#siothelibrarian

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Article Review: Unexpected Benefits of Return on Investment Analysis

This article was originally reviewed for my statistics and research methods class. Pan, D., Wiersma, G., Williams, L., & Fong, Y. S. (2013). More than a number: unexpected benefits of return on investment analysis. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(6), 566-572. Since the crash of 2008, libraries (along with everyone else) have struggled to provide more resources with less funding, frequently under close scrutiny from administrators and other higher-ups who want to make sure that the money being spent is having … Read More from Siobhain Rivera http://ift.tt/1H2MLVp via IFTTT

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Article review: Overlap between faculty citations and library collections

This article was originally reviewed for my statistics and research methods. Kellsey, C. & Knievel, J. (2012). Overlap between humanities faculty citation and library monograph collections, 2004-2009. College & Research Libraries, 73(6), 569-583. The purpose of this study was to determine whether library collections are meeting the needs of faculty members, as assessed by citation analysis of books published by authors in four humanities departments. The researchers were also interested in investigating several related research questions: How old are the … Read More from Siobhain Rivera http://ift.tt/19Oqiy6 via IFTTT

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Article Review: Computer Assisted Instruction versus Bibliographic Instruction

This article was originally reviewed for my statistics and research methods course. Van Scoyoc, A. M. (2003). Reducing library anxiety in first-year students: The impact of computer-assisted instruction and bibliographic instruction. Reference and User Services Quarterly, 42(4), 329-341 The purpose of this study was very straightforward. The author notes that “library anxiety” is a common issue among undergraduate students and that it can affect their ability to be sucessful in their coursework. Traditionally, this anxiety has been mitigated by bibliographic … Read More from Siobhain Rivera http://ift.tt/1Mv92zI via IFTTT

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Trials and Tribulations: Survey Research as an MLS Student

I’m so excited!!! The last few weeks have been crazy busy, but it’s almost over. (Well, except for the rest of the semester. But still.) This weekend I will be presenting at the College English Association conference in Indianapolis with my colleagues Ariadne Rehbein and Erica Hayes. We’ll be talking about the results of our study on digital humanities pedagogy … Read More from Siobhain Rivera http://ift.tt/1FCJUTu via IFTTT

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[siothelibrarian]

Happy Open Access Week!

This week is Open Access week, and the IU Libraries are celebrating with a variety of events that you can see here. IU Libraries: Open Access Week 2014

Tomorrow I will be participating in a round table discussion with some other students, so I may try to get a post about that later in the week, but for today, I thought I’d share a resource that a colleague of mine and I developed for our Reference class. The assignment was to develop a wiki about something we were interested in, so we chose Open Access. We focused less on scholarly research and more specifically collections of resources that could be used for academic or artistic projects. Feel free to let me know if anything was helpful!

Resources compiled by Siobhain Rivera and Abi Parker for Z501: Reference at IU ILS, Fall 2013.

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What is ‘Open Access’?

Open access (OA) is the practice of providing access without restriction. It stems from the idea that information and resources should be freely available, which has quickly become a widespread movement. As the internet has proven itself to be a perfect platform for open access sharing, communities have formed to help promote and protect the freedom of information. Practically, this has been applied to various forms of both copyright free material (like media that has reached the public domain) and material whose creators make provisions for free use.

Copyright, Licensing and Fair Use

Issues of copyright are very important in the open access community. For many people, the idea of someone utilizing something they have created makes them feel happy and connected to others, but they still want their contribution to be recognized and credited. The open access movement has developed a variety of licenses, or use agreements, to address these concerns.

Traditionally, copyright law has been used to restrict access to intellectual property. Copyleft is considered an alternative to this restriction, in which the author of the work grants the limited rights to the user to adapt or redistribute it. Examples include the GNU General Public License for software, and Creative Commons Licenses for artistic works.

Fair use is actually an exception to copyright law, and allows users to utilize a limited portion of a copyrighted work for specific purposes without receiving specific permission from the author; for example, quoting a scholarly text in a paper or search engines quoting text and photos from a web site.

Advocacy: Important Figures

The Open Access movement began with the rise of the internet in the 1990s, and has gained support in many areas since then. Many organizations have contributed to the open access community, with the Wikimedia Foundation being one that many people know best. There are also organizations such as the Open Knowledge Foundation and Creative Commons. In the programming world, the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation are regarded as the two largest proponents of open access culture. The FSF was founded by Richard Stallman, who also developed the GNU Project and wrote the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Other famous open access activists include Cory Doctorow, the editor of the blog Boing Boing, the producer Danger Mouse, and musician Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Libraries have also been supporters of open access, and the movement is spreading further and further as time goes on.

Resources:

Literature Resources

Open Library A catalog project of the Internet Archive, also has over a million books available for download.

Hathi Trust Digital Library A digital repository with a variety of collections based in many institutions. Not all materials are available to people from non-partner institutions.

Project Gutenberg Free, public domain ebooks available in a variety of formats and languages.

Librivox A crowd-sourced project devoted to turning public-domain books into audiobooks. Free to download; many are available as podcasts in the iTunes Store.

Open Source Shakespeare Open source, searchable database of all of Shakespeare’s works. Includes a concordance to look up unfamiliar vocabulary.

FreeTechBooks Forum listing free computer science, programming, and engineering text books. All books are legal and hosted on authors’ or publishers’ web sites.

Music Resources

All of these sites have music or sound effects that can be downloaded free-of-charge. They can be published in noncommercial projects for free and most require only that credit is given on the project. Some of the sites allow use on commercial work and some require small payment for certain kinds of use (i.e. without giving credit). Some have special provisions for use such as a licensing application, so be sure to read about each site’s requirements.

http://www.mobygratis.com The musical artist Moby has selected over 150 of his songs for free use, particularly for independent film makers. In order to use the music, you must fill out a licensing application.

http://freesoundtrackmusic.com Mix of public domain and original compositions. Some are free to license and some cost a small fee.

http://beatpick.com Includes recordings of both public domain music (like folk songs) and original compositions. BeatPick provides a service that allows the user to describe their needs and then receive personalized suggestions. This site has a variety of licenses for different uses but you must apply for a license.

http://musopen.org Both recordings and sheet music for mostly classical music.

http://publicdomain4u.com This is a resource for original recordings of music that are now in the public domain and songs that the artist has agreed to allow for free use.

http://magnatune.com Subscription music service, also has low-cost and free music for podcasts.

http://freemusicarchive.org An archive of high-quality, legal mp3s made available by artists for specific purposes.

http://www.musicalley.com Podcast-safe music

Image Resources

Most of these sites provide free images without licensing or credit-agreement restrictions. Their revenue comes from the advertising on the sites and their content creators are rewarded by exposure.

Stock.Xchng User generated content is a available for use in exchange for exposure; no credit necessary. The image quality is guaranteed by a hand-picked and curated catalog.

http://freerangestock.com This site provides high-resolution and high-quality photographs from their paid staff photographers.

http://www.morguefile.com This site allows unrestricted use, including manipulation, as long as they are not used as stand-alone content.

http://www.freemediagoo.com There is a small selection of images including photographs, textures, and computer generated images. There is no curation on this site so quality is not consistent.

http://www.stockvault.net A user friendly site that does not require the user to create an account or sign-in. Not the highest resolution of images.

http://flickr.com Advanced search allows users choose to search only for images under the Creative Commons license. Vast collection without any quality control.

Software and Programming Resources

There tends to be a distinction in the software community between free (meaning, ‘freely able to modify, distribute, etc.’) and open source (meaning the source code is ‘open’ to anyone for any purpose), but since the two often overlap, we’ve chosen to include software that falls into both categories, as well as software that is free in the colloquial sense of the word.

GNU Pronounced “g’noo” this is a free, Unix-based operating system. They also have a list of links to other Unix/Linux-based operating systems that are available for download.

30 Pieces of Free and Open Software for Windows A blog post that highlights a variety of replacements to traditional paid software packages, such as Firefox, OpenOffice, and VLC Media Player.

SourceForge A massive archive full of programs and code available for anyone to use, including games, utilities, and every other kind of software.

LOOP The Ubuntu help site offers a list of mostly Windows-compatible open source software, but also includes links to Mac- and Linux-compatible programs.

Other Resources

Internet Archive The Internet Archive offers a variety of music, software and videos, as well as archived websites and a variety of other projects. All materials from the archives are under the artists’ copyright, but most may be downloaded for free provided the copyright restrictions are followed.

Creative Commons Offers a variety of licenses tailored towards artists who want to allow limited distribution and adaptation of their works.

GNU General Public License Copyleft license for software projects.

Wikimedia Foundation The foundation behind Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation is committed to open access educational content.

Indiana University Libraries Open Access Page IU’s page on open access has information on common misconceptions, types of open access and information about the IUScholarWorks Repository.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory CSHL’s Libguide has a variety of detailed information about the open access movement, including history and important documents and figures.

[siothelibrarian]

That Moment Right Before You Drop

Things have been slowly revving up here; this week is fall break, but I have one big assignment to prepare and a few more that are slowly turning over in my head. I’m also working with some of my cohort to prepare a paper for a conference in the spring, and doing some reading about the MarineLives, which I’ll be doing some volunteer transcription for this fall. And did I mention that I’m still updating my portfolio and tweaking my CV to get ready for jobhunting? Right now I feel as though I’m poised at the top of a rollercoaster, mentally preparing myself for the drop. Let’s hope it’s one of the fun rollercoasters, not the ones that bang you around so much you emerge with a headache. ^_^

Playing with technologies is one of my hobbies, as the number of Lifehacker pages open in browser tabs can attest to. I’m in the process of prepping my computer to dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows 7, mulling over a project in Unity for my Digital Arts and Humanities Class, and thinking about how I want to use Drupal for my Digital Library final. I also enjoy tweaking this site, and finding ways to make WordPress do the things I want it to do, despite my complete lack of familiarity with PHP (It’s on my list – but it’s a very long list).

One of the issues I’ve had for a while is that much of my portfolio is documents, which isn’t really what WordPress had in mind for portfolios. As I’ve built my portfolio, I’ve had to work around that, and I’d been especially bothered by my inability to embed PDF files; so I was really proud of myself last week when I was able to make it work by spending a few hours last week googling and tinkering with post settings. And it works! And just in time for me to have finished adding all of the files from my Academic Library Managment class.

You can see some of the portfolio items with embedded PDFs here:

Academic Library Management: Digital Initiatives Librarian Professional Documents

Digital Libraries: An Illustrated Review of the International Children’s Digital Library (shoutout to MyLifeintheLibrary for the idea to choose this project to focus on)

Mathers Museum of World Cultures Internship: Omeka Workflow

[siothelibrarian]

Article Review: Brewster Kahle on Access and Preservation

This blog post was old, but I found the topic intriguing; digital preservation is my particular area of interest, so I’m always curious about the challenges and opportunities that face the digital access movement, and Brewster Kahle is definitely one of the people at the forefront of this area. “Kahle suggests that universal access is within our grasp and suggests that two key elements in its provision are the roles and politics that will undergird the work.” I found it really interesting to read Kahle’s cost projections of digitization techniques, and his opinion that the only real obstacles to digitization of nearly any format are the infrastructure required and the politics involved with copyright and ownership of the information.

I’m curious to see where this movement goes. Kahle talks about how preservation and access must be inexpensive, and I definitely agree that they must be, in order to be sustainable. The question, especially for libraries, is can they be? I really wish that I could talk to Kahle about the steps that libraries have taken in the past few years to lower the costs of digitization, and how it might be possible to make those costs even more negligible, and our processes more effective. The relatively recent “More Product, Less Process” trend seems like it has started us on a path towards that, but I’m sure there are still ways that libraries could improve.

Another question that seems extremely important: who will be responsible for these archives of knowledge, and how can we make things accessible to all, both right now and in the future? As Kahle points out, right now the issue of control is paramount, and also extremely political. There seem like so many questions to consider that I’m personally overwhelmed by the sheer scope of all the factors: location, storage, replication, access, format, regulations and standards… It seems as though we will be working through these issues for the next few decades.

References

Larsen, Lida. (2007). EDUCAUSE North East Regional Computing Program Conference 2007. Summary: Universal Access to Human Knowledge. EDUCAUSE Blogs. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/blogs/llarsen/educause-north-east-regional-computing-program-conference- 2007-summary-universal-access-human-knowledge

This post was originally written as an assignment for my academic library management class.