Month: September 2016

In recent years, libraries have developed an increasingly integrated and flexible approach to working with faculty and students. Firmly based on building collections, providing research assistance, and offering classes in the use of library materials and databases, these still-relevant services have been augmented in areas that reflect the many new roles possible with technology and collaborative services.   For example, here at Boston College Libraries we have opened up our special collections for teaching and learning, and transformed our library spaces to better accommodate the dynamic needs of the Boston College community. Moreover, we continue to develop a robust digital library that provides global access to our unique content and collections.

In a few weeks, all faculty will receive a brochure outlining in detail a suite of services – many familiar, but several new – aimed at supporting faculty needs.  We view our services as increasingly integrated with digital content and web-based tools, and our expertise lies in facilitating the navigation of this complex world of content, helping faculty explore their creative and complex interests.

This newsletter features two of our latest collaborative digital scholarship projects that exemplify the services becoming a priority for the Libraries.  Emerging from faculty and student research, these two compelling new digital projects – one that brings a 14th century music manuscript to life and the other Seamus Connolly’s prized collection of Irish traditional tunes – demonstrate creative uses of materials from our special collections as new, open access resources.  They engage users digitally, widen access and understanding of materials, and provide new forms of scholarship and information presentation. The rare and unique materials of Burns Library have made it a treasure trove for digital scholarship and a teaching space that inspires new ideas and possibilities.

To further develop the digital scholarship program at Boston College, this fall the Libraries will play a central role in a selective pilot program with the Association of Research Libraries. The five selected institutions will delve into creative new ways of integrating digital tools into cutting edge scholarship. We are thrilled about our selection for inclusion in this three-day program and look forward to implementing the results to make an impact on our services and resources in this area for faculty.

To meet the demand for the latest equipment and software for digital creations, new attention has been given to the Digital Studio on Level Two in the O’Neill Library.  While the space remains focused on development of vital technical skills, we encourage exploration of new modes of media-rich and data-driven digital scholarship.  The Digital Studio includes technology and services for exploratory and early phase digital scholarship, including data analysis and visualization. Faculty can reserve a room outfitted with media viewing equipment and a Sound Room makes possible high-quality audio recording with microphone, keyboard, and audio composition and editing software. The Digital Studio will also be used for programming and instruction, including both technology office hours and workshops for faculty and students on the latest digital scholarship tools. The Studio is the result of a partnership between Boston College Libraries and Information Technology Services and is open to students, staff and faculty.

This is an exciting time for Boston College and the Libraries. We like to think of the possibilities and value proposition in terms of six C’s: Content, Collaboration, Creativity, Change, Character (formation), and Catholic (mission). These C’s are reflected in all the services and programs we provide, and the high-performing Library Staff are eager to explore, support and partner with faculty and students in all academic endeavors. Come join us!

Irish music followers worldwide will soon be able to stream and download hundreds of newly-released music tracks in The Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music, a digital collection that will be published by the Boston College Libraries on October 11. This exciting compilation features audio recordings of some of the best-known performers of Irish traditional instrumental music and song. With audio available via SoundCloud, the collection also offers music transcriptions and stories, and is fully compatible with mobile devices.

Originally from Killaloe in County Clare, Ireland, master fiddle player Séamus Connolly directed Irish music, song, and dance programming at Boston College for twenty-five years, and served as the Sullivan Artist-in-Residence from 2004 until his retirement in 2015. A ten-time All-Ireland fiddle champion, Connolly is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship and a Boston College Faculty Arts award.

The digital collection offers a window into traditional music through Connolly’s long experience as a performer and teacher. Thanks to the generosity of over one hundred performers, the collection’s ten playlists, containing a total of over 330 tunes and songs, will soon be made freely accessible worldwide via The Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music under a Creative Commons license.

The product of a three-year collaboration between the Boston College Libraries and Connolly, the digital collection reflects the work of many departments across the libraries, with Connolly’s own work on the project beginning nearly fifteen years ago. The collection complements the Séamus Connolly Papers, one of several archival research collections on Irish music at the John J. Burns Library. Please feel free to contact Burns Library staff for more information about the Séamus Connolly Papers, the digital collection, or Irish music resources in general. We invite you to preview the Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music at connollymusiccollection.bc.edu and to visit the full site on October 11th when the full collection is launched.

