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December 3rd, 2019
By Rebecca Richardson, Assistant Dean for Collections and Access, Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies.
As part of our ongoing effort to provide the highest quality media content for Purdue students and faculty, while endeavoring to be good stewards of university resources, Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies (PULSIS) will soon join institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and Duke in adopting a new “mediated” policy with the streaming video service Kanopy beginning January 1, 2020.
Kanopy is a streaming video platform that provides a wide variety of documentary, independent, and award-winning films for educational use. It is not a subscription service; rather, pricing is based upon the number of views per individual title, with expensive annual licensing fees incurred once a film has been viewed for 30 seconds just four times. At $150 per title, PULSIS spent $73,512 on Kanopy in 2018. In 2019, these costs ballooned to $137,000 in the first 10 months alone. This is an exorbitant amount of money to pay for media that we do not get to retain in our permanent collections. With academic and student recreational use both contributing to Kanopy’s rising expenditures, we can no longer sustain an unlimited-use model.
Beginning January 1, Kanopy will be restricted to instructional use and select learning-based opportunities only. We will continue to allow the Criterion, PBS, and Media Education Foundation collections to remain unmediated in their entirety, but instructors interested in other unlicensed titles will be prompted to request access directly through the Kanopy platform. License expirations will vary by title, and instructors who require access to a Kanopy title for a course will need to check on its availability before the start of each semester. Kanopy is one of many exceptional video resources available through the PULSIS, and we encourage all of our patrons to explore our extensive collections of media across a wide variety of platforms and formats.
A Libguide (Library Guide) at http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/streamingvideo provides an in-depth look at the video streaming platforms available to the Purdue University community.
For inquiries or more information about upcoming changes to Kanopy, please contact Assistant Dean Richardson at rarichar@purdue.edu.
Filed under: collections, generalNovember 25th, 2019
Six Purdue University students’ research projects were honored at the 2019 Purdue University GIS Day Conference. The students’ projects were reviewed by a panel of faculty and staff judges during the one-day event, which was held November 8 in Stewart Center. First-, second- and third-place winners received $100, $75, and $50 respectively.
The winning students and their projects are listed below.
Undergraduate Student Winners
Graduate Students
Each year, the Purdue University GIS Day Conference is organized by Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies (PULSIS) Associate Professor and GIS Specialist Nicole Kong and GIS Instructional Coordinator Shirley Li, as well as a multidisciplinary team of faculty and staff from PULSIS and other departments on campus. Learn more at www.lib.purdue.edu/gis.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, general, GIS, PSETNovember 21st, 2019
When the Integrative Data Science Initiative (IDSI) was announced, Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies (PULSIS) Associate Professor Clarence Maybee saw the initiative as an opportunity to create a sustainable and scalable course-development process for integrating data science into undergraduate courses.
In Fall 2019, such a process was supported when Maybee’s and his team’s project proposal, “IMPACT Data Science Education: Preparing Undergraduates to Lead into the Future,” was funded through the IDSI’s second round of research funding.
“Knowing that Purdue is interested in graduating undergraduate students with data science skills, which will enable them to lead into the future, we brought together the programs on campus already doing this type of work. Many of us leading the Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation program, commonly known as IMPACT, have been working with Purdue instructors since 2011 to make courses more engaging and student-centered. The Data Science Consulting Service works with instructors specifically to help them integrate data science into Purdue courses,” Maybee explained. “IMPACT and the Data Science Consulting Service are the right partners to develop a program that works with Purdue instructors to integrate data science into undergraduate courses,” he added.
For the project, Maybee, who is the principal investigator, and his team are looking for six Purdue University faculty members to design innovative and engaging data science coursework. This is a rolling application process and will be open until the six participants are selected, Maybee added.
“These faculty members will participate in the IMPACT program and additional activities during spring 2020. The coursework they design will enable their students to use data science methods and techniques in their fields,” he explained. “In addition to receiving the IMPACT funding, participants will receive $2,500 each for participating in IMPACT Data Science Education.”
According to Maybee, in addition to taking part in IMPACT, the participants will:
Faculty interested in applying to participate in IMPACT Data Science Education will need to complete the form for the project and the application to participate in IMPACT. Both application forms can be accessed at http://sites.lib.purdue.edu/dse/.
For more information, contact Maybee at cmaybee@purdue.edu or Yixuan Sun, grad assistant, at yixuan-sun@purdue.edu.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, generalNovember 18th, 2019
Every semester end, Hicks Study Breaks offer students the opportunity to relax and de-stress during prep and finals weeks. This fall semester, Hicks Study Breaks will start Monday, December 2.
All events are free and open to all Purdue students and will be held in the Hicks Undergraduate Library’s main common area.
