L&LR staff blog

The entire e-resources and repository team went en masse to the latest Repositories Support Project event, “Doing it differently“, which was held in Sheffield Cathedral on the 27th of October 2010: “to hear about alternative approaches to repository-like functions, open access and the general field of improving research communications“. Some quick points from the notes [...]

Our blue-skies library ‘un-project’ (which is still codenamed Jerome) took a significant step forward this week, as Nick Jackson has described on the Jerome blog. Thanks to some clever Horizon-wrangling code (courtesy of Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield), Jerome will soon provide searchable access to the whole library catalogue of the University of [...]

We’re getting another spate of queries across the desk, and sent to RefWorks@lincoln.ac.uk, from students who are confused (understandably) about the procedure for logging in to RefWorks or Write-N-Cite when presented with an unhelpful and baffling ‘RefWorks login center‘ screen asking for a ‘Group Code’. That ‘Group Code’ is a red herring. We don’t use [...]

There’s a small book display on the ground floor of the GCW University Library to mark the end of Boolefest (“a celebration of the life of George Boole“), a week-long arts and sciences festival which has been organised by Dave Kenyon in the Faculty of Media, Humanities & Technology. It consists of: A short ‘Boolean [...]

I recently chaired the first meeting of a new ‘Library Innovation Group’ for the University. Here are its terms of reference. We’re hoping that this new group will be a bit more lively than its predecessor (which had got a bit stale and reactive through overfamiliarity, and which wasn’t very accountable to users or even [...]

I’m going to be giving a presentation, along with my colleague Mr Leach, about our Jerome library ‘un-project’, at the next EMALINK (East Midlands Library Information Network) workshop in the Pilkington Library at Loughborough University, on Wednesday, 24 November 2010. EMALINK Workshop Joint Lincoln University Library/ Loughborough University Library event The next generation OPACs Lab [...]

I baked this chocolate cake to mark Open Access week 2010, and to celebrate (belatedly) our passing 2,000 items on the Lincoln Repository. It was enjoyed over coffee in the Enterprise@Lincoln café, by colleagues from C.E.R.D., the Library, and the University Research Office, all of whom have been instrumental in making a success of our [...]

I’m about to launch (along with Joss Winn and David Young) into a series of training sessions for University of Lincoln staff, entitled: Understanding Google Apps Straightforward online collaborative tools for researchers 90 mins (+ optional 30 min ‘surgery’) This training workshop will introduce you to some of Google’s collaborative applications that may be useful [...]

For more than a year, I’ve been meaning to resurrect my website of tips & tricks for reference management. I finally got around to doing so today, with a new video tutorial about sending references to a RefWorks account from the University of Lincoln Repository. You can see it at – http://refworks.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ Last July, inspired [...]

I’ve suspended my Facebook account because I’ve been finding it increasingly (a) difficult to keep on top of its ever-changing privacy settings; (b) redundant: I get far better mileage from Twitter et al.; and (c) an irritating intrusion instead of a pleasure. These messages—which I saw when I tried to deactivate my account—only confirmed that [...]