Search
Loading
October 4th, 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: GREENR, from Gale Cengage Learning.
Find it:www.lib.purdue.edu/parrish, Under the column headed Collections, click on List of Business Databases.
Description/focus: GREENR is a resource for environment and sustainability research.
Try this: The GREENR landing page has links to broad issues such as Resource Management, and more focused topics such as nuclear energy, coal energy, and wind energy. You can do a keyword search in all content or in specific collections (videos or case studies), or use an interactive world map for country information. Search results can be limited by subject or type of resource. See here for a short video tutorial on the basics of searching GREENR
Why you should know this database: GREENR covers food security, environmental law and politics, economics and trade, pollution, ecology, energy, and more. It includes many of the academic resources that appear in text-only databases, but GREENR also includes podcasts, websites, newspapers, videos, magazines, and case studies. You can navigate country, organization, and country portals for news, video, and primary source documents.
Why students should know this database: GREENR is easy to navigate and students can use it to narrow a broad interest to a specific topic, or find content on an assigned subject.
Tags: agribusiness, agricultural economics, agriculture, articles, companies, countries, country profiles, demographics, economic conditions, energy, environmental research, full text, international markets, international news, news, resource economics,
Cost: Paid annually by Purdue University Libraries..
——————————
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, MGMTOctober 2nd, 2013
February’s executive memorandum from the Office of Science and Technology Policy required over twenty federal agencies who have annual research and development budgets of more than $100 million to submit plans to the White House to ensure that “the direct results of federally funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.” This includes openly and freely sharing the publications that result from sponsored research as well as datasets. Purdue and the Libraries have supported this new policy and helped to inform its development.
The goal of the memo is to ensure that data that are produced with federal funds are made as available as possible for access and reuse by other researchers as well as the general public. Some agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health already require data management plans and have been encouraging data-sharing for years. Datasets such as spreadsheets, instrument and sensor data, software source code, transcripts, images and video, and the other “raw ingredients” of research need to be shared in order to reproduce experiments and validate their findings. Efficiency is gained by reusing instead of reproducing the same data in different studies, and new discoveries and economic opportunities can be created.
What does it mean for researchers on our campus? In practical terms, our researchers will be required to submit data management plans with their grant proposals to the major federal funding agencies. The agencies will be required ensure the evaluation of the merits of the data management plans, including how well the researcher identifies and describes what data will be produced by the research and how the data will be made accessible and preserved.
Since the establishment of the Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2) by the Libraries in 2006, we have been preparing to help our researchers meet these requirements. In collaboration with the Office of the Vice President of Research and Information Technology at Purdue, the Libraries launched the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR, http://purr.purdue.edu) to give researchers a platform for collaborating and publishing and archiving their data. We have been involved in the creation of solutions such as the DMPTool (http://dmptool.org) that walks a researcher through the process of writing an effective data management plan, step-by-step. Purdue is also a founding member of DataCite (http://datacite.org), which is an international organization to assign unique, globally resolvable digital objects identifiers to datasets and promote the scholarly use and attribution of data in research.
Most importantly, our subject-specialist librarians are advocates, consultants, and collaborators in research data management, helping to write and review plans, working with faculty and students to understand issues related to data use and stewardship, and contributing as co-principal investigators on sponsored, data-intensive research.
As many of the parties involved in this new policy work on drafting potential solutions, the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has offered their proposed policy solution. Published in June of 2013, the Shared Access Research Ecosystem, or SHARE model, proposes that academic universities and libraries are well suited as a solution to the new OSTP policy requirements due to their long standing history of investing into the services, tools, and infrastructure to support the dissemination, access, and preservation of research. One of the key components to the infrastructure of this model that universities already have in operation is institutional repositories, such as Purdue e-Pubs (http://purdue.edu/epubs). Institutional repositories, including Purdue e-Pubs, are poised to play an important and significant role in the continued discussions on these new funder requirements, and the promotion of scholarship and research by Purdue faculty, staff, and students.
