A one-day seminar focusing on the role of libraries as institutions at the forefront of profound changes in society. It is organised by EUROLIS (the consortium of librarians from European cultural institutes in London) and the International Library and Information Group (ILIG) of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).
An external event
Leading experts from Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany will present current projects and share their experiences and ideas with the audience.
The seminar will be chaired by Martyn Wade, Chair of the CILIP Board and Chair of FAIFE (Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression Advisory Committee) Committee of IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions).
– short tea and coffee break-
– Lunch break-
– Tea and coffee break-
via RSS Feed
Tour of Britannia Royal Naval College Library.
Britannia Royal Naval College has been the site of officer training for the Royal Navy for over a century. Built upon the design of a public school it now delivers modern military training in an environment that honours the traditions and ethos of the Royal Navy. The College is an extremely imposing Edwardian building overlooking the town of Dartmouth.
via RSS Feed
The aim of the Informed Peer Recognition Awards (IPRA) is to give due recognition. We have all seen colleagues go above and beyond what is “expected” of them to contribute to a substantive benefit for their service or community. Informed has launched IPRA to provide these hardworking individuals with the credit that they deserve.
About IPRA
The Informed Peer Recognition Award recognises the contributions of a library and information professional working in the UK who has gone beyond the requirements of their job to make a positive difference. Nominations can fall under one of the following three categories;
Further information on the background to the award can be found here (shortlink: http://bit.ly/2bEmZPR) and FAQs are here (shortlink: http://bit.ly/2bEmZPR).
How to Submit a Nomination
Nominations should consist of a 500 word summary, and be supported by two nominators. These can be submitted via the online form here (short link: http://bit.ly/2bEzZQK) no later than 5pm on Friday the 25th of November, 2016.
via RSS Feed
Charlie McMurdie, who spent 32 years in the Metropolitan Police, is senior cybercrime adviser at PwC consulting with clients on a range of global strategic and operational cybersecurity programmes. She talks to us about how universities tick all the boxes for cybercrime risk factors – and how people, more than technology, are both the problem and the solution.
What are the latest trends in cybercrime?
"To put the latest cybercrime trends in context, technology is now integral to virtually everything we do. New technology and new features are constantly coming out, from the Internet of Things1 to biometrics2. The more accelerated the pace of change we go through, and the greater the demands from customers and companies to roll out technology quickly, the more opportunities there are for cybercriminals.
In terms of trends, there’s been an increase in denial of service (DDoS) attacks on companies, knocking them over, and also rogue emails – there’s been a 37% increase in phishing emails, with criminals using them as a point of access and compromise into organisations.
2016 has been called the year of ransomware, with an increase in the use of malware infections to lock down an individual’s or organisation’s data followed by demands for money, normally through the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which in itself presents a challenge for law enforcement to try to track and trace for legal recovery.
One of the biggest features we see every time is the part that insiders seem to play in most of the breaches that take place. That’s insiders either deliberately engineering themselves into an organisation to gain a position of access, or gaining entry into premises through fake IDs. Or, often, employees just not following policy and process, perhaps through a lack of awareness, training or understanding, and doing something that results in allowing an infiltration or a breach to occur."
So, cybersecurity is less a technology problem than a people and process problem?
"Yes. There’s certainly fantastic technology and automated processes being rolled out but, at the end of the day, it’s always individuals making the decisions around how that technology should be used and checking it is safe and secure before it’s actually deployed.
Time and time again, when you look at most of the breaches, it is down to companies not checking who’s got access to their network and who should have various permissions within that network. If you give a member of staff permissions across the HR database, the finance database and more, you actually make that individual quite a nice target for cybercriminals.
If the criminals can compromise that person then they’ve got lots of access and permissions that they can then use for criminal purposes. It’s a very complex picture for those that need to defend and implement security."
What threats do education and research, in particular, need to be aware of?
"Universities are one of the top targets for cybercriminals and that's a top concern raised by most security services. One of the reasons is that universities aren’t just a place of education. They are where most of our cutting edge research happens and where a lot of our new technologies are up and running as businesses because that’s where they have been commissioned and developed.
But look also at how universities are set up: they’ve got a massive population coming and going all the time and that’s a huge group of users who want access to technology 24/7 and who want to have it all on the move. So you’ve got a large population that’s constantly changing and lots of end points that could present opportunities to cybercriminals and you’ve got some of the crown jewels of the latest R&D taking place.
On top of that, you've got a nice big population of students who have previously been targeted in scams – the student loans scam was a fairly high profile one - by criminals seeking to defraud them or use them for money muling purposes."
The recent PwC report Cybersecurity and Privacy Hot Topics said that one of the key points of an organisation's strategic approach to cybersecurity is to 'understand your adversaries'. In the case of education and research, do we have an understanding of who those adversaries might be?
"First of all, you’ve got different types of crime under the cyber banner. There are organised crime groups around the world that will look to capitalise on stealing data and turning it into monetary assets, perhaps by compromising financial credentials or taking over bank account details. Then there are the hacktivists, the likes of Anonymous. We’ve seen relatively young individuals attacking companies because they disagree with what they’re doing or how they’re doing it, whether it’s animal research or stem cell development – that might apply to universities.
Then there are the cyberterrorists using cybercrime for funding or market manipulation. The big concern here is the potential for blended attacks - using technology to bring down or take control of our utilities and perhaps blending that with a physical attack at the same time. And then you’ve got the 'state sponsored' attacks, attributed back to various nation states who might be attacking infrastructure or infiltrating and taking sensitive data for espionage purposes.
When you look at those different types of attacks, and different types of cybercrime, universities are clearly going to be a particular target because of the nature of what they do and the way that they are set up and the high value of the population on the networks."
So it sounds like universities tick all the boxes in terms of risk?
"Yes, they do. Cyberterrorism is an obvious area to look at in terms of compromising individuals. With some of the extremist activity that takes place, we see the befriending and social engineering of individuals, to gain access to networks, as a key factor. We need to encourage people to think about who it is that's communicating with them online.
We already recognise that risk with child abuse grooming - kids think they’re communicating with somebody of a similar age and background and it turns out it’s not, it’s actually a paedophile. Well, the same tactics and tools and issues are there when it’s organised crime. When somebody is doing what they’re doing for criminal purposes or terrorist purposes, you don’t necessarily know who it is you’re communicating with. We do tend to trust what we see on the screen."
What areas of risk do people most misunderstand or underestimate? It sounds like that’s one of them.
"You ask people how many friends they’ve got and these days it’s not three or four friends or even half a dozen friends, but ‘I’ve got 1500 friends’, because of social media.
That means they’re giving away what they’re doing, where they’re going, what’s exciting them, in innocent conversations and postings, which is really useful data for somebody who wants to use it for unlawful purposes. That's a big, commonly underestimated, risk."
