Fifth-year arts-law student James5 (aka Devon Whittle) offers seven tips for new university students, including some comments about laptop usage, Endnote and personal information management. James5 is a student at the University of Melbourne.
In an Ockham’s Razor talk on ABC Radio, Sydney-based science writer Peter Macinnis describes his own ‘fact fossicking’ behavior when researching material for a new book about Australian explorers:
“I wanted to look at the ways Australian explorers worked, to examine and describe what they took with them, how they used it, what they ate and drank, what medical treatments they used, and I knew this information was in the journals that all the explorers kept, and most of them published in the 1800s.
“I have a major gripe about the way new science gets into schools. Thomas Kuhn said it first but I have adopted it: new science textbooks are written by regurgitating old science textbooks, with little reference to new finds or ideas. Most scientific advances take 30 years or more to even be noted. As a textbook writer and general science writer, I’ve always tried to go back to source, even when that made me read research that caused my brain to hurt…
“Many of the gems that I gathered… were in libraries like Sydney’s Mitchell and Adelaide’s Barr Smith, but the bulk of my material came from one brilliant source, Project Gutenberg, and in particular, from the Australian arm of that organisation. Technology delivers what we need to get the full picture.
“I downloaded 5 million words of journals, all scanned, processed and proofed by volunteers. I culled to make a database of about 1 million words, 5-1/2-thousand selected passages, each linked to the explorer, a date, a source and a set of keyword codes. Explorers often called crocodiles alligators or caimans, and some used curious spelling as well. I needed the keyword codes if I was ever going to find the themes…
“Keeping it brief, I took text with line breaks, used word processor macros to format this into paragraphs, used other macros to add extra fields to my chosen passages, separated by tabs. I exported them to a spreadsheet, where more fields were added or calculated, to allow sorts and searches. Later, I used a spreadsheet to generate the Visual Basic code to convert my keyword codes to plain English, and then put that code into a word processor macro before exporting the translated codes back to the spreadsheet. I also used the spreadsheet to generate an HTML version, a full-on database and a word processor version.
“Then I could start writing…”