L&LR staff blog

Hopefully, you should have noticed a few recent changes to the Electronic Journals A-to-Z.

• First, we’ve all but completed the summer campaign to improve the accuracy of the 60-odd individual e-journal package holding files. Di, Adele, Carole, Phil, Elif and I have been working through each package in turn and using the most up-to-date information from the publisher/provider to improve the A-to-Z holdings. One or two inconsistencies still to iron out, and it’ll never be entirely bug-free (please carry on sending any mistakes that you spot to acquisitions@lincoln.ac.uk), but the quality of the data for our managed packages should be significantly better than it’s ever been. This review process is going to be [it's going to have to be] an annual event.
• Second, the ‘New e-journals at Lincoln‘ RSS feed has been updated through the summer to reflect the changes. Noting that EBSCO’s terms and conditions for use of the A-to-Z state that we ”may not distribute, encourage or allow distribution of [...] data updates“, I’m going to be restricting the RSS feed to just those packages where we, not EBSCO, are the source of the updated information (i.e. where we are managing the title lists directly). This includes the packages providing access to our individual title-level subscriptions: i.e. the ‘important stuff’.
• Third, and last of all, as I discussed with several people in my workshops at the L&LR awayday in June, I’ve revamped the A-to-Z home page ready for the start of the 09/10 session…
  As discussed in those workshops, I’ve taken a ‘just do it!’ approach. It’s not the finished article by any means – I’m relying on your initial and ongoing criticism, comments and ideas to take it forward – but we agreed: better to make changes then tweak as appropriate, rather than discuss ouselves into inaction.

(Image: the new A-to-Z homepage)

Compare with the old home page (below):

(Image: the old A-to-Z homepage)

The changes / new features include (hopefully these will ring bells with those of you who took part in the discussions):

• Generally – the aim has been to make the site more clean and simple.

1. The page ‘header’ – extraneous information (and slightly excitable formatting!) removed – just the name of the application (there was some discussion about dropping ’Electronic Journals A-to-Z’ in favour of ’E-journals Catalogue’ or similar, but now’s probably not the time for that) and the strapline with the number of titles.
2. The navigation tabs – I had hoped (and people had agreed) to reduce these to a minimum, replacing most of them (advanced search, subjects, etc.) with lower-profile links further down the page, but I encountered a problem – if I use A-to-Z admin to ‘hide’ a tab, it becomes impossible to link to that tab elsewhere. This is weird, and unfortunate in the extreme – unfortunately it’s something we’re stuck with for the time being. Inevitably, I’ve ended up adding to the number of tabs – as well as a new tab for the new home page, there’s also now a ‘Log in‘ tab which routes the user through Athens (and back to the homepage), which ought to help us to troubleshoot users’ full-text access problems.
3. A big, unmissable search box. Needs a better search button graphic, but it does at least now include a search tip (to subtly reinforce the idea that users should be searching for journal titles here).
4. See also the sentence on using the e-Library for initial subject keyword searching  – could we / should we expand on this?
5. More options – links to the other A-to-Z pages. I had intended these to replace the tabs entirely, but see (2). Maybe, given that, we don’t actually need these extra links?
6. Still to come – a screencast video showing the user how to use the A-to-Z in the context of a literature search. I’ll blog when that’s ready. Also need to revamp the ‘Help’ tab more generally.

So – what do people think?

The Mahara e-portfolios system is now accessible (via standard university username & password) at: portfolios.lincoln.ac.uk

Julian Beckton is blogging a set of instructions on using the system.

“An e-portfolio is a collection of information and digital objects that demonstrate your learning development, skills and competencies.”

You can read more about the open-source Mahara system on their web site. Other facilities for building an e-portfolio at Lincoln include PebblePad and Blackboard.

Alison Sharman will leave the department at the end of August to take up a post at the University of Huddersfield. Alison has worked with us for 16 years, we will be sorry to lose her and we wish her well in her new role.

We will not be replacing Alison. The ASL B&L Faculty team will cover Alison’s subject-specific responsibilities as follows, with the help of ASL colleagues from other teams who will help out where necessary. Her non-subject-specific duties will be redistributed as indicated.

Helen will be responsible for: the MSc HRM (Hull and Lincoln); MSc Commissioning; IMDP; and PhD training.

Lesley T and Martin will be responsible for: the IMMP; FT UG Business; FT UG European Business; and FT UG Management.

Research workshops in September will be covered by Daren, Katie and Marie. RefWorks workshops in September will be covered by Judith and Lesley T. The PG research student enrolment event in September will be covered by Judith with Oonagh as back up. Lesley T will take over membership of the British Business Schools’ Librarians’ Group (BBSLG). Marie will take over the co-ordination of the British Library trips. Paul will take over membership of the Lincolnshire Information Services Network (LISN).

