September 17, 2012

Concussion Data, Articles, & More


Now that it's football season (Go Giants!), it's also time to rethink concussions in the sport. There have been some good articles lately, such as Melissa Segura's heartbreaking story about three girlfriends/wives of retired NFL players. Also some indications that the NFL and NCAA are taking concussions seriously: Darrelle Revis was held out of yesterday's Jets game due to last week's head injury, and Arkansas' quarterback Tyler Wilson was held out of yesterday's game against Alabama.

 Additionally, some of my students are working on sports infographics, including one dealing with concussions. I collected links to data & graphics for that class here as well.
Data on Concussions

Recent articles about NFL concussions & related issues
Bibliographies & Resources
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August 21, 2012

Embedding LibGuides into Course Management Systems

from
http://www.iconarchive.com/show/
color-stroked-icons-by-mfayaz/find-icon.html
My getting-ready-for-school tasks include creating library course guides for each class I plan to talk to about using library resources. Last academic year, I taught 54 groups, including "one-shot" instruction sessions, orientations for new & prospective students, and non-course workshops.  I created 31 course guides in support of these sessions, including the ever-popular page for Penny Abernathy's Digital Media Economics and Behavior, Barbara Friedman's Women and Mass Communication, and Dave Cupp's History of Broadcasting. These three pages were among the top 10 visited pages of the whole Park Library website last year. 

 Whoo! those pages are popular! I have long known that, as a student of website analytics.  A recent article in Reference Services Review provides another level of support for this assertion.

 Aaron Bowen, reference librarian at the University of California, Chico, conducted a small study of students' use of LibGuides (software for creating library course guides) in Blackboard, a course / learning management system. The LibGuides were embedded in CSU Chico's Blackboard sites, much as UNC library course guides are embedded in our Blackboard / Sakai course management systems. Bowen queried students about their use of resources used to conduct research for their Communication 131 class.

The results were striking: Of the "57 valid responses, 36 students (63.16 percent) responded they did not use any internet resources, other than the Guide, to complete their assignment." In my words: wow! 63% of students who responded to the survey only used library-sanctioned resources to do research required for their assignment. Those students did not use Google or Wikipedia (or they didn't admit to having done so), while 30% used Google and 16% used Google Scholar in addition to the Guide (9% admitted to having used Wikipedia).

Lots of research indicates that students use Google or other resources on the free Internet to research for their courses. Bowen's research is more consistent with Alison Head's 2007 research described in First Monday that only about 10% of students use Google and other free websites to start their research for courses.

So, good news broadly for student research: there are cases when students are more likely to use library resources to complete their assignments. And good news more specifically for me & my UNC colleagues: embedding library guides into course management systems improves students' use of our resources.

http://www.iconarchive.com/show/
red-little-shoes-icons-by-raindropmemory/
Document-icon.html
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August 07, 2012

Mining User Data: E-Books & E-Journals

I've been meaning to blog about the recent Wall Street Journal article "Your E-Book Is Reading You" and now there's a companion post to write: "Mendeley Injects Some Pace into Academia with Fast, Big Data" (reporting by GigaOM).

Both talk about mining user data generated from use of a product. Alexandra Alter reported in the June 29, 2012 print edition of the Wall Street Journal (online July 19, 2012) that e-book vendors (specifically Nook and Kindle) have data "revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them." The data "focuses on groups of readers, not individuals," and leads Amazon to identify popular passages of books (by looking at the most underlined sentences in books downloaded to their Kindle device). This is moderately interesting: the most underlined is a passage from the Hunger Games trilogy, followed by the first sentence of Pride & Prejudice (see for yourself on Project Gutenburg).

E-book vendors are starting to share data with publishers, "to help them create books that better hold people's attention." (according to Alter's interview with Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble's vice president of e-books). ACK! Writers may start to use metrics to determine the outcome of their novels, or to shape their nonfiction. As a fiction reader, I would much rather that my authors construct the entire novel from their imagination instead of relying on a reader, or worse, the lowest common denominator of readers, to help guide the novel's conclusion. That's why I read fiction: because I want to inhabit the writer's world. Not the writer's world heavily influenced by my fellow readers' opinions.