Prep Week
Finals Week
November 15th, 2019
Purdue University students who take social science or humanities courses will learn more from digital scholarship concepts and ideas incorporated into these courses in the coming months and years.
Thanks to Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities Matt Hannah, Professor of English and African-American Studies Venetria Patton, and the Integrative Data Science Initiative (IDSI) at Purdue, College of Liberal Arts faculty—who have had a desire to redesign an existing humanities or social science course to include digital scholarship—have been awarded small seed grants via Hannah’s and Patton’s “Engaging in the Digital Humanities” IDSI project.
In 2018, their proposal was awarded funds as part of “the first investment towards achieving the goals of the Integrative Data Science Initiative.”
According to Hannah, most of the faculty will work closely with him to strategize and implement key changes in an effort to expand digital scholarship into new arenas. In addition to the several faculty members who were awarded seed grants, Hannah was able to fund five graduate students working in some area of digital scholarship to attend conferences and present original work.
“I was delighted by the range and scope of the proposals,” Hannah said. “I am excited about the future of Digital Humanities at Purdue.”
Graduate students and faculty members awarded grant funds are listed below.
For more information, contact Hannah at hannah8@purdue.edu.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, general, HSSEB, press_release, UncategorizedOctober 28th, 2019
Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies (PULSIS) will offer four new digital scholarship-related information and library science (ILS) courses in Spring 2020. According to Matt Hannah, assistant professor of Digital Humanities, PULSIS, the courses are designed to provide students with important skills related to Digital Humanities, data science, archival science, and data management.
For a complete list of Spring 2020 ILS courses offered through the Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies, visit www.lib.purdue.edu/initiatives/spring-2020-courses.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, generalOctober 25th, 2019
by Beth McNeil, Dean of Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies and Esther Ellis Norton Professor of Library Science
During International Open Access week each year, those who work in libraries around the world lead conversations on our campuses, sparking discussion on the changing nature of scholarly communication and the benefits of open access. We often offer OA-related programming and sometimes celebrate our successes during the past year. This year’s theme, “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge,” is timely, as conversations have expanded beyond the benefits of open to the challenges of building new systems for sharing that offer full access for all.
Earlier this week here at Purdue, four faculty members from across campus described what “open” means to them during an engaging panel program moderated by Justin Race, director of Purdue University Press. Kris Bross, associate dean for research and creative endeavors, Honors College, and professor of English; Gaurav Chopra, assistant professor of chemistry; Wayne Wright, Barbara I. Cook Chair of Literacy and Language and associate dean for research, graduate programs, and faculty development, College of Education; and Michael Witt, associate professor and interim associate dean for research, Libraries and School of Information Studies, each offered examples of how open scholarship/open science influenced their individual academic work and teaching. Their personal experience, plus comments and questions from the audience, made for a very engaging program.
When I think about what open means to me, I know that I, as a librarian, care deeply about making information available to all who need it. In university research libraries we work hard and, sometimes very creatively, to find ways to meet the information needs of our faculty, students, and campus community. Finding the balance between a scholarly communication ecosystem that I know needs deep and sustained change and meeting day-to-day local research information needs can be challenging and complicated.
Oct. 21-27, 2019, is International Open Access Week. This is part of a series — written by Purdue faculty and staff — that demonstrates the benefits of open access scholarly publishing. For the entire series, visit https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/oaweek19/.
Each year personnel in libraries, including here at Purdue, are forced to make tough decisions regarding which journal subscriptions to renew. Subscription cost increases of 5-7 percent each year are not sustainable, and when major for-profit publishers report profit margins in the 30–40 percent range each year, higher than Apple, Google, and Amazon — it just seems wrong.
I believe the scholarship and data produced by our researchers, scholars, and faculty can change the world, but to do so, it needs to be open and freely available for all. Contracts and licenses with publishers and content providers should be transparent across institutions and equitable for all parties, and the costs of scholarship should be financially sustainable for libraries. Open. Transparent. Sustainable. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
Learn more about Purdue’s Open Access resources, including Purdue e-Pubs, Purdue’s open access digital repository, at www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, general, OAWeek19, Open_AccessOctober 24th, 2019
Oct. 21-27, 2019, is International Open Access Week. This is part of a series — written by Purdue faculty and staff — that demonstrates the benefits of open access scholarly publishing. For the entire series, visit https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/oaweek19/.
by Sandi Caldrone, Data Repository Outreach Specialist
Publishing open access data requires imagination. When I review datasets submitted for publication in the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), I try to put myself in the shoes of a scholar hoping to reuse this dataset, and I try to imagine every question the scholar might have. When you share your data with the world, you open it up to new possibilities—possibilities that are hard to anticipate.