Established in 2005, Purdue e-Pubs is the open access institutional document repository of Purdue University providing free and open access to research and scholarship authored by members of the Purdue community. Submitting work to Purdue e-Pubs is open to anyone affiliated with Purdue, and can serve the public deposit requirements for any Purdue Principal Investigator (PI) on federally funded research projects. Once the work has been uploaded to the repository many of the services, tools, and infrastructure currently in place in Purdue e-Pubs are poised to fulfill several components of the policy’s requirements. After an item is deposited, Purdue e-Pubs makes the metadata and full text submission of the work available to commercial search engines, such as Google Scholar, and other discovery systems through the implementation of the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It is also at this time that the repository will create within the metadata a link to the publisher’s version of the work through the creation of an Open URL. Purdue e-Pubs also belongs to a cross-institutional repository system, the Bepress Digital Commons Network (http://network.bepress.com/). The Digital Commons Network is a federated institutional repository-based discovery tool aggregating works from over three hundred institutional repositories. Built upon the Bepress institutional repository platform, Digital Commons, the Digital Commons Network further illustrates solutions to the OST memorandum’s accessibility requirements.
There are also several methods to ensure compliance with using the Purdue e-Pubs repository and other institutional repositories as components to the new policy requirements. Upon submission and final deposit of a work an automated notification is currently sent to all authors. This automated notification could be potentially sent to other designee’s including the author’s institutional research offices, the publisher of the work, and to the funding agency to ensure notification and compliance with the new policy. Authors currently also receive an automated monthly email informing them on the industry recognized COUNTER (http://www.projectcounter.org/) compliant download statistics. These download statistics, as well as the access and site statistics from Google Analytics and altmetrics, could also be supplied to administrators and other invested parties by Purdue e-Pubs and its additional services.
At the time of this publication, the federal agencies have turned in their plans to the White House, which will review and respond to them over the course of the next six months. Because of our involvement and early engagement in issues related to research data management, Purdue is prepared and equipped to meet these new funder requirements and promote the research of our faculty and students through global data-sharing and reuse.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter
October 1st, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University Libraries will celebrate Information Literacy Month during the month of October with a variety of educational and awareness initiatives and a culminating Information Literacy Symposium on Tuesday, Oct. 29 at Purdue University featuring Dr. Mary Somerville, University Librarian at the Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver.
Purdue University Libraries is committed to leading the way in learning and information literacy through a variety of cutting-edge initiatives, including the newly expanded IMPACT program, which helps transform Purdue’s core curriculum to support learners in today’s information-rich environment and enhance student information literacy by advancing educational practice and research.
About Information Literacy
Information Literacy is a survival skill in the Information Age, according to the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy Final Report (1989).
Instead of drowning in the abundance of information that floods their lives, information literate people know how to find, evaluate, and use information effectively to solve a particular problem or make a decision–whether the information they select comes from a computer, a book, a government agency, a film, or any number of other possible resources.
Libraries, which provide a significant public access point to such information and usually at no cost, must play a key role in preparing people for the demands of today’s information society…
From American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy Final Report (1989)
About the 5th Annual Information Literacy Symposium – Oct. 29
In celebration of Information Literacy Month, Purdue University Libraries present: The 5th Information Literacy Research Symposium by Dr. Mary Somerville, University Librarian at the Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver – “Toward Informed Learning in Professional Practice” on Tuesday, October 29, 2013, Purdue University West Lafayette Campus, 318 Stewart Center.
During the morning presentation, eminent library leader and researcher Dr. Mary Somerville will discuss her research on informed learning. She will explain how it builds on her experiences as a practitioner/ researcher/leader. She will reflect on her colleagues’ engagement with informed learning and the implications of informed learning for academic curriculum design. She will invite questions and comments from the audience members as educators, including a discussion of opportunities to take the ideas presented forward.
The afternoon will consist of a workshop to design an instructional activity or a cross-disciplinary project based on informed learning theory/principles.
