Author Archives: jayshree

Tackling the pandemic situation in French academic libraries: ADBU’s initiatives

©G.Gouret

Tackling the pandemic situation in French academic libraries: ADBU’s initiatives

ADBU is the French Association of Academic Libraries and Documentation (https://adbu.fr). In the transforming ecosystem of knowledge and information, ADBU carries the vision of a university library with a strong societal role. ADBU is concerned with questions of strategy and the evolution of scientific and technical information and constantly questions, with openness and audacity, the place of academic libraries in society. ADBU fights against preconceived ideas and fully reaffirms the role, missions, ambition and values of university libraries. Places of sharing and expression, of effervescence of ideas, of intellectual wealth, of achievement and innovation, academic libraries are the pioneers, within higher education and research, of the dissemination of digital knowledge and the sharing of knowledge. They are a key player in student success and research.

Facing Covid-19, France is under confinement since March 17, 2020. The situation disrupts our daily lives: students, teachers, researchers, administration staff, IT staff, librarian. We all have to deal with this injunction of continuity and manage our own personal lives. ABDU regularly releases episodes written from academic librarians point of view, all CC-BY: https://adbu.fr/covid-19-france/

ADBU also launched the “Decrypting disinformation with my library” initiative, which offers an analysis of disinformation via an infographic, which regroups a series of useful definitions, links to some reliable sites, and free tools accessible online when facing conspiracy theories, rumors, fake news and deep fake that are developing on the Internet in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This initiative and others taken by those involved in higher education, including documentary and library support, are listed on the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research website https://services.dgesip.fr/I19/T17/

In an uncertain and changing legislative environment, ADBU also provides a valuable forum for its members for information exchange and reflection at a time when dialogue is essential to allow academic libraries to operate in a coherent manner.

More information can be found on www.adbu.fr, you can also contact us at infos@adbu.fr

Sophie Valade, ADBU

Musings on a Closed Library Building Or: A Library’s Reach Should Exceed Its Grasp . . .

What’s a building for?  I promised to write for the ARL section blog a few weeks ago, when the world was a simpler place.  My theme is reinvention:  how we reinvent the future of libraries by the way we reinvent the buildings in which we practice our profession.  Since I made that promise, of course, we have for the most part left our buildings closed and dark while we together ride out the viral storm that has swept upon us.

But perhaps this moment can give us perspective on my topic by making us think about just what we are missing, just what we need, just what we can do.  For there are certainly voices emphasizing for us just how much of what libraries have traditionally done can be done now either by libraries working in a purely networked digital space or even simply by the free market in information mediated by the open internet.  What then is left for library buildings?

In 2015, I came to Arizona State University, a large public institution (well over 100,000 students) known for its innovative research, innovative pedagogy, and digital outreach, with a mandate to take on the challenge of “the building”.  The Carl Trumbull Hayden Memorial Library, built in 1966 in a near-brutalist style, featuring 13-ton concrete panels shielding the upper floors, needed help advancing into its second half century:  so what should we do?

A two-year planning process and now a two-year reconstruction process have given us a shining, essentially new facility with which we are just beginning to work.  What can it hope to do?

The essential function of library buildings has always been to provide a place to read and think and write.  Yes, spaces filled with books are near ideal places to think and write, but I choose to put the emphasis on the people who came into these buildings and what they did there.  The most fabulous collection – be it imagined by Borges or Eco or the administration of Harvard University – is nothing without people who know how to keep it alive, by infusing it with new materials and by making creative use of what such a collection holds.  That powerful ability to support some of the most fragile of human activities has made the word “library” what the marketers would call a “killer brand.”  People know what libraries are and they think of them in almost invariable positive ways.  There are people who don’t use libraries or think about them, but libraries have vanishingly few enemies.  Destruction, when it has come to libraries, has more often been thoughtless and incidental, arising from budget cuts, ignorance, and neglect, not so often deliberate and focused.  True, the positive associations of the brand may be weak in some quarters, but they remarkably widely held nonetheless.

