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April 6th, 2018
Learn about how faculty and staff at Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries are building research infrastructure to support open scholarship for a range of disciplines—spanning the sciences to the humanities—at the Purdue University Libraries’ upcoming guest talk by Sayeed Choudhury.
The Associate Dean for Research Data Management and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, Choudhury will present “Research Infrastructure for Open Scholarship” at 10 a.m. Thursday, April 26 in Stewart Center, room 320. The talk is free and open to the public.
“Over the course of 20 years, at the Sheridan Libraries, we have learned and adapted our approach based on both local developments on university campuses and broader developments within the private sector and government sector (including data management plans, in the latter case). While there are multiple units on any research campus that play an important role in building and supporting research infrastructure, the library may be uniquely positioned to support a diverse set of researchers, and perhaps more importantly, to identify possible interrelationships or connections between those disciplines,” he explained.
This talk offers an opportunity to hear about the Sheridan Libraries as a case study within the broader context of open scholarship and research infrastructure.
G. Sayeed Choudhury, who is a President Obama appointee to the National Museum and Library Services Board, is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) based at Johns Hopkins. He is also a member of the Board of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and a member of the Advisory Board for OpenAIRE2020. He has been a member of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information, the ICPSR Council, the DuraSpace Board, Digital Library Federation advisory committee, Library of Congress’ National Digital Stewardship Alliance Coordinating Committee, Federation of Earth Scientists Information Partnership (ESIP) Executive Committee and the Project MUSE Advisory Board.
Additionally, he has served as Senior Presidential Fellow with the Council on Library and Information Resources, a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins and a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the recipient of the 2012 OCLC/LITA Kilgour Award. For more information about Choudhury, see www.library.jhu.edu/staff/g-sayeed-choudhury/ and https://members.educause.edu/sayeed-choudhury.
Choudhury’s talk is sponsored the Purdue Libraries Seminar Committee.
Filed under: general, Open_Access, press_releaseNovember 27th, 2017
Purdue University Libraries Associate Professor Michael Witt has been awarded a visiting research fellowship at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at Lund University in Sweden, where he will spend a month as a part of a sabbatical during the Spring 2018 semester.
According to the Pufendorf IAS website, it hosts international experts on different themes that revolve around one or more current research issues. Witt will participate in the “DATA” theme, which incorporates five distinct threads that relate to archiving vanishing languages, data visualization, text mining, creating astronomical catalogs, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Witt’s research focuses on the application of library science principles to the management and curation of research data.
“The DATA theme is taking an integrated, interdisciplinary approach that includes the university library as a partner and incorporates library science as a fiber that could potentially be woven into all of its five threads,” Witt said.
The aim of his sabbatical is to gain a better understanding of data repositories and to promote the practice of using data repositories, in particular, in underrepresented disciplines and geographic regions of the world, Witt noted.
“One way of increasing the impact of research is to share the underlying datasets that support the findings in an appropriate repository and make them available to other researchers to reproduce the results and to repurpose the data for new research,” he added.
Witt, who is also the head of the Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2) in the Research Data unit of Purdue Libraries, will begin his six-month sabbatical in February.
The Pufendorf IAS is named after Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694), a philosopher and a faculty member at the 350-year-old Lund University.
Witt is featured on the Pufendorf IAS website at www.pi.lu.se/en/activities/theme-data/michael-c-witt and in a video profile at www.pi.lu.se/article/videoportratt-av-tema-datas-gastforskare.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, UncategorizedNovember 15th, 2017
On Tuesday (Nov. 14), Purdue University Libraries recognized the research contributions of Libraries faculty members during its annual “Celebrating Research” event. During the celebration, one of the presenters, Associate Professor and Information Literacy Specialist Clarence Maybee, talked about his new book, “IMPACT Learning: Librarians at the Forefront of Change in Higher Education,” which will be available in March 2018.
The book covers how librarians in academic libraries can help enable the success of college students “by creating or partnering with teaching and learning initiatives that support meaningful learning through engagement with information,” states the book’s description on the publisher’s website.
“Since the 1970s, the academic library community has been advocating and developing programming for information literacy. This book discusses existing models, extracting lessons from Purdue University Libraries’ partnership with other units to create a campus-wide course development program, Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT), which provides academic libraries with tools and strategies for working with faculty and departments to integrate information literacy into disciplinary courses,” the description continues.
At Purdue, Dr. Maybee is among the group of faculty members in the libraries and in other academic areas demonstrating the importance of information literacy not only for college students, but also for new graduates and mid-career and long-time professionals–indeed, for everyone.
To create awareness about this importance Maybee, Libraries Information Literacy Instructional Designer Rachel Fundator, with the help of Julia Smith, graduate assistant, and Teresa Koltzenburg, strategic communication director, implemented “Inform Purdue,” a social media campaign to “celebrate information literacy at Purdue. The campaign features interviews with Purdue students, alumni, and faculty in a series of videos and social media posts.
