IRis, Northeastern’s Digital Archive, Reaches Milestone: 1 Million Downloads!

When the Northeastern University Libraries launched IRis in 2006, the idea of an “institutional repository” was still fairly new. Universities were starting repositories to share their intellectual and administrative output – faculty-authored articles, dissertations and theses, student-run publications, university-created reports, and other documents. Seven years later, many more colleges and universities around the world have digital repositories of open access materials created by their faculty, students, and staff. These repositories often also host open-access journals and other publications – at Northeastern, IRis has hosted the Annals of Environmental Science since 2007, and also provides access to faculty-authored and -edited books. IRis began with only a few collections in 2006, but has grown exponentially since then. Today, IRis contains over 6,000 items, and as of Tuesday, October 15, 2013, these items have been downloaded one million times! Although it’s not possible to determine which one item received the lucky one-millionth download, we know that on that day, 649 items were downloaded 1147 times. Here’s a breakdown of the types of materials downloaded that day: Here are top downloads in each category, for October 15, 2013: As you can see, slightly more than half of the items downloaded were dissertations or master’s theses. An important contributor to the growth of IRis has been the university’s transition to an Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) program in the 2007-2008 academic year – instead of depositing print copies of dissertations and master’s theses in the library’s archives, graduate students now submit their ETDs to ProQuest and an open-access copy is made available through IRis. Both undergraduate and graduate research output is very popular in IRis – in fact, almost every month our most highly accessed collection is the Honors Junior/Senior Projects! In the coming months, we will be expanding on the success of IRis with DRS – Northeastern University’s Digital Repository Service. The DRS will offer even more functionality for users and depositors, such as more flexible sharing options, the ability to manage permissions, and options for curated and noncurated collections.

Northeastern Celebrates Open Access Week: October 21-27, 2013

The seventh annual International Open Access Week is upon us! What is Open Access?
“Open Access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole. Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year.” — SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition
Snell Library has several events planned to celebrate: Monday, October 21 3:00-4:30 DMC Circle 2 (blue) SPARC/World Bank Webcast Panelists representing a diverse set of stakeholders – scientific researchers, publishers, technologists and policy makers – will examine the potential positive impacts that can result when research results are shared freely in the digital environment. The panel, moderated by SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph, will feature:
  • Stefano Bertuzzi, Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology
  • Brett Bobley, Chief Information Ocer for the National Endowment for the Humanities
  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association
  • Michael Stebbins, Assistant Director for Biotechnology in the Science Division of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy
  • Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director for Public Library of Science
Tuesday, October 22 3:00-4:00 421 SL Panel Discussion: Open Access in the Digital Humanities Faculty members Ryan Cordell, Ben Schmidt, and Julia Flanders will lead a discussion on the impact of open access on humanities research and publishing, leading off with some examples from their own work in digital humanities:
Ryan Cordell will talk about “Building With/Building On” and his use of open-access data from the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, William G. Thomas’s “Railroads and the Making of Modern America,” and David Rumsey’s celebrated map collection. Ben Schmidt will talk about the process of working in public through open-access research methods and publications like the Journal of Digital Humanities, and will also offer perspectives on open-source and open-access approaches to code and software development that might provide models for the humanities. Julia Flanders will talk about the tools and methods that underlie Digital Humanities Quarterly, an open-access digital journal now housed at Northeastern University.
Wednesday, October 23 12:00-5:00 90 SL Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Join us to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of under-represented groups in local Boston history. This hack-a-thon style drop-in session will focus on editing and updating Wikipedia pages in a group setting. Bring a laptop and a power supply, and go on a tour of Northeastern’s archives and special collections. More information available here.
And on Friday, October 25, Snell Library will be playing host to several of the DPLAfest’s open workshops – see the full schedule here. All Open Access Week events are open to the public (photo ID required to enter Snell Library) and refreshments will be served.

How the Government Shutdown Is Affecting Research Websites

Today’s government shutdown is affecting access to information at Northeastern and all libraries, whether directly or indirectly. We’ll do our best to post alerts about web sites that are unavailable on our database A-Z list. There are different effects depending on the government agency.  For example, web sites that support essential services, such as the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, which supports federal law enforcement, are up and running. Other sites are running but are not being updated, such as PubMed and MedlinePlus. Some sites are completely down, such as the Department of Education’s ERIC database, but the library purchases ERIC information through private third party vendors and so fortunately we can make ERIC available to the NU community.   Census.gov is also down, although some of the information there may be available in SimplyMap. We’ve also noticed effects on our behind-the-scenes work.  We are unable to order PDF articles from the National Library of Medicine, and we’re unable to do some database maintenance that relies on information from the Library of Congress.  That won’t affect you in the short term, but we hope the situation is temporary so it doesn’t have long term effects! Learn more about how the shutdown is affecting libraries here. We’re really sorry for any inconvenience, and our reference librarians are here to help you find alternative research sources. You can reach us by phone, email, text, or in person at Snell Library at http://library.northeastern.edu/ask.

Reserve a Study Room or DMC Workstation in Snell Online, & How!

Note: The information on this post is out of date. Please visit our Rooms and Spaces page for the most current information on room booking in Snell Library.

New CoLab study rooms on Snell Library's level 1

There are 20 brand new CoLab group study rooms on the first floor of Snell Library, and now a brand new reservation system to go along with them! 

Reserve a Group Study Room in Snell Library

First of all, to access NUSSO, the new, online self-service reservation system, log in with your myNEU credentials at https://nuevents.neu.edu/ and follow the directions on the page in order to reserve the room of your choice. The link is also available under the “Self-service” tab on myNEU. You can follow the instructions in the system to make a reservation for you and your group, or stop by the first floor Help & Information desk to get help using the system.

The fine print:

  • Group Study Rooms can be used for group study only.
  • Group Study Rooms can be reserved only by students: undergraduate or graduate.
  • Group Study Rooms can be reserved for up to three hours at a time.
  • A student may have only one reservation at a time.
  • Reservations can be made up to two weeks in advance.
  • These rooms are only bookable during the library’s regular service hours, meaning that during overnight study they will be first-come first-served.

Have any questions about reserving these rooms? Visit the Help & Information desk on the first floor, call 617-373-8778, or email circulation@neu.edu.

Snell Library Recording Studios (temporarily located in CoLabs E & F) are available through the new system, as well. When you put in your request, library staff will follow up after you make your reservation to confirm and talk through any training or equipment questions you might have.

Reserve a Digital Media Commons Workstation

This is new: Digital Media Commons Workstations can now be reserved. These computers, Macs and PCs, on the second floor of Snell Library, are intended to be used for media creation and project work. For standard computer use, about 200 additional Mac and PC computers are available in the first floor InfoCommons on a first-come, first-served, basis.

The fine print:

  • DMC Workstations can be reserved by students: graduate or undergraduate.
  • DMC Workstations can be reserved for up to 90 minutes and students may have three reservations at a time.
  • These reservations can be made up to two weeks in advance.

Have any questions about reserving the workstations? Visit the second floor DMC information desk, call 617-373-2465, or ask online at dmc.northeastern.edu/content/contact-us

 

Snell Library Seminar & Presentation Spaces

Using the same NUSSO reservation system, Snell Library Seminar & Presentation Spaces are available by request for faculty and staff to use as a special lecture, seminar, or other presentation space. These spaces include the 90 Snell Library seminar room and the two Digital Media Commons presentation areas: DMC Circle-1 (white), and DMC Circle-2 (blue). These spaces may not be reserved for use as standard classroom or group study space. More information on these spaces and the reservation process is available on the library’s web site.

Have any questions about reserving this space? Visit the Help & Information desk on the first floor, call 617-373-8778, or email circulation@neu.edu.

 

Keep up with Current Contents

If you’re actively involved in research, you’re probably on dozens of email lists from publishers and scholarly societies, and maybe you’re even following them on Twitter, or with an RSS feed reader. Well here’s a way to consolidate your alerts to make things a little easier to manage and to reduce the amount of mailbox clutter you receive: Current Contents Connect (Thomson Reuters/Web of Knowledge). With Current Contents Connect, you can
  • Browse tables of contents of all your favorite scholarly publications within a single web site;
  • Subscribe to tables of contents of your favorite journals to receive an update when new issues are published;
  • Set up an alert based on a topic or keyword;
  • Find that hot new article your colleague told you would be really interesting to your research;
  • Link directly from an item in the Table of Contents to the NU library’s subscription, or to request a PDF via interlibrary loan;
  • Email the article author directly to request a reprint or ask questions; and
  • Save the citation to Endnote, Refworks, or Zotero.
Citation tracking is a key strength of the Web of Knowledge family of databases. This means the following advanced features are also available:
  • View a list of all the references the author of the new article has cited (and if they cited you, of course!);
  • Subscribe to an RSS feed to be alerted every time this new article is cited by someone else; or
  • View a citation map that shows links from one journal article to another (see below).
Citation map for Ionescu's Dialectic in Plato's Sophist (2013)

Citation map for Ionescu's Dialectic in Plato's Sophist (2013) (click to enlarge).

          Note also that we have moved away from our old E-journal Finder, so if you have been receiving alerts from that system (in the form of emails from TDnet/Teldan), those alerts will end sometime this fall. Current Contents Connect is the perfect substitute going forward.