Edit (8th July) – slideshare.net does not seem to like displaying these slides on-screen, so here they are to download in MS PowerPoint format.

Here are the slides (on slideshare.net) of the 5-minute lightning talk I just gave at Mashed Library 2009, on using ticTOCs data to display e-journal ToC feeds, and on creating a new-titles feed with Yahoo Pipes, etc.

Joss has explained to me that your name is stored within these blogs in 2 separate places:

1. In your profile in BuddyPress – the ’social networking’ glue which holds all the blogs together;
2. And also within the blog-writing admin interface itself.

In both of these places, the default for your name is your University username (e.g. dbeckham, or, if you’re a student, 06543210). You can replace this default with your real name (or an alias…), but unfortunately…

…you have to change it in BOTH PLACES in the blogging environment.

To update your name in both places, you first need to go to your BuddyPress profile – log in to blogs.lincoln.ac.uk and go to My Account > Profile > Edit Profile.

Edit your full name, scroll down, and hit ‘Save Changes’.

Here you can also add an avatar (picture) to your profile (it doesn’t have to be the standard ‘mugshot’ picture – you could use a graphic which represents your work in L&LR, a picture of your cat; whatever), and fill out the other details of your profile, if you want to do so.

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Then, go to your (entirely separate) profile within any of our individual blogs (for example, the L&LR staff blog) – here’s a direct link:

• http://librarystaff.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/wp-admin/profile.php

Or, you can get to it by going to My Blogs > L&LR Staff Blog > Dashboard, then by scrolling down and clicking on the link to ‘Your Profile’.

This gives you a whole load of options to change the way your name actually displays in your blog posts. When you’re happy with this bit, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Update Profile’.

That’s it!

It’s unfortunate that you have to enter this information twice, but it only takes 2 minutes and it does give you the perfect excuse to fill in all your profile details :-)

In February, I wrote about  how I’d added more than 5,000 ticTOCs RSS feeds to the A-to-Z, so that researchers can easily find and subscribe to Table-of-Contents (ToC) updates from journals in their field. I think this is an indispensable current awareness service, and I’m pleased it’s being promoted at the ‘Working Smarter With the Web‘ workshops.

(An aside: that ticTOCs data is overdue to be re-generated and reloaded onto the A-to-Z. This is next on the long list of e-journal packages for the “e team” to review.)

That’s all well and good, but there’s a clear need for a current awareness service ‘one level above’ the individual ToCs. That is, we could (and should) be providing an RSS feed of new e-journal titles.

At the moment, the EBSCO A-to-Z platform doesn’t provide this feature (I really do hope it’s something that EBSCO are considering developing themselves), and so in the past we’ve had to resort to emails, spreadsheets, etc.—all with varying degrees of success—just to keep people up to date with what new e-journals have become available.

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So, I’ve created a rough-and-ready working demo of a ‘New e-journals at Lincoln‘ RSS feed for the A-to-Z. It’s not supported by EBSCO, so it’ll require a bit of manual intervention to keep it running (it’ll be a nice five-minute daily task for the “e team” to take on!), but has the potential to be a really important enhancement to the e-journals service.

Next time you go to the A-to-Z site, you’ll see a new tab – next to the existing ‘Titles’ tab – which I’ve labelled ‘New Titles (RSS)‘. This new tab links to a page containing information about the RSS feed, with a prominent link to the feed itself, plus a display of the 10 most-recently-added titles in the feed.

The links in the ‘ten most recent…’ list should go directly to the A-to-Z record for that title. The feed link itself you can paste into your favourite feed reader (I use Google Reader). I’m working on enabling email subscription to the feed. We should also be able to take this feed and filter/manipulate it to create (for example) subject-specific lists in Blackboard.

I’ve also made the feed autodiscoverable (c.f. my earlier post), so it should display in the browser toolbar (this will vary between browsers).

This is how the feed is auto-discovered by Firefox browser.

I still need to do some work on creating better documentation for users of the feed, and for the process of adding new titles within L&LR.

I’ll also need to do a bit of testing to make sure everything’s working as it should be, and iron out my feed-validation bugs.

When the time is right, I’ll launch the service more publicly.

Paul

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P.S. Here’s how I did it:

1. The first stage is the most clunky – it involves getting information about the newly-added titles out of the closed box that is the Electronic Journals A-to-Z. EBSCO provide a daily report (available only to administrators) of “Titles added to Packages in my Collection“. This data can be exported on a daily basis in tab-delimited format.
   
