Thirteenth International Conference on Grey Literature Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA December 5-6, 2011
Abstracts
Conference Program (PDF)
Session One - Social Networking
Social Networking: Product or Process and What Shade of Grey? Julia Gelfand and Anthony Lin, UCI Libraries, United States Social networking which debuted in 1997 is now an established and common method of communication with much variation and is increasingly related to and supportive of academic publishing, scholarship and generating new information.Some of the most mature and popular sites are Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Linked-In and Plaxo plus many more specialized examples.As many professional societies and individuals choose to develop a presence on social networking sites (SNSs), the utility of them has become more valuable and ubiquitous.With emerging forms of technology to provide personal space and networking opportunities, the sites gain a new presence blending information products with new means to be discovered and searched. This paper explores how academic libraries are implementing a range of social networking activities to augment their online presence through traditional websites and launch new ways for their users to find, discover, access, navigate, evaluate, create and apply content.Libraries are also extending access with greater mobile optimized sites for Smartphones (iPhone, Droid, and Blackberry) and other emerging technologies that enhance information to grow richer content in utilizing and managing data, images, audio and streaming media.Library collections and services are being transformed due to electronic publishing, data curation, preservation and archiving efforts in order to allow users dependable and 24/7 access to resources with potential for interactive communication.In an increasingly global and mobile society, the new social communication mediums reduce boundaries, transcend the digital divide and invite more transparency and participation by shadowing the grey parameters in the scholarly community and redefining publishing outputs and opportunities.This evolution did not happen without cautious regard to intellectual property, privacy and confidentiality.The new by-products are not always tangible but remain instructive and promote innovation within communication as a new adopted and accepted form of authorship and creative expression.By adding the social communication features of this kind of networking that promotes introduction, networking, commentary, critique, discourse, sharing, and the building of new communities, grey content is enhanced and the sources of access multiply with an open and entrepreneurial future for SNSs.
Knowledge Communities in Grey Claudia Marzi, Institute of Computational Linguistics, CNR, Italy The dynamic nature of modern human social interactions, and the increasing capability of wireless and mobile devices for creating and sharing contents, open up the opportunity for a wide dissemination of information through complex knowledge sharing systems. The development of digital technologies and the continuous evolution of telecommunication networks are rapidly heading our society towards a culture of participation and to a more and more interactive communication. Adaptive networking protocols and data management systems are fostering pervasive information and communication environments. In this context, subject based communities offer the steadily increasing availability of ubiquitous accessible information. Networking communities, focussed on supporting relationships and content sharing, act at the same time as providers and users of all kind of grey literature materials in a highly distributed and collaborative scenario. Collaboration networks are thus becoming a key element in the advancement and dissemination of knowledge in scientific domains as well as in diverse aspects of everyday human life. In this sense, social media at best enhance new frontier ideas and highly innovative contents; they offer the enormous potential to transform research, and research results, into a knowledge co-creation process. As the shared knowledge components build cognitive ties, there is no real sharing of knowledge without a common understanding of it. Large amounts of structured information have to be managed, and generation and assimilation of knowledge have to be facilitated. The unlimited universe of data and information available on the web need to be identified, classified, analyzed, and filtered, so as to enhance the generation and assimilation of new knowledge. Knowledge needs to be represented, standardized and distilled from multiple sources. Tagging on a web scale provides a potentially useful source of metadata, and paves the way to automated post-processing services such as information retrieval, and acquisition of concepts from large document repositories. In other words it creates an environment conducive to knowledge transfer. In the full version, particular emphasis will be laid on technologies in natural language understanding and knowledge management for providing structured, intelligent access to the continuously evolving content generated on-line in a pervasive collaborative environment. In particular, the work will focus on exploring the interaction/synergy between different modes/tools for knowledge acquisition and representation: from highly structured, standardized and objective knowledge information systems based on ontological hierarchies and relations to more dynamic, subjective tools for volatile knowledge representation such as word clouds and concept maps. This approach will highlight current automated tools for concept acquisition and ontology learning that are conducive to an incremental approach to content access and management, to establish a fruitful bridge between modes of knowledge sharing/creation and dynamic, incremental approaches to automated knowledge acquisition and representation.
Using Social Media to Create Virtual Interest Groups in Hospital Libraries Yongtao Lin, Tom Baker Knowledge Centre and Kathryn M.E. Ranjit, Health Information Network Calgary; Peter Lougheed Knowledge Centre, Canada Social networking has positively impacted the realm of human interactivity. Libraries have traditionally been viewed as a place for research and information seeking.Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and Instant Messaging (IM), are starting to change users’ experiences of current library services.In this quality improvement study we aim to examine whether the opportunity for enhanced researcher-librarian interaction that Web 2.0 tools provide creates a synergistic experience for health research interest groups.In addition, we will explore if these tools increase efficiency in obtaining information and/or improve quality and quantity of research evidence. This study was conducted by two hospital librarians working in tertiary hospitals. An email was distributed to the health care professionals from these two sites, inviting participation in two online research interest groups, Clinical Practice Guidelines and Patient Safety.A pre-survey of participants was intended to assess the comfort level of this group with Web 2.0 tools and gauge their level of use both professionally and personally.We created a virtual interest group environment to incorporate the following Web 2.0 tools into the existing library website: user blogs, enabling commenting to facilitate a knowledge-sharing atmosphere; chat software to assist with easy access to acquired information; and Delicious tagging for a more systematic documentation of grey literature.A post-survey will be conducted after three months in order to re-evaluate the participants’ experiences with social media, in particular with the online interest group environment. Findings from this study can be used to illuminate future trends into the discoverability of grey literature with social media tools and establish a basis for integrating Web 2.0 tools in library websites and services. Information-seeking behaviour of Slovenian researchers: implications for information services Primož Južnič and Polona Vilar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Our study examined the information seeking behaviour of researchers in Slovenia to reveal the development of information services for this specific group of users. They were surveyed as to their use of different information sources, which provide necessary information for their work. Other similar studies concluded that electronic resources have become indispensable for research, and have a profound effect on information behaviour, but varying from methods and types of material used.As part of a broader project an online questionnaire will be distributed to a sample of 850 researchers in Slovenia, based on SICRIS database that contains data about 4250 active researchers - faculty members and researchers employed at research institutes. The sample will include humanities researchers, social scientists and natural- and life science researchers. Topics of the questionnaire are user experience with electronic journals and other information sources, as theses and dissertations, preprints and other grey literature material. Researchers use a variety of information resources ranging from popular Internet search engines to specialized bibliographical databases, from electronic journals to grey literature resources. We expect that they make little use of traditional library services and instead perform many traditional library functions internally.The extent of use of different information resources varies on the basis of scientific specialty. While a large number of studies have measured the use of print/electronic journals and have surveyed users, few studies have extended the study to involve other information resources.
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