That makes our buildings places of first resort, for just the sort of people and activities we most seek to support.  We see that now in academic institutions, where even students whose own disciplines have transitioned heavily to digital information resources, still flock to library buildings as places to work, alone or (increasingly) in small focused ad hoc groups of friends and comrades-in-study.  At ASU, we see 15,000 users a day in our two main buildings during ordinary term time, more when exams loom.  They come to do what their ancestors did – read and write and think.

Fewer of them come looking for print books.  So do we pull back the books?  Yes and no.  Given modern technologies of access and, as the retailers say, “fulfillment”, we can get books or, often enough digital representations of books, into the hands of any user anywhere quickly and easily.  We no longer need or benefit from one huge collection of public-facing books in one place as obviously as we once did.  Accordingly, many academic libraries have chosen to be more selective in how and where print books are housed, while increasing accessibility through various forms of delivery.  Our experience was that our traditional stacks were largely deserted and unpopulated – even beginning to be thought of as unsafe for isolated students!  (ASU became a university in 1958 and does not have old, rich, deep collections of the kind where traditional browsing is a treasure hunt.  Older, richer institutions have a different opportunity here, but realistically most academic collections can do as we have done.)  So now we will have about 325,000 volumes on our open shelves and another 4.5 million available on request.

Our principles in selection for those stacks?  (1) Emphasize the book-heavy disciplines of the humanities.  (2) Select for relevance, currency, quality, and interest – not for frequency of circulation.  (3) Emphasize collection and display of materials of high interest specific to the given library’s user community.  With time, this will mean more shift of collecting focus to the things that make a given library truly distinctive.  (4) Think of every book on the shelves as having two functions:  first, as an important and high quality work of human creation capable of enlightening and informing the best research and learning; and second, as a marketing device.  Marketing device?  I mean that when those 15,000 students come through our buildings every day, we want them to see and handle and think about print books that do attract their attention and communicate to them especially the diversity and character of the work we do in a university.  The ideal student is one who stumbles on a volume of medieval philosophy or gender theory and has her whole intellectual life transformed by the encounter.

That means we now work with faculty and students to curate and keep alive our collections, presented for the most part on lower ranges of shelving, brightly lighted, interspersed with reading and study spaces, with many books facing out and many innovative strategies for gathering books together – gathering them as it were to talk to each other and thus to be able to talk to students and researchers in new ways.

The goal here with print books is shared by our other services – our maker spaces, our video studios, our geospatial center, our data science group, our digital antiquity repository – to give students the advantage in the library of direct contact with resources that can excite, inspire, and elevate their best work – their best selves.  They will go away from the building at the end of the afternoon, but we want to use that “marketing” opportunity to send them away changed – more ambitious, more confident, more curious, more disciplined, and of course readier to use all the other resources that we make available to them.  In the last calendar year, ASU users (students, staff, and faculty) used their university credentials to log in to our library systems from 175 different countries.  On that version of the ASU Library, the sun never sets.  The buildings we maintain on our campuses are often enough open 24 hours a day during term time, but they are now engines of community, curiosity, convening – and, always, ambition and curiosity.

We believe our library buildings can and will be as important and exciting and essential to faculty and students as they have ever been – and in many ways, even more empowering and enabling.  We can’t wait to re-open the doors again to prove we’re right.

Further reading:

 

James J. O’Donnell

Professor, Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies

University Librarian

Arizona State University

jod@asu.edu

Academic Libraries: a Chilean Perspective

Esta foto de Autor desconocido está bajo licencia CC BY-SA-NC

Academic libraries are currently transforming the traditional services of reference and lending for researchers and undergraduates to one where they provide large collaborative spaces for their users to work on projects of their areas of study or simply on business projects.

This trend is quite attractive thanks to digital services. For example, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile implements cultural management services customized to the needs of the Library users. This encompasses guidance for the usage of the library and its management systems, as well as bibliographic research for dissertations. This is certainly is a step forward for our academic libraries in the sense that it goes beyond traditional services. Effectively, the creation of collaborative workspaces serves not only the internal users of the prestigious university but also all other kind of researchers and students.

All Chilean higher-educations institutions – so-called traditional universities, professional institutes, and technical training centers – have been involved in such an initiative. In other words, academic libraries have been transformed into distant relatives of the public libraries, sharing the same need to create links with communities and provide quality knowledge and cultural management.