You've described DDoS attacks as a 'diversionary tactic' rather than merely a short-term annoyance or disruption. Can you say a bit about that?
"The UK suffers significantly with DDoS attacks, in fact it suffers more than a lot of other European companies – we're one of the top three most targeted countries, along with the US and Japan. These attacks can be diversionary tactics. What for? It's possible to speculate - for extortion purposes, for testing to see if they have got the capability to knock over our infrastructure as and when they wished to? Is it stock market manipulation?
However, although cybercrime statistics in the UK are particularly high, we’ve also got quite a good reporting, intelligence sharing network here so we’re getting a better intelligence picture, and that in turn obviously pumps up our statistics."
There are some issues around openness when it comes to security breaches. Obviously, there’s an incentive for organisations to try to cover up security breaches. What is the best way around that and is there also, conversely, a security risk in revealing too much information about a security breach?
"We’re going to see more breaches being reported and made public. The EU general data protection regulation is coming out soon and significant fines will be imposed if companies are found wanting by having redundant or irrelevant data or inappropriate security or encryption to protect their data.
I think the risk is in not revealing the right information in a timely fashion. When breaches occur, the outcry is often not so much about the data loss or breach but why it took so long for the breach to be reported, and how it's done.
If a significant breach is dealt with by providing the correct information in a timely fashion and all the right steps are taken, it's rarely newsworthy. But if the organisation isn't prepared, if they don’t know what to do or say, if they don’t know what their message to the market or their shareholders should be, if they’re giving incorrect information and then they have to correct the information, that's a problem."
And that’s a leadership issue not an IT issue, isn’t it?
"It is. I think the culture is changing within companies. It used to be that cyber and 'all this technology stuff' was dealt with by the IT department and it was an IT issue. Now it is a board issue. The chief executive and stakeholders want to know what’s going on and have oversight of it to make sure things are dealt with appropriately.
Some companies are now creating positions where one person has overarching security responsibility covering IT, information, physical security, and people training. You need to bring all those different aspects of the business together to make sure that you haven’t got any gaps in your cybersecurity. If that position then reports up to the board, there is genuine oversight."
There’s been quite a lot of discussion recently about whether there’s a cyber security skills gap. Is there one, where is it and, if so, how can it be filled?
"Time and time again, people talk about the skills gap. But I know that there are thousands and thousands of fantastic people out there who have technology skills. You look at any of the universities, and the students on their masters and PhDs, and they’ve got cyber skills all over the place.
The issue is aggregating and utilising the skill set that’s out there. Cyber cannot be considered in isolation, we need to bring together the different skill sets that exist in organisations and share the intelligence. Technology is moving and changing at such a pace that you will never have one single person who is aware and up to date about every different aspect of technology.
Yes, you need network investigators, who can interrogate malware etc, but you also need, more generally, to have people who are keen, passionate, enthusiastic and intelligent. So it’s not so much a skills gap as changing who you’re looking for, who you’re recruiting and taking the people with the passion who want to learn and keep up to date, and they can be given the cybersecurity brief on top of their normal skill sets.?
Cybersecurity needs to be integrated into all aspects of training now. So I’m not so sure that there is this massive skills gap, it's more that we’re not really investing in the right people in the right way."
via Jisc news
This session will offer support to people wishing to revalidate their CILIP Certification, Chartership or Fellowship.
Those attending will be helped to add their continued professional development records and personal statement to the VLE and shown how to arrange and submit their revalidation application.
If you are interested in attending please book a FREE place on Eventbrite
United Kingdom
via RSS Feed
This will be a half day event for candidates working towards CILIP professional registration and is a great opportunity to get some help with your portfolio, network with library colleagues and meet local mentors and the Candidate Support Officer.
The workshop will explain the professional registration process, introduce candidates to the VLE and help them understand what to include in their portfolio. We shall also have some local mentors joining the first part of the workshop.
Mentors are invited to join the first half of the session after which there will be an opportunity to exchange experience and update on the mentoring process.
If you are interested in attending please book a FREE place on Eventbrite
United Kingdom
via RSS Feed
It’s a conundrum. Digital scholarship can readily be defined by the use of technology to support the access, retrieval and application of knowledge – but that’s only a fraction of the story.
In our latest book of edited chapters we try to get under the skin of what digital scholarship really means for academic library services – and it’s far from being about the technology. In fact the technology is, in many instances, the least interesting aspect of what we discovered.
If I was asked to describe what digital scholarship means, I might perhaps echo Clifford Lynch and agree that on one level it is nonsensical; but it is also a characteristic of the environment in which many of us work today; it may also be revolutionary. As Alison Hicks points out ‘digital scholarship must be understood as going beyond the adoption of new research methods to engage more deeply with personal habits as well as ideas of outreach, engagement and education’. Many of the scholars who actively embrace these principles will want to participate in networked environments but the tension that arises between networked openness, and research which is often based on conservative value and reward systems, place many scholars in an unenviable position – how far to share? What tools should they use?
Is the librarian able to provide a critical gaze over these scenarios, the use of new technologies and practices and provide an informed view, contribute to the conversation and re-assure?
One of our case studies focuses on the Disruptive Media Learning Lab at Coventry University UK, now home to a team of librarians; it examines how they are adapting to this new environment, retaining their identity and forming new partnerships. This, and other examples demonstrate how you, as professional librarians, are successfully adapting, innovating and generally navigating your way through these disruptive changes. That is one reason to be cheerful and optimistic and it is also a recognition that, cliché aside, digital is the new norm.
The challenge, and one which is explored throughout the book is how are the many facets of the scholarly environment impacting on academic libraries? If we accept that all scholarship is by default digital how are academic librarians responding? We suggest that the answers come in many shapes and forms – the link between digital scholarship and workflow redesign is explored from an Australian perspective; the development of digital scholarship centres in North America forms an in depth case study and,across all countries represented, new partnerships, roles and initiatives are discussed and provide sources for inspiration and adoption. Specifically we draw from the literature on career coaching and identify the professional and personal qualities that characterise your successes.
These findings are refreshingly positive – librarians are being bold and as they emerge as robustly digitally resilient, their future feels positively secure.
Developing Digital Scholarship: Emerging practices in academic libraries, edited by Alison Mackenzie and Lindsey Martin, spans a wide range of contrasting perspectives, contexts, insights and case studies, which explore the relationships between digital scholarship, contemporary academic libraries and professional practice.
Banner image source: Icon made by Flat Icons in computer from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY”
via RSS Feed
In a time of shifting goalposts and rigorous competition for scant resources, public librarians and managers are increasingly called upon to collect and utilise data which will enable them to innovate, to evolve, and to justify both their social and economic worth. This approach to professional practice has strong and well developed foundations (Eldredge, 2012) and is backed by international library advocates and practitioners alike. But it is also a model increasingly espoused by professional bodies (CILIP Impact Toolkit) and national governments. The latter being most recently and specifically evident in the consultation document Libraries Deliver: Ambition for Public Libraries in England 2016-2021 where the significance of, and a national UK requirement for evidence-based library and information practice (EBLIP) is clearly laid out.
