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November 12th, 2013
November is Native American Heritage month and the Purdue University Libraries worked with Felica Ahasteen-Bryant, Director of the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, to create display cases in the following Purdue Libraries to recognize and honor the Native American culture.
Engineering Library
Display focuses on Native engineers, including Mary Golda Ross and John Herrington, and Purdue AISES chapter. A variety of Native artwork is also included. Created by Sandy Galloway.
HSSE Library
Display focuses on the Navajo including Navajo books and artwork. Created by Patrick Whalen.
Physics Library
Display focuses on the universe, specifically Native American legends related to stars and constellations. Created by Becky Hunt
Chemistry Library
Display focuses on sustainable and renewable energy. Includes posters, pictures and articles on current events taking place in Native communities. Created by Becky Hunt.
Hicks Undergraduate Library
The display at the Hicks Undergraduate Library shows a selection of titles available in the media collection that highlight several areas of Native American history, culture, and portrayals in popular film. The corresponding LibGuide has also been updated to reflect recent acquisitions. It can be found here: http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/content.php?pid=434712. Created by Ann O’Donnell.
For a list of events visit the Native American Educational and Cultural Center’s website.
Filed under: CHEM, ENGR, events, general, HSSE, PHYS, UGRLNovember 8th, 2013
(Published Oct. 25 by Ian Chant, Library Journal)
Agricultural research can take seasons to come to fruition, meaning the data researchers gather is voluminous, tracking things like weather patterns and crop yields over years. A failure to establish data standards and sharing practices means that most of these raw figures never make it out of the hands of the researchers who gather them. With new open access standards coming to federally funded research, though, agricultural researchers will need share their data more effectively, and a team of scientists and librarians at Purdue University may have the first blueprint for the field.
The Purdue team was the driving force behind the Smarter Agriculture conference that took place in Washington on October 10. Despite being hampered by a lack of representation from federal agencies due to the government shutdown , the conference brought together attendees from universities, farming concerns, and private enterprise to discuss how to create a system for sharing agricultural data. In large part, said Sylvie Brouder, a Purdue agronomist who’s been working on the problem of data-sharing in agricultural sciences for years, it’s a system that stakeholders will have to build from the ground up.
“Some disciplines are further along the path in sharing data, but agronomists are pretty far behind,” Brouder said. “The idea of making your data shareable is new to the field. We share the synthesized results of experiments in published papers, but not much else, and the result is, we don’t have strong standards and norms for data or metadata in the way other sciences do.”
Getting that data to a point where it’s shareable could not only improve understanding of complicated subject areas, but make study more efficient by taking advantage of work that’s already been done. Raw data from Brouder’s work on water quality, for example, could be used by researchers looking at related topics as well—if only they could access it. “On an hourly basis, I’m collecting data on the flow of water through soil,” said Brouder. “Someone else may want to know the day’s rainfall and the nutrient load that’s taken away by a rain. That person could do that with my data, but that data is not available to them.”
It’s not that most researchers are unwilling to share the information they’ve gathered, Brouder said. When a fellow agricultural scientist calls looking for data, she’s generally more than willing to offer it up. But sharing as a rule, rather than on request, need to become part of the culture of the field. And that will start with students, said Brouder. “We need to start by figuring out how to prepare students for a data-intensive world,” Brouder said.
That’s where Marianne Stowell-Bracke comes in. Stowell-Bracke is Purdue’s Agricultural Sciences Information Specialist, and acts as a liaison between the library and the ag science department. She and her colleague Jake Carlson have been working on ways to make data management part of the agricultural science curriculum, and they’ll start testing two styles of doing so in the spring semester.
On one front, the department will start offering its first data management class to students in the biochemistry major, which at Purdue is under the umbrella of the agricultural sciences department. Previously, hey’d been bringing the subject into classes here and there as visitors, but this approach hasn’t been sufficient to get the concepts to take root.
That’s why they’re trying multiple methods to find what works best. In addition to making a class available, Stowell-Bracke and Carlson will be taking a cohort of graduate students under their wing to teach them how to use best practices to manage their own data, something many haven’t been exposed to previously. “People don’t give their data a thought until something bad happens,” Stowell-Bracke said. “They store everything on their laptop, and leave the laptop on a bus in Madrid.”
The Purdue team is also working to build a model of what a shared, searchable agricultural science database would look like with its recently launched data management tool, the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR). Built on the HubZero platform and operated by Purdue Libraries and the Information Technology department, PURR provides primers on how to manage data, collaborate on projects, and publish data with metadata tags and DOI references for tracking how often and where its cited.
While they have a model to work from and a lot of new interest from farmers, agribusinesses, and academics, there are still obstacles to getting agricultural scientists managing and sharing their data more effectively, not the least of which is the cost involved. “Someone has to pay for this, but it’s unclear who or what the funding model looks like,” said Brouder, who has been surprised by the costs of managing data properly. “One clear outcome we’d like to see is that our funding agencies have an explicit funding line for data management, which we’ve never had before.”
It’s not just funding that’s an issue, though, says Brouder. Agricultural research often involves a wide variety of stakeholders, from university researchers to federal funding agencies like the Department of Agriculture, from individual farmers to agribusiness concerns like Monsanto. Getting them all on the same page about what information should be shared, how it should be made available, and who should have access to it. Independent farmers don’t generally like the idea of having information about their land made common knowledge, said Brouder, while businesses may have concerns about footing the bill for research that could benefit their competitors as well. While many concerns remain about how to address the issue, though, there’s little doubt it needs to be addressed, and soon. The drive toward open access to federally funded research, outlined earlier this year in a memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, means that better data management likely won’t be optional for agricultural researchers in the future.
Filed under: general, Open_Access, press_release, RSRCH, scholcomm
November 7th, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The College of Agriculture, with support from Purdue University Libraries, is seeking to recruit graduate students in the College of Agriculture for a semester-long pilot data literacy program to be offered in spring of 2014 with some limited follow-up in the fall. The course will teach graduate students the knowledge and skills they need to be successful professionals in their discipline. Accepted students will receive a stipend of $1,500 for participating in this program. Applications are due by Nov. 18th at 5 p.m.
Research in agriculture and related fields is growing more and more dependent on the application of data. Emerging research professionals and data producers need to understand how to manage, organize, describe, disseminate and archive their data sets for themselves and others.
In addition to teaching current trends and thinking in managing, organizing, sharing and curating research data, students will actively participate in shaping the program to address real world challenges and issues they face in developing and working with research data sets. Participants will be applying what they learn to their own data sets as a part of the program.
Through offering this pilot, the Libraries and the College of Agriculture will develop a better understanding of the issues with data that are universally relevant across departments and experience in teaching the knowledge and skills needed for students to address these issues. This cohort of students will benefit from receiving intense, hands-on training in managing their own data. One of the goals for the program is to create a community of students knowledgeable with data management and curation issues who will then be able to spread awareness and best practices of data management with fellow students and others in their own labs.
Students will be able to improve their current data processes through taking this course by working with research data they are already using.
The application process:
Space in this program is limited. The pilot program can only accept 5 to 10 graduate students from the College of Agriculture. Students will be selected through an application process. Although PhD students are preferred, the course is open to both PhD and Masters level students provided that they meet the criteria listed below. A $1,500 stipend Applications are due November 18th, 2013 by 5 p.m.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Sources:
Jake Carlson, Associate Professor of Library Science / Data Services Specialist, can be reached at: jakecarlson@purdue.edu
Marianne Stowell Bracke, Associate Professor of Library Science / Agricultural Information Specialist, can be reached at: mbracke@purdue.edu
Related web site:
http://wwww.lib.purdue.edu
Filed under: D2C2, faculty_staff, general, press_release, RSRCH, scholcomm
November 7th, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The College of Agriculture, with support from Purdue University Libraries, is seeking to recruit graduate students in the College of Agriculture for a semester-long pilot data literacy program to be offered in spring of 2014 with some limited follow-up in the fall. The course will teach graduate students the knowledge and skills they need to be successful professionals in their discipline. Accepted students will receive a stipend of $1,500 for participating in this program. Applications are due by Nov. 18th at 5 p.m.
Research in agriculture and related fields is growing more and more dependent on the application of data. Emerging research professionals and data producers need to understand how to manage, organize, describe, disseminate and archive their data sets for themselves and others.
In addition to teaching current trends and thinking in managing, organizing, sharing and curating research data, students will actively participate in shaping the program to address real world challenges and issues they face in developing and working with research data sets. Participants will be applying what they learn to their own data sets as a part of the program.
Through offering this pilot, the Libraries and the College of Agriculture will develop a better understanding of the issues with data that are universally relevant across departments and experience in teaching the knowledge and skills needed for students to address these issues. This cohort of students will benefit from receiving intense, hands-on training in managing their own data. One of the goals for the program is to create a community of students knowledgeable with data management and curation issues who will then be able to spread awareness and best practices of data management with fellow students and others in their own labs.
Students will be able to improve their current data processes through taking this course by working with research data they are already using.
The application process:
Space in this program is limited. The pilot program can only accept 5 to 10 graduate students from the College of Agriculture. Students will be selected through an application process. Although PhD students are preferred, the course is open to both PhD and Masters level students provided that they meet the criteria listed below. A $1,500 stipend Applications are due November 18th, 2013 by 5 p.m.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Sources:
Jake Carlson, Associate Professor of Library Science / Data Services Specialist, can be reached at: jakecarlson@purdue.edu
Marianne Stowell Bracke, Associate Professor of Library Science / Agricultural Information Specialist, can be reached at: mbracke@purdue.edu
Related web site:
http://wwww.lib.purdue.edu
Filed under: D2C2, faculty_staff, general, press_release, RSRCH, scholcomm
November 5th, 2013
When Purdue University Press was brought under the wing of the university’s library in 2009, it was a marriage of necessity, brought on by the flagging financial fortunes of the press. Since being absorbed into the library in 2009, the press has moved from reporting to library administrators to participating in planning with them, said Dean of Libraries James Mullins at a recent conference sponsored by education non-profit Ithaka. Purdue is one of a growing number of universities and colleges across the country where the in-house press and library are working more closely together, offering a glimpse into the possible future of academic publishing.
In 2009, financial concerns, including unpaid royalties, forced a bailout of Purdue’s in-house press, which saw its business operations taken over by the library. Several years on, the new partnership with the library has righted the ship, accounting-wise. But perhaps even more importantly, it has also helped Purdue’s press rethink how it presents things like datasets in its publications. “Our authors are very interested in enriching their publications with additional digital content,” said Purdue University Press director Charles Watkinson. “Because the library is one of the core places to create data repositories for institutions, we’re able to link to those more easily, and that’s an area where we’ve had success.”
Along with new technologically driven opportunities, there is also a distinctly old-school benefit to bringing together the library and the university press, said Watkinson, in that it makes the press feel like more of a part of the campus community than it has in the past. Traditionally, presses tend to linger on the fringes of campuses, part of the organization, but at arm’s length. Becoming part of the library, a place often seen as a center of campus both academically and physically, let Purdue’s press get more engaged with the campus as a whole. That’s led not only to closer collaboration with faculty, but also with students, resulting in the Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research (JPUR), an open access look at research done by some of Purdue’s youngest and brightest students.
The merger hasn’t been without hiccups, though. The funding models of libraries and presses are fundamentally different, Watkinson points out. That fact has forced staffers on both sides of the equation to learn new financial vocabularies. Dealing with revenues remains “a learning process,” according to Watkinson. It’s a learning process that more and more academic libraries are engaging in, though, as demonstrated by the recently released Library Publishing Directory, a guide to more than 100 library publishing ventures around the world, many of which include collaborations with university presses. In the directory the Library Publishing Coalition details what each one is doing and provides an overview of the burgeoning industry as a whole..
University presses aren’t the only ones looking to partner with academic libraries, either. Publishing collaborative BioOne is partnering with the libraries of Dartmouth University and other universities across the United States to launch Elementa, an online, open access journal focusing on the science of climate change and sustainability from a variety of angles. According to program director Mark Kurtz, Elementa is an experiment in many ways, one of which is taking a look at what role libraries can play in large scale open access publishing, which many think represents the future of the industry. “We’re trying to explore if the model PLOS One demonstrates so well, be applied to a grand challenge, like climate change,” Kurtz said.
While BioOne provided capital, marketing and general coordination for the project, Dartmouth staffers have taken point on developing and hosting for Elementa, which is built on the PLOS digital platform and hosted on Dartmouth’s servers. The library is also helping to manage editorial workflow for the new journal, in collaboration with editors from the University of Michigan, University of Washington, University of Colorado Boulder, and Georgia Institute of Technology. Like PLOS, the journal is funded by publishing fees—$1,450 per article—rather than subscription revenues, and brings readers peer reviewed articles in subjects connected to the study of climate change, including ecology, atmospheric and weather research, and sustainable engineering.
Kurtz admits that Elementa has been a complicated project to get off the ground, pointing out that both BioOne and Dartmouth’s library have had to move out of their comfort zones to ”create a shared vocabulary and a new management framework.” He even cedes that it may not end up being a model for the future. But no one will know the answer until someone tries. That’s the driving force behind Elementa, which launches officially on November 15. “We need experimentation, and our experiment is to see if there is a place for the academy to take some control of publishing. We think there is, and that we can demonstrate that,” Kurtz said. “We think the academy is an appropriate locus of scholarly communication, and that we can help libraries see how to assert their role there.”
A good partnership between library and press can be a boon for both. Some other universities, though, are taking a different approach, building their presses from the ground up within an existing library framework. Amherst University, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, is creating a press within its walls that is devoted to open access. The decision to build a new press from scratch was prompted by the frustration that Amherst librarians felt at the current state of academic publishing. “We were convinced that you couldn’t build a system much worse than the one we have right now,” said Amherst librarian Bryn Geffert.
The university’s first press will be a part of the library from day one, with a mission devoted to publishing open access works, and to publishing only online. “We’re going to insist that everything we publish be free and open to anyone with an Internet connection,” Geffert said “We don’t want to get into printing or inventory management or sales.” If Amherst’s press does offer printed versions of the work it publishes, Geffert said, the work will be outsourced through a print on demand publisher. Taking print out of the equation, said Geffert, will allow the press to take chances and experiment. “We want to be really nimble, and if our commitment is to free and online publications, we can stay simple and efficient.” Geffert said.
Filed under: general, press_releaseNovember 1st, 2013
Welcome to Database of the Week. This feature from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics is intended to give you a brief introduction to a database that you may not know. These weekly snapshots will have only basic information about our most relevant and beneficial online resources, and hopefully tempt you to explore. Feedback is always welcome. If you have a suggestion for a database or research topic that should be covered, please let us know.
This Week’s Featured Database: Business Source Premier, from EBSCO.
Find it: www.lib.purdue.edu/parrish, Under the column headed Collections, click on List of Business Databases.
Description/focus: Business Source Premier provides articles and reports.
Try this: Business Source Premier opens at the basic search, which is a good place to start exploring your topic. If you choose advanced search, you can pre-select options such as full text, publication type, or date. If you go with the basic search You’ll still be able to use these filters when your initial results are displayed see the browsable indexes, such as author names and publication types. Note the top bar with the tab for Company Profiles. These are MarketLine Reports, searchable by name, industry, or keyword Click here to see the basics of searching Business Source Premier.
Why you should know this database: Because of its broad range of content and ease of use, Business Source Premier is one of our most highly recommended databases. It includes journals, trade magazines, newspapers, and more.
Why students should know this database: Whether students need to find scholarly articles, market research reports, or company information, Business Source Premier can guide them by offering suggestions to narrow down a broad search.
Tags: articles, companies, EBSCO, full text, news, trade journals
Cost: Business Source Premier is an Inspire database provided by Indiana, with enhanced features paid by the Libraries. For more information contact mdugan@purdue.edu.
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Database of the Week comes to you from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact parrlib@purdue.edu. Database of the Week is archived at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/MGMT/. For more Purdue Libraries news, follow us on Twitter (@PurdueLibraries).
If you would like us to promote your favorite database, send an email to mdugan@purdue.edu.
Filed under: database, general, MGMT
October 31st, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — Purdue University Libraries is helping connect researchers to their research by participating in ORCID, a non-profit organization that registers researchers’ identities and links them across different systems that manage scholarly information, associating researchers with their publications, grants and patents. ORCID also helps researchers, especially those with common names to get appropriate credit for use and cite of their work.
For example, ORCID can enable people to search for the published work of a specific individual named “John Smith” without the ambiguity of different spellings or mixing up works from other authors who have the same name.
ORCID is working with major research institutions, funding agencies, publishers, and professional societies to establish and link identities across different systems and publications.
It is free for researchers to register for an ORCID identifier and associate it with their publications, grants, and patents. Researchers own their identifiers, which they keep for their entire academic career as they move from one institution to another.
With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Purdue Libraries will encourage adoption of ORCID by integrating it into HUBzero, an open source software platform that was developed at Purdue for creating dynamic web sites that support scientific research and educational activities.
“Integrating ORCID with HUBzero will enable hundreds of thousands of hub users to register their identifiers and make it easier for people to find their scholarly output”, said Michael Witt, an Associate Professor of Library Science who is leading the effort at Purdue.
ORCID functionality will be piloted and tested on three hubs—the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), nanoHUB.org, and HABRI Central—and then become available to more than 50 other hubs in September 2014.
Source: Michael Witt, Purdue University Libraries, mwitt@purdue.edu
Reference: ORCID, http://orcid.org
Filed under: D2C2, general, press_release, RSRCH, scholcomm, Uncategorized
October 30th, 2013
The Universal streaming archive of the October 25, 2013 “Scientific Reproducibility: Opportunities and Challenges for Open Research Data and Code” presentation by Victoria Stodden is available for online viewing at the following URL:
Abstract: It is now widely recognized that the traditional published article is insufficient to permit verification of computational results. The emergence of powerful computational hardware combined with vast data collection and storage capabilities presents many novel opportunities for researchers. Unfortunately current standards for communication of published computational findings make verification and validation next to impossible. A movement toward reproducible research – dissemination that includes sufficient experimental details such that results can be replicated by others in the field, i.e. the code and the data – has developed in many disciplines and research areas to address this shortcoming in research communication. In this talk Dr. Stodden will explore the problem and address solutions emerging from researchers and institutions, federal policy efforts, and journal publication standards.
Bio: Victoria Stodden is an assistant professor of Statistics at Columbia University whose research centers on the multifaceted problem of enabling reproducibility in computational science. This includes studying adequacy and robustness in replicated results, designing and implementing validation systems, developing standards of openness for data and code sharing, and resolving legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research. Her work has resulted in platforms and tools such as SparseLab, RunMyCode.org, and the Reproducible Research Standard. Stodden is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Directorate Subcommittee on Support for the Statistical Sciences at NSF, the National Academies of Science committee on Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process, and several committees in the American Statistical Association. She completed her PhD in Statistics and her law degree at Stanford University, and her Erdös Number is 3.
Filed under: general, Open_Access, press_release, scholcomm
October 23rd, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University will host several events for “GIS Day at Purdue: Geospatial Data is Everywhere” on Wednesday, Nov. 6. GIS Day is a global celebration of geospatial research and GIS, which uses a collection of software applications, GPS receivers and data sensors to combine maps and statistical data in a digital mapping environment to answer research questions.
Activities including talks, demonstrations, graduate student presentations and a poster session will be held 8:30 a.m.-7 p.m. in Stewart Center, Room 306. The events are free and open to the public.
Matt Hutchinson, Research Scientist, Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT), Woolpert, Inc. will give the morning keynote address at 10 a.m. in Stewart Center, Room 302 on the topic of “Big Data GIS: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles”. Randall Raymond, Geospatial Data Information Specialist, Office of Research, Evaluation, Assessment and Accountability, Retired, will present the afternoon keynote address at 2 p.m. in Stewart Center, Room 302, “Pathways to GIS Careers: A bring your laptop, hands-on, ArcGIS Online Experience.”
Students and faculty will also learn more about the GIS resources (including software, servers, virtual and local classes) available to them at Purdue University. In addition, a hands-on ground penetrating radar demonstration will take place on the Purdue Mall.
The complete schedule for GIS Day is available at http://stemedhub.org/groups/2013gisday/college
GIS Day is sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Research, College of Agriculture, College of Science, College of Education, College of Technology and Purdue University Libraries GIS Dept.
Source:
Benjamin Branch, Purdue University Libraries GIS Dept., bbranch@purdue.edu
Filed under: events, general, GIS, press_release, RSRCH, scholcommOctober 22nd, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue e-Pubs, one of the three institutional repositories as part of Purdue University Libraries, has reached another significant milestone, hitting 5 million downloads this past month.
A key collection piece downloaded as part of this milestone is the Birck and NCN publication series, one of the most popular and highly utilized collections housed in Purdue e-Pubs, which has seen more than 281,000 downloads to date. The 5-millionth download was an article from the Birck and NCN publications series, “Conductance Asymmetry of Graphene p-n Junction,” by Tony Low, Seokmin Hong, Joerg Appenzeller, Supriyo Datta, and Mark S. Lundstrom.
As part of Open Access Week, Oct. 21-27, the Mark Lundstrom, Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology, will be awarded the Open Access Research Award on Oct. 25 for his leadership in creating NanoHUB, a radical departure from traditional forms of scholarly communication in nanotechnology with a strongly open access character. Lundstrom also is a co-author on the 5-millionth article download.
For faculty wishing to make their work available through Purdue e-Pubs and start receiving monthly download counts, visit: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess/getstarted. For center directors and others interested in more formal publishing options, repository specialist David Scherer, dscherer@purdue.edu, is available for consultations.
About Purdue e-Pubs
Purdue e-Pubs is a service of the Purdue Libraries, providing free global online access to Purdue-affiliated articles, reports, conference proceedings, student scholarship, and more. Purdue e-Pubs also provides online publishing support for original publications.
About the Birck and NCN Publications Series
The Birck and NCN Publications Series contains more than 1,400 publications authored by members of the Birck Nanotechnology Center and the Network for Computational Nanotechnology. Formed in 2007, the Birck and NCN collection of publications was one of the earliest collections in Purdue e-Pubs and has become one of its most popular collections to date. The collection of publications in Purdue e-Pubs serves a portal into some of the important and fascinating research being conducted at Purdue on nanoscience and nanotechnology from these two centers.
Contact: Dave Scherer, scholarly repository specialist, Purdue e-Pubs, 765-494-8511, dscherer@purdue.edu
Filed under: general, Open_Access, press_release, RSRCH, scholcomm