Clearly, such an evolution has not been easy given the usual budget metrics of academic libraries, which in Chile depend on the level of student enrollments in institutions of higher education. Still, the increase of document loans has helped raise awareness amongst authorities of the need to provide an adequate budget to such initiatives. In effect, adequate resources allocation has proven beneficial for both external and internal users of the academic libraries.

Today, in the same way as digital readings clubs are renewing the usage of public libraries, likewise co-working spaces are reinventing academic libraries. In that sense, awareness by policy makers and library managers of these trends is important, because reaching out to communities means opening up to new potential students of the higher education institutions.

Chile is changing. This is true not only the constitutional field – since a December 2019 popular vote, the political framework known as “Magna Carta”, which dates to the 1980’s, is set to change. This is clearly also the case for libraries and especially academic libraries and their impact on communities. There are 63 universities in Chile and 34 Institutions of higher education that are geographically positioned in places outside the reach of Public Libraries. Therefore such academic libraries must have a double function: provide curricular education, and encourage reading.

Camila Muñoz Churruca

Bibliotecológa
Universidad Bolivariana de Chile
Chile
Email: camilachurruca@live.com

Further reading:

  • González Guitián, Virginia. (s/a). University Libraries: brief approach to their new settings and challenges (2010): http://scielo.sld.cu/pdf/aci/v18n2/aci02808.pdf
  • Colegio de Bibliotecarios de Chile. Buenas Prácticas aplicadas a las Unidades de Información. Santiago de Chile. Colegio de Bibliotecarios de Chile (2011): http://bibliotecarios.cl/descargas/2012/10/libro20111.pdf
  • Varela-Prado, Carmen, & Baiget, Tomàs.. El futuro de las bibliotecas académicas: incertidumbres, oportunidades y retos.Investigación bibliotecológica26(56), 115-135 (2012): http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0187-358X2012000100006&lng=es&tlng=es
  • Pisté, S., & Marzal, M. A. (2018). Bibliotecas universitarias y educación digital abierta: un espacio para el desarrollo de instrumentos de implementación en web y de competencias en información e indicadores para su evaluación. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología, 41(3), 277-288. doi: 10.17533/udea.rib.v41n3a06
  • Machado Borges Sena, Priscila & Cándido, Ana Clara [Et .al]. (2019) Prácticas de innovación abierta para impulsar propuestas novedosas en bibliotecas. IFLA WLIC.

Research Commons in Public Libraries: New Space for Development

Nowadays public libraries are rarely viewed as a space for researchers. Digitalization and the Open Science movement are the prime drivers which have changed the situation. Thus, in 2020 a new space for researchers will open in the Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow. Although it’s a public, not an academic library, we hope it will further enhance citizen science. Moreover, research spaces in public libraries can be used for advocating interests of libraries in a variety of ways.

Information literacy for everybody
Research Commons are places where librarians can show how useful they can be for the digital era natives. It is information literacy that is the most important skill for those working with electronic information. In terms of lifelong learning, everybody needs basic research skills to find, evaluate and quote information sources correctly.

Research for everybody
Research Commons in public libraries offer the local community a great opportunity to connect with the world trends in research. That could be a great contribution to popularization of science. Besides, among services available in Research Commons there will be
scientometrics, grant and conference searching, as well as academic reading and writing services. These services will show how essential librarians’ assistance can be, particularly their searching skills.

Academic reading for everybody
Also, it’s a great opportunity for libraries’ partners to promote their collections and to make their electronic resources globally visible. The general public will have access to unique resources, which universities and academies normally don’t have. Combining science, education, library and business in one place will have a positive effect upon scholarly communication. And that’s how the ecosystem of
open science is being created. We are very thankful to our partners Elsevier and Proquest, who have started creating the Research Commons together with us.

Mikhail Shepel
Director General
Rudomino All Russia State Library for Foreign Literature
Russian Federation

mikhail.o.shepel@libfl.ru

UGC-CARE Reference List of Quality Journals – an unique Indian national initiative to control the menace of Predatory Journals

To promote quality research, academic integrity and publication ethics among Indian Higher Education Intuitions, University Grants Commission (UGC), Government of India on 26th November 2018 formed a Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics (UGC-CARE) to develop a reference list of quality journals. The basic purpose of UGC-CARE list of quality journals is to discourage researchers from publishing in low quality journals or predatory journals. The UGC-CARE is managed by an Empowered Committee with the help of 31 UGC-CARE Members. Besides, there are four coordinating Universities to create awareness among the Researchers and also to provide necessary support and guidelines for the faculty and students in different zones.