“Purdue Libraries’ approach to information literacy is to teach students to use information in the context of learning about something—much as they will do on the job, or to make personal decisions after graduation,” Maybee explained. “In the ‘Inform Purdue’ campaign, Purdue students, faculty, former faculty, and staff share their own ‘stories’ of teaching and learning about information literacy, and how it helps them to accomplish their educational and professional goals.”
The campaign concludes today with a final video featuring Dr. Maybee (see above).
You can catch more of the videos online at www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfiLH31ZZsO3vwygf_oblFiyZfqZzWV1k or via the Libraries’ news and announcements website at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/inform-purdue/.
Filed under: general, RSRCHOctober 26th, 2017
Suresh V. Garimella, Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships and the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Distinguished Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, was honored with the 2017 Leadership in Open Access Award from Purdue University Libraries and the Office of the Provost Monday, Oct. 23.
This week (Oct. 23-29) academic institutions and libraries across the globe are celebrating the benefits of Open Access for research and scholarship during the 10th annual International Open Access Week commemoration.
According to Dean of University Libraries James L. Mullins, Garimella was selected to receive the recognition this year for leading by example in the Open Access movement at Purdue University. Garimella has more than 400 works posted in the Purdue e-Pubs repository, which have been downloaded close to 256,500 times.
“Dr. Garimella has demonstrated leadership in Open Access to Scholarly Publications by depositing his numerous papers and articles, consistent with copyright and contractual agreements, into Purdue e-Pubs. Therefore, we present the 2017 Leadership in Open Access Award to him in recognition of his outstanding leadership and continued partnership with Purdue e-Pubs to increase visibility of scholarship at Purdue,” Mullins noted.
“It is a great honor to be recognized for our research group’s commitment to Open Access. I am deeply thankful to the scores of students in my group who, over the years, have contributed to the impactful publications that have been eagerly downloaded through the University’s excellent Purdue e-Pubs portal,” Garimella said.
Since 2012, Purdue e-Pubs has close to 15,153,000 downloads from users all over the world, with the average download rate of 2,256,893 per year.
“Dr. Garimella embodies the spirit of the land-grant institution through his work to make scholarly research widely available,” said Jay Akridge, interim Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Diversity. “I congratulate him and all of the students in his group who contribute to global learning by broadening the reach of scholarship.”
For more information about Open Access at Purdue, visit www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess. Learn more about Purdue e-Pubs at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, press_releaseJuly 19th, 2017
This Friday, when searching for materials in and through Purdue University Libraries, you may notice a difference in the aesthetics of the search results’ display.
That’s because, as of Friday, July 21, “Libraries Search,” the large field on on the Purdue Libraries’ home page that instructs users to “Find Articles, Books, Media, Journals, Collections & Archives,” will take users to search results’ pages that display an updated interface based on a new, responsive web design — all done with the user experience mind.
At Purdue Libraries, a team of faculty and staff, the “Libraries Search Oversight Committee,” has been working on the update to the Libraries Search functionality, and Dean Lingley, chair of that group, provided a brief overview of the update to Libraries Search (see Q&A below) and explained how the update will affect users.
Q. What is “Libraries Search” at Purdue University Libraries?
Dean Lingley: Libraries search allows library patrons to not only search the local, physical and electronic holdings of Purdue University Libraries, but it also enables users to search millions more articles and citations from journal vendors and database providers–all in one easy-to-use interface. Libraries Search will link patrons directly to the electronic copy of the specific article, when available, licensed by Purdue Libraries. If the article is not available immediately in electronic format, the patron can request the material from another institution via a simple link to our Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
Q. How does it work to find materials in the libraries and at other library institutions?
Dean Lingley: Materials held locally are indexed locally, and articles and citations from journal and database vendors are stored in a central index. When a user performs a search, the results from our local collection and central index are blended to give the patron the search results most relevant to the search terms.
Q. Why is the interface being updated/changed?
Dean Lingley: The interface is being updated to keep up with web design changes that have been occurring over the past several years.
Q. How is the new interface different from the one that is replacing? What are the benefits of the updated interface to users?
Dean Lingley: The new interface is different in the fact that it features a responsive web design. This allows patrons to have similar search experiences whether they are searching from their desktops, tablets, or phones. The interface was redesigned by our vendor with user experience in mind, and the new interface should provide an easier-to-navigate set of search results for our patrons. It is important to note that the underlying search ranking algorithm is not changing, just the way those results are presented to the user.
Q. When will Purdue Libraries switch to the new interface permanently?
Dean Lingley: The new interface will become the default search interface this Friday (July 21). There is a feedback link available at the top of the new interface, so please feel free to use it for any comments or questions you might have.
Filed under: collections, database, general, press_releaseMarch 31st, 2017
Purdue University Libraries Associate Professor Michael Witt has been recognized by the American Library Association (ALA) with the Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural or Natural Sciences. He shares the award with Frank Scholze, from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, for their collaboration on re3data, which is an online registry of research data repositories.
