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Opening Up the Research Support Ambassadors
This Open Access Week sees the launch of the fully open version of our popular Research Support Ambassador programme. This initiative has been running in Cambridge libraries since 2015 and has seen over one hundred staff from across the library network enhance their knowledge of scholarly communication. It has also been through several different versions, transitioning from a taught face-to-face programme to an internal online course. The time is now right to open up this content to a wider audience and launch the programme as a resource for anyone who wants to make use of it. You can watch an online trailer for the programme on our OSC YouTube channel.…
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Text and data mining services: an update
Text and Data Mining (TDM) is the process of digitally querying large collections of machine-readable material, extracting specific information and, by analysis, discovering new information about a topic. In February 2017, a group University of Cambridge staff met to discuss “Text and Data Mining Services: What can Cambridge libraries offer?” It was agreed that a future library Text and Data Mining (TDM) support service could include: Access to data from our own collections Advice on legal issues, what publishers allow, what data sets and tools are available Registers on data provided for mining and TDM projects Fostering agreements with publishers. This blog reports on some of the activities, events and…
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Libraries’ role in teaching the research community – LILAC2017
Recently Claire Sewell, the OSC Research Support Skills Coordinator attended her first LILAC conference in Swansea. These are her observations from the event. LILAC (Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference) is one of the highlights of the information profession calendar which focuses on sharing knowledge and best practice in the field of information literacy. For those who don’t know information literacy is defined as: Knowing when and why you need information, where to find it and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner (CILIP definition) Showcasing OSC initiatives Since it was my first time attending it was a privilege to be able to present three sessions on different…
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Where did they come from? Educational background of people in scholarly communication
Scholarly communication roles are becoming more commonplace in academic libraries around the world but who is actually filling these roles? The Office of Scholarly Communication in Cambridge recently conducted a survey to find out a bit more about who makes up the scholarly communication workforce and this blog post is the first in a series sharing the results. The survey was advertised in October 2016 via several mailing lists targeting an audience of library staff who worked in scholarly communication. For the purposes of the survey we defined this as: The process by which academics, scholars and researchers share and publish their research findings with the wider academic community and…
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Changing roles and changing needs for academic librarians
The Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) has joined the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (C-EBLIP) Research Network, and as part of this commitment has prepared the following blog which is a literature review of papers published addressing the changing training needs for academic librarians. This work feeds into research currently being carried out by the OSC into the educational background of those working in scholarly communication. The piece concludes with a discussion of this research and potential next steps. Changing roles There is no doubt that libraries are experiencing another dramatic change as a result of developments in digital technologies. Twenty years ago in their paper addressing the education of…
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Are academic librarians getting the training they need?
As part of Open Access Week 2016, the Office of Scholarly Communication is publishing a series of blog posts on open access and open research. In this post Claire Sewell looks at the training of library staff in areas relating to scholarly communication. The problem Few people would deny that the world of the academic library is changing. Users are becoming more and more sophisticated in their information gathering techniques and the role of the academic librarian needs to adapt accordingly or risk being left behind. Librarians are changing from the traditional gatekeeper role to one which helps their research community to disseminate the outputs of their work. This shift offers…
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It’s time for open access to leave the fringe
The Repository Fringe was held in Edinburgh on 3-4 August. With the theme of “Integrating repositories in the wider context of university, funder and external services”, the event brought together repository managers across the UK to discuss practice and policy. Dr Arthur Smith, Open Access Research Advisor at the University of Cambridge, attended the event and came away with the impression that more needs to be done to embed open access in scholarly processes. In his keynote speech to Repository Fringe 2015, titled ‘Fulfilling their potential: is it time for institutional repositories to take centre stage?’ David Prosser, Executive Director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) gave a concise overview of the history surrounding…