UGC-CARE List of quality Journals.

The UGC-CARE List of quality Journals which was launched this year includes research journals from all disciplines and mainly divided into two groups. Group I Journals found qualified through UGC-CARE Protocol. Group II Journals indexed in globally recognized databases. The list is dynamic in nature and is being updated quarterly on the first of January, April, July and October every year.

UGC-CARE List Group I:

Anyone can recommend journal/s, whether Indian or foreigner, for inclusion in the UGC-CARE List, Group I by following the prescribed submission process available at https://ugccare.unipune.ac.in preferably through UGC-CARE Member or UGC Coordinating Universities or IQAC Cell of any college or University. Publishers can also submit journal title/s through IQAC Cell of any affiliated college / University following the prescribed submission process with the recommendation of teaching faculty along with the duly signed declaration form by competent authority .The title is/are reviewed by the UGC Empowered Committee and if qualified on parameters and UGC protocol, it is included in the list. Apart from these journals, a list of Indian journals, especially from disciplines of Arts, Humanities, Languages, Culture and Indian Knowledge Systems, is being prepared and updated quarterly. It has good organizational structure to identify and prepare a list of reputed journals not indexed in international indexing databases

UGC-CARE List Group II:

The Journals which are included in reputed and globally recognised indexing databases such as indexed in Scopus (Source list) or Web of Science (Arts and Humanities Citation Index Source Publication, Science Citation Index Expanded Source Publication, Social Science Citation Index Source Publication) etc. have been included under this group.

What more?

For the benefit of the Scholars and Researchers from time to time UGC-CARE develops the guidelines and organized training programmes. On the recommendation of UGC-CARE, University Grants Commission has approved 2 Credit courses to create awareness about publication ethics and publication misconducts entitled Research and Publication Ethics (RPE) to be made compulsory for all PhD. Students for pre-registration course work. It is going to be 30 hours course and having six modules. UGC has also issued a notification that Researchers will not be having benefit of getting research score for the papers published in Journals not listed in UGC-CARE list.

I hope that this blog post may be useful and can start further discussion on the subject. For any further suggestions / information / clarification please feel free to contact me.

Professor (Dr.) Ramesh C. Gaur
Dean, Director (Library & Information) & Head, Kalanidhi Division
Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA)
rcgaur66@gmail.com

Fantastic Futures: The 2nd International Conference on AI for Libraries, Archives, and Museums

As trusted partners in the provision and management of information, libraries, archives, and museums are looking for practical and ethical approaches to the suite of technologies known as Artificial Intelligence (AI).  The second Fantastic Futures conference, hosted at Stanford Libraries from December 4th to the 6th2019, brought together more than 250 practitioners from across these fields to build communities of practice around the application of AI, and to examine the ways in which AI has the potential to change libraries, the ways libraries can (or should) change AI, and conversely the ways AI can elevate library services.

The conference opened with a day of presentations and plenary sessions.  In their opening keynotes, Stanford’s University Librarian, Mike Keller, and Aslak Myhre from the National Library of Norway looked at the potential for AI to radically improve the ability of libraries, archives, and museums to unlock the stored value of their collections by making them more findable, and more accessible.  Libraries have strong traditional values, and as AI transforms workflows librarians are questioning the capacity of AI to respect and embrace privacy, openness, equity, and diversity.  Each field can potentially learn from the other.  Additional presentations delved more deeply, looking at AI and its emerging role in cultural heritage, approaches to democratizing AI, and issues of data privacy and ethics.

The second day brought a series of hands-on workshops providing practical instruction for staff across library, museum, and archive organizations, including administrators, content experts, catalogers, designers, and engineers.  Workshops included an introduction to computational text analysis, a focused look at Tensorflow 2.0 + Keras for model prototyping, a walkthrough of work on algorithmic object and feature extraction from historical maps, and a session directed at project managers examining the implications of programmatic applications of AI.  To extend those workshop discussions and further foster interaction, the third, and closing, day of the conference was an Unconference-style event, with attendees self-organizing around interest groups.