PROGRAM:
9:30 a.m. – 10 a.m. Registration
10 a.m. – 12 p.m. Presentation
12 p.m. – 1 p.m. Lunch (Purdue Memorial Union Anniversary Drawing Room)
1 pm. – 3 p.m. Workshop
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Source:
Sharon Weiner, PhD, W. Booker Chair for Information Literacy, Purdue University Libraries, 765-496-3128, sweiner@purdue.edu
Related Web sites:
Purdue University Libraries/Learning and Information Literacy – www.lib.purdue.edu/infolit
National Forum on Information Literacy – www.infolit.org
Filed under: ADM, events, Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, general, press_release, RSRCH, scholcomm, services
October 1st, 2013
The Purdue University Libraries will continue the Library Scholars Grant Program this year with a focus on supporting access to unique collections of information around the country and the world. Awards of up to $5,000will be made for this purpose to untenured tenure-track members of the Purdue faculty, and to associate professors tenured effective July 1, 2011, or later, with grant-supported activities to be completed by December 31, 2014.The Library Scholars Grant Program is made possible through the generosity of the 50th anniversary gift of the Class of 1935, and continuing gifts from this class and others, to an endowment fund in the Purdue Research Foundation.
The Library Scholars Grant Program is designed to provide grants to untenured tenure-track Purdue faculty members, and recently tenured or hired associate professors, to help them gain access to library materials necessary for research required for their continued growth as faculty members. Just as people come to Purdue to use our unique collections, the research of Purdue faculty may require visiting unique collections beyond Purdue. The Library Scholars Grant Program offers an opportunity for support for such activities to untenured tenure-track members of the Purdue faculty, and to Purdue associate professors tenured effective July 1, 2011, or later, in all disciplines, from the West Lafayette, Calumet, Fort Wayne, IUPUI, and North Central campuses, and the Statewide Technology Program. (Purdue faculty at the Fort Wayne and IUPUI campuses are those within “Purdue mission” programs; i.e., those for whom the promotions process falls under Purdue.)
Each Library Scholars Grant recipient will be asked to present a seminar about the information-related activities supported by the grant. The seminars will permit the Libraries to learn from recipients’ experiences in order to better serve both Purdue scholars and those from outside Purdue who visit our collections.
The 2013-2014 Library Scholars Grant Program awards will be in amounts of up to $5,000. The funds may be used for expenses associated with travel to archives or collections beyond Purdue, including the cost of transportation, lodging, meals, and fees charged by the library or other collection owner for access, photocopying, scanning, etc. Reimbursement will be made, for approved expenditures, up to the amount of the award.
Criteria used to judge the proposals will include how well the case is made that the proposed information-related activities will support the candidate’s research and that conducting these activities requires travel to unique collections beyond Purdue, the appropriateness of the budget, and the feasibility of the project within time constraints. Proposals will be evaluated by a panel chaired by a tenured member of the Libraries faculty and composed of tenured faculty and one or more previous winners, with recommendations made to the Dean of Libraries. Award recipients will be contacted in December 2013.
The guidelines for proposals are outlined below.
All proposals must be submitted by email to Carole Tolley, tolleyc@purdue.edu, with the Subject: Library Scholars Grant, no later than 5:00pm, Friday, November 15, 2013.
Guidelines for Proposals
Overview
The Library Scholars Grant Program, administered by the Purdue University Libraries, focuses on supporting access for untenured tenure-track members of the Purdue faculty, and associate professors tenured effective July 1, 2011, or later, to unique collections of information found around the country and the world. Awards of up to $5,000 will be made to for this purpose, with grant-supported activities to be completed by December 31, 2014.
The Library Scholars Grant Program is designed to provide grants to untenured tenure-track Purdue faculty members, and recently tenured or hired associate professors, to help them gain access to library materials necessary for research required for their continued growth as faculty members. Just as people come to Purdue to use our unique collections, the research of Purdue faculty may require visiting unique collections. The Library Scholars Grant Program offers an opportunity for untenured tenure-track faculty and recently tenured associate professors to receive support for expenses associated with travel to archives or collections beyond Purdue, including the cost of transportation, lodging, meals, and fees charged by the library or other collection owner for access, photocopying, scanning, etc.
