Tag: #author:James

We are your library… wherever you are right now.

To all of our amazing colleagues across academic and professional support departments, and our wonderful students, whether you’re playing football in the field outside the Bill Bryson Library, or at home caring for family and loved ones, our thoughts and best wishes are with you at a time which many of us are trying to struggle for normalcy as everything is changing rapidly around us.

University Library and Collections colleagues are working flat out (both on campus, and working from home – we’ll be sharing pictures and experiences in the near future!) to try to ensure that our existing collections are made as accessible as possible and we are providing support wherever we can, in challenging times (see our web pages for more details and updates including click & collect services, expanded virtual library help and live chat support).

But we are also working with publishers and library colleagues at other universities to ensure we can ease access online to resources wherever we can, for both students and staff. We have highlighted some of those new developments below:

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(Open Access Week) How Open is Open?

During open access week, we have had discussions with academic and professional support colleagues at the department’s we have visited, through events organised for academic colleagues to talk about their research, and through our posts on this blog and via Twitter. We have tried to discuss open access in a wider context, focusing less on the “policy stick” (what authors have to do because their funder, publisher or university requires them to do so), and more on the actual research being made available, how that is then shared and used, and how you (staff, students and everyone else) can search for and access it outside of your usual approaches.

We’d like to close our series of posts this week by briefly highlighting that “open access” can mean different things, and carry different expectations for different content creators and content users. Essentially, when we say something is open access, how open is open?

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(Open Access Week) How can I find Open Access content?

Open Access is about ensuring that anyone anywhere (with a connection to the internet) has free, unimpeded access to the published outputs of publicly funded research. At Durham University, we pay around £3 million each year to provide access to our staff and students to journals and databases. Much of this content is not available to those not at a University – whether that is health workers, teachers, commercial companies or charities working in areas of social welfare.

Even at Durham, staff and students can not access everything they want to. In 2018/19, just under 5,000 requests were made through our Document Delivery Service for items not covered by our current subscriptions. Students and staff at other universities, without the same level resources than Durham has, will face difficulties accessing all of the published research which is out there – they may be faced with paywalls which regularly require the payment of a fee.

“Every year, JSTOR said, it turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles.”

‘JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles’, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 13 2012

Rising to this challenge, policies from research funders, national governments and universities, coupled with support and action from academics across all disciplines, is making more and more research available for free. It still can be tricky however, when hitting that dreaded paywall, to see if there is an open access version of the research available to you.. so lets look at some of the options available to you, whoever you might be.

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Planning a conference – 10 thoughts

Northern Collaboration Conference Committee 2019: The seventh or eighth attempt at a group photograph….

This year Durham University Library and Collections staff both presented at and attended the Northern Collaboration Conference in Hull. One of our colleagues, Rosi Jelfs, was also a member of the Conference Planning Committee. We know that each year, many of our students and professional support colleagues take on similar responsibilities for the first time, so we asked Rosi how she found helping organising the conference this year…

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Open Access Week, 21st – 27th October 2019

Celebrating, discussing, and promoting open access publishing needs to be done throughout the year but it is helpful to have a designated “Open Access Week” and use this as an opportunity to channel our thoughts and to put an extra spring in our steps.

As the blurb on the official website states:

“Open Access Week, a global event now entering its tenth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.”

http://www.openaccessweek.org/

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A judgement on prorogation: floundering in legal citation

Law Reports

Down the road in London Town this morning, a judgment was handed down by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Whilst the judgment itself has attracted far more attention than many others in recent memory, we imagine that for some of our students, and both academic and professional colleagues (denizens of Durham Law School excepted), some of the many citations that peppered the pronouncement may prove particularly perturbing. But help interpreting these is available…

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Looking for a seat?

Durham Teaching & Learning Centre

A shh of Librarians from Durham University Library have this week been getting a sneak preview of the soon to be opened Teaching and Learning Centre. Just 2 minutes walk from the Bill Bryson Library, the centre will offer a range of spaces including a cafe, a range of group quiet study areas, group study rooms (they’re sound-proof – we checked!), flexible teaching rooms, lecture theatres and (after our tour guide got temporarily disorientated and took us into it), at least one walk-in cupboard!

We’ve included some pictures here so you can see the spaces before they’re teeming with staff and students. Enjoy!

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Over a decade of television and radio programming at your fingertips

We’re always excited to highlight new additions to our collections, but from a personal perspective this is one I have been keen for us to get since I first arrived at Durham. If you’re:

  • a student wanting free access to over a decade of archived tv and radio content (whether that’s a Panorama documentary you recall watching that would be useful to recap for your current essay, the entire first season of Bake-off, one of the film’s of the “Grandmother of the French New Wave”, Agnès Varda… or the latest edition of Hollyoaks Omnibus);
  • a member of academic teaching staff, looking to expand module reading lists or ensure students have access to a recent news programme, documentary or film for discussion at an upcoming seminar;
  • a researcher who engages with the media, and wants to keep track of when and where your appearances on the news or at a recent Parliamentary Select Committee were broadcast…

… read on.

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“Isn’t that something! Magnificent sight out here.”

Guardian article headline: Apollo 11 moon landing

Fifty years ago today, the Apollo 11 mission saw the first two humans – Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – land on the surface of the moon (whilst Michael Collins, remaining on the command module overhead, momentarily experienced a solitude unparalleled as he disappeared, alone, in orbit round the dark side of the moon and out of contact and sight of every other known living creature).

Most of us here in the University Library were young children or but glints in our parents’ eyes. But we have many primary sources available to Durham staff and students to explore these and other momentous (infamous or obscure) events in our shared history. Snapshots of how they were reported, the views of those who observed or experienced them, the discussion, commentary or argument that followed.

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“I am not a number. I am a Free Man*!”

* (Please note – this title is a quote from the 1967 British TV Series, The Prisoner. There are recognised issues of gender bias in citation and authorship across academia – this title was not intended to reflect that (and yes, the author was male). Please consider yourself equally free to be treated as a number rather than a person – whatever your gender identity – but recognise that those numbers may reflect bias in the practice of authors and reviewers) [ed: 17th July 2019]

Who is citing who?

We often (well, sometimes) get asked by students:-

– How do I know who has cited this work? (How do I do this?)

We more frequently get asked a similar question by our academic colleagues:-

– How do I know who has cited MY work? (How do I do this?)

Is BIGGER always BETTER?

Why would you not want to know who has been citing your research? It may just be to massage your ego, or it might offer an opportunity to re-evaluate your own work in the new light shed by others. It could offer an opportunity for a future collaboration, or a conversation starter with a citing author at an upcoming conference. Sometimes it is just nice to have that (often fleeting) sensation of finally having your value recognised by someone. Or often, sadly, being able to show how often you have been cited is the game you are forced to play for that next academic job application or promotion review.

When it comes to that last reason, the assumption is often that “bigger is better”. Whilst this may often be true, there is a lot of nuance to that question.. not least what might be understood to be “big” from one discipline to another. But, casting your eyes back to the title of this post, do you want ‘quality’ to be measured by a number? The answer to that question might be influenced by whether you’re a STEM or humanities scholar… or just whether you’re the person sitting on an interview panel with a long-list of over 500 applications to get through in far too little time. Continue reading ““I am not a number. I am a Free Man*!”” →

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