Since January of 2015, members of the Boston College community have had access to the Scopus database.  Scopus is a large multidisciplinary database, similar to the Web of Science database.  BC researchers and students are using Scopus for author, subject, and citation searching in a wide array of disciplines. Faculty can use it to find H-Index information, compare journal impact data, and analyze publication and citation trends. Scopus provides comprehensive coverage of a large number of journals from 1996 – present, with added older content (comprehensive coverage back to 1970 is expected by late 2016).  Due to very positive user feedback, the original Scopus trial has been funded and extended for another year to December 2017.

What are users saying about Scopus?  Comments from a campus-wide user survey, a graduate-student study, feedback sessions and website comments have indicated the following: users find the search interface easy to use and visually effective; they like that author searches more reliably retrieve results limited to the chosen author, rather than including results from other authors with the same name (a benefit of the sophisticated “disambiguation” algorithm embedded in the database); and they appreciate being able to see the connections between citing and cited articles (just as in Web of Science, but delivered in a different manner).

Many, however, especially appreciate the data and visual analysis tools delivered by Scopus.   These tools make it easy to see emerging research trends for individuals, academic departments and specific search terms.  Here you see screen shots showing visualization of data analysis resulting from a search for Boston College publishing on the topic of “climate change”.

Figure 1 shows how publishing on this topic has grown over time.

Under another tab (Figure 2), you can see the names of the BC authors who publish with greatest frequency on climate change topics.

Figure 3 shows the journals where BC authors publish tend to publish on this area of study.

Another tab, not shown here, reveals those BC campus departments publishing most prolifically in this area.  An additional tab shows BC author collaborations with researchers at other institutions in this work.  Similar results and visualization analysis can be applied at all levels of granularity, making Scopus a particularly effective tool for comparisons at the institutional, departmental, and/or specific topic level.

Those looking for multidisciplinary indexing of the journal literature, particularly in the Humanities, and those requiring journal literature indexing prior to 1996, continue to use the Web of Science.  Usage numbers for each database were quite similar this past summer.  If you have thoughts to share about either Scopus or the Web of Science or would like to learn more about either database, please contact the Scopus/Web of Science Task Force.

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Learning to Use Scopus will be Required in “Tools for Scholarship” Course in the Graduate School of Social Work, Spring 2017:

Adam Williams, Senior Reference Librarian/Bibliographer, Social Work Library, will be working with Social Work graduate students when they take a Spring 2017 Canvas-based course on the skills they need to succeed in their program. Scopus will be one of the key components in the Library Resources module.  Dr. Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, Director of the Social Work Doctoral program, and her team, reworked the Tools for Scholarship course into online, self-paced learning modules with sections on topics such as Citation, Academic Integrity, Human Subject Protections, and Library Resources.

The inclusion of Scopus in the Tools for Scholarship course came from the recommendation of doctoral students attending the libraries’ Scopus workshops throughout the past year. PhD students found the data visualization and search term analytics particularly valuable functions to help assess and revise their search strategy. The extensive citation tools in Scopus also helped doctoral students identify key authors on topics of interest.

The multidisciplinary nature of social work research makes Scopus an appealing resource. Dr. Pitt-Catsouphes and the doctoral students find Scopus to be a more robust and comprehensive alternative to Google Scholar for exploring the peer-reviewed literature in any field of study.”

At Boston College, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are tools used to “visualize, question, analyze, and interpret data to understand relationships, patterns, and trends.” Academic departments and centers across campus including Nursing, Social Work, Management, Economics, Education, History, Theology, Sociology, Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action and of course Earth and Environmental Sciences integrate GIS into instruction and research. The Boston College Libraries and ITS Research Services collaborate with BC GIS users and provide data and software support. This essay by Nicholas Libby describes how the Facilities Management Department, a full-service, centralized organization that works on the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of all University buildings, utilities, and properties, utilizes the many features of GIS in their daily work.

GIS IN FACILITIES

BC Libraries helped introduce GIS to Facilities Management about five years ago, where the initial objective was to map physical elements of the campus (i.e. buildings, walking paths, roads, etc.). Since then, over 100 maps have been created for departments throughout the University, a GIS Roundtable was formed to incorporate the thoughts of others interested in using GIS, a book of maps was published for key stakeholders of the University, and a presentation was given on the use of GIS in Facilities during the University’s Spring 2016 Tech Forum.

GIS maps that are built today in FMIS are categorized by project types such as Data Analysis, Asset Management, Engineering & Energy, Planning & Design, and Safety & Security. ArcGIS (GIS software innovated by Environmental Systems Research Institute) is unique in giving information analysts, like Nicholas Libby, the ability to visualize location-based data on a map for Facilities Management.

NOTE: The maps shown in this article were created by Nicholas Libby of the FMIS Department for the use of Facilities Management purposes only. For the sake of confidentiality, some data has been removed or manipulated for public appearance.

GIS ROUNDTABLE

In August 2014, the GIS Roundtable was established to bring together BC Faculty and Staff from across the University that have an interest in using ArcGIS as a base for a standardized campus map. Currently the GIS Roundtable is made up of over 30 members from numerous departments including the Boston College Libraries, Facilities Management, Boston College Police Department, Information Technology Services, Emergency Management, Office of Marketing and Communications, and more. There is a growing interest and awareness of the economic and strategic value of GIS, and if you or anyone you know would like to join the GIS Roundtable, please use the contact information below to submit a request. Please be advised, the GIS roundtable is for Faculty and Staff only.

ABOUT FMIS

In Facilities Management, the internal Information Systems Department (FMIS) is responsible for managing data, devices, and systems used throughout the University, including those related to GIS. The FMIS Department is made up of four full time personnel including Steven Bentley (Facilities Systems Analyst), Karin Harriman (Senior Archibus Analyst), Nicholas Libby (BIM & Facilities Information Analyst) and Lynn Berkley (Director of FMIS).

If you or someone you know would like to learn more about how GIS is being used in Facilities Management, or would like to gain access to non-confidential campus related GIS data, please email one of the following contacts below.

• Nicholas J. Libby | BIM & Facilities Information Analyst – libbyn@bc.edu
• Lynn Berkley | Director of FMIS – berkleyl@bc.edu
• FMIS Department – help@bc.edu

Submitted by:  Facilities Management Information Systems Department (FMIS)

If this has inspired you to learn more about how you might use GIS tools, BC Libraries and ITS, Research Services co-teach “Introduction to GIS” workshops every semester. For dates see: http://www.bc.edu/offices/researchservices/tutorials.html We are also happy to provide individual training sessions.

If you have any questions or wish to request a consultation, contact Barbara Mento, Data/GIS librarian. The Eighth Annual GIS Contest celebrating student work will be held in the Spring. Details coming in November.

It is a defining mark of any major academic library to possess an extensive collection of materials in many languages which represent the distinct and special knowledge areas reflected through these languages and the global nature of scholarship.   The Boston College Libraries provide a strong example of this and collect widely in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin, Greek and Irish.  We also have holdings in a number of other languages including Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Polish, among others.  These holdings include books, journals, and newspapers both in print and electronic formats, as well as films and other media.

Multilingual holdings are prominent throughout the humanities collection, especially in the areas of theology, philosophy, literature, and history as well as the social sciences.  The Russian collection is especially strong in literature.  It’s interesting to note that while many journal and monograph series titles may be in one language, they often contain essays in multiple languages.  One notable example is the interdisciplinary collaborative encyclopedic work of scholarship Aufstieg und Untergang der rӧmischen Welt (The Rise and Decline of the Roman World) which contains essays in multiple languages as well as in English.  

Also, the foreign language collection is not limited to O’Neill Library but extends across all of the Boston College Libraries.  The Bapst Library has holdings in art and art history in many languages, while the Educational Resource Center has a sizable collection of children’s books in Spanish that are perfect not only for children, but also for students developing their language skills.  The Special Collections in Burns Library contains many foreign language works including many rare texts in Latin and Spanish within the Jesuitica collection and special materials in the Irish language.

So the next time you want to look at Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, are searching for the novel Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel Marcia Marquez, or want to read one of the volumes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, take a look at the holdings at Boston College Libraries or speak to the library staff.  You’ll most likely be surprised and amazed at what you’ll find.  And if by chance we don’t have the foreign language work you are looking for, we can look at adding it to our collection or obtain it for you through Interlibrary Loan.