Monthly Archives: April 2013

Tech Sharecase, 26 April 2013

Making It Easier to Browse

We looked at StackLife, which has been set up for the new Digital Public Library of America and is being piloted for Harvard, too.

We also looked at how North Carolina State University libraries do a shelf browse. Here’s a sample record:

NCSU shelf browse 1

And here’s the “Browse Shelf” view for that book:

NCSU shelf browse 2

We then looked at BrowZine, an iPad app that lets you browse journals your library has online access to and save them to your bookshelf in the app. This video gives a good overview of what it looks like on an iPad.

 An “Awesome” Recommender

Harvard has also been piloting its “Awesome Box” project. As books are returned to the library, patrons may elect to bypass the usual book drop off slot and instead place the book in an “Awesome Box” as a form of recommendation. Items returned that way show up in a special Awesome at the Harvard Library page (which features a RSS feed of items featured there).

New Baruch-FacStaff Wifi Coming

We learned about a new wifi channel, Baruch-FacStaff, that is being tested out now. When configured on your mobile device–laptop, phone, tablet–it will automatically connect you to the wifi network as soon as you come on campus and it will allow access to the network drives.

Harvard Business Review and EBSCOhost

We talked a bit about the recently announced restrictions on use of Harvard Business Review content in Business Source Complete. It’s not quite clear how or if this will affect our use of the journal.

New Baruch College App Preview

We got a preview of the not-yet-launched update to the Baruch College app (the current version can be found in the iTunes App Store).

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Trends in Scholarly Communication: Article-Level Metrics

SPARC just released a report that is meant to serve as a general introduction to article-level metrics, which SPARC says “are rapidly emerging as important tools to quantify how individual articles are being discussed, shared, and used.”

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Profiles of Information Seeking in Everyday Life

We recently acquired a book published in 2011 by MIT Press, Everyday Information: The Evolution of Information Seeking in America, that might be a source of readings for many of our credit courses. Here’s the table of contents:

Everyday Information--table of contents

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List of Questionable and Scam Journals

“Beall’s list”

Article in the New York Times covers “the dark side of open access,” detailing the effort of academics to identify and combat pseudo-science publications and those journals with less-than-rigorous standards for article submissions.

The sources cited are informative and useful for academics for avoiding scam publications and bogus conference offers. Jeffrey Beall’s website maintains a list of individual journals that have made his blacklist and the criteria in which he uses to identify these journals. Also, the special issue of Nature covering “The Future of Publishing” featuring articles “The dark side of publishing” and “Sham journals scam authors” among others.

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