On November 10, 1981, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave a lecture on cinema in a Paris university. When he prepared his notes for class that day, he could have had no way of knowing that a student’s audio recording of that lecture, along with dozens of his other lectures, would eventually find their way to the French National Library, and from there to PURR, where anyone can download it to hear his words or text mine the transcriptions.
When Deleuze gave this lecture a little less than 40 years ago, that tape recorder was the most advanced technology in the room. Now, digital humanities students can plug his words into online tools that spin out word clouds, bubble charts, and network graphs. That’s why data curators are always pushing for richer descriptions of data. We want to give future researchers everything they might need to conduct analyses we can’t even imagine yet.
The cycle of imaginative reuse doesn’t have to take forty years. In PURR, we’re already starting to see second-generation open access data—open access data that has been combined, transformed, and republished as a new open access dataset.
As it was in Deleuze’s classroom, it is students who are in the vanguard.
In 2019, PURR has started to see examples of student-faculty collaborations in which students collect data from various open access datasets and put in the labor required to prepare those data for analysis. By publishing their transformed data, they give other researchers the opportunity to pick up where they left off and push scholarship forward, instead of reinventing the wheel. See two excellent examples:
It’s hard to imagine what students might do with data 40 years from now, but I’m really looking forward to finding out.
Explore the Purdue University Research Repository at https://purr.purdue.edu/.
Learn more about Purdue’s Open Access resources, including Purdue e-Pubs, Purdue’s open access digital repository, at www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, OAWeek19, Open_AccessOctober 24th, 2019
The HSSE Featured Database for October is ERIC (EBSCO Interface). This database is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and stands for “Educational Resources Information Center,” which has been providing education research since 1964. It also explores research in other disciplines that have implications on educational theory and practice.
Filed under: database, general, HSSE, HSSE Featured Databases
October 23rd, 2019
Oct. 21-27, 2019, is International Open Access Week. This is part of a series — written by Purdue faculty — that demonstrates the benefits of open access scholarly publishing. For the entire series, visit https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/oaweek19/.
by Erla P. Heyns, Head, Humanities, Social Sciences, Education, and Business Division
Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies
An issue very dear to my heart is providing access to published research for alumni. The professionals who graduate from our universities and enter such fields as veterinary medicine, psychotherapy, social work, and many more have been carefully trained to find and evaluate research literature while they are students. Once they graduate, they are cut off from this access, and they have to depend on employers who might or might not subscribe to certain needed journals. If not, they have to pay, if they are able, for access.
The consequences of deficient access are far-reaching for our society. How can it be acceptable for a veterinarian, for example, not to be able to stay current with the research literature? How can it be acceptable that a psychotherapist has to depend on learning about the latest research only haphazardly, at annual conference presentations, instead of being able to focus on current research in a particular area at the time of need? These critical fields, in which professionals make a significant difference in the lives of their clients, in our lives, typically do not have adequate access to important new research.
The urgency of having a holistic approach to provide access to research for all professionals cannot be overstated. Universities, not just libraries, should tackle the issue with renewed vigor, since we are not only infringing on the lifelong learning opportunities of our alumni, but we are also hurting ourselves and the entire population as consumers of professional care.
There is very little written about this subject in the library research literature, but what is published relates to two different approaches to the problem.
One is to think about alumni as an extension of the university they graduated from and to suggest ways to give them access, perhaps through subscribing on their behalf or providing a service through which they can request an article for a fee or the university will pay the copyright fee.
Another discussion that has been happening at some institutions is to try to convince publishers to create favorable funding models so that alumni can subscribe to journals in their fields of study. This has not been successful, except in very limited instances. Another issue with the solution of individual subscription access is, in most fields, research literature is not just published in a few journals. The problem, of course, is also bigger than just access to the journal literature; journals are indexed in databases that alumni also cannot access. Google Scholar provides valuable access to be able to identify research, but it is by no means comprehensive or complete.
The second context in which this problem is being discussed in the literature is in the context of open access. The benefit of open access is apparent since everyone will be able to access current research. Bruce Symphony, in “Open Access for Scholars Left Behind” (2018), emphasizes the importance of teaching students how to find and cite legitimate open access publications so that they are aware of these resources and are more likely to use them in their professional lives.
Providing access to alumni requires a university community working toward a comprehensive solution, and a main feature of the solution is awareness of and ability to use high-quality, open access material.
Information about other 2019 Open Access Week activities at Purdue is available at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/2019/09/26/oa-week19/.
Learn more about Purdue’s Open Access resources, including Purdue e-Pubs, Purdue’s open access digital repository, at www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, HSSE, HSSEB, OAWeek19, Open_Access, scholcomm