Search

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the College’s library and the office of institutional research & training (OIRT), along with all departments of our college, shifted to working fro...

Similar to smaller archives, this college’s archives have not been traditionally accessible online. Two instructors sought to teach summer bridge program (Boot Camp) students basic archival practices and quantitatively measure their information literacy skills through using the Information Literacy Skills (ILA) and Students’ Perceptions of their Information Skills-Questionnaire (SPIL-Q) instruments (cite). Boot Camp students’ average perceived confidence with IL skills as assessed by the SPIL-Q instrument increased from 4.00 to 4.77 (+19.2%) on the post-training SPIL-Q. By adding the ILA and SPIL-Q instruments to the course curriculum, combined with end of course reflection questions, the instructors were able to quantitatively determine if the students’ comprehension of evaluating information improved after handling, processing, and digitizing primary source documents. This study demonstrates the opportunities for community building and collaboration afforded by archivists and librarians engaging faculty and students with primary source exploration through college archives.

The researchers’ primary goal when working with faculty on the research and publication process is to empower them to independently write literature reviews, deploy surveys, collect data, analyze data, and submit manuscripts to peer-review journals and edited book collections. The authors coach faculty in doing so in a variety of ways, from one-on-one trainings to small group workshops. For faculty who have recently earned their PhD, librarians have worked with them to narrow their dissertation topic into a publishable product. As part of the publishing process, the authors have shown them how to select potential publication outlets by reviewing the journals most cited by those the faculty are citing through using Web of Science and by reviewing journal SJR index scores. To assist faculty with marketing their publications, we surveyed the college’s faculty to determine their awareness of authors so that the library can assist them to increase their scholarly reach. Overall, with the exception of Google Scholar Author Profiles and LinkedIn, more than 50% of the college’s faculty indicated that they were unaware of the remaining author services. This indicates there is need for librarians or educational technologists to train faculty on the benefits author services provides faculty.

Data collected from 50 institutional repositories (IR) on various platforms and from around the world will be analyzed for this presentation to demonstrate aggregate IR performance, use, and the visibility of content. The Repository Analytics & Metrics Portal (RAMP) is a free web service developed in 2017 with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The dataset collected by RAMP currently exceeds 300 million rows and it is the only open aggregate data available to evaluate the visibility and use of IR content, diagnose deficiencies with performance, align content with user needs, and optimize metadata for maximum click-through ratios, among myriad other potential uses. This presentation will address several potential research questions that could help improve IR performance and demonstrate the IR value proposition. Methods for extending the RAMP dataset’s analytic potential through augmentation with complementary, publicly available datasets will be described. The presentation will encourage audience members to register their own repositories with RAMP and/or to consider additional ways to analyze the dataset., Open Repositories 2019, Hamburg, Germany