Fourteenth International Conference on Grey Literature
Tracking Innovation through Grey Literature
29-30 November 2012
National Research Council, CNR Rome, Italy
Abstracts
Session Three – Adapting New Technologies
An Environment Supporting the Production of Live Research Objects
Massimiliano Assante, Leonardo Candela, Donatella Castelli, and Pasquale Pagano; Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione – CNR, Italy
Scientific research is rapidly evolving in all fields, it is multidisciplinary, networked and driven by new patterns, e.g. data-intensive sciences. In this complex scenario scientific communication must go well beyond traditional scholarly publications. In particular, it requires accessing all the elements exploited and developed during the scientific workflow to achieve a result, e.g. datasets, analysis tools, and methods. This wide corpus of primarily grey elements is at the moment mostly unavailable and, even when they are available, they are not linked to the scientific result. This makes difficult to completely understand the result and validate it. To overcome this limitation “live research objects” are emerging as replacement of traditional “documents” in the scientific communication. These are multi-media and multi-part objects that aggregate all “pieces” contributing to a research result. Such elements, which may range from binary files to compound objects including maps, time series, and tabular data, are generally structured according to well-established templates and produced according to user-defined workflows. In this paper, we present an environment for the production of live research objects. Such environment includes: (i) a workspace where users can organise and share in a file-system-like environment items of very different types (from binary files to compound objects); (ii) an editing framework where users can define the structure of a live research object (a template indicating sections, layout, active elements) and compile objects compliant with one of the defined templates by entering content or taking it from the workspace via drag & drop; and (iii) a workflow engine where users can define the workflow governing the production of a live object by specifying the phases and the relative responsible actors(s). Supporting these new live research objects outgrows the capacity of traditional technological approaches based on locally specialized data management facilities. The paper also briefly discusses how the above facilities have been realised by exploiting the capabilities offered by an Hybrid Data Infrastructure. The exploitation of the above described supporting environment is discussed by exemplifying production of research objects aiming at estimating the probability of distribution of biological species in a global scale. Such objects comprise some descriptive text, data on the species gathered from authoritative data sources, environmental data reporting on ecological elements, the algorithm(s) aiming at estimating the probability of occurrence of a species in a given area, and the maps resulting from the algorithm(s). The environment described has been designed and implemented in the context of two successive EU projects: D4Science-II (www.d4science.eu) and iMarine (www.i-marine.eu). It is now available as a gCube Apps in the D4Science e-Infrastructure (https://portal.i-marine.d4science.org/).
Creating and Assessing a Subject-based Blog for Current Awareness within a Cancer Care Environment Yongtao Lin and Marcus Vaska; Health Information Network Calgary, University of Calgary, Canada
The Health Information Network Calgary (HINC) is comprised of a group of libraries providing information services and resources to urban and rural sites in the Calgary Zone of Alberta Health Services. Establishing a current awareness service is a necessity in any discipline, especially in health care. Web 2.0 and social networks have transformed how health care professionals and researchers create knowledge, access information, collaborate, and disseminate research. One of the earliest forms of social media, blogging has taken the world by storm (1). Although there is a wealth of literature on the use of blogs in providing current awareness services for libraries, there is a pronounced gap on how blogs are assessed or evaluated, especially for information alert purposes (2). Clients within the HINC subscribe to e-mail alerts and RSS feeds, a trend particularly evident within the Cancer Care environment where a number of researchers have already implemented feed readers to remain aware of current literature. However, they often comment on challenges associated not only with maintaining alerts and managing RSS feeds, but also in selecting and creating alerts for unpublished materials. The need for a librarian-facilitated current awareness strategy became more and more apparent. The literature reviewed addressed the value of an alert, namely to indicate a gap in the participant‘s knowledge, rather than to deliver content the librarians may have perceived as useful (3). The authors saw the creation of a subject-based blog as an opportunity to disseminate current awareness “grey” information to this specific research community. The Grey Horizon Blog was created in April 2012 using Blogger. The selection and re-aggregation of information involves ongoing assessment of user needs and continuous work on the Blog. A weekly global email-digest listing of the postings will be distributed two months after the launch. Several metrics will be employed in October 2012 to evaluate the Blog. Blogger itself tracks the number of page-views over time. Google Analytics was set up as it tracks additional information on access and use of the Blog. As clients may be using feed readers to read blog entries and may thus not visit the Blog at all, Feedburner has also been incorporated to track the number of times that the blog RSS is accessed, as well as calculating the number of subscribers. A post-survey will be conducted in six months to complement the web statistics data. The additional feedback and comments will help us determine whether the Blog has successfully created an easy platform for users to keep current with unpublished literature, the type of resources found most important, and whether the amount of time spent maintaining the Blog met expectations. It is anticipated that this case study will portray how to successfully plan a subject-based blog to meet users’ current awareness information needs in grey literature. Further efforts will focus on targeting the blog to the topic areas in grey literature where users feel more information is needed. The findings from this assessment will direct us to potential marketing opportunities and changing technology that haven’t been fully utilized in our Grey Horizon Blog.
Centralised National Corpus of Electronic Theses and Dissertations Julius Kravjar and Marta Dušková; Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical information, CVTISR, Slovakia
We recorded the first signs of activities towards ETD in Slovakia on the threshold of the Millennium. March 2004 was to become a significant milestone: sixteen academic libraries of twelve Slovak universities decided to solve the ETD.SK project: "Building Digital Academic Libraries - Collecting and Providing Access to Full Texts of Slovak University Publications". The ETD.SK project marked the beginnings of cooperation on a national level in this area, with the effort to follow up the international ETD activities. Unfortunately, the project was not sufficiently implemented due to the lack of financial and personnel resources, but mainly because of the lack of legislative support. The ICT and internet penetration, low copyright awareness and the rapid growth in the number of universities and students in our country contributed to the expansion of plagiarism. There was also an inherent lack of systemic action, which would act as a barrier for its future growth. The establishment of a nationwide electronic theses and dissertation repository and their originality check was considered as a perspective solution. A significant step in this matter was made in 2008: the Ministry of Education decided to implement a comprehensive nationwide solution for the collection and processing of theses and dissertations produced at Slovak universities. The goal: creation of the national theses and dissertations repository, increase in the quality of theses by their originality check, copyright protection. In 2009, the Higher Education Act was amended and the most relevant change was this: Before the defence of the thesis, the university forwards the thesis in the electronic form to the Central Repository of Theses and Dissertations (CRTD) and the originality check is performed. During 2009, the CRTD was built and the whole system with the originality check became reality at the end of April 2010. The existence of such a system has had a preventive effect, and not just in the student community. Slovak universities are obligated to use the system (central repository + originality check). CRTD is now publicly available source of gray literature. Yearly increase in CRTD is about 80 thousand items of bachelor’s, master’s, dissertation and habilitation theses.
A funder repository of heterogeneous grey literature material with advanced user interface and presentation features Ioanna-Ourania Stathopoulou, Nikos Houssos, Panagiotis Stathopoulos, Despina Hardouveli, Alexandra Roubani, Ioanna Sarantopoulou, Alexandros Soumplis, Chrysostomos Nanakos; National Documentation Centre; National Hellenic Research Foundation, Greece
The present contribution concerns the development of a funder repository aiming at the dissemination, reuse and preservation of mainly grey literature material of diverse types. This material which was produced under the auspices of large scale (multi-billion Euros) funding programmes of the Hellenic Ministry of Education (co-financed by the European Union). The project involved the handling of a wide range of content, like (among others) studies, reports, educational material, videos, theses, material from a range of conferences/events. The project has been successfully completed and the system is publicly available since spring 2011 at http://repository.edulll.gr. In this repository creation use case, technical enhancements were used to provide the means to organise, process and import to the repository a wide range of heterogeneous material. Special facilities for the support of these workflows were included. The metadata schema used is an application profile using elements for Qualified Dublin core, LOM and PREMIS. A major part of the work concerned mechanisms to enhance presentation of the digital material and better navigation to the corresponding metadata records. Easy browsing to the wide range of the available content was achieved using a tag cloud feature that was developed from scratch for the purposed of the project. The tag cloud was applied to the thematic category data field, which used the EuroVoc thesaurus as a controlled vocabulary for assigning thematic categories to individual items. Regarding digital material presentation, a streaming video player was incorporated into the item pages to enable easy access to the video content and including configuration capabilities that enabled differentiation of the player presentation based on values of specific metadata fields. Regarding text documents, an online reading feature was included in the repository, enabling users to open, read online and search into big texts without the need to save them in their systems – an implementation fully compatible with tablets like iPad and Android-based devices. The infrastructure that enables that is based on transforming documents to JPEG2000 images, including OCR text for searching, and serving them to users via an extended version of the Internet Archive Book reader using open source and W3C standards compatible technologies.
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