The ‘Ambition for Public Libraries’ does, however, acknowledge a number of existing data issues which will be all too familiar to many public library practitioners: the focus on “inputs rather than outputs and long-term impact”, an emphasis on “quantitative data over qualitative data” “a ‘time delay’ in accessing up-to-date information”, “‘siloed’ datasets”, “data… held behind pay walls” and “a lack of resource to make effective use of available data”. Such obstacles, combined with other practical and organisational barriers such as the responsibilities of general management; an ever widening service portfolio and an ever shrinking budget, might make drawing on or participating in evidence based practice seem an almost insurmountable task.
In 2015, Pam Ryan posted a 'Call to Action’ for public librarians: "We need to collectively take responsibility for changing public library culture and take ownership of telling our own stories and sharing our evidence". But where and how to begin? Koufogiannakis and Brettle’s new EBLIP framework ‘Articulate, Assemble, Assess, Agree, Adapt’ (Being Evidence Based in Library and Information Practice, 2016) offers a realistic model for workplace application which takes into account “the context in which librarians work” and the types of evidence which are available and appropriate to their decision making. Top tips for public library practitioners include:
Traditional research evidence (whether quantitative, qualitative, mixed method or secondary), remains key to professional practice, but it should be considered one aspect of a complex and often unique puzzle. When taking a “holistic approach to EBP in librarianship”, variety is key, and Koufogiannakis and Brettle (2016) have identified two other overarching categories: “local evidence” (including statistics , evaluation, documentation, observation, anecdotal evidence and organisational realities) and “professional knowledge” (expertise, tacit knowledge, input from colleagues, best practice from other organisations and non-research literature) - each element of which may be of potentially equal value in reaching a “well informed and considered professional opinion.”
If you have a problem that you need to address, or an idea that you want to try, it’s likely that someone else in your sector, or at a comparable institution, has already tried something similar. Before you start your project or process, do a quick literature search, check your mailing list archives, and if you can’t find anything there, ask at your next regional meeting, or email colleagues working in similar fields who may be willing to share examples of their own best practice. Refine and modify your search as you go and you'll uncover plenty of tools that you can apply, or at least gain a better understanding of the issues and potential solutions involved.
Don’t always assume that you know what your users want: watch how they use your service, how they operate within the environment; how far do they get by themselves, at what point do they need help to find the information they need? Local, empirical evidence can be crucial in understanding what your users want, and in helping you to develop processes and systems that are intuitive for library users, rather than librarians themselves (Gillespie, 2014, Partridge, 2016). Incorporate user comments into your service design, move or expand your collections according to need. Then look at what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved.
It is undoubtedly frustrating that public librarians do not always have the same easy access to resources as their academic peers. But there are other ways to collect, engage with and organise your evidence. Tools such as the CILIP Impact Toolkit and GOV.UK’s Libraries shaping the future: toolkit and case studies; Arts Council England’s ‘Inspiring Learning for All’ framework, research published by the Carnegie Trust, Public Libraries News and open access journals such as Evidence Based Library and Information Practice and The Journal of Information Literacy are a good place to start. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 50 more.
Whatever you do, do something. Your sector needs you, so “build our evidence-base, inform our collective practice, and…tell our stories” (Ryan, 2015). Why not use the comments below to share the ways in which you use evidence in your daily practice or to highlight relevant open access resources which can be used by the international public library community?
Becky Cole is a contributor to the book Being Evidence Based in Library and Information Practice (2016). The book is edited by Denise Koufogiannakis and Alison Brettle and builds a research-grounded, theoretical foundation for evidence based library and information practice. It is divided into two parts: firstly, exploring the background to EBLIP and proposing a new model for its application in the workplace and secondly, providing an overview EBLIP developments in academic, public, health, school and special libraries around the world.
via RSS Feed
Facet Publishing have announced the release of Developing Digital Scholarship: Emerging practices in academic libraries
This new book, edited by Alison Mackenzie and Lindsey Martin, provides strategic insights drawn from librarians who are meeting the challenge of digital scholarship, utilizing the latest technologies and creating new knowledge in partnership with researchers, scholars, colleagues and students.
The impact of digital on libraries has extended far beyond its transformation of content, to the development of services, the extension and enhancement of access to research and to teaching and learning systems. As a result, the fluidity of the digital environment can often be at odds with the more systematic approaches to development traditionally taken by academic libraries, which has also led to a new generation of roles and shifting responsibilities with staff training and development often playing ‘catch-up’. One of the key challenges to emerge is how best to demonstrate expertise in digital scholarship which draws on the specialist technical knowledge of the profession and maintains and grows its relevance for staff, students and researchers.
Developing Digital Scholarship spans a wide range of contrasting perspectives, contexts, insights and case studies, which explore the relationships between digital scholarship, contemporary academic libraries and professional practice.
The editors said,” Our book demonstrates that there are opportunities to be bold, remodel, trial new approaches and reposition the library as a key partner in the process of digital scholarship.”
Alison Mackenzie is the Dean of Learning Services at Edge Hill University. Alison has been an active contributor in the development of the profession having held roles on the SCONUL Board, and as Chair of the performance Measurement and Quality Strategy group. She is currently a member of the Northern Collaboration steering group and is co-editor of this book.
Lindsey Martin is the Assistant Head of learning Services and is responsible for the learning technologies managed and supported by Learning Services. She has responsibility for the virtual learning environment and its associated systems, media production, classroom AV, and development of staff digital capability. Lindsey has worked in academic libraries for the past 20+ years in a variety of roles. She has been active on the Heads of eLearning Forum Steering group (HeLF) for a number of years and is currently its Chair. She is co-editor of this book.
- ends
Press and review copies contact:
James Williams, Marketing Manager, Facet Publishing
Tel: +44 (0)20 7255 0597
Email: james.williams@facetpublishing.co.uk
Notes:
Developing Digital Scholarship: Emerging practices in academic libraries | Oct 2016 | 192pp | paperback: 9781783301102 | £49.95 | hardback: 9781783301782 | £89.95
The book is published by Facet Publishing and is available from Bookpoint Ltd | Tel: +44 (0)1235 827702 | Fax: +44 (0)1235 827703 | Email: facet@bookpoint.co.uk | Web: www.facetpublishing.co.uk. | Mailing Address: Mail Order Dept, 39 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4TD. It is available in North America from the American Library Association.
via RSS Feed
Ian Levy, technical director of the government’s brand new National Cyber Security Centre and keynote speaker at today's Jisc security conference, explains how the centre will open up cybersecurity and work with the education and research sector to help it protect itself better.
What’s the structure and focus of the National Cyber Security Centre and how does it improve on what’s gone before?
"The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) brings together, in a single new organisation, significant chunks of government that deal with cyber; from CESG, the information security part of GCHQ, to CERT-UK, our computer emergency response team. For large swathes of cyber advice and transaction, the NCSU will now be your first port of call.
There are two things that make the NCSC fundamentally different. Firstly, our focus on the customer. In the past, like all governments, we’ve sat in our ivory doughnuts and proclaimed that we know everything and pronounced on what people should do. And, of course, it turns out it’s not that simple. There are always constraints that we don’t understand.
The NCSC is going to work much more closely with our customers so that we really understand their constraints and their environment and can be a much better partner for them."
"As a corollary of that, we’re going to be much more open. We want to generate data. We want to publish it online. We want everything that we do in the NCSC to be online, by default.
Learn more about the NCSC in their introductory video
We should be saying, here’s what we think the problem was, here’s what we’ve done to try to address it and here’s what the effect was – and do that whether it worked or not, and in a way that people can understand. That way, you start to get people to understand how cybersecurity affects them and how they can participate in their own protection.
The second big change is that we’re becoming more active in our protection of the UK, more interventionist. The full details of that will come out when the national strategy is published. But the general idea is that we’ll build automated systems that get rid of a significant amount of the commodity attacks that affect the UK: we want to make spam go away for people, we want to make the banking attacks go away for people, we want to make it very difficult for anybody to impersonate the government brands."
Looking specifically at the education and research sector, how are you going to work with the sector to do that?
"We want to work with the education and research sector in two ways. Firstly, by working with them on research and helping people to get into STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects.
In terms of how we help the sector protect itself, we’ve traditionally had a hard time talking to academics and universities. That’s because, usually, government comes along and says, ‘we think you should be filtering these sorts of things’. And they say, ‘No. Academic freedom’. So that’s one of the reasons we want to talk to Jisc.
We want to say, look - here’s what we do for the rest of the country. We don’t want to do this for you. We want you to do it in a way that works for you, that you’re happy with as a community. Let us help you do that."
"Protecting the sector is critical because it’s where the future of the economy lies. We don’t want to interfere in academic freedoms but we do want to partner with organisations like Jisc to help the academic sector protect itself better."
That involves listening as well?
"Of course. We want the NCSC to be much more open.
To contrast, GCHQ is a top secret organisation and it’s very difficult to get into our buildings, it’s very difficult to talk to us. The NCSC building is an unclassified building and about 20% of its space will be reserved for collaboration."
"I want to get people from various sectors to come and sit in there and a) teach us, and b) let us work with them to help them understand the threat better so that we don’t end up with this artificial divide between cybersecurity people and people who understand the sectors.
We also want to deploy people out in the various sectors so we really understand how our customers work."
What do you think are the particular cybersecurity threats faced by education and research?
"In terms of research, it’s intellectual property theft on a massive scale. That’s our differentiator in the world, and there’s going to be disruption at some point."
What about the things that are, perhaps, lower level but very annoying and disruptive such as phishing and DDoS attacks?
"We want to tackle those at national scale.
One of the things we are doing is making it very hard for somebody to spoof a gov.uk address. Until six weeks ago you could fake some @gov.uk addresses, such as taxrefund @gov.uk, and there were thousands being sent every day. We’ve stopped it. It’s a relatively simple thing to do. And I’d like all the universities to do that so that university addresses can’t be spoofed."
What else would you like institutions to do?
"DNS filtering. We’re going to do it for government first, to prove it works and prove you can manage all the privacy issues, and then we want the ISPs to do it for the public at large so, by default, you get protected from bad sites (bad meaning they’re trying to send you malware or steal your credentials or get you in a phishing campaign).
We think it would be sensible for institutions to do that for their staff and students."
"But there is always a balance around academic freedom and it’s not for us to say what the balance is, it’s for us to say ‘here’s what we’re doing for government, here’s the data that shows what benefit it brings’. If you want help to do this filtering stuff, you can have it, that’s absolutely fine. If you do take it, I’d really like high level stats back about how you stopped 10,000 phishing attacks today or 25,000 malware attacks today so that we can start to build a national threat picture - but that’s all I want back."
Is there going to be a fear that there may be an element of compulsion involved?
"There will not be any element of compulsion from government. That’s not how we want to do this."
In the past you’ve said some interesting things about language and how that impacts on risk management. Tell me a bit more about that.
"Take the names of the financial instrument that caused the 2008 crash. You start off with ‘mortgaged-backed securities’. They sound good, they’ve got the word secure in them and they’re backed by a mortgage. You go through until you get to ‘toxic debt’ and you say, you can be forgiven for investing in mortgage-backed securities but you’d be an idiot to invest in toxic debt. But they’re all the same thing."
"The way you talk about something fundamentally changes how you view the risk of it. The way we talk about cybersecurity today is all very scary and doesn’t aid good risk management.
We need to get evidence, we need to get data and we need to be realistic about what the threats actually are."
Is there a risk that you may heighten people’s fear rather than assuaging it by being so much more open, ie by publicising the amount of phishing?
"No I don’t think so. If you read the technical press today or even the tabloids, it’s all codified in words that sound scary, such as cyberwar and cyberterrorism.
What I’m hoping we’ll be able to show in the next six to nine months is that we can take away a good amount of phishing, scamming, credential stealing malware for people at scale. We can make email trust mean something again. We can make it harder to launch DDoS attacks against the UK."
"The question then is, how do you generate the data and the evidence to show people that it works or doesn’t work and be honest about that? What will happen is that the attackers will evolve as our defences evolve? So this isn’t a one-stop shop."
One of NCSC’s objectives is to nurture and grow the UK’s cybersecurity capability. How will you do that? Is there a cybersecurity skills gap?
"There definitely is one. I think it probably starts back at school. We’re not good at keeping enough people in STEM subjects, generally, and we’re not good at making cybersecurity an interesting subject for them at the moment. We need to try to fix that over the next few years. "
"We’ve got CyberFirst, which talks about how we intend to do stuff in schools. We’ve got sponsored MScs, we’ve got an apprentice scheme, cyber apprentices.
Over the next few years we’re trying to build a pipeline of people who have a sustainable set of skills. I think the key thing for me is how you get everybody who is involved in technology - of whatever kind - to understand cybersecurity. They don’t have to be experts but they have to be cognisant of it.
Getting it into the right curricula across the space is really important. The final bit is getting it into MBAs, because it’s business who generally do the risk management. They have to manage cyber risk and they’re doing it differently to the way they manage any other business risk at the moment and that doesn’t seem right. I think that’s because it’s not well taught in MBAs at the moment."
So, it needs to be a leadership issue?
"In a business it absolutely should be a board-level issue. It’s just another business risk.
As an example, every business must have a financial control policy, which is audited and presented to the board every three months. But ask them if they have a patching policy for their system and they’ll say yes, of course, our IT guys patch our systems, according to our patching policy. Then ask when it was last taken as an audit item, and the answer, generally speaking, is “never”. Because they push it down to the IT guys, because it’s “weird techy stuff”. You’d never do that with a financial liability, so why do you do it with a cybersecurity liability?
There’s a dissonance between the different business risks and we need to try to corral them together."
via Jisc news
CILIPinKent is pleased to offer library professionals and para-professionals the opportunity to visit The Women's Library at London School of Economics.
'The Women’s Library documents all aspects of women’s lives, with an emphasis on women in the UK throughout the great political, economic and social changes of the past 150 years. It includes 60,000 books and pamphlets, 3,000 journal titles, over 500 archives and 5,000 museum objects, including photographs, posters, badges and banners.'
The visit will include a tour of a LGBT exhibition marking the anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967.
More information at www.lse.ac.uk/library/collecti...
via RSS Feed
Hear Ye Hear Ye, I hereby announce the CILIPinKENT Christmas Quiz!
Join us to celebrate the festive season.
In the capable hands of our quizmaster we can promise you an enjoyable evening of fun. We have a range of questions to get your brain ticking, and prizes for the winners!
You can come in ready-made teams (Teams are of up to 4 people. Remember to book a ticket for each member of the team) or you can come on your own or with friends and join a team on the night.
Supper will be served at half time. You can order your food on the night (they have a selection of good pub-like food) or, if you fancy a Christmas-themed meal, please email us (CILIPinKENT@gmail.com) with your choice in advance from this menu http://bit.ly/2dCQ0xH
The entry fee will go towards the cost of a prize for the winning teams.
via RSS Feed
A chance to tour a School Library and learn about the work of a school librarian.
By the end of the session you will have:
• An improved understanding of the function and purpose of school libraries
• Information about typical duties carried out by the librarian
• An idea of the activities and programs run in school libraries
• An opportunity to ask questions and compare this library to your own
via RSS Feed
If you cannot attend this important event you can still follow the proceedings using either Twitter and hashtag: #Strixlecture
or by following the live stream which will show both the speakers and their PowerPoints:
http://geolsoc.adobeconnect.com/ukeig1610/
In addition to the Strix Annual Lecture given by the 2015 winner of the award, Professor Peter Ingwersen, we are lucky to have an introductory lecture - Search: then and now -- with particular reference to the web - given by the winner of the first ever Award in 1998, Stephen Robertson.
A further highlight of the afternoon will be the awarding of the 2016 Tony Kent Strix Award to Professor Maristella Agosti.
The full programme can be found at http://www.cilip.org.uk/uk-einformation-group/events/strix-annual-lecture
where you can still register for the event, and further details of both winners can be found at:
via RSS Feed
The RSL is the main science library of Oxford University and has holdings of around 1 million items. It covers subjects from biochemistry to zoology via engineering, forestry, medicine and more. The librarians also run innovative reader services projects including loaning iPads and hosting an Edible Book Festival (mostly cake!) for World Book Day. The tour will talk about the history of the library, show us round the spaces and collections, and wrap up with a demonstration of the library's 3D printer.
We will stop at the King's Arms after the tour for a drink and a little festive season networking.
via RSS Feed
A visit to Lancaster Libraries is being organised by the NW Group of CILIP Local Studies.
Date: 16 November 2016
Location: The Ruskin Library
Highlights: The Whitehouse Collection
Schedule:
11.00am A tour of the Ruskin Library
1.30pm Special collections at Lancaster University Library
2.00pm Tour of Lancaster University Library
There is a regular bus service to the University from the train station. Detailed advice on travelling to the university can be found at http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/contact-and-getting-here/maps-and-travel
Please contact :
Linda Clarke: linda.clarke@cheshiresharedservices.gov.uk to book a place
Deadline: 9th November, 2016
via RSS Feed
This article aims to provide an overview of the importance of political advocacy to our profession and offers practical guidance on how to effectively engage in it. It is not intended to be a comprehensive guide on what is a wide and varied subject matter but instead seeks to draw on personal experience to provide information and assistance to those wishing to explore the subject.
This article originally appeared in An Leabharlann: The Irish Library Volume 25: Issue 2 October 2016
via RSS Feed
Two significant new research projects have been approved under the CILIP Information Literacy Group Research Bursary scheme. One will look at the information practices and experiences of New Syrian Scots refugees who are resettling in Scotland; and the second seeks to understand how mis-information influences young people’s psychological, physical, and behavioural reactions to functioning with a person with perceived extremist views - and whether there is a link between these reactions and people's level of ability to make sound judgements about information they are presented.
This is a scoping study that aims to examine the information related experiences and information literacy practices of Syrian New Scots (the Syrian refugees in Scotland) during their resettlement and integration.
More specifically, the research aims to explore the following areas:
The project will be conducted through interviews with Scottish Refugee Council representatives and focus groups with New Syrian Scots families in Aberdeen and Glasgow. The duration of this project is from October 2016 to February 2017.
The outcomes will help towards making recommendations on how to best aid Syrian newcomers in their social inclusion and community engagement and how to support their habitual and emerging information landscapes for their resettlement and adaptation.
The findings will be of interest to local and regional support organizations and community volunteer groups who contribute to the social wellbeing and social integration of Syrian New Scots, as well as public libraries as centres for educational and cultural orientation sessions and support for newly settled refugees and for the communities that welcome them.
Worldwide, people engage with a variety of information outlets to gain insight into world events. To this end, it is not known how mis-information (e.g. websites promoting religious or racist extremism) affects young people’s well-being (including psychological and physical responses). What is also uncertain is how young peoples’ level of ability to make judgments about the online information they encounter is a protecting factor against the ill-being (i.e. negative stress responses) that mis-information may cause.
This project seeks to understand how such mis-information influences young people’s psychological, physical, and behavioural reactions to functioning with a person with perceived extremist views. We also wish to find out whether there is a link between these reactions and peoples level of ability to make sound judgements about information they are presented. We expect that young people who are good at making judgements about information will be less affected by people perceived to have extremist views. We will be working with participants aged 16-24 because they are the most likely users of the Internet and therefore exposed to mis-information on a regular basis, which may result in the development of ill-being, especially through prolonged social media use.
This multidisciplinary project brings together experts across information literacy, user experience, applied psychology and psychophysiological stress reactivity. The team believes that the way that people make judgements about information moderates the relationship between mis-information and cardiovascular responses in stressful social situations. This research has wide implications for policy makers, educationalists and governments, indicating for the first time that information literacy may have social and physical, as well as educational benefits, and that it should be added to current preventative measures against mis-information.