As an organizer, I’m very pleased with the extensive engagement and practical discussions that I saw happening at the Fantastic Futures conference.  The program went beyond demonstrations of current practice, though it did that, and demonstrated both the significant opportunity that AI presents to transform librarianship, as well as the need for incorporating ethics and traditional library values in the field of AI  A third annual conference is already being planned for 2020, and look forward to even greater global engagement there.

Mimi Calter
Deputy University Librarian
Stanford Libraries, USA
mcalter@stanford.edu

Grant Winner Report, Nigeria

IFLA 2019 Congress Experience by IFLA WLIC 2019 Attendance Grant Winner

My first attendance at the IFLA World Library & Information Congress in Athens, Greece did not disappoint! I had the great opportunity to attend for the first time an IFLA Congress with generous sponsorship by Ex Libris and SAGE. I was advantaged to be selected as one of the attendance grant winners for IFLA ARL Attendance Grants for IFLA 2019 from Africa.

Pre-Conference Workshop

I arrived in Athens via Istanbul on the 21st of August, 2019 to be part of pre-conference workshop organized by IFLA Journal Editorial Committee and the Social Science Libraries held at the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation Library, Piraeus, Greece, the pre-conference workshop was an eye-opener to the latest trends in social science research, thanks to the scholarship grants by the IFLA Journal Editorial Committee.

Main Conference

At the end of the pre-conference workshop on the 23rd of August, along with other participants, I moved to the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre (MAICC) to pick the conference materials. MAICC offers the finest facilities, stunning aesthetics and cutting-edge technology. A landmark in the centre of Athens. I was not disappointed with what I have read about Athens around May 2019 when I was scheduling date for my visa interview; No doubt, Athens has been rising as Southern Europe’s most exciting city-break destination. The city’s appeal as a tourist destination is booming, thanks to infrastructure and cultural attractions, transportation network, green spaces, and the unification of the city’s main archaeological sites. I was privileged and excited to attend ARL meeting at the Athens College, where I was introduced as the Grant winner from Africa by the chair ARL standing committee; Mimi Calter.

The Opening Ceremony took place at the Lambrakis Hall on Sunday, 25 August. The event brought together over 3700 librarians and information professionals to discuss ideas relating to the Conference theme Libraries: dialogue for change. The second and third days of the Conference was an intensive and totally enlightening environment for me due to the large spectrum of topics discussed. Through the papers presented, I realized clearly that Libraries serve as open, free, democratic, inclusive and participatory meeting places. I had a chance to join interesting sessions where presenters talked about their publishing experience, open access initiatives, as well as measures to research evaluation. I also had a chance to talk to some of the technology vendors’ representatives exhibiting their products and services in the marketplace hall.

During the conference, I enjoyed learning about initiatives to drive change in international representation among scholars. I gained new knowledge by participating in sessions where topic experts presented their perspectives on Libraries: dialogue for change. I am grateful to have gained these perspectives.

Indeed the IFLA WLIC 2019 in Athens presents a great opportunity for my professional development and I am more than happy to be able to contribute to the discussions during the conference. The theme of the 2019 conference was Libraries: dialogue for change. As IFLA says, “Libraries serve as open, free, democratic, inclusive and participatory meeting places. I couldn’t agree more, and I dialogued extensively with new friends about the exciting future of libraries across the globe. The discussions that have the potential to define the future of our profession for years to come. Indeed, Athens inspires and seduces its visitors, leaving its mark on their hearts and minds. Surrounded by a lining of stunning seas and mountains, this travel-friendly city is filled with gems just waiting to be discovered. Ohhhhh I have to come back very soon!

I returned home very excited, awestruck by the excellent organization of the conference, and professionally richer by gaining plenty of new ideas to be shared among my colleagues back home in Nigeria. Thank you once again to IFLA ARL Standing Committee for offering me the funding: I am very grateful!

Adetomiwa  Basiru

Tekena Tamuno Library, Redeemer’s University, Ede Osun State, Nigeria.

tommybashy06@yahoo.com   adetomiwat@run.edu.ng