End of course

I found the course very stimulating and informative. It will certainly serve to enhance my professional interaction while having exposed me to the gentle art of blogging for fun.

The creative aspect of web design and blogging also sparked a new aspect of my talents to life, which I will continue to develop in my blogging and web design activity.

During this course, I also gained a good understanding of concepts and principles in the field of ICTs and it deepened my interest in the subject matter. 

The essay  I wrote was a good exercise in preparing myself for writing my proposal in the coming weeks. Our lecturer provided us with valuable feedback on basic academic writing. Writing the blog also improved my writing skills and I found that having someone else read my work really helps.  I don’t craft my words quite as carefully as I could, and I tend to repeat myself a bit. Furthermore, academic writing in a second language is not an easy task. Having someone read over my writing can highlight these issues and help me to clean up my work.

My thanks to our lecturer, Dr Zinn, and my classmates of this course for your dedication and patience.

Web content & Creative Commons

This week we continued working on our websites and blogs. We uploaded podcasts and video content to our websites. Just like with images, we have to find videos that we can share legally without copyright infringement, as some videos are protected with copyright. Laura Tucker gives a useful guide to finding non copyrighted material in her article called 5 websites to find creative commons videos. A creative commons license allows the free distribution and use of otherwise copyrighted work.

 http://creativecommons.org

I've read much on my topic, altmetrics, and it is not easy to decide which content to add. Much is written on the topic, despite it being a relatively new concept. Before this course I did not really have much interest in the topic - I was still trying to make sense of other metrics such as bibliometrics. My exposure to the concept however has broadened my knowledge and sparked my interest. I have two more pages to populate before my website is complete and I'm looking forward to seeing the result.

Essay presentations

This week was packed with activities for us as MLIS students. We kicked off with presenting our essays in class. Everyone presented his/her topic and it was discussed in groups afterwards. We received valuable and feedback and insights from our lecturer. My topic was: "How have libraries accommodated the Generation Y user". It provided me with the opportunity to read about current trends in libraries to suit our users' needs. 

Generation Y is also referred to as Millennials or Digital Natives and they represent youth currently at university, future undergraduate students and recent graduates. They demand instant information, access this information via digital communication devices and share information via social media sites the world over, instantly. Libraries run the risk of losing relevance in this age of instant access to information and communication unless they find a new role for themselves.

In order for libraries to remain relevant, librarians have to know how to access this information via digital communication devices and share information via social media sites the world over, instantly.

Libraries run the risk of losing relevance in this age of instant access. To remain relevant and indeed, to become instruments of social development, they have to adapt to technological innovations and adopt a more interactive way of doing business.

I would like to thank my fellow students for their informative presentations on Open Access and Research Data Management. 

We also met with our lecturer this week to discuss our essays. The individual consultations with her were highly appreciated by everyone.

Adding content to Website

We continued working on our websites this week. Although Altmetrics is a relatively new concept (the term was coined by Jason Priem in 2010), much has been written about it. There are those who advocate Altmetrics and those who criticize metrics in all forms. Regardless of your stance on Altmetrics, it is here to stay and librarians should understand altmetrics to support the research community.

What  to add to my website is not an easy task. It is important to remember that people visit a website for content, although the design is equally important. I have to determine who my target audience will be. Knowing who I'm speaking to through my website, will provide clarity on the content. Because metrics deal with scholarly publications, my target audience will be researchers, academics, students, librarians, etc.

Take a look at this video by Jesse Smith on:

How to Write Effective Website Content - YouTube

I hope to have enough content by next week to populate my website. This involves a lot of reading and filtering of information. For now, I am concentrating on matters at hand, which are presenting my essay in tonight's class and writing an essay for another module.

Website creation

This week we started creating our own websites. I have to admit I am starting to enjoy the creative aspect of the course.  I remembered creating a website during my undergraduate studies and how difficult it seemed at the time, but I was amazed at just how easy it has become. We are not creating our websites from scratch, but instead we make use of templates from the website wix.com, using a topic we have chosen. I chose Altmetrics since I have become very interested in the topic after the presentation we had.  I also enjoy the social media aspect and how it can enhance my professional interaction.

