Libraries celebrates Open Access Week

BY SCOTT BRANDT

PILLAR: Scholarly Communication

Open Access Week, October 22-26 is a celebration to raise awareness about open access in scholarship and research. Open access in the general sense refers to making knowledge more accessible globally — not everyone in the world has a library like ours and can get access to many journals. It also describes a movement to inform authors of their rights to make articles more widely available, as well as an evolving business model for journal publishers to do likewise. And more specifically for the Purdue Libraries, it involves moving forward on a University Senate recommendation for a policy that all Purdue authors submit copies of their articles to e-Pubs to make them more available globally.

Libraries will be hosting events and recognizing champions in open access during the week. One event will be presentation of an award to a faculty member for her or his work in championing open access. Another will be will be a similar presentation of an award to a graduate student who has been instrumental in promoting open access. There will also be a forum for graduate students, who represent the next generation of authors, to discuss open access with experts. This will include Donna Ferullo, director of the University Copyright Office, who can talk about publisher-author copyright issues, and Ada Emmett, special assistant to the Dean for Scholarly Communication, who led efforts at Kansas University Libraries to implement an open access policy.

New Libraries website

PILLAR: Infrastructure

The Libraries’ new website has been released for beta testing at http://newsite.lib.purdue.edu. The website team has migrated content from the current Libraries main site and will be working with all libraries to fill in their unique content. Features of the new website include:

• The new website is built using the Drupal content management system. Content and visual appearance can be easily managed and updated to give users a consistent experience.
• The redesigned homepage features a simplified navigation menu, a unified library search powered by Ex Libris Primo discovery layer, quick links for common tasks, highlights of Libraries events, emphases of Libraries' strategic initiatives and a drop down list for quick access to individual library sites.
• Consolidated and reorganized content from various existing pages for simplified browsing and workflows.
• Redesigned libraries information pages for quick discovery of basic information such as location and hours.

We invite you to browse and provide feedback about your experience using this form: https://purdue.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_elbRnM1CNignOVD.

Please contact Tao Zhang, digital user experience specialist, at zhan1022@purdue.edu if you are interested in a one-on-one user testing of the new website.

Libraries promotes National Information Literacy Awareness Month

PILLAR: Learning

Celebrating National Information Literacy Awareness Month is Purdue University Libraries showcasing state proclamations from around the country in support of information literacy.

Governors in twenty states have issued Information Literacy Awareness Proclamations! Congratulations to Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New York, Illinois, Texas, Oregon, Rhode Island, Alaska, Indiana, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Connecticut, Delaware, Virginia, Colorado, South Carolina, Ohio and Maine which are the leaders in accomplishing this project. Another 17 states and 2 territories are working on drafts to submit.

The display poster was created by Elaine Bahler.

SMILE in Purdue Libraries

PILLAR: Infrastructure

The SMILE (Staff Moral in Libraries Environment) Program is intended to acknowledge and demonstrate immediate and spontaneous appreciation for the contributions of individuals. Every Libraries employee is eligible to participate in both parts of the program. You can be on the giving end in submitting a thank you note to a colleague. You can also be on the receiving end of a colleague’s thank you note that gives you a chance to win a monthly monetary award supported by the Dean.

SMILE was designed by a Task Force that included Angie Ewing, Nancy Hewison, Kate Kester, Sharon Sturgeon and Mary Sego, chair. They spent several weeks creating and refining the process that will support the SMILE Program

The staff of Libraries Human Resources will be administering the program. To learn more about how to participate in our SMILE Program, please visit and bookmark this page on the Libraries Intranet: http://intranet.lib.purdue.edu/display/HR/SMILE+Program .

Data Initiatives: Memorable Manic Monday

PILLAR: Scholarly Communication

On Monday, September 24 Purdue Libraries staff participated in three different events in three different cities!

In Denver
Paul Bracke spoke at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Forum "Tracking it Back to the Source: Managing and Citing Research Data." The forum brought together librarians, information scientists and domain scientists to discuss data management. Bracke's talk provided an overview of Purdue's approach to data services, but had a particular emphasis on DataCite and the role of persistent identifiers and data citation in campus data services. The talk was well-received and tweets afterward included "Most other academic libraries could learn a lot about the data services that Purdue's library is providing to its campus" and "Impressive strategic focus: data curation profiles, identifier support."

In Indianapolis
The Libraries' Purdue University Research Repository (PURR) project team invaded Indianapolis to participate in the third annual HUBzero conference, also known as HUBbub 2012. Members of the team contributed to three different sessions on the research data management track. First, Courtney Matthews presented PURR as a service model for institutional data curation. In the next talk, Neal Harmeyer presented our work in digital data preservation and metadata with contributions from Amy Hatfield and Brandon Beatty. Lastly, Michael Witt spoke on a closing panel with colleagues from Purdue, Notre Dame and the Oak Ridge National Lab. It was exciting to see some of the features that we developed for PURR incorporated into the new version of HUBzero, which was released and demonstrated in other sessions that were presented by our colleagues at ITaP. In addition to the three talks about PURR, a presentation by Tao Zhang and Debbie Maron on the usability assessment of HABRI was also very well-received. The conference was live-streamed and will be archived on the web (http://hubzero.org/hubbub/2012/).

Back row, left to right: Michael Witt, Tao Zhang, Courtney Matthews, Dewayne Branch, Neal Harmeyer. Front row, left to right: Brandon Beatty and Debbie Maron.

At Purdue
Back here at home the Libraries hosted the Data Curation Profiles Symposium. Speakers included a variety of librarians, who have completed profiles including Agricultural Sciences Information Specialist Marianne Stowell Bracke, as well as educators who have used them as class assignments and experts who have been working in this area for many years. The symposium was streamed over the Internet and Tweets from around the world included “Lots of good ideas on data curation I can take back to reference staff.” and “Best experience I have had attending a meeting virtually!”

The Symposium was part of the wrap-up of a grant sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services in which Jake Carlson, data services specialist, and Scott Brandt, associate dean for research, taught workshops around the country. Presentations will soon be posted to e-Pubs under: Data Curation Profiles Symposium.

Gretchen Stephens discusses the process and outcomes of the Data Curation Profiles with a symposium attendee at the poster session.

PILLAR: Learning

While photographing the recently redesigned IMPACT classroom in Hicks B853 I was reminded of how the space was originally designed to house the Independent Study Center (ISC). The ISC provided study carrels and rooms for students to come in and listen to their recorded lectures on audiocassette tapes, view 16 mm films, slide sets or videocassettes that were used in their classroom instruction. Today that same space has been redesigned so that instructors and students are able to take advantage of the latest technology for instruction and learning.

Even though the space looks different — once housing individual study carrels in the 1980s-90s to the partnership with ITaP in 2002 to its present day modernized movable tables, projectors and white boards — the Libraries’ goal continues to focus on providing creative learning spaces, within the Libraries and elsewhere on campus, while strengthening the role of our librarians to lead and participate in information literacy and learning initiatives.

The Libraries other IMPACT classrooms include the Learn Lab located in the Parrish Library, Potter 141 located in the Engineering Library and Hicks B848 and G980D. These classrooms can be scheduled for one-time or recurring classes, as well as for instructional sessions or presentations. Please contact the respective libraries for class scheduling. Hicks and Parrish Libraries at parrlib@purdue.edu and Engineering Library at enginlib@purdue.edu.

WBAA interviews Distinguished Lecture speaker Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran

PILLAR: Scholarly Communication

Listen to WBAA’s interview with Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Purdue Libraries Distinguished Lecture Series speaker scheduled for Thursday, October 18 at 7 p.m. in Fowler Hall. http://wbaa.org/post/purdue-libraries-distinguished-lecture-series

Vaitheeswaran is an award-winning correspondent for The Economist magazine and book author who writes about trends that will shape the future of business and technology and how to get away from the world's addiction to fossil fuels.

Vaitheeswaran, author of "Need, Speed, and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness and Tame the World's Most Wicked Problems," will talk about "Need, Speed and Greed: Welcome to the Innovation Economy." The lecture is free and open to the public.

Libraries new staff

PILLAR: Infrastructure

Ada Emmett
Visiting Associate Professor of Library and Information Science and
Special Assistant to the Dean for Scholarly Communications
Purdue University Libraries

I’m thrilled to be at Purdue Libraries this year and to be part of remarkable changes that are happening here on the scholarly communication and more specifically the open access (OA) front. I am actually at Purdue just temporarily while on academic leave from the University of Kansas where I’ve been serving as the Scholarly Communications Program Head. In that role I worked as a part of a team to shape and then move to passage the faculty’s Open Access Policy. My recent work has been on policy implementation, including education around rights issues and how OA fits into the larger ecosystem of scholarly communication. Here at Purdue our hope is that the combination of my experience and Purdue’s genuine enthusiasm, capacity and already successful efforts will join forces to assist the university faculty to recognize the benefits of open access (in its largest sense) and begin to take direct action by changing how they steward global access to their own scholarship.

I joined the field of librarianship later in life. An undergraduate degree in Linguistics and wanderlust kept me traveling and working in both human services and para-professional jobs in the United States and abroad. Then in the late 1990s while working in an Interlibrary Loan department of the University of Washington Health Sciences Library I enrolled in one class in the UW’s MLIS program as a non-matriculated student. It was in that class that the scholarly communication reform issues came up. I knew then that if THAT was something that librarians could work on then I wanted to be a librarian. I started school full time and dedicated every opportunity I was given to study the issues of scholarly communication.

There were very few scholarly communication librarian positions at that time but I did apply for a position as a science librarian at the University of Kansas, renowned already for its scholarly communication reform efforts hoping that I might devote some of my research time at least to an effort that was near to my heart and a passion of mine.

I was offered the position and started there in the fall of 2002, my first work as a librarian. I consider myself very lucky to have gained so much experience on the ground, in the company of great minds and up-and-coming activists for this open access movement. It is an extremely exciting time to be a librarian in this area. Each day there are new developments and new people joining the conversation and adding new complexities and richness to the discussions.

On my time off I play with my kitty Beatrix, occasionally dabble in the arts (most recently collage), but my favorite activity is dance. I go through phases of learning various social dances: contra dance was my most recent passion, now Argentine Tango, earlier Swing/Lindy and a mix of others like blues, waltz and Cajun two-step. I’m only good at contra and Swing/Lindy but trying to gain some ground with tango. Lastly, I was recently certified as a permaculture (permanent-agriculture) specialist, although I have a lot of practice to do before fully integrating these principles into my organic gardening/farming plans.

My office is located in the Research Division area, STEW 279, or I can be reached at lemmett@purdue.edu.