2. Next, I created a spreadsheet using Google Docs and published it to the Web. The tabbed data from the A-to-Z admin report is pasted in to the spreadsheet, so it becomes openly accessible. Using Google Docs also means that I can invite other people to act as editors of the spreadsheet, and create public web forms to add titles that don’t appear in EBSCO’s daily report (not all of our e-journal packages are managed by EBSCO, so the data will need supplementing when we add custom titles).
3. The data output of the Google spreadsheet is then fed into Yahoo! Pipes, an excellent application for ‘mashing up’ and processing data. You can inspect the Yahoo! pipe for yourself, at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/lincoln/newejournals. If you create an account on Yahoo!, you can clone this (or any) pipe and modify it to create your own data mashup.
   
4. The Yahoo! pipe takes the raw Google spreadsheet data, filters it according to various rules, and exports a valid * RSS feed of new items, in reverse order by date.
5. * Well, it’s nearly valid. I need to do a bit of cleaning up of the pipe (I did say this was a working demo), mainly so I can pass the feed through Feedburner, which will allow email subscriptions. But it works well enough!
6. Finally, I created the new tab on the A-to-Z public site, and added the details to the page (the ‘ten most recent’ list was created using feed2js). The code for the autodiscoverable feed was pasted into the top of our customised A-to-Z template.

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Organised by the East Midlands Section of University College and Research Group on the 28^th April and held at the Kimberlin Library, De Montfort University, Leicester, Focus on your teaching was primarily an event for librarians teaching in HE institutions but held relevance for many other staff.

It struck me that many of the things that were presented and discussed at the event, Lincoln already carried out. Lincoln could present a similar event, perhaps based around the mid-point strategy review action plan, along with contributions from library staff from other HEIs.

For me, the main theme of the event was about teaching information skills to students without the traditional ‘talk-demo-do’ method of introducing a database then demonstrating its various search functions, before letting students perform keyword searches themselves.  Although technology probably holds the answer, I felt that  no single answer existed. Students often find databases themselves are the problem because they are so hard to find, hence the reliance on Google.  Derby University’s Emma Butler and Catherine Varney demonstrated how the software Captivate offered a possible alternative; recording what the demonstrator performed on screen (i.e. a demonstration on how to retrieve articles from a database) and the ability to record a voiceover. Allegedly it’s as easy to use as PowerPoint. The presenters recognised that the software is a supplement to inductions and workshops but could not become a replacement. Emma and Catherine suggested that the short online tutorials work fine as a refresher and could be placed in an area on a VLE, like Blackboard.

Chris Powis from Northampton University discussed the dilemma of the strategic learner within HEIs who only want information they need to complete an assignment or course of study.  Librarians, he said, were ‘tool/search focused’ and students are ‘result/content focused’. Bridging the gap was key to maintaining relevance of the profession, otherwise there’s a risk of disengagement.

Richard Hall from De Montfort University also spoke about technology responding to the transitional phase of universities moving away from the traditional method of teaching students information skills.  Richard said that Blackboard is used as a safe environment and more challenging methods of reaching students needed to be deployed to enhance student progression, improve retention and the learner experience, like utilising Facebook or other Web 2.0. The audience discussed afterwards that they needed to achieve relevance not try to be perceived as trendy.

I have some handouts from the event if you would like copies.

Daren Mansfield (Academic Subject Librarian)

For anyone who doesn’t use Yammer and who missed the conversation leading up to this: data innovator Tony Hirst of the OU posted to his blog explaining how he’d…

“put together a page showing how the well the HEI Libraries are doing at getting autodiscoverable RSS feeds declared on their website homepages.“

Only about 10% of the library homepages had autodiscoverable feeds, and Lincoln wasn’t one of them. A conversation with Joss and the University’s website manager later, and now our feed is there:

A tiny thing, and who knows whether it’ll lead to greater readership of the news blog in future? But worth the small investment in time, I feel.

F.A.O. all staff in L&LR at the University of Lincoln.

I’ve ‘pushed the button’ on quite a big change for the way L&LR staff post new messages to our three blogs. The main result of the change is that we’ve been brought within the main University blogging platform. Our old blogging interface [image below] is now defunct.

The old, now-defunct blogging interface.

And here's the look of the new platform.

This post explains [below] how you can get started using the new platform. Please note that your old password for the blogs is no longer valid – also that the web address to log in and post to the blogs has changed.

But first – why the change?

• The new platform offers the potential for building a much greater readership of our blogs. It plugs in to other blogging activity going on at Lincoln and brings us closer to the centre of the University.
• We benefit from the social-networking aspects of the “BuddyPress” extension to WordPress blogging software which forms part of the new platform. BuddyPress has been described as “a Facebook for the University of Lincoln” – a description which may excite or depress you! :-)
• The new blogging platform is based on a newer, updated version of WordPress software, with more powerful features, and which is hopefully easier to use.
• Because it uses the same installation of WordPress blogging software as all other University blogs, there’s no need for us (me!) to manage the software separately – that’s less work to do, and fewer add-ons and user accounts to keep up to date.
• The new platform is attached to your standard University account, so you don’t need a separate password any more. One less to remember…

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Here’s what you’ll need to do to start using the new blogging interface:

1. Go to the following address (and save it in your bookmarks – N.B. this link replaces the previous login link):
   • http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/
2. You’ll see the login page. Log in with your normal, University username and password (don’t use any passwords you’ve used for the blogs until now – they’re history!)
3. Hit ‘log in’. You’ll see the message “There is a problem with this website’s security certificate“. Click on “Continue to this website”. (This message will disappear, in time).
4. Using the toolbar at the top of the page, highlight “My Blogs”. A drop-down menu will appear.
   
5. Highlight the name of the L&LR blog you want to post to (at the minute, we’re running three blogs). If you can’t see the blog to which you want to post, please let me know and I’ll give you the correct rights.
6. Then click on “New Post”.
7. This will take you to the author’s interface for the blog you selected – equivalent, but different, to the admin interface on the ‘old’ Blogs·Library·Lincoln platform.
8. Don’t forget to add tags to the post you’re creating, to insert images as appropriate, and to follow these blogging tips.
9. Any questions? Please ask me for help, or take a look at the “New here? Read this…” message on the new blogging home page.
10. It’s also worth taking 5 minutes to update your Profile (under ‘My Account’ at the top of the page). You can add a photo / image, change your profile name (from e.g. “dbeckham” to “Dave B.” or “David Beckham (Football Librarian)” – however you want your name to appear on your blog postings in future, and add additional information about you & your work within the University.
    

That’s it! I still need to do some work with C.E.R.D. to ensure that traffic to our blogs is being directed to the correct address [and also to close down our old blogging software], but our readers can continue to access our blogs in the way they’ve always done (directly on the Web at blogs.library.lincoln.ac.uk, via RSS feed, email subscription, or through the in-page feeds on the University website and the Portal), but we get the benefits of being part of the much wider University blogging community that’s being built up at blogs.lincoln.ac.uk.

Again – any questions about the change, please talk to me!

Paul S.

The following details outline the organisation of an event in June.  If anyone else is interested in helping with organisation or on the day please let Oonagh Monaghan know at omonaghan@lincoln.ac.uk

Steering group:

Helen Farrall (CERD), Pat Hughes, Oonagh Monaghan, Lesley Thompson

Publisher/supplier communications:

Di Walker, Vicki Winchester-Fraser

Helpers on the day:

Alice Frear, Marie Nicholson, Daren Mansfield, Cheryl Cliffe

Event: Supporting the learning experience: a joint event by Library and Learning Resources and CERD

Location: EMMTEC building (foyer and lecture theatre)

Date: 23^rd June 12noon-2pm (starting with buffet lunch)

Format:  Exhibition style in foyer and 10 minute presentation programme in the lecture theatre

Participants:

Exhibitors to include: publishers, suppliers, CERD,  Library and LR (ASLs – Paul, Alison, Acquisitions), Computing Services, Student Services, LiSN group)

Presentations to include: CERD (Helen for LD@L and possible others), ASLs with topics to include e-resources (Paul?), RefWorks (Alison?), Student Services?, CS?, publishers/suppliers

Funding:

Joint funding for refreshments from LLR and CERD budgets

Potential sponsorship funding from publishers/suppliers for event publicity

Timescale:

Publisher/supplier contact emails (emailed by Di and Vicki and recorded on spreadsheet)

1^st Week beginning 30^th March

2^nd Week beginning 20^th April

3^rd Week beginning  4^th May

Week beginning 18^th May – start publicity campaign and organise refreshments and logistics

The following email is/has been sent to suppliers/publishers:

The Library and Learning Resources department (http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/lr/index.htm)  and the Learning Development Co-ordinator from the Centre for Educational Research and Development (CERD) (http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/cerd/) at the University of Lincoln are hosting an internal event for academic staff from the University with the aim of promoting various resources, services and projects.  We would like to invite database suppliers and publishers who would be able to set up stands in an exhibition style format and/or demonstrate their databases etc.  We also have the facilities in a lecture room for a programme of 10 minute presentations.

The event is scheduled for the 23^rd June starting at 12 noon for lunch and ending at 2pm.  It will be held in the EMMTEC building on the main campus at the University in Lincoln.  Details of the space are at http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/businessservices/index.htm

Participants will be able to arrive before 12 noon to set up displays in the foyer area.

The event would offer you the opportunity to promote your services and materials to academic and library staff here at the University of Lincoln.

We would also like to ask participants if they are interested in sponsoring the event in return for promotion in all the marketing materials we produce running up to the day.