Eligibility
Untenured tenure-track Purdue faculty members, and recently tenured or hired associate professors effective July 1, 2011, or later, in all disciplines, from the West Lafayette, Calumet, Fort Wayne, IUPUI, and North Central campuses, and the Statewide Technology Program are eligible for Library Scholars Grant Program awards. (Purdue faculty at the Fort Wayne and IUPUI campuses are those within “Purdue mission” programs; i.e., those for whom the promotions process falls under Purdue.) Grant recipients are not eligible for an award in consecutive years.
Proposal contents and format
1) Cover page with the following information:
a) Name
b) Rank, title
c) Date of appointment to the Purdue faculty; if Associate, date of promotion (if hired as Associate, please amend date of appointment with this information to clarify)
d) Department
e) College
f) Campus address
g) E-mail
h) Phone number
i) Name and address of Head of Department
j) Name and address of Dean of College/School
k) Name of Purdue Libraries faculty member or other Purdue Librarian from whom the applicant is submitting a letter of support (see #4)
l) Total amount of fundingthe applicant seeks from the Library Scholars Grant Program
m)Additional funding (grants, departmental funds, etc.), if any, available to the applicant to support the information-related activities for which a Library Scholars Grant is being sought
2) One-page narrative stating the following:
a) Area of research;
b) Related information needs that require using collection(s) beyond Purdue;
c) Information-related activities to be undertaken
(Note: The award may be used for expenses associated with travel to archives or collections beyond Purdue, including the cost of transportation, lodging, meals, and fees charged by the library or other collection owner for access, photocopying, scanning, etc.);
d) Projected timeline; and
e) Expected outcome(s) of the information-related activities, i.e., how they would support the applicant’s research.
3) Budget, itemizing proposed activities and their estimated costs, and showing total.
The following websites should be used to estimate lodging, meals and incidentals.
— For U.S. General Services Administration – Domestic destinations:
http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/105307
— For U.S. Dept. of State — Foreign destinations:
http://aoprals.state.gov/content.asp?content_id=184&menu_id=81
4) Letter of support from a Purdue Libraries faculty member, or other Purdue librarian, with whom applicant has consulted regarding the information needs and information–related activities reflected in the proposal. In the letter, the librarian should briefly state the reasons the applicant cannot meet the information needs by using Purdue collections and electronic information resources and, therefore, needs to travel to unique collections beyond Purdue.
5) Brief resume (3 pages maximum).
6) List of publications
Reporting requirements
A brief report or presentation on the information-related activities accomplished as a result of the award, and their significance to the research of the recipient, must be sent to the Dean of Libraries by February 15, 2015. Additionally, each individual awarded a Library Scholars Grant will be asked to present a seminar about the activities supported by the grant. The seminars will permit the Libraries to learn from recipients’ experiences in order to better serve both Purdue scholars and those from outside Purdue who visit our collections.
Funding
Awards will be in given in amounts of up to $5,000, with reimbursement, for approved expenditures, up to the amount of the award. The Libraries Business Office will coordinate reimbursement with the grant recipient’s business manager. Expenses may be reimbursed as they occur over the course of the project, with grant-supported activities to be completed by December 31, 2014. All requests for reimbursement, accompanied by appropriate documentation, must be received in the grant recipient’s departmental business office no later than February 15, 2014.
Criteria for judging proposals
Criteria used to judge the proposals will include how well the case is made that the proposed information-related activities will support the applicant’s research and that conducting these activities requires travel to unique collections beyond Purdue, the appropriateness of the budget, and the feasibility of the project within time constraints. Proposals will be evaluated by a panel chaired by a tenured member of the Libraries faculty and composed of tenured faculty and one or more previous winners, with recommendations made to the Dean of Libraries. Award recipients will be contacted in December 2013.
Proposal deadline
All proposals must be submitted by email to Carole Tolley, tolleyc@purdue.edu, with the Subject: Library Scholars Grant, no later than 5:00pm, Friday, November 15, 2013.
