Harvard style

One of the lecturers informed us that the citation style language markup of Harvard style that his faculty recommended had disappeared from the Zotero repository. In dealing with this our old grievances about Harvard style came up again. We, and I in particular, find it irksome that there is no actual standard (unlike APA), and different faculties use different guides. I no longer fully trust the library version either. We decided to take on a project to gather together the variant guidelines, compare them in a grid, and come up with a standard that suits all the faculties as far as possible. We are then going to mark this up in citation style language for upload to the repository named as the Griffith College Harvard style to be used in Zotero and Mendeley.

There are several advantages in this:

  • students lives will be made easier we think
  • it allows us to teach without worrying about different faculties and not meeting their standards for the students
  • it is a more professional approach and look for the entire college across campuses
  • lecturers, particularly new ones, will know where they stand
  • we can do more thorough learning materials safe in the knowledge that we won’t have to add ones for new faculties
  • I can get through some of my cranky personal opinions

csl_editor

My own cranky personal opinions that I refer to mostly revolve around not putting in URLs but rather DOIs which I believe makes more sense. Some other of my suggestions aren’t going to happen (getting rid of place of publication and putting in ISBNs).

Two of us independently came up with the idea of saving APA 6th CSL out, renaming it as Griffith Harvard, and seeing if any of the lecturers noticed.

Using the CSL editor is new learning in my professional digital capacity and this relates to teaching in that we work with students on this topic throughout their time here.

 

Advertisements

Copyright law

Sometimes I love my job. So much I take it home with me. I am expected to know about intellectual property. Mostly keeping up to date with this involves reading short sections of text books, law articles, or sometimes case law and legislation. Very rarely does it involve reading comics and listening to music*. This is not a good thing as listening to music and reading comics are activities I can really buy into!

I think this blog doesn’t often deal with the amount of reading that I do, and I can guess a few reasons for this, but at least there are some representatives. This book, though written by lawyers, brilliantly focuses on morality and creativity. Concepts that are frankly absent from IP law. Though there is discussion of creators, rights holders are the focus. It’s about the money, not the sustainability of artistry and creativity, the productivity of the creative sector, and creative innovation. Due to the absence of these concepts from courts of law we have deliberate stagnation of creativity and a culture obsessed with retro.  While the tone of this book is not entirely to my taste, and the female author is objectified and sexualised in the illustrations gratuitously I think, I really enjoy this and recommend it to all fellow librarians that have professional and teaching responsibilities in IP that also love music, history, and comics.

That’s a surprisingly large audience I think!

*I have insisted that a sampler be brought into the classroom for law intellectual property classes, and I have tried to get comics as learning materials whenever possible because: reasons.

Reading lists/ bibliographies

03/04

Using Mendeley,Mendeley web, and Word for a reading list – we have tended to support Zotero. Digital capacity, professional skills

I realised that in order to support students better I had really better learn to use Mendeley for a good sized project. Just “learning” it makes no sense if I want to get an idea of the challenges that a student might face. I made the foolish decision to do this with a document due in to QQI very soon. I think the decision was time based: I wanted to support Mendeley for the students as soon as possible. This compromised my support work for the faculty on this occasion.

In general though I appreciate having decided to support Mendeley after the amount of effort sunk into Zotero. I think it expresses my confidence in my colleague Dimphne who now supports this that I wholly trust her in this and am supporting her efforts by helping the minority of students who have a strong preference for Mendeley.

I also attended webinars on Mendeley and supporting researchers before doing this.

Informal, non-accredited

Various activities on 29th of March

29/03

Wrote catalogue notes for exhibition on migrants for the library- this is a first for us and we will be joining it to an online exhibition. Need to learn Omeka.

IMG_6094

Koha email list – learning how to do acquisitions. I began the list and it hasn’t been used much. I hope to kickstart it and lead the community a little bit.

Began using the Outlook/Office 365 project management tool for the Delegated Authority  project

 

What is professional development?

I was nominated to represent the group in the project and suggest a definition of professional develooment. Here are some starts and what I sent in.

Striving to improve myself in my profession, seeking to improve my profession.

Seeking recognition for the change and development I have undergone and that the profession does. Seeking to keep up to date with changes as far as possible.

This sounded better last night.

 

Professional development means me striving to improve myself in my professional life. It also indicates a goal of me striving to improve my profession and its recognition. It also means recognition and validation of that development externally. I believe it also should include seeking such improvement in those around me and in recognising that and using it to manage, measure, and reward performance in an organisational environment.

On a basic level professional development includes updating skills and upskilling, but it should also seek to interrogate and inform the professional, ethical, and philosophical standards.

Marc and related training

Today I taught two of my colleagues how to use marc ftp server, to bulk download records for ebooks.

Then how to use MarcEdit to batch process these (join, mnemonic, edit for 856 field url, process) then upload, stage, and add to koha catalogue.

It’s quite technical and very library. It’s interesting to consider this as teaching as I normally wouldn’t. For me training is teaching. If we think that teaching relates to learning in that the learner does the learning it becomes a part of their identity for me this really fits this. This kind of detailed technical knowhow is a real part of building the identity of a librarian. We need to feel comfortable, or at least many of us do, in this kind of data and metadata related detail for our professional identities.

Webinar on research tools 16/03

I suppose I should have guessed as much from Elsevier

12 time saving tips for research support

Mendeley offerssocial advances on Zotero
Mix of Research Gate
I should formally follow that up

Scopus
Refining and running a continuous lit search interesting concept.

Seems obviously much better than Scholar.

Stream failed at 1530

I went back to this later but it really was too much of a product placement for Mendeley, with Mendeley integration with Scopus being the key. That said the collaboration between scholars possible on M. was quite an eye opener. This doesn’t work well in my experience with Zotero. That said my attempts to get groups of students to share scholarship, with Zotero or without, have always been pretty unsuccessful.
https://hecapd1.wordpress.com/tag/professional-knowledge/page/2/
hecapd1.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-09
55667
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:WSSDGDRVOW76YWXFP4IHJL3OP27RMGMR
<urn:uuid:781a0a67-fa12-49df-ad52-f25abcf71862>
2018-02-25T19:14:25Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:37MQEDQYX2YPTOYFUDJIPIW7DCPG5JCO
<urn:uuid:7f534fb7-ccf2-4381-99d6-a76953e8d19d>
https://hecapd1.wordpress.com/tag/professional-knowledge/page/2/
length
response
<urn:uuid:0624d939-116a-4398-b6ea-49c846df1d99>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-168-252-115.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-09
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf