Meeting with your tutors? Why not ask your librarian along?

A lecturer asked me along recently to a meeting with sessional tutors. This was a great way for me to meet these staff members and give them information and answer questions about library services and resources. I spent just 15 mins but was able to explain library holdings of material for the course, point to library links we had in Blackboard, tell them about information literacy activities students would be offered, show them the where to find the APA referencing guide and the new subject guides, and give them my contact details for further help.

If you are meeting with tutors for a course, I’d be very happy to speak to them briefly and help them become familiar with the Library.

New subscription to Scopus

I mentioned last year our trial of Scopus. As announced in the latest RMIT Update we now have this resource:

Our acquisition of Scopus is a win for researchers. Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools for tracking, analysing and visualising research. It’s easy to use and has global coverage.

Scopus gives you:

• 15,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers;
• 1000 open access journals;
• 500 conference proceedings;
• patent information; and
• 17 million records from before 1996.

Scopus lets you:

• refine search results;
• track citations;
• find the most highly cited articles and authors in your area;
• see research trends from a particular year or group of years;
• distinguish between authors with similar names;
• set up search and citation alerts and RSS feeds;
• display your work on your personal homepage using profiling options to create HTML feeds or cited by counts;
• measure research performance by identifying papers of an individual, tracking the citations and analysing their influence using the Scopus h-index; and
• go straight to the full text of an article or learn more about a particular author.

Scopus is available from Search It.

Career education and development

 

 

 

 

 

We have just created a new online subject guide for Career education and development. As with all the education guides we are very happy to receive suggestions about items to be included.

Childcare in crisis

Berenice Nyland form RMIT University’s School of Education recently featured in a discussion and talkback on the childcare crisis on RRR’s Wax Lyrical program.  She also has a blog on Openforum.com.au where she has written a piece called “Childcare in crisis — did anyone not know?”

Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year 2008

Macquarie Dictionary is looking for its 2008 Word of the Year. Words are nominated by committee in various categories ranging from entertainment to fashion, environment to technology. You can vote online for your favourite in each category until Jan 31 and the overall winner will be announced in February.

Nominations include:

car crash TV
noun Colloquial a television program that is simultaneously absorbing and repulsive for the viewer.

toxic debt
noun debt which, although initially acquired as a legitimate business transaction, proves subsequently to be financially worthless, as the subprime loans which precipitated the GFC.

dub-a-dub-dub
Colloquial a realisation in speech of the prefix www used in website addresses. Also, dub-dub-dub.

lifestreaming
noun the online recording of one’s daily life, delivered either by means of a webcam, or aggregated from personal blogs, microblogs, etc.

ecocentrism
noun a philosophy based on the idea that the ecosphere (def. 1) is more central to life than any particular organism, and that human activity, whether it is community or individual activity, must base its morality on this recognition.

guerilla gardener
noun a person who plants gardens in areas controlled by councils or other organisations but neglected by them in terms of vegetation, as nature strips, roundabouts, council-maintained gardens, etc. Also, guerrilla gardener.

ear gauging
noun an ear piercing procedure that involves the stretching of the pierced hole with a series of objects, each one larger than the previous one. [from the different gauges of the plugs inserted to widen the piercing]

guerilla dining
noun dining at a restaurant that has been set up temporarily in an unused space such as a car park, beach, rooftop or a private home, etc., customers being alerted by word of mouth to the location. Also, guerrilla dining.

sugging
noun Commerce attempting to sell under the guise of conducting market research, often with incentives attached to lead the potential customer to a purchase. [s(elling) u(nder the) g(uise of market research)]

click-and-mortar
adjective of or relating to a company which has operations both online and offline, as by having both a commercial website and a physical store.

lawfare
noun the use of international law by a country to attack or criticise another country, especially a superior military power, on moral grounds, that is, by accusing it of having violated international law.

climate wars
plural noun international conflict caused by the effects of climate change, such as reduced resources, population shifts, failing economies, etc., theorised as likely to occur in the future if measures are not taken to control global warming.

helicopter parenting
noun a style of child rearing in which parents are excessively attentive to and involved in the lives of their children. [from the notion that the parents are always hovering overhead]

terminator technology
noun a method of restricting the use of genetically modified plants by causing second generation seeds to be sterile.

Q&A — Peter Murphy

Thank you to Peter Murphy, program manager for English and Further study within the School, for being the next Q&A subject.

Some questions about your teaching and research
 
What are your teaching/research interests?
I’ve just changed jobs into program management so I’m pretty focussed on what makes for good management and leadership in an educational environment.
 
Website/online resource you regard as indispensable?
Google
 
A favourite educationalist/author/theorist and why.
John Dewey for his many insights on education.
 
Where do you do most of your teaching preparation/research?
Don’t do much of this now that I’m a manager. But it used to be mostly on campus.
 
How do you find out about newly published research?
I use the fantastic alert service that many journals provide nowadays + what ever I glean from colleagues.
 
Are professional networks important to your research/teaching? How?
 They are because I always find other people’s interests and passions fascinating.

Describe your personal library.
 Very small as I’m a great believer in public libraries. What I do have tend to be xmas and birthday gifts.

Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica?
 Wikipedia

Something you’d like your students to know and understand about the Library?
That it’s a fantastic resource which I fear is often under-utilised by students
 
Favourite journal?
New Internationalist

 What Are you reading right now?
I’m not a one-book-at-a-time person, nor big on fiction so
In defence of food by Michael Pollan, Retooling by Rosalind Williams and  Leadership as service by Kent Farnsworth

Something you’d like to change about the Library?
That it was open more often.

Staff publications

I have just added an item to the homepage of our subject guides with links to recent publications from researchers within the School of Education.

If you have published something recently and think it might be available online please feel free to send me the details.

I will archive everything from this new publications listing within a separate page in the Education subject guide. I’m happy to also include here any past items which you might like to include.

New journal table of contents alerting service

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject.

I have tried it against some of the journals listed on our education guide. The coverage of Australian education journals is not yet great, but it does have reasonable coverage of the education field more generally. A lot of publisher sites and databases offer various forms of alerting services, but this recource promises to draw them together in one site.

It allows table of contents for favourite journals to appear as an RSS feed. It also apparently allows you to register so that your favourite journals are visible each time you login.

UPDATE: There doesn’t seem to be an automatic registration and because to the popularity of the service it took over a week for them to confirm my registration. But I am registered now.