Questions should be submitted to Carole Tolley, Office of the Dean, Purdue University Libraries – ADMN, email: tolleyc@purdue.edu., telephone: 765-494-2900; fax: 765-494-0156
Filed under: ADM, events, Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, general, press_release, scholcomm, services
September 30th, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — Purdue Libraries is now sponsoring BrowZine, a new tablet application that allows users to browse, read and monitor many of the Libraries’ scholarly journals, all in a format optimized for iPads, Android tablets, and Kindle Fire HDs.
Users can mark journals to follow and will receive push notifications when new issues of journals come out. Users can read and save articles in BrowZine; send PDFs of articles of interest to preferred PDF readers or other places like Dropbox; and, save articles to reference management tools such RefWorks and Zotero. This app recreates the experience of browsing new journal issues and discovering interesting articles at their fingertips.
Instructions on how to download the app onto tablets can be found on the Libraries website: http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/browzine
Who can use BrowZine? Any student, staff, or faculty member currently associated with Purdue
Is there a fee?Cost to download the app is free
What devices are supported? So far, just tablets are supported, including the iPad, Android tablets (with OS v4.0+), and Kindle Fire HD.
What about smartphones? Early 2014, iPhone and Android smartphones will be supported
What publishers are supported? A list of publishers can be found here: http://support.thirdiron.com/knowledgebase/articles/132654-what-publishers-do-you-support-
Journals that are available as part of aggregator subscriptions, like ProQuest or Ebsco databases, aren’t included. Only subscriptions direct with participating publishers will be available.
What if a patron has problems with BrowZine? ThirdIron, the company who owns BrowZine, offers great customer support here: http://support.thirdiron.com
Questions or concerns about Browzine: Send to Rebecca Richardson, rarichar@purdue.edu.
Filed under: collections, DIGIT, general, press_release, scholcomm, servicesSeptember 27th, 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: WARC, from World Advertising Research Center Ltd.
Find it: www.lib.purdue.edu/parrish, Under the column with the header Collections, click on List of Business Databases.
Description/focus: WARC is a marketing and advertising information service used by media and market research agencies.
Try this: WARC has the familiar box to do a key word search, but you can also use the pulldown menus to search by type of content: case studies, trends, news, data, forecasts. If you click on one of the fields along the top, you’ll see the options for further breakdown. The Topics list includes consumers, marketing, industries, and profiles of global brand owners. For example, the industry Topic Page for Travel & Tourism shows case studies, trends, and company profiles. See here for a short demonstration of a basic WARC search.
Why you should know this database: Content in WARC includes news stories, case studies, research papers, conference papers, best practice guides, speeches, data, and WARC’s own reports. The subjects covered include communications, media research, market research, trends, and more.
Why students should know this database: Searching in WARC is easy to do so even students who are unfamiliar with database searching will be able to find marketing or consumer information.
Tags: articles, communications, consumers, countries, datasets, industries, market research, media, news, products, scholarly journals
Cost: Paid by the Libraries annually.
——————————
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, MGMTSeptember 26th, 2013
Liaison Services
As liaisons to academic departments, Libraries faculty members work with faculty across campus to provide services and support for instruction, information literacy, scholarly communication, and data. The Libraries offers repository services for your scholarship, Purdue e-Pubs, and research data, PURR. Please contact your departmental liaison for more information and assistance. (http://www.lib.purdue.edu/help/askalib/librarians)
Instruction & Information Literacy ( http://www.lib.purdue.edu/infolit )
Libraries faculty can assist instructors with determining the best way to teach students to use information to support course learning goals. Informed learning is a pedagogic approach to teaching students to use information to learn about subject content. It is based on the idea that rather than information literacy being taught as a subject of its own, learning to use information should be part of the process of understanding a subject.
As departments are identifying courses or co-curricular activities to meet the Core Curriculum embedded outcomes Libraries faculty can assist with identifying how students will meet the information literacy outcomes. Liaisons can help determine what embedded information literacy is for the fields covered by the department, through standards, policy documents, etc., but also discussion with curriculum committees, etc. Liaisons can also assist with addressing the embedded information literacy requirement, e.g., courses, service learning experience, etc. , where possibly a already exist that meets or can be adapted to meet the embedded information literacy criteria, or is there an opportunity to develop something new?
