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I suppose this proves that books are still relevant, but what about people?
Thoughts?
A High-Tech Library Keeps Books at Faculty Fingertips—With Robot Help
PRIMO Recognition for LIS
Last week staff in Library Instruction Services heard the good news that two more of their instructional efforts were accepted into the PRIMO Database, the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Instruction Section’s peer-reviewed collection of instructional materials. The purpose of PRIMO is to foster sharing of high quality digital resources to support academic librarians’ as they teach users how to find and evaluate information.
PRIMO now includes a total of four projects designed by Library Instruction Services:
This tool helps students turn their research question into a successful database search. Students often struggle with this first piece of the research process but good keyword selection is vital to bringing back relevant and useful resources.
Tip Jar posts, which have been featured on this blog before, use comics and video to introduce undergraduates to research strategies, resources and library services. They are shared through the News For Undergraduates blog, incorporated into course-specific research guides, and used during chat reference transactions.
This interactive tutorial helps students avoid unintentional plagiarism. Students learn what constitutes plagiarism, why it matters, and strategies for avoiding plagiarism such as quoting, paraphrasing and note-taking. The tutorial is assigned by faculty across campus who can upload a related quiz to their Blackboard course site. Libraries staff were also featured in a PRIMO Site of the Month interview discussing the tutorial’s design.
Understanding Citations Tutorial
This interactive tutorial helps students do research and avoid plagiarism by explaining the elements of a citation. At the end of the tutorial, students are able to discern between different types of citations (a journal article versus a book, for example) and recognize the elements of a citation so that they can build a proper citation for their own bibliography.
These resources are available through the Libraries website 24/7 for students who need help even when the Libraries aren’t open. They allow us to provide point of need instruction whatever the time of day and support us as we work with students on their research projects.
Catherine Hamer is the Associate Director for User Services at the University of Texas Libraries.
This Donation Sounds Great
An unexpected gift can sometimes be the most invaluable.
Thanks to a generous donation from the Audio Preservation Fund – an Austin-based nonprofit formed by three UT alumni in 2009 – the already extensive Historic Musical Recordings Collection (HMRC) just got a little more so with the addition of 1,000 vinyl albums.
Chairman of the Audio Preservation Fund William Vanden Dries hand-delivered the eclectic mix of recordings to the Collections Deposit Library on Tuesday. After an extensive review of the HMRC’s holdings, the group determined where their reserves might bridge gaps in the collection’s catalog, and the gift was amassed from the cache of an unnamed individual collector.
The Audio Preservation Fund acts as a facilitator for the collection and preservation of sound recordings, and for the distribution of donated items to suitable recipients including public archives, libraries, museums, universities and research centers. The Fund’s goal is to make private collections available to the public in an effort to improve access to rare, unique and historical audio.
We express our gratitude to the Audio Preservation Fund on behalf of the Libraries and the patrons who will benefit from their generous gift.
On Litigating Fair Use
From Duke University Libraries:
When the Association of Research Libraries wrote a letter to the CCC expressing disappointment over the decision to help underwrite the lawsuit, CCC’s reply emphasized that no damages were being sought and maintained that their participation had the simple goal of “clarifying” fair use. This strikes me as disingenuous. There are more efficient ways to clarify fair use than litigation, and the CCC has a definite financial interest in the case even absent any request for damages. CCC’s aim here is not to clarify fair use but to narrow it dramatically, to their direct and immediate profit.
The argument developed here by Kevin Smith places the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) in a harsh light – subvening copyright violation litigation in order to further restrict access options to intellectual property, thus securing its own role in the publishing community while attempting to prop up that foundering industry a little longer. As Paul Courant observes elsewhere (and thanks to Paul for the pointer to this article) it forces a reluctant higher education community to seek alternatives to its own and commercial presses – an outcome potentially fatal to the industry.
The Future Predicted in 1936
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I think Binkley could be on to something….
“The present generation should not be surprised at the conclusion of a technological revolution that has as its seed [sic] of a cultural revolution. Such may indeed be true in this instance. The cultural revival of the monopoly of the metropolis and the democratization and deprofessionalization of scholarship are on the horizon which seems to lie ahead. And these things themselves accord with other elements of our social and economic prospects, notably the possible decline in the centralization of population in cities and the development of a new leisure in the hands of a well-educated people. The same technical innovations that promise to give aid to the research worker in his cubicle may also lead the whole population toward participation in a new cultural design.”
The Libraries have two copies of his Manual on methods of reproducing research materials, both available for recall from the Library Storage Facility.
(via boingboing.net)
HRDI Project Earns Grant
The Aegis Trust is one of eight organizations that have been awarded an EMC Heritage Trust Project grant through the company’s Information Heritage Initiative program for its work on the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. Aegis partnered with the Rwandan government and the Libraries’ Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) to build the framework for the Archive, the digital files of which reside with HRDI.
The grant will provide for ongoing archival activities including the digitization and preservation of audiovisual testimonies, historical photographs, documents, newspapers and genocide victims’ information which is made available through the Archive’s site.
Congratulations to the HRDI team for their continuing excellent work on this important project.
Choosing a Path Forward
Recently, The University of Texas at Austin has found itself at the center of a debate over the structure of modern research universities. Questions have been raised about the value of research to the academic mission of higher education, and in light of the state’s current budget situation, whether state institutions can afford to be so heavily invested in the research enterprise. There is a belief in some quarters that the commitment to research excellence that characterizes top-tier research universities is unavoidably detrimental to the University’s teaching mission.
President Bill Powers presented his case last week in a speech that effectively made the argument that teaching and research are inextricably linked at the level of excellence the University pursues. In fact, his examples demonstrated that the interplay between teaching and research has resulted in the sort of collaboration and innovation invoked by the notion that what starts here changes the world. President Powers noted that our ability to sustain this level of excellence requires a continued commitment to the tradition of ongoing institutional introspection and transformation that have made The University of Texas at Austin a model of efficiency and excellence.
If you’ve yet to do so, you can view the speech in its entirety or read the transcript.
In Memoriam
Hal Box, one of our Libraries Advisory Council members and a former Dean of the School of Architecture has passed away. The University of Texas Libraries has lost a dear friend and advocate, and we join with our colleagues across the University in mourning his passing.
Among his many honors and awards, Hal was also recognized by the University of Texas; The Hal Box Endowed Chair in Urbanism was established at the university in 1999 and the Texas Exes Alumni Association bestowed on Box its highest honor, the Distinguished Alumnus Award, in 2003.
Memorial services are pending. Visit Box’s online memorial page.
Heath Talks Assessment in Austere Times
Before Dr. Fred Heath joined the University of Texas Libraries as Vice Provost and Director, he had spent several years at Texas A&M with a team of faculty and research professionals developing and honing an assessment tool called LibQUAL+™. With a certain degree of prescience, his earlier work has given the Libraries a leg up in dealing with the economic downturn.
Dr. Heath took some time to discuss his experience and perspective on the vital role of assessment in building a library.
So, why do assessment?
Fred Heath: I think this pressure for accountability has always been part of the public sector where it’s really hard to measure bottom lines. If you’re going to succeed in advancing your program then you are going to have to have some structure that relates investments to outcomes, and there aren’t many tools to measure our “profits and losses” in the public sector. For several years we’d been searching and we found a tool called SERVQUAL that was used with great success in the private sector, and we also had a great relationship with the developers of that tool. We started noodling there, and it grew.
There were three young professors in the College of Business at Texas A&M – assistant professors at the time they started developing SERVQUAL – who needed a research protocol, and grew it into, perhaps, the most significant user satisfaction survey in that sector. It applied to everything from aircraft companies, to insurance, to restaurants. And one day we visited with the professor who was still there – the other two are now employed elsewhere around the world in higher education – and asked, “Do you think we can redirect SERVQUAL to the not-for-profit sector, specifically to education, and then even more specifically to libraries?” And we were really cautious, because it was a shameless emulation of what those three researchers were trying to do, but he was hugely supportive, open to the idea, and, in fact, all three of those developers have lent time to us over and again to help us build the tool that LibQUAL+™ became. Without them, without that beginning, I doubt we would’ve had the perspective and background ever to get it launched.
How important was it for the development of LibQUAL+™ to have faculty members as part of the development team?
FH: We could never have done this without the methodologists and the economists and the statisticians that we had on our side. And we, ourselves, were faculty in our own specialties, but not those skill sets. It was bringing all of those tools, all of that commitment, an emerging awareness of survey protocols in a nascent Web environment…we’d had no clue how we’d plan to do this on paper, and one of the methodologists said, “You know, I think we can do this on the Web pretty soon.” So, it took a village to build it; it took many different types of faculty to make it happen. Continue reading Heath Talks Assessment in Austere Times
TPA Giveaways Are Back – Season Subscription Contest
Last year, followers of Tex Libris and friends and followers of the Libraries Facebook page and Twitter feed got to participate in contests for tickets to events that were part of the Texas Performing Arts 2010-11 season.
We’re happy to say that we’ve partnered with TPA again for the 2011-12 season, and we’ll soon be kicking off the promotion with a pair of tickets to an as-yet-unspecified performance.
While you’re waiting for our first giveaway, enter TPA’s big opening contest for a season subscription (four pairs of tickets!) to upcoming performances.
And check back here often (or add us to your RSS feed) for more chances to win.