New Collaborations in Engineering Libraries

Journey to the Center of a CV (Curricula Vitae) 
Judy Hoesly and Anne Rauch

At University of Wisconsin Madison librarians developed an institutional bibliography within Bibapp which compliments their institutional repository.  The software has five majors connected parts: works, groups, people, publications, and publishers. This tool seems similar to VIVO, which was developed at Cornell, and allows development of individual researcher profiles. Also allows listed of faculty by department, which links to higher level, College of Engineering for instance. Could be useful for departments when creating annual reports. They started with engineering physics which has 27 faculty members. They mapped workflow and relied on student employees and library liaisons, they tapped into technical services staff for quality control. The students searched Google Scholar and engineering databases to find items on each CV. Google scholar didn’t offer great citations, but the links into the native publishers obviously offered. Goal: to find 80% but only found around 70%. They used citation managers.

The librarians developed the departmental structure and established authorities. They are hoping that liaisons will set up citation alerts and update the database going forward, as well they can grant access to researchers or their assistants for updates.

Benefits: librarians aware of current research and publishing trends within the departments they support. They can extract and repackage reuse data. Next up: Health Sciences Library has been collecting information to add to this tool. The initial goal was to allow library staff to feed current publications into their IR, they founda bout 30% were unfindable so the IR can allow them to make the research papers, PowerPoints, publications findabilty.

BLOGGERS NOTE: ResearcherID.com is a web-based tool developed by Thomson Reuters which allows researchers to develop their own researcher profile.  ResearcherID ties in with ISI, EndNoteWeb and cited references, if institutions subscribe to ISI Web of Science, may provide an alternate to local development of similar software or adopting an open source version. Community of Scholars is another subscription-based database that provides researcher profiles. See also Cornell’s VIVO at vivoweb.org. I also think that Faculty 1000 in Biology and other tools are allowing more researchers to develop and share personal profiles with publications. All told, there’s a perceived benefit in having more compete  picture of our faculty research within our institutional repositories.

Engineering Librarian Participation in Technology Curricular Design
Megan Sapp Nelson and Michael Fosmire
At a meeting with the ECET department chair in Fall 2009 Purdue librarians learned students had a gap in their learning. Specifically, the chair felt they were lacking creativity skills. This turned into a conceptual design for a “total curriculum overhaul.” Nelson joined a small curriculum committee where ongoing discussions of information literacy and its relation to creativity and lifelong learning ensued. At first faculty were unsure why Megan was there but her broad perspective on the Purdue curriculum and information literacy allowed her to infiltrate. The goal was to look at existing role of classes and broader outcomes and infuse “creatively” throughout.

Nelson helped the faculty understand what “lifelong learning” means and espoused the virtues of IL and how they relate to creativity. She pointed them to Shuman et al’s definition and ACRL’s the developed a comparison chart of ACRL IL for Science and Engineering/Technology performance standards and ABET. For those related to creativity see ACRL: 3.3 & 3.7, 4.4. The ACRL standards provided concrete, measureable outcomes which faculty could use as examples when redesigning their curricula.

An ECET faculty (aka “IL convert “) presented these ideas to the department and helped to develop IL outcomes throughout the curriculum. Concepts of IL and creativity are often too abstract for faculty and can be challenging to teach. The team discussed lab notebook expectations, prescribed citation formats, and also use of citation organization in senior design. In the proposed redesigned curriculum, IL is spiraled throughout however it’s been put on hold due to department head staffing changes. Stay tuned, we hope for future updates from Megan Sapp Nelson. During Q&A she mentioned that student portfolios may be one method of accessing student’s development over time of creativity skills.

Lesson: librarians need to be part of curriculum redesign teams. Also, need to review those standards and this new “creativity” spin to figure out how we can use this at our own institutions.

Librarian Learns with the Students: LibGuides, Video Tutorials for Instruction
Mary Strife at West Virginia University Library
Strife discussed how WVU Chemical Engineering students helped design and shape the delivery of research instruction. She initially used libguides and video tutorials for senior seminar. You can view her videos at libraries.wvu.edu. During Q&A librarians suggest linking this tutorial in many ways: other libguides, a specific guide on “using the library catalog,” perhaps chunking up more, posting on YouTube. They are worth the investment and we have an information literacy wiki for ELD where we can share these tutorials. Larry mentioned at Vtech they have a 1 credit online course and these tutorials are all online, which other libraries may link to. He argues that we can just do them extemporaneously and then send them along to the professionals for editing and smoothing out. Another librarian suggested more modularization is better, since interfaces change so much and the tutorials need continual updates. At ASU they use ScreenR but you can upload to Twitter and YouTube with a simple click.