If you are thinking about creating your own website, watch this Wix Tutorial 101 video on how to create your own website using wix.com.

http://smartmindedmarketing.com/wix

We started off with searching for suitable templates for our topics, followed by searching for images on the Internet. This was not as easy as I thought at first. We have to bear in mind copyright issues  when using images from the Internet. I'm sure most of us are guilty of using images from the web without thinking about copyright. I've found however  that the best images are not labelled "for reuse or modification", so I had to look at quite a few search engines to find images I like. When using search engines such as Google, take note of usage rights and make sure that you use images labeled "for reuse".

                            

I stumbled upon this webpage, "The 7 best search engines for finding free images" which shows the best search engines for finding free images.  Finding images and a suitable template for my website was the easy part. The difficult part of this exercise is designing my framework and populating the website with content. So, the next step involves a lot of reading and preparing content.

Digital Libraries & Heritage Sites

We had Prof Hussein Suleman from UCT's department of computer science as a guest presenter in our class this week. Prof Suleman is passionate about digital libraries,  especially as a resource to support education in poor countries. The topic of his talk was digital libraries and digital preservation from an African perspective. With his team of postgraduate students at UCT, he is conducting research with particular emphasis on the poor countries of the world with their associated unique constraints, such as cultural differences, limited Internet bandwidth and limited access to skilled staff.

South Africa (and Africa) needs a different perspective because of:

• Deterioration of documents, (some storytellers are the last in their generation)
• Rewriting history - educate people about contributions by every culture
• Lack of skills and education . Digital media is not the norm for many forms of communication and information storage
• Limited availability of funding for projects
• Digital divide: economic and social inequalities 
• Poor internet bandwidth

Examples of digital collections: 

• Mapungubwe Collection

Image: http://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/589

 The Digital Bleek and Lloyd

Image: http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/

Image: http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/

Numerous new collections are being created within institutional repositories and digital archives in public institutions and institutions of higher learning. While it is very important to preserve at-risk information, new knowledge that is being created on an ongoing bases must be part of  any digital preservation strategy.

Open Access

The topic for Tuesday's class was Open Access and Institutional Repositories. One of the advantages of doing this particular module is that I have started to read extensively on these topics. It has also deepened my understanding of the Open Access movement.

Open Access refers to  unrestricted, free, online access to scholarly material. It is seen as a way of improving the supply of scholarly publications, since closed access to scholarly materials is available only to those whose institutions can pay for it.

The demand for  open access has grown rapidly with the rapid pace of internet adoption and development and the movement gained momentum in South Africa in 2010. South Africa adopted O.A. practices by means of the development of Institutional Repositories (I.R). Institutional repositories are digital collections of the research outputs at a university, eg. SUNScholar at Stellenbosch University.  It preserves and  makes the institution's intellectual capital accessible while at the same time it becomes part of a global system of scholarly publishing.

The Open Access Movement removes barriers to academic literature and offers opportunities to participate in the wider research and teaching community, and in doing so, reducing the digital divide.

Published by Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen

Achieving Open Access is however not easy. Bjork (2004) discussed the barriers to open access in  "Open Access–Are the Barriers to Change Receding".

This quote by Bjork (2004) sums up the movement to open access perfectly: 

"Trying  to  get  researchers  to  support  the  move  towards  open  access,  which  most agree  would be  good  for  the  advancement  of  science  in  principle,  is  like  trying to get people to behave in a more ecological  way.  While most  people  recognize the need to save energy and recycle waste, it takes more than just awareness to get them to change their habits on a large scale. It takes a combination of measures of many different kinds, such as, technical waste, disposal infrastructure, legislation and taxation to get massive behavioral changes underway."

Looking forward to this afternoon's presentation on Digital Libraries & Heritage Sites by Prof Hussein Suleman of the UCT Department of Computer Science.