This is a new multidisciplinary collaboration between Manchester Metropolitan University, Northumbria University, and Staffordshire University. The team brings together expertise from the fields of Information Science, Psychology, and Sport & Exercise Science.
via RSS Feed
Two significant new research projects have been approved under the CILIP Information Literacy Group Research Bursary scheme. One will look at the information practices and experiences of New Syrian Scots refugees who are resettling in Scotland; and the second seeks to understand how mis-information influences young people’s psychological, physical, and behavioural reactions to functioning with a person with perceived extremist views - and whether there is a link between these reactions and people's level of ability to make sound judgements about information they are presented.
This is a scoping study that aims to examine the information related experiences and information literacy practices of Syrian New Scots (the Syrian refugees in Scotland) during their resettlement and integration.
More specifically, the research aims to explore the following areas:
The project will be conducted through interviews with Scottish Refugee Council representatives and focus groups with New Syrian Scots families in Aberdeen and Glasgow. The duration of this project is from October 2016 to February 2017.
The outcomes will help towards making recommendations on how to best aid Syrian newcomers in their social inclusion and community engagement and how to support their habitual and emerging information landscapes for their resettlement and adaptation.
The findings will be of interest to local and regional support organizations and community volunteer groups who contribute to the social wellbeing and social integration of Syrian New Scots, as well as public libraries as centres for educational and cultural orientation sessions and support for newly settled refugees and for the communities that welcome them.
Worldwide, people engage with a variety of information outlets to gain insight into world events. To this end, it is not known how mis-information (e.g. websites promoting religious or racist extremism) affects young people’s well-being (including psychological and physical responses). What is also uncertain is how young peoples’ level of ability to make judgments about the online information they encounter is a protecting factor against the ill-being (i.e. negative stress responses) that mis-information may cause.
This project seeks to understand how such mis-information influences young people’s psychological, physical, and behavioural reactions to functioning with a person with perceived extremist views. We also wish to find out whether there is a link between these reactions and peoples level of ability to make sound judgements about information they are presented. We expect that young people who are good at making judgements about information will be less affected by people perceived to have extremist views. We will be working with participants aged 16-24 because they are the most likely users of the Internet and therefore exposed to mis-information on a regular basis, which may result in the development of ill-being, especially through prolonged social media use.
This multidisciplinary project brings together experts across information literacy, user experience, applied psychology and psychophysiological stress reactivity. The team believes that the way that people make judgements about information moderates the relationship between mis-information and cardiovascular responses in stressful social situations. This research has wide implications for policy makers, educationalists and governments, indicating for the first time that information literacy may have social and physical, as well as educational benefits, and that it should be added to current preventative measures against mis-information.
This is a new multidisciplinary collaboration between Manchester Metropolitan University, Northumbria University, and Staffordshire University. The team brings together expertise from the fields of Information Science, Psychology, and Sport & Exercise Science.
via RSS Feed
CILIP, the library and information association has called on Westminster City Council to halt proposed cuts to the library budget of £750,000 a year until a proper public consultation has been carried out.
In an open letter CILIP CEO Nick Poole has written to Westminster Council Chief Executive Charlie Parker with concerns about the proposals and the impact it will have on communities and the local economy.
Nick Poole said, “Westminster Libraries are some of the best in the country, helping 140,000 people to set up a new business, tackling social isolation and exclusion and are cultural beacons in their communities providing space for exhibitions and performances, access to reading and unique archives. I am profoundly concerned about the impact of these budget reductions on the quality of services the public expect and deserve. Without question the Council should consult with the public and consider their views carefully.”
In the letter Nick Poole sets out the case for properly resourced and staffed libraries, saying “They play a crucial role providing access to information and knowledge, supporting small businesses and employment, improving health and well being and providing everyone with opportunities for learning and developing new skills.” He raises specific concerns about the apparent lack of public consultation about the impact of this budget reduction and seeks assurance that public consultation will take place and proposals will not be confirmed until the views of residents have been fully considered.
Following a House of Lords debate on the importance of libraries on the 13 October CILIP has warned about the pending impact of the Autumn Statement on Local Authority budgets. Nick Poole said, “Through My Library By Right CILIP is campaigning for the public’s rights to quality library services to be respected and for central and local Government to follow their duties under the law. Although libraries are statutory services their budgets are not ring-fenced, and while we wait for the Government to publish a robust strategy for public libraries in England I am concerned that under-pressure Councils will make ever deeper cuts.”
-ends-
Press contact
Mark Taylor
Director of External Relations, CILIP
Email: mark.taylor@cilip.org.uk
Tel: 020 7255 0654
Mobile: 07792 635 305
Notes for editors
CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is the leading voice for the information, knowledge management and library profession. Our goal is to put information and library skills at the heart of an equal, democratic and prosperous society by 2020. Registered charity no. 313014. www.cilip.org.uk
via RSS Feed
Last week Ingenta, a leading software provider to the publishing industry, launched Ingenta Open, a new hosting platform solution and discovery portal designed exclusively for Open Access content, noting that with an increasing amount of Open Access content being published, much of which is indexed across a variety of sites or stored away in institutional repositories, Ingenta Open is a new central hub and browsing service for researchers, students and the general public specifically seeking Open Access resources. The press release follows:
The platform hosts content from all scholarly disciplines and caters for multiple formats, including whole books, chapters, monographs, single articles and entire journals. It will eventually provide access to millions of Open Access articles, whether they are hosted on the platform itself, indexed via third party services such as DOAJ & OAPEN.
Ingenta Open provides users with access without any registration requirements, while offering a clean and responsive design, a simple interface and an easy-to-use search function.
Publishers who choose to host their Open Access content on the platform will immediately be able to tap into the Ingenta Connect network of over 25,000 registered institutions, and millions of end users across 170 countries. Further publisher benefits include:
- Distribution of metadata to EBSCO, OCLC, InfoTrieve, NLM, and other discovery services
- Tagging in Google Scholar
- Access as HTML or PDF
- Bolt-on services, including automated APC processing, print-on-demand and social media marketing are planned for future editions
Byron Russell, Head of Ingenta Connect, said: “One of the main reasons behind the academic publishing community migrating towards Open Access models was to make content more readily available, and free-of-charge, to users. The problem is a great deal of these resources are hidden away in institutional siloes or poorly indexed online with minimal discoverability options. Our aim in creating Ingenta Open is to make Open Access really open – to provide users with a globally central access point for all Open Access content online and to guarantee that publishers and authors get the visibility their research deserves. “The portal is designed to be intuitive for the end user, who can search and discover academic research in any discipline, in any format, on any device, with just a few clicks. For publishers the solution offers a hassle-free and affordable way of hosting, indexing and disseminating research, smoothing over many of the pain points associated with managing Open Access content in the process. We are extremely excited with this innovative new offering and we look forward to launching it and then rolling out addition features in years to come.”
For more information, please visit www.ingentaopen.com
Notes to Editors:
For more information, please contact: Daniel Freeman, Midas PR +44 020 7361 7866 daniel.freeman@midaspr.co.uk Julia Charnock, Ingenta plc +44 (0) 1865 397873 Julia.charnock@ingenta.com
About Ingenta:
Ingenta is the world-leading provider of content solutions that transform business. We cover the publishing process from end to end with our suite of commercial products, CMS and advertising solutions and content services packages. Combining our unmatched publishing knowledge, global operations and customer support with our extensive technology and service products, we offer the industry’s only full spectrum of solutions to help publishers manage and monetise their content effectively. Listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange, the company operates jointly from Europe (Oxford) and North America (Boston and New Jersey), with local offices in Brazil, India and China. Assisting 450 trade and scholarly publishers for nearly 40 years, Ingenta solves the fundamental issues content providers face.
via RSS Feed
Amazon sells a quarter of all print books and two-thirds of ebooks. It hosts 31% of the internet and is even setting up its own freight carrier. How can anyone compete?
Well, you can't. So don’t.
Why bother competing on shipping when the book your customer wants is only 5 minutes walk away? Why compete on range when your customer only wants good books that they will love? Why compete on price when you can offer something no one else has?
There are lots of things that Amazon can’t or don’t do: discovery, community, curation, trust, rarity, immediacy – a list of things that libraries happen to be very good at.
In 2015, there were 2,967 literary projects funded through the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter. That is a huge amount of money that didn’t go to Amazon or to a traditional publisher.
Book projects such as the stunning One Third Stories – beautifully teaching languages or The Island of Lost Things, a stunning book about solitude, thrive on Kickstarter, offering exclusive access and rewards to people willing to pay up-front for a product.
Launched in 2009, the platform offers customers rarity, community, connection with real people (creators own their email lists if successful), a sense of beneficence, plus the material satisfaction of owning something first, something totally new. The experience of buying it is almost as special as the thing itself – which could never be said of Amazon.
Amazon lists over 50 million books, but your customer is not interested in 99.99999% of them. Selectivity is an advantage.
“Every week we are inundated with requests from publishers and authors but we have to be selective and believe in the books we feature, otherwise we’re going to lose the trust of the community we’ve worked so hard to build,” says Georgina Atwell, founder of Toppsta, a children’s book review site launched in 2014.
Being a specialist builds trust and loyalty, and Toppsta has built a huge audience of book lovers by quieting the noise.
Warehouses, planes, trucks, postage and packaging… that’s Amazon’s burden. But Near St knows that the book you want is already within reach right now, no shipping necessary. The idea is that you can browse the real-time shelves of your local bookshops.
Co-founder Nick Brackenbury says, "We started Near St because it's so difficult to find and buy exactly what you want from a shop nearby. The by-product of solving that problem is taking on Amazon, because they aren't set up to serve this kind of customer." That’s the point – there are so many customers that other businesses can serve better than Amazon can.
Near St isn’t just helping people find books. It’s also helping people find book places. “We've a customer who's ordered books for collection from a shop in almost every part of London, is slowly touring all of the independents across the city.” Amazon just can’t do that.
Well, who is to say that libraries shouldn't share their stock with platforms like Near St? And Toppsta would love to work with librarians - Georgina says to email her at georgina@toppsa.com with any ideas. Crowd-funding sites have already seen various library projects funded. These include A Little Free Library for Woolwich, Banned Books Week at the Vonnegut Library and Bring the Hulk to the Northlake Public Library.
There are lots of other areas – browsing, series information, sensible recommendations, in-person events... what start-ups or platforms have you seen that can take on Amazon?
Image source: Amazon - official opening by scottishgovernment, used under CC BY-NC 2.0 / original cropped and resized
via RSS Feed
As we mark the beginning of another Open Access Week, we speak to Mike Taylor, palaeontologist, open access campaigner and co-founder of Who Needs Access website, about the moral imperative for open access and the destructive power of the brand name in academic publishing.
You've written about the moral dimensions of open access - can you outline what you mean by that?
"It’s hugely important to me. A lot of open access advocates come from a very different foundation, supporting open access because they think it will save money, for example. That’s important, of course. But to me, what's much more important is this very fundamental thing that the internet is essentially a machine for creating value out of thin air.
So, pre-internet, if I had a reprint of a paper and I gave you my copy, I would no longer have my copy. Now we are living in a world where I can give you a copy at no expense to myself and retain all of my collection. I can do that an infinite number of times and give everybody in the whole world a copy. So, suddenly, a thing that was of value to me can be of value to six billion people instead.
It feels morally wrong, given the capacity we have to do that, not to do it. Anything that stands in the way of our making this enormous increase in value for everybody in the world is inherently a bad thing. That’s the fundamental argument for open access - we can create free value. It’s stupid not to.
I co-run a website called Who Needs Access. It’s anecdotal because, often, anecdotes will reach people when numbers won’t. It’s about those people outside of academia who are deeply reliant on access to published academic papers, such as people running small businesses, translators, third world entrepreneurs, patients with various obscure diseases.
Christy Collins is one. She has a child with a rare genetic condition. Her GP doesn’t have time to do the enormous amount of work involved in reading up and becoming an expert on a condition suffered by just one of his patients. Christy has the time and motivation to do it yet constantly runs into problems where she can’t find out what she needs to know about her own child’s medical condition because paywalls are in the way. That, for me, is a very compelling moral case for open access, quite aside from what it means for cost savings in libraries and suchlike.
We in academia are generating this astonishing amount of fantastically valuable information. We have to get it into the hands of the people who need it – and that doesn’t just mean other academics."
The theme of open access week this year is 'open in action' and it’s about the small steps that everyone can take to make openness in research a reality. Are there any particular areas of great practice that you can point to?
"I’m an associate researcher at the University of Bristol and it was very encouraging when we finally adopted our own open access policy within the university. However, I’m in a slightly unusual position. Although I’m a research associate of Bristol, my day job is not in academia, I’m a computer programmer. So I don’t need to play a lot of the games that paid researchers have to play to make their CVs look good for the kinds of jobs they want to get.
So, for example, if I suddenly stumble across definitive evidence for the biggest dinosaur that ever existed, I don’t have to send that to Science or Nature in the desperate hope of getting a Science or Nature paper that will make my career, I can send it to the journal that I think will do the best scientific job. As a result of that, it’s very easy for me to take a fundamentalist position on open access, and I need to remind myself that other people don’t always have the privilege of looking at it in such a black and white way.
But the upshot is that all my stuff goes to open access journals. None of it goes to journals that are owned by large multinational corporations, even if those publishers do run open access journals. That’s because I’m more concerned about the openness of my work than I am about any other aspects of its publication.
Now, I would love everybody else to adopt that same policy but I do understand why it’s not always that straightforward for people in other situations."
