Author Archives: Steven Bell

Even Harvard Must Reckon with the Scholarly Publishing Crisis

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With an article titled “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing”, Craig Lambert, writing in the January-February 2015 issue of Harvard Magazine, details the challenges that even universities with the resources of Harvard face as they attempt to navigate the scholarly publishing crisis.

Lambert examines two specific challenges. First, how can the existing 105 university presses survive in an environment where it is increasingly difficult to sell more than a few hundred copies of a scholarly monograph. Second, how can higher education bring sensible reform to a badly broken system of scholarly article publishing that has faculty giving away content to publishers (both commercial and non-profit societies) that sell back the content to academic libraries at subscription prices that cannot be rationalized.

Is open access publishing a possible solution? Lambert dives into the question, and offers some possibilities by profiling a few experiments in approaching scholarly publishing in an entirely different way. This article provides insight into the scholarly publishing crisis, and could well serve as material for a conversation in academic departments where there are concerns about the future of scholarly publishing.

What’s New Wednesdays: Library Quick Guide

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Temple University Libraries staff are constantly asking themselves how to make our collections more accessible, how we can make it easier to get help when it’s needed, and how to help our students and faculty find what they need when they need it. To that end we create numerous research guides, a general user guide to the Libraries, lists of our subject specialists who can answer your questions and even a special guide to computing at the Libraries.

Great stuff, right. But we never rest on our laurels. We are always trying to come up with that next great way to help our community members.

Introducing our new “Getting Started at Temple University Libraries” guide. We’ve distilled the most essential questions and answers into a single, simple guide.

It covers just six things: (1) How do i find a book? (2) How do i find articles? (3) What are the hours? (4) How do i view my account? (5) Where are the study spaces? (6) How can i get more help?

It looks like this:

image of a new library guide

This is our new Getting Started guide

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This is the reverse side of the new quick guide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can pick up one of these new guides at most of our library service desks. If you have any feedback about our new guide, please let us know.

Complete Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)

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Open educational resources (OER) are freely available learning materials that are becoming more popular as a strategy for providing students with an alternative to costly textbooks. Knowing that their students are already challenged by the cost of higher education, many faculty are looking for ways to help students save money. Adopting openly accessible textbooks and other open learning content is one way to do that. But it also has other advantages, the primary one being that it can enhance student success by making learning materials affordable. Research has shown that many students don’t buy an expensive textbook or they try to share it with other students. That detracts from learning.

How do you get started with OER if you are interested in learning more about the resources and how to integrate them into a learning environment? Campus Technology recently published a good introduction to OER in the August 2014 issue. “Complete Guide to OER” starts with a definition: “Teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain…and includes full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, texts, software, and other materials used to access knowledge.”

It then provides a good overview that includes four myths about OER, six tips for using OER, six arguments for OER, 18 sites for finding OER, ideas for spreading the word about OER on campus, and some information about OER formats.

The other way to learn more about OER and how it’s being used at Temple University is to explore our Alternate Textbook Project website. The Temple University Libraries has offered support for faculty to replace their traditional commercial textbook with other materials, including OER. There are examples of projects and links to additional resources. If you would like to learn more about the Alternate Textbook Project or OER, please contact Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian.

Temple Libraries Are Closed for the July 4th Holiday

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Friday, July 4, 2014 is an official Temple University holiday. All Temple University Libraries will be closed on Friday, July 4. All libraries, except the Ginsberg Health Sciences Library, will also be closed on Saturday, July 5.

To help students get ready for summer session 2, the Paley Library will be open on Sunday, July 6 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. Paley Library will return to normal summer session 2 hours on Monday, July 7, operating from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm Monday through Thursday, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm on Friday, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm on Saturday and noon to 5:00 pm on Sunday.Consult individual libraries such as Science and Engineering and Ambler for their hours.

Paley Library Now Open 24 hours For Finals

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Hunkered down and studying hard? You don’t have to worry about leaving your library study space until finals are over. For the duration of the study days and finals period, we’ll suit your schedule, no matter what it is. Paley Library is open 24 hours, all day, every day, from today, Thursday May 1 through 8:00 pm on Wednesday, May 14.

You Can Now Reserve a Study Room at Paley Library

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Finals will be here soon. Study rooms will be in demand. Now you and your study group can reserve one of those study rooms in advance so you will know exactly when and where to get together for your study session. To use a study room a group must have at least three people.

This is a new service that is available, to start, with four study rooms on the third floor of Paley Library. Students who want to screen a movie may reserve one of four rooms in the Media Services area on the lower level. A room may be reserved for a two-hour block. Rooms may be reserved one time a day per student, and may be reserved up to 48 hours in advance. To reserve a room navigate to our new study room reservation system.

Once you reserve a study room, just stop by the Paley Library Circulation/Reserve Desk (in Tuttleman) to check in for your reservation. You’ll be given the key to your study room. Just return the key when you are done using the room. Here’s a quick look at how it works.

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To begin, click on the desired location as shown in the image on the left.

 

 

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Next, from the calendar select the date for which you wish to reserve a study room.

 

 

 

 

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Green blocks illustrate available time slots. Click on the block to select your desired time. Note that there are 15-minute slots between the two-hour blocks. This allows time for students to pick up and return the room keys at the Tuttleman Circulation desk. Add your name and email and then submit.

 

roomres4 When your submission is complete you will receive an on-screen and email confirmation.

 

Our goal in implementing this study room reservation system is to make it more convenient and predictable for students to gain access to one of our study rooms. We also seek to make the use of the rooms more equitable by allowing as many students as possible to reserve one of them for a time slot. If you have any questions about the room reservation system or study rooms, call our Access Services Desk at 215-204-0744. We are also open to your suggestions and feedback.

America’s Other Deficit – The Innovation Deficit

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Here’s an informative four-minute video to help you understand a new type of deficit that threatens the U.S. economy. Innovation helps to grow the American economy through the discovery of new products and services that will bring value to consumers and industry. Many of these innovations, ranging from GPS technology to MRIs or life-saving medicines, were the result of higher education research. We now find ourselves facing an innovation deficit that weakens our capacity to produce the research that leads to innovation.

In a nutshell, the innovation deficit is the difference between actual federal funding for scientific research and education and the amount of funding actually needed for those activities to produce a sufficient level of innovation. The point of the video is that while this may seem like an effective strategy in the short-term to reduce the budget deficit by cutting research funding to higher education, in the long-term it’s actually hurting the economy by reducing our national capacity for innovation. Because we also compete in a global economy, fewer funds domestically decreases the attraction of American universities to the world’s best scientists and innovators and instead encourages them to seek research opportunities in other countries offering more funding. That compounds the problem over time.

InnovationDeficit.org, the producer of the video, is a coalition of higher education, business and public health associations, including the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Council on Education and the Business and Higher Education Forum. The Coalition hopes to use their site and video to alert members of Congress to the serious problems that may result if we allow the innovation deficit to grow.

It’s For the Birds

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It is well documented that the Temple University campus, with it’s many buildings with large windows, is hazardous to birds. Thousands meet their demise when they mistakenly fly into the windows. Paley Library is recognized as one of the most dangerous buildings for birds because of the trees surrounding the building and the extremely large main level windows. Many of the birds don’t stand a chance.

Over the years the University has tried different strategies as deterrents. Unfortunately, attaching plastic hawk figurels to the building exterior and putting a few bird decals on the windows has made minimal difference. In 2012, a new strategy was devised. Students at the Tyler School of Art designed a new type of stencil to apply to windows that proved more effective in repelling the birds before they made contact. The good news is that we are finally beginning to install these decals on windows around the Paley Library. Here is an example of the decal’s appearance on windows in the corridor between Paley and Tuttleman.

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No solution has yet proven to be100 percent effective in ending all bird strikes, but we hope this will help to decrease the numbers of birds that meet an untimely death because of Paley Library.

Something New for Spring 2014 – A Redesigned Catalog Interface

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In an effort to constantly improve your ability to get good results when you search for books, DVDs and more in our library catalog (AKA the “Diamond Catalog”), we have redesigned the interface to simplify the search and improve your library research experience. The transition from our existing catalog to the newly redesigned one will take place on Tuesday, February 4, 2014.

The intent of the new design is to offer a streamlined appearance that minimizes clutter while providing easy access to the mostly frequently used resource links. For example, we’ve made the links to E-ZBorrow and Journal Finder much more prominent at the top of the page. Instead of our current small tabs for title, author and subject searches running along the top of the search box, we’ve made them much more visible by enlarging them and adding them to the left side of the page – where they are more likely to be seen and used.

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The effort to simplify and streamline carries over to the display of records:

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We hope you will find our new catalog design easy to use. If you would like to give it a try in advance of the official debut on February 4 you can visit the preview site. If you would like to provide feedback on the appearance or functionality of our redesigned catalog interface please leave your comment to this post or use our “What’s Your Suggestion” blog to share your feedback.

Legislative Update – Open Access Advances

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Each year more faculty and more institutions acknowledge the importance of reforming scholarly communications by creating a new system that better supports publicly open access to research. One way in which this happens is when faculty senates approve Open Access Resolutions that encourage the open sharing of research articles by depositing them in institutional or disciplinary repositories. Significant progress also happens when federal law creates new guidelines and requirements for public sharing of research funded by taxpayers.

In 2007, with the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), federal law mandated that all articles published as a result of grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) be made available to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication. Known as the “Public Access Policy”, it was a major advancement in open access. As a result close to 100,000 research articles are publicly accessible. However, since then, there has been no additional legislation passed to expand the Public Access Policy to other fields. It is not for lack of trying.

The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was first introduced in 2006, reintroduced in 2009, and reintroduced again in the 112th Congress on February 9, 2012 (as S. 2096 and H.R. 4004). FRPAA aimed to expand public access policies to other departments/agencies. Despite setbacks experience wiht FRPPA, the effort to pass new public access legislation continues. On February 14, 2013, The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR, HR708 and S350) was introduced. This bipartisan legislation would require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

While it was beneficial for the White House, in 2013, to request the Office of Science and Technology Policy to direct each Federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to increase public access to funded research results published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications, it is still necessary to pass the FASTR bill in order to ensure that the expansion of public access requirments to other federal agencies is mandated by law. Despite the number of legislators from both parties co-sponsoring FASTR, in the current legislative environment, the prospect for it being approved this year is questionable. Whatever happens, the momentum continues to grow for public access legislation in both the library and higher education communities. With the undeniable success of the NIH Public Access Policy, in time we are likely to see the passage of FASTR.