Researchers & social media

In early February I was asked to participate in a discussion on the use of social media by researchers for our 2013 Research Week. I was joined by @jennaprice and we mostly agreed with each other. Mostly ...

I based my talking points on the content of two presentations that I have uploaded to SlideShare. They are among the most popular of my 30 or so uploads and here is the most recent version: Make me famous with social media

For those who prefer the most recent discussion, here are a few words based on the rough notes that I used.

I started by saying that I recognise the ephemeral nature of almost all social media posts. I am not really sure that any institutions needs to try to record all of it. A lot of it is complete rubbish and quite meaningless without the context of time, place and others participating in the same conversation or open discussion. As Clay Shirky has said though, it does represent a connective tissue that fuses both public and personal media and that is what makes it so significant, at least in our time. For researchers it can assist in connections, communication, the provision of sometimes instant feedback or responses, increased reach and in finding your own "voice". One of social media's key and perhaps most valuable characteristics is that it allows and encourages us to share; it helps facilitate altruism and that is a real benefit (as long as it lasts).

So, if we take a quick look at three key platforms as an example for researchers and what they can do with them:

• TWITTER - helps with connections, asking for help, news, "voice", sharing and searching.
• ACADEMIA.EDU - basically Facebook for academics (without the ads). It is not as well used here as it seems to be in the US, but has huge potential to facilitate better academic social networks. (Jenna didn't agree with me on this one.)
• BLOGS - allow you to test ideas and to share, practice, ideate and form or contribute tio various communities of research practice.

My tips and advice for researchers who want to use social media:

• Start with your own community
• Keep it in perspective (see the note above re the ephemeral nature of social media and social networks)
• Listen (it is a two way street, not simply a public broadcast media)
• Engage - I doubt you'll fully realise the potential benefits by just lurking
• Play, fail, learn - most social networks are very forgiving
• Respect others and their acknowledge their generosity
• Be real - I'm not at all a fan of anonymity on the social web
• Be careful how much you reveal about yourself and your long term research (Jenna reminded us that most researchers, like journalists like to be the first to publish)
• Don't feed the trolls!
• Be patient - it isn't always instantaneous and not everyone is always connected and always paying attention

Finally I said that for some researchers in a highly competitive market for research funding that social media can lead to the creation of a higher public profile (which then needs some management). This might be combined with sharing (via Open Acces publication), clever use of social networks and altmetrics to deliver crowd-funding for your research.

Ebooks, the future of research & cultural preservation by libraries

I read this post from O'Reilly TOC this morning and I was glad that someone finally raised these issues that have been bothering me for some time. I almost posted about the same issues a few weeks ago, but was distracted. The post raises some real concerns about the preservation of knowledge for future research. For me it is wider than that and goes to cultural preservation for our communities. Is it right that for our e-content we should just rely on someone else to have a copy (like Apple or Amazon as the article suggests)?

I had been worried about this, because like many other libraries we have been e-preferred for some time now. Is it also right that cultural material we collected and provided for our own communities could be unavailable for them in the future because the e-content is no longer available via our library? I don't think it is and I don't think we should simply hope for the best, divest ourselves of this responsibility and rely on others doing it for us, like say the National or State Libraries and certainly not the publishers because it isn't really their role and it really never has been. Don't we have an obligation along these lines (i.e. cultural preservation) for those in our communities? I think the rush to e-preferred has possibly led us to a focus on the now, the most convenient, the most efficient, and the least expensive alternatives, but quite probably at the expense of our obligation to preserve knowledge and culture for future generations.

I had been running around asking everyone who was involved with ebooks a lot of questions about what happens when the providers go bust, when we cease subscribing, or in the case of other inconvenient but worrying events (like hacking, file corruption, etc.). I am told that it varies with different ebook providers. Some regard it as a lease of those ebooks, others allow you to download the content in their proprietary format or in xml, but this ultimately isn't a solution. Encrypted formats offer a whole other dilemma. Many contemporary publications are in danger of disappearing, becoming untrustworthy or inaccessible in the future if we don't seriously consider this issue now. My own view is that there is actually more to cultural preservation of publications than simply preserving the xml. Books have always had other features, like covers, layout, typography, illustration, decoration, way finding assistance, etc., that add to the reader's experience. In our relentless hunt for efficiency and convenience I think we've progressively discounted the value of these features for our readers.

Perhaps this will be addressed by those talking about ebooks at the 2013 ALIA Information Online conference in Brisvegas next week.

This was originally posted here:
http://informationonline2013.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/ebooks-the-future-of-research-cultural-preservation-by-libraries/

Supporting researchers & research publication at UTS

Supporting researchers & research publication at UTS from Mal Booth

Presentation I gave at seminar "Measuring & Improving Library Value" on 29 November 2012 in Sydney.

Unlikely Avian Taxonomies

For those of you who are obsessed with taxonomic strictures and ontological classification:

This image will take you to a set on Flickr that showcases the recent research interests of Zoë Sadokierski and Kate Sweetapple in DAB LAB. See also cargocollective.com/

Making researchers famous with social media

Making researchers famous with social media

View more documents from Mal Booth

These are the slides and notes for a workshop we are running for academic researchers on using social media to raise their profiles as part of our UTS Research Week 2012 program.

Social media for academic researchers

Social media for academic researchersPresentation for UTS Library Research Week 2011.

View more documents from Mal Booth.

UTS Library Research Week

UTS on future academic libraries

On 9 February 2010 Dr Belinda Tiffen, Sophie McDonald and me from the UTS Library presented some ideas for our future Library to a national library conference in Melbourne (VALA2010).

As part of the UTS City Campus Master Plan, we have begun the early stages of planning for a new library building or “learning commons” on Broadway that will set new standards for online and physical services to our clients (students, researchers, academics and staff), green culture and operations, and our own work environment. About 60% of our current collection will be buried in a robotically-served retrieval system under Alumni Green (adjacent to the new library building), freeing up the library space for things other than book storage. That facility will be designed and built in the near future.

Our ideas for the future library were presented in three short but entertaining video clips outlining scenarios for:

• students (by UTS students James Shepherd, Dan Miller and friends),
• researchers and
• our staff (in homage the the well-known CommonCraft videos).

Cory Doctorow on Copyright & Open Access

I just watched a great presentation by Cory Doctorow from Access 2009 (Canada's Premier Library Technology Conference). Cory gives a bit of a history of the web to date as a massive copying machine and then criticises various attempts to regulate it. Towards the end there are some really important statements and answers to questions about Copyright and open access publication. These ideas struck a chord with me:

• allowing free trade of electronic editions sells more print editions
• librarians under-appreciate the extent to which they are unimpeachable sources of moral authority on liberal info access
• creative people, such as authors and artists, are not the most astute people on (rights) policy questions (he doesn't agree that we librarians are the moral equivalent of car thieves!)
• authors who give up copyright to publishers lose negotiating power
• authors' relationships with publishers are best described as Stockholm Syndrome
• the difference between purchasing a book and buying the right to read one on Amazon's Kindle
• libraries should spend [part of their] research subscriptions budgets on peer review fees for an open access journal
• citation is a function of access and you get cited more in open access journals
• there is a duty to release publicly funded research to the public

You can watch all 57 mins of his address below. More slides and videos of other presentations are available on the UPEI presentation portal.