Further, as a librarian, I'm very wary of the assertion that the data "focuses on groups of readers, not individuals." That may be true today, but will it be ever thus? Can I opt out of having an e-book reader report back what I am reading? Apparently not. I still read my fiction the old-fashioned way, so no one knows what I read. In fact, since most of my fiction is borrowed from the library, the only one who tracks what I read is me (via Goodreads). Most libraries actively do not keep data on what books patrons read, because we believe so strongly in a reader's right to privacy.  Alter quotes security expert Bruce Schneier, who "worries that readers may steer clear of digital books on sensitive subjects such as health, sexuality and security—including his own works—out of fear that their reading is being tracked."

I'm definitely not a fan of e-book vendors tracking my reading habits on a Nook, Kindle, or any other device.

And yet, I cheer at the prospect of "reference manager and PDF organizer" Mendeley offering me data on journals faculty are reading or not reading. TheNextWeb reports that "Users can gain insight into how academic research is consumed, discussed and annotated with social metrics in granular detail" through Mendeley Institutional Edition ("powered by Swets").  Dutch library subscriptions agent Swets says this would offer "real-time visibility into the usage of your library content," but it is not clear how this data would be shared, or at what level.  For instance, would we see only a list of the most and least popular journals? The most and least popular journal articles? Would we see this by discipline? By university? By university and discipline? The more granular the data goes, of course, the greater the chance for veering into user privacy issues noted above.

  • Then again, if I as a librarian who pays a lot of money for academic journals could see which articles or which journals are most and least popular with journalism faculty, or neuro-marketing researchers, I could make better financial decisions about journal subscriptions.
  • Then again, if I ceased to purchase journals because they were not popular, I might enhance a journal's demise by not making it available ... which veers towards the idea that the way e-books are consumed might influence the way fiction is written.
  • Then again, this seems to offer a viable alternative to the slow-moving and proprietary journal assessment tool offered by ISI's Journal Impact Factor.

I'm definitely conflicted on Mendeley's International Edition, but I look forward to hearing more. I'm not conflicted about e-book vendors keeping statistics on what I read, so I'll continue to use the library for my fiction fix.

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July 23, 2012

Good Reading!

I joined Goodreads a few months back, and for some reason, that's motivated me to read more. Actually, I can't prove causation - only correlation. Perhaps I joined Goodreads because I wanted to read more. Or because I was reading more, I joined Goodreads.

Anyway, there is something very satisfying about marking books "read" on Goodreads. Additionally, GoodReads is a nice way to save books I want to read, instead of collecting titles on scraps of paper or in my email.

There's no real relation to cognitive science, as my books are primarily mid-list women's fiction, with an occasional science fiction (or even cognitive science fiction) thrown in. No mysteries, no non-fiction.

Here are the last five:

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March 07, 2012

Find Good Research, Free


image source: FindIcons 

I recently spoke to Daniel Kreiss' JOMC 244 class: Talk Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication, and I created this library resource guide for further research.  I wrote this post for the class tumblr (talkingpolitics.tumblr.com) and am reposting it here.

My presentation had two goals:
  1. Show researchers how to improve search terms to generate more relevant
  2. Show researchers how to access free resources for finding scholarly & newspaper articles. 
I'd like to highlight some of the tips and resources I shared in class in the hopes that they will be useful to those seeking to incorporate research into their reporting.

Search tips: Generating Good Search Terms (any resource)
  1. Start with your concept -- such as negative advertising
  2. Too many results? Put "quotes" around the phrase to require it be searched as a phrase: "negative advertising"
  3. Add another term or two to your search, to make the results more precise:  "negative advertising" AND campaign AND politics
Search tips: More Precise Results (library search engines; won't work in Google)
  1. If you're searching a library database / search engine, limit the content type to scholarly articles or newspaper articles
  2. To expand your results, but keep them relevant, try the wildcard operator, *: "negative advertis*"  AND campaign* AND politic*, which will search for
    • negative advertising; negative advertisements; negative advertisement
    • campaign; campaigning; campaigns
    • politics; political; politician; politicians
  3. To expand results further, while still keeping them relevant, use synonyms for one search term:
    • "negative advertis*"  AND (campaign* OR election*) AND politics
Free Search Resources 
Most states in the United States offer multiple free search engines to residents with a library card. I'll focus here on resources for North Carolina residents, but this model exists all over the U.S.!
NC Live offers hundreds of free, full-text resources to North Carolina residents with a library card. Check out this list of search engines to help you find free journals and newspaper articles!  
  • Academic Search Complete is incredibly useful for scholarly articles, though it also includes newspaper and trade publications. The full-text of many of these articles identified will be available for free; if not, ask your library to get the articles for you (free! via "Interlibrary Loan" magic).
  • Newspaper Source Plus has full-text from hundreds of U.S. newspapers, including over 50 from N.C. as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
All you need to access these is a free North Carolina library card.

Note: while these resources are "free-to-you," they cost the State Library millions of dollars. Please use them!

You may wonder about Google Scholar, which is Google's way of finding scholarly articles.  I have mixed feelings about Google Scholar, which I have documented in a blog post.  As long as you know what it does and doesn't have, it's fine to use. But if you need the full-text of an article that's not in Google Scholar, please ask a librarian!

image from IconArchive
Which brings me to my last point: Ask a Librarian!  Many news organizations have an on-site library, including CNN, the New York Times, and NPR -- if you are lucky enough to work at one of them, please make use of your library resources! Luckily, all you need is a public library card to contact a librarian at your public library for research help. They are happy to help all residents, including journalists.  Public universities are also equipped to help members of the public, including journalists.  

If you spend a little time up front learning what library resources are available in your community, it will save you lots of time later AND will help you find more relevant material to write about.
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February 13, 2012

Engaging Audiences via Social Media (shoutout to #scio12)

teamwork 1, from stock.xchng
I'm facilitating a class tonight on how to increase visibility and evaluating response to a blog. The class is a group of students in the Interdisciplinary Health Communication program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They run the blog Upstream (go take a look!), which has "the goal of encouraging dialogue and debate on health communication."

I'm going to discuss two elements important to all bloggers / Twitterers, both in the library and in the science community (and other communities too, of course):
  1. How to improve visibility of your blog (Twitter / other social media)
  2. How to evaluate the response to your blog
To address these issues,  I plan to morph two great sessions I saw at the 2012 Science Online conference.

To improve visibility folks need to be talking about or sharing your content. Emily Finke and Kevin Zelnio's #scio12 session Understanding audiences and how to know when you are *really* reaching out helped me generate the following questions for the class:
  • What would improving visibility look like? 
    • More hits on your blog?
    • More shared blog posts?
    • More comments on the blog?
  • The audience raised some excellent points about using blog comments to make assessments about your blog itself. These include:
    • Sharing (retweeting or emailing to others) vs. commenting on a blog post
    • Many barriers to commenting on blogs, such as:
      • Comments are longer-lasting, possibly contentious
      • Comments requiring login serves as an additional barrier
      • Commenting is tough on a mobile phone
    • Tweets are more ephemeral, and sharing with people you've chosen
  • Based on these questions, are comments a good way of assessing visibility?
  • One audience member suggested that a good way of increasing reach would be to translate your blog into another language.  This would be important if you wanted a to reach a group for whom English is not the first language.
It's also important to communicate back and forth with your audience on your blog and via Twitter.

I've collected a lot of links to help evaluate the response to your social media presence, which are on my library guide Assessing Social Media Campaigns.  Many of these links were identified by the ScienceOnline session The Attention Economy and Influence Metrics by Adrian J. Ebsary and Lou Woodley. Handy links include 
  • Website Grader, analyzes websites for SEO, readability, links, and more. 
  • TwitSprout, which track social media activity for your Twitter account.
  • TweetPsych creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter account and compares it to the thousands already in the database on categories such as learning, work, media
  • SnapBird doesn't assess your media reach, but it does store the last 3,000 tweets from any Twitter account. Handy for assessing comments about a brand or campaign from a known account.
Lots more to talk about -- I'm sure we won't cover all of these points in the class, but at least it's a good outline.  I plan to share some ideas from the students in a future blog post.

See Also
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February 06, 2012

My Library Life, Last Week

Once again, I participated in #libday8, a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff & library students share a day (or week) in their life through Twitter & other social media tools.

I like to do this for a few reasons. First, I find it fun to chunk my work into 140-character segments -- and amusing to see how much time I spend on the same projects.  By the end of the week, I was tweeting less because the tweets would have read "still working on that LAUNC-CH project" or "still slogging through the 10,000 volume reclassification project."  In fact, I did tweet "still preparing for class" -- but at least in that case, I was preparing for different classes.

My ulterior motive is to show folks, my students and colleagues mostly, what all we librarians do.  Everyone associates librarians and libraries with books, when in fact, most of us do so much more than just deal with books.  The fact that we do more is illustrated, 140 characters at a time, over several days, twice a year, and I think that's good public relations for all librarians & libraries.

I also enjoy the camaraderie of tweeting along with other librarians about their day -- it helps lessen the isolation of dealing with yet another missing book, or corralling another "cheeky journal" (tm @wigglesweets). Plus it's fun to see what other kinds of librarians do, like public librarians and children's librarians.

Thanks to Bobbi & everyone who participated. I had fun!

You can see what I was up to last week by reading these tweets: 
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January 30, 2012

How Librarians Can Help in Real Life, at #scio13, and more

Librarians are so helpful!
(Creative Commons image courtesy of
Christchurch City Libraries on Flickr) 
How do librarians help scientists? If you haven't worked with a good librarian, it's hard to know what we can offer and how we can be useful. I'd love to see a session at a scholarly conference (ScienceOnline, AEJMC, I'm looking at you!) where librarians model how we work our magic with patrons.

I envision a real-time demonstration of the "reference interaction"* between a librarian and a grad student or other patron type. *The term "reference interaction" is used to indicate the session where one of us meets with a researcher ("you") and asks questions about what kind of information you need. We then suggest resources tailored to your need and make sure you know how to use them. 

In my current position, as librarian for journalism & mass communication, recent questions have included:
  • How to download the entire issue of magazine from HathiTrust 
  • Information about online advertising rates for newspapers. Patron needs both the rates themselves as well as scholarly articles about online advertising for newspapers. 
  • Looking for NBC News archives for possible use on Carolina Week. 
  • Need scholarly articles on the history of social media for an independent study. 
  • Fact-checking resources for a class of advanced editing students (list of resources) 
As a super librarian / information coach, I was able to help all of these patrons. But if you didn't know someone could help you find resources as diverse as these, you'd just go to Mr. Google (or Dr. Google Scholar; read my thoughts on this) and see if you could find something useful. 

Maybe you'd go to your favorite database -- many students would go to JStor to get scholarly articles because they'd learned about that terrific search engine in a class. BUT that would be unproductive, because JStor doesn't contain current articles in it (why? "moving wall") ... so if you wanted articles about the success of advertising for online newspapers, you'd get frustrated and go back to Mr. Google.  Or maybe you'd go to LexisNexis, because you've used it before. But you wouldn't find scholarly articles there ... so back you'd go to Mr. Google.

Another reason to talk to a librarian is that we work with folks from many disciplines and can often refer you to someone doing related work. For instance, Student A recently asked me how she'd find a list, (ideally with contact information) of African American newspapers. I pointed her to an excellent resource (the Gale Directory of Publications & Broadcast Media) AND mentioned that one of her colleagues, Student B, had used the resource to identify Latino media outlets. I suggested that Student A contact Student B for tips on how best to use the resource for this project.
These reference sessions generally take 10-30 minutes, depending on how detailed the question is and how knowledgeable the patron is about the resources available. Good librarians will make sure that you know the best resources to use AND that you know a few tips on how to make the resource(s) do what you want.
It's one thing to write about this in a blog post, or for librarians to study and discuss this amongst themselves.  There's got to be a way to show you what we do and how we can help ... so I propose a librarian demo at conferences to demystify our services and share resources with a broader audience.
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January 22, 2012

Field trip to Durham's @LifeandScience museum! #scio12

I was thrilled to go on a behind the scenes tour of Durham's fabulous Museum of Life and Science at last week's ScienceOnline conference. Here is an annotated visual tour of the trip, with photos taken by several of us on the tour. I used Storify to curate the images, which were posted on Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube (the bear video is awesome; especially the last 10-20 seconds).

Thanks especially to Keeper Mikey for the tour!
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January 16, 2012

A Librarian's View of ScienceOnline

I've submitted a photograph to #scio12 science-art show.  I wanted to convey something about science, which is tough since what I most like to photograph is flowers and cats. Ok, I could have argued that they were science photos, but I thought it was a stretch.

I thought more about it and decided to take photos of some of the books I've acquired (for myself or for my library) as a result of ScienceOnline past & current.  Here, therefore, is my view of ScienceOnline:


The books are, from top to bottom:

You can check out (literally and figuratively) these books on my WorldCat list of ScienceOnline Books.
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