting high-quality research and publication, and some OA journals have been ranked as high as the best traditional print journals. The findings will help convince scholars to make more contributions to OA journal publications, and also encourage librarians and information professionals to make continuous efforts for library publishing.
Data curation
Demystifying the data interview: Developing a foundation for reference librarians to talk with researchers about their data
As libraries become more involved in curating research data, reference librarians will need to be trained in conducting data interviews with researchers to better understand their data and associated needs. This article seeks to identify and provide definitions for the basic terms and concepts of data curation for librarians to properly frame and carry out a data interview using the Data Curation Profiles (DCP) Toolkit.
Subscription statistics
Subscriptions in Context (powerpoint) is a clear and elegant presentation for University of Central Oklahoma library faculty liaisons on all the factors the Serials department considers when evaluating subscriptions.
Just for fun
A Library Society of the World thread began, “Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find he had been transformed into a monstrous librarian” and went on from there.