Would it have been more difficult for you in the past to find open access journals that you wanted to publish in, has there been a proliferation of journals that have opened things up for you?
"There definitely has been a proliferation. It’s not affected me personally as much as it might have done because palaeontology has always been somewhat ahead of the field in open access. I’ve got more choices now than I had before, but ever since I started publishing there have been good open access places to put my papers.
It varies enormously between different fields. So chemists, for example, have a much harder time finding somewhere appropriate."
How about the level of debate in recent times and the extent of awareness of open access?
"A few years ago there was a whole series of articles, particularly in the Guardian, but also the Independent, Telegraph and all sorts of other mainstream publications, looking at open access issues. I think that was really important in gradually shifting the views of a lot of people, making it an issue that became difficult to ignore. So I’m really happy about that.
Having said that, the quality of debate is sometimes not all we might to ask for."
How might open access progress?
"The neuroscientist Bjorn Brembs talks about building a completely new infrastructure that takes full advantage of the technological advances we’ve seen since we first started putting paper journals on the internet. He would like to do something dramatically different in areas such as dynamic illustrations – and he's done this with one or two of his own papers - where you can fiddle with the data and the tables and see the graphs and the paper updating in real time, showing how it would come out differently if various things happened.
All of this kind of thing feels terribly futuristic to us but it really isn’t, of course, it’s just the kind of stuff, that outside of academia, is happening all the while on the internet.
Bizarrely, we're in a situation where, although the world wide web was created primarily for enabling the free sharing of scholarly publications, scholarly publications is behind almost any other field of endeavour in taking advantage of the internet.
Bjorn Brembs’ new infrastructure solution is not a particularly difficult thing to do, technically, and the cost would be tiny compared with what we throw away in subscriptions every year."
Is it important for the community to own its infrastructure?
"I think that’s crucial. Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin and Cameron Neylon wrote an important paper, Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures, that lays this out in terms of the social structure of an organisation and what kind of contractual or legal things can be put in around it to ensure that remains it open. They've really thought it through in detail.
Geoff Bilder works at CrossRef, which exemplifies most of those principles very effectively, despite being funded by publishers. CrossRef has done a fantastic job of maintaining its independence because it nailed down these principles very early on. Whatever we build absolutely needs these considerations, from having open software to financial firewalls between various parts of the organisation."
What’s holding back infrastructure development?
"The real problem, of course, as always, is not the technical one, it’s the social one. How do you persuade people to turn away from the brands that they’ve become comfortable with?
We really are only talking about brands, the value of publishing in, say, a big name journal rather than publishing in a preprint repository. It is nothing to do with the value of the research that gets published. It’s like buying a pair of jeans that are ten times as expensive as the exact same pair of jeans in Marks and Spencer because you want to get the ones that have an expensive label. Now ask why we’re so stupid that we care about the labels."
OK, why are we so stupid that we care about the labels?
"It’s because we are tied into this ridiculous way of assessing people in the academic world. So a researcher who does very, very good work but publishes that work in, say, PLOS ONE will receive less academic credit for doing that than had he or she published a tiny super-summarised compressed version of the same work with one illustration all squeezed in, too small to see, and got it into Science or Nature.
The work itself is the same but the exposition of the work is objectively less good in every way and yet, because of the Science or Nature label, that person will have better prospects for getting a job or promotion or whatever it might be and that’s insane.
So we’re in a system that has extremely perverse incentives and that teaches scholars to present their work in the least useful possible way because that’s what we reward them for doing."
Which is ridiculous?
"It really is. Ultimately, I think all of our problems come down to cultural inertia. But analysing it out to that doesn’t really get us very far because cultural inertia is an extremely difficult thing to deal with.
How can we bring about that kind of level of culture change, and get university administrators and research committees and everybody else to recognise the valuable work that is published in objectively good venues, that are open access, that have no arbitrary length limits, that allow large full-colour illustrations and supplementary video and all the other good stuff?
How do we get people to recognise the value of that in a way that helps them get the jobs and promotions?"
Open Access Week takes place between 24-30 October 2016.
via Jisc news
The recent Diamond Review has reformed higher education (HE) and financing for students in Wales, putting student and researcher experience under the microscope.
So now more than ever, it’s fundamental that students and researchers get a learning experience worth every penny. Jisc has been helping to improve this experience in several new endeavours that showcase why Wales is a trailblazer when it comes to sharing information and digital resources.
Times Higher recently reported that:
“A transformation of higher education funding in Wales could give it a “more attractive” system than England by creating “exceptionally generous” support for students’ living costs, funded by ending subsidies for tuition fees.”
If these reforms go ahead, Wales could be set to become an even more popular destination for HE students.
We also know from several surveys that access to digital resources are key to a successful HE experience. Jisc’s student digital experience tracker recently found that approximately three-quarters of HE students (78%) produce work in a digital format. Fortunate then, that Wales is so ahead of the game when it comes to accessing digital resources, thanks to the following recent outcomes.
In a groundbreaking achievement, as of autumn 2016 all universities in Wales, NHS libraries and the National Library of Wales, now share a single bilingual library management system (LMS). Students and researchers can search library collections throughout Wales in a consistent way for the first time, and it is envisaged that the platform will have the potential for a student in one university to access a resource at another.
In 2012, Jisc funded the Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum (WHELF) to undertake a feasibility study into having a shared LMS for Wales, and continue to support the shared LMS process for Wales. Collaboration is key in such a venture and Wales is a shining example of how partnership working can make a whole sector achieve an ideal.
At Cardiff and Swansea University Jisc’s new safe share pilot service has already been a great success, enabling competitive research by providing secure access to remote data. The service means that UK researchers can use and share sensitive health, biomedical and administrative data safely and securely by providing encrypted connections over Jisc’s Janet network, the UK’s national research and education network. The secure connection saves precious time and resources.
Simon Thompson, chief technology officer at Swansea University Medical School said:
“What safe share effectively does is run a managed service, so Jisc puts a firewall in an organisation then encrypts traffic so data can go from one place to another, where there will be another Jisc-owned firewall, which can decrypt the data once it arrives.
It's about making things easier on a per-project basis - this project is allowed to talk to an institution and access their datasets – and we can make requests on a more impromptu and flexible basis, because its managed by the system it is guaranteed that all the end points are secure.”
We’re in the information age where big data management is an expectation of consumers, and students and researchers are no different. In this respect, Wales is at the forefront of information sharing and setting an excellent example for those looking to follow in their digital footsteps.
via Jisc news
The day will provide an opportunity to listen to a range of speakers present on issues relating to the event theme of demonstrating impact. Attendees will also have the opportunity to contribute to discussions, network, and attend the CILIP Ireland AGM. The event will include lunch and be followed by an optional tour of the Linen Hall Library.
A full programme and details on how to register will follow shortly. This event will be free for CILIP Ireland members.
via RSS Feed