“Researchers are being required by funding agencies to share the data generated by grant-funded research,” Witt said. “They can search re3data to identify the best repository for them to deposit their datasets to satisfy these requirements and to increase the impact of their research by sharing their data.”
re3data has been widely adopted and is referenced in guidelines by such funders as the European Commission, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Transportation, as well as publishers, including Nature, PeerJ, Copernicus, and the Public Library of Science.
The registry also helps students, publishers, research administrators, and librarians find research data and track the impact of data-sharing. Users can browse and search for data repositories in re3data by subjects, keywords, policies, locations, and a variety of other features.
Repositories are identified and entered into the registry by an international editorial board of librarians working toward comprehensive coverage of every discipline from repositories around the world.
“All entries in re3data.org are reviewed twice by the editorial board for accuracy. The search, browse, and filtering options make this registry quite useful, and the icons and other metadata indicating important repository characteristics, such as access restrictions and persistent identifiers, add considerable value,” said Sara Scheib, chair of the award committee.
Early work on re3data was supported in the United States by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany, and it is currently managed in collaboration with DataCite, an international, nonprofit organization that promotes data citation.
Purdue University Libraries is a founding organizational member of DataCite, and re3data complements other campus services the Purdue Libraries offer, such as consulting on data management with researchers, teaching data literacy, and providing the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR).
Witt is also the director of PURR, a university core research facility, provided by the Libraries, the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships, and Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP).
The Oberly Award is given every other year by the Science and Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), which is a division of ALA. It will be presented in June at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, UncategorizedMarch 7th, 2017
“In a society named for the ubiquity of information, it is essential that everyone knows how to use information to continually learn in order to be successful in their professional, personal, and civic lives.” — Clarence Maybee, Assistant Professor of Library Science, Information Literacy Specialist, Purdue University Libraries
Information literacy is Clarence Maybee’s “thing” at Purdue University Libraries. He is, after all, the Purdue Libraries’ information literacy specialist.
So, it was with much excitement that he recently accepted a faculty position with the Association of College and Research Library’s (ACRL) Information Literacy Immersion Program. The week-long teacher development program is designed for academic librarians who want to enhance their teaching or programming skills related to information literacy. Maybee, who applied for the position in the ACRL’s recent national search for Immersion Program faculty, interviewed for the job at the American Library Association‘s annual Midwinter Meeting in January. He readily accepted the offer last month.
“As a faculty member in the Immersion Program, I will help craft the Immersion curriculum, work with the other Immersion faculty to facilitate the program, and mentor participating librarians in their teaching and programming roles on their campuses,” he explained.
In the Immersion Program, Maybee joins nationally recognized faculty, from college and research libraries around the nation, who lead the program, which provides instruction librarians the opportunity to work intensively for several days on all aspects of information literacy.
Below, Clarence shared a bit more information about his new opportunity with the ACRL and how his work in the Immersion Program will help serve the students and faculty at Purdue University.
Q. Tell me a little bit about your background, e.g., your work in libraries, as a librarian, a faculty member, as well as specifically what interested you in information literacy.
Clarence: I became a librarian in 2005 after completing my MLIS at San Jose State University (SJSU). Under the mentorship of Dr. Mary Somerville, then assistant dean of the library at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), I completed a master’s thesis in which I studied undergraduates’ experiences of information literacy. The research made me aware of how essential it is to understand the experiences of the learners for whom we are designing instruction. I began my career in librarianship in the role of Information Literacy Librarian at Mills College, and I served in a similar role at Colgate University before coming to Purdue.
Based on my research, which reveals that learners use information in more sophisticated ways when learning about course content, I focus my work at Purdue on integrating information literacy into Purdue courses. With colleagues from the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE) and Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), I manage the Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation program (IMPACT), which aims to make undergraduate courses more student-centered. In 2015, I received a PhD from Queensland University of Technology (QUT). My dissertation thesis, “Informed learning in the undergraduate classroom: The role of information experiences in shaping outcomes,” received QUT’s Outstanding Thesis Award for its contribution to the discipline and excellence demonstrated in doctoral research practice.
Q. How do you think taking part in the Immersion program will help you in your position as an information literacy specialist at Purdue Libraries? How do you think it will help students and faculty at Purdue?
Clarence: Great new ideas come from diverse minds sharing and discussing the possibilities. The Immersion Program Faculty is comprised of nationally known information literacy experts. A cornerstone of the Immersion Program is bringing together academic librarian participants from across the U.S. and beyond. No doubt, the learning experiences generated by this group will give me insights and new perspectives to bring back with me to my work at Purdue.
Q. Tell me something that people may be surprised to learn about you…
Clarence: I used to be a poet in San Francisco.
Q. What do you know about yourself and/or your work now that you wish you would have known when you first started your career?
Clarence: Understanding learning theory better has really advanced my own teaching, as well as helped me in my work with librarians and other instructors.
Read more about information literacy at Purdue University Libraries at www.lib.purdue.edu/infolit, and learn more about the ACRL Immersion Program at www.ala.org/acrl/immersion.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, Uncategorized