Data Services (http://d2c2.lib.purdue.edu/ )
As you may know, emphasis on data management has been an increasing focus in research and funding. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the OSTP, and many funding agencies require data management plans for all proposals. Libraries faculty can provide support through Data Management Plan ( DMP) consultations, identifying metadata standards, offering an online data-sharing platform through PURR, and providing general data management guidance.
PURR, or the Purdue University Research Repository, provides an online, collaborative working space and data-sharing platform to support the data management needs of Purdue researchers and their collaborators. Go to PURR
Liaisons can also discuss library collections, alternative publishing models such as Open Access, how to deposit into Purdue e-Pubs and PURR, and other services offered by Purdue Libraries. Please contact your liaison for more information.
( http://www.lib.purdue.edu/help/askalib/librarians )
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter
September 26th, 2013
While a journal article or a book may be the final record of research, there are many other “informal” types of publishing that faculty at Purdue engage in. These range from technical reports to white papers, from conference proceedings to student publications. Place so many innovative people together, and there will always also be experimental new forms of digital scholarly communication that don’t quite look like any publication that has ever existed. While societies, university presses, and commercial publishers are available to publish formal materials, informal publications have traditionally fallen through the cracks. They have been distributed on CD, placed as PDFs on servers that keep being moved, or printed out and distributed from a closet. Librarians refer to this type of material as “gray literature” because it exists in an awkward limbo area of the information supply system and is hard to discover and even harder to obtain if requested. This situation is a problem for everybody, potentially leading to duplication of research and wasted federal funding.
It was to address this problem that the Scholarly Publishing Services unit of Purdue Libraries was formally established in spring 2012. Using existed staff and infrastructure, SPS provides a complement to Purdue University Press (PUP), the scholarly publishing arm of the University which was established in 1960 and is part of the Libraries: The University Press publishes only formal and peer-reviewed materials, both books and journals, focused on certain disciplines aligned with the strengths of the University and over 50% of the authors published come from outside Purdue. SPS meanwhile publishes informal materials, subject to varying levels of peer review and appearing in a multitude of formats. The publications are all originated from Purdue and come from a wide range of subject areas. The financial model is also different since the Press relies on sales and licensing income to cover its publishing costs and SPS operates on a mixture of internal funding and charge backs. While basic SPS services, such as the design and online hosting of a new digital publication, are offered free of charge to the Purdue community, fees are charged for value-added elements such as copy editing and typesetting. All services, whether fee or for free, emphasize best publishing practices, such as the use of stable URLs and DOIs to allow citation, preservation planning, and discoverability through popular services such as Google Scholar.
The relationship between Purdue University Press and Scholarly Publishing Services is conceptualized as a continuum or “spectrum” of services, from formal to informal. As more and more Purdue centers and departments take advantage of the expertise and infrastructure provided, partnerships are starting to emerge where a mix of products are made available under both PUP and SPS imprints. For example, the Libraries works with the Global Policy Research Institute (GPRI) to publish student scholarship, policy briefs, and conference proceedings (including video) through SPS, and the book series Purdue Studies in Public Policy through PUP. This type of relationship permits links to be made between different publications and for cross-marketing. The end result is increased impact for Purdue scholarship. SPS is always interested in new challenges and further case studies and contact details are available at www.lib.purdue.edu/publishing.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter
September 26th, 2013
What is it?
“Scopus is the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature with smart tools that track, analyze and visualize research.”
[http://www.info.sciverse.com/scopus]
Benefits
· Search a wide variety of sources across most disciplines
o Analyze results to see the most frequent authors, journals, and disciplines related to your search.
o Search by author to view an “Author Evaluator” page that visualizes an h-index, breakdown of publications by source, co-authors, subject areas, and generate a graph of citations per year from 1996.
o Set up email alerts or RSS feeds for: searches, document citations, author citations, or affiliations.
o Export to print, email, citations managers (EndNote, ProCite, Zotero, Mendeley, Excel, and others), or generate a basic bibliography right from Scopus.
o Can search by first author only
· Measure your (and others) scholarly impact [only for publications from 1996 to present]
o Find out who is citing your publications
o Find your most cited publication
o Find the most cited publications in your field/discipline
o Links to other documents that cite your publications, like patents, dissertations, and other documents in academic document repositories
· Analyze the impact of particular journals using two journal metrics – SJR (SCImago Journal Rank; similar to Impact Factors) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) that are updated every two months. Compare multiple journals using the Journal Analyzer, a visualization tool.
Significance/Uniqueness
· Scopus indexes over 8,000 unique titles compared to Web of Science.
· More disciplines are represented when compared to Web of Science
Key highlights
· Alternative, but complementary, to Web of Science
· Provides analytics and visualization tools to compare authors, publications, and journals.
· Can set up email alerts related to research of interest, when people cite you, and when a particular person has published something new.
Most disciplines are represented, so all researchers should give it a try. (weakest is Arts and Humanities, but they have taken steps to help correct this over the last couple of years).
Filed under: Faculty E-NewsletterSeptember 26th, 2013
Ecotones is a term used in ecology to describe the place in which two ecosystems touch or merge. However, the term could also be used to describe what is anticipated in the Active Learning Center (ALC): the touching or merging of the activities that typically have taken place in a classroom, lecture hall, or laboratory with what has traditionally occurred in a library. Instead of single use spaces, often in different buildings, the ALC will merge the teaching spaces and learning/study spaces in a flexible environment. The ALC will accommodate the teaching pedagogies and methodologies used in the Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Transformation (IMPACT) program and active learning on the site now occupied by the long vacant North Power Plant and the Engineering Administration Building (ENAD), across from the Bell Tower.
The ALC will combine the best of new classroom pedagogies and create a learning commons for the 21st Century — a blend of centrally scheduled teaching spaces, library/information services, formal study spaces, informal learning space, and collaborative work areas. Its design is being developed with assistance from students and faculty collaborators throughout Purdue who are coming together to provide crucial input for a unique learning facility.
Ranked as the Number One capital project by Purdue University when it was submitted for support to the Indiana Legislature, a request was made for support of $50,000,000, of the $79,000,000 project (includes cost of demolition of the North Power Plant and ENAD). The Indiana Legislature allocated the $50,000,000 in cash at the end of the session in April. The University has committed $13,000,000 toward the cost of the demolition required for the project, leaving $16,000,000 to be raised from donors. As of September, approximately $2,400,000 has been committed.
Approximately sixty percent of the overall building will be dedicated to formal classroom settings, with the remaining forty percent committed to individual or collaborative study/learning space. When classes are not being held, and during evenings/nights and weekends, the classroom spaces in the ALC will be available for study, as many of our classrooms are now. An important difference in the new ALC is that it will be monitored by the Libraries to provide a secure and conducive environment for study.
During the day, students may work in teams or individually in the Libraries’ learning/study spaces in preparation for class. After a class is over, a student may continue to work on what was begun during class in the Libraries’ learning/study spaces. The ALC will also provide spaces for you as a faculty member to meet or work with students before or after class.
During the planning and design phase, it is anticipated that faculty will be asked to describe specific types of classrooms settings and to suggest technology that will further instruction in those settings. In addition, faculty will be asked to recommend technology or configuration of learning spaces which will enable learning outside of class in the Libraries’ spaces.
To see what will be possible in the Active Learning Center, you only need to visit existing ‘blended’ spaces at Purdue:
These Libraries’ facility transformations were designed in collaboration with the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE), Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), Discovery Learning Research Center (DLRC), and Facilities Planning.
The Active Learning Center will expand upon the successes realized to date and will evolve and adapt, serving as a living laboratory to refine and develop our strategy to plan future learning spaces in response to emerging trends in pedagogy.
The concept of a new centrally-located learning center on the campus will further reinforce Purdue’s leadership as an innovator in teaching and learning. It will also help meet Purdue’s needs for learning space, collaborative study and active learning space over the next decade and beyond.
For more information, please contact: James L. (Jim) Mullins, Dean of Libraries and Esther Ellis Norton Professor, at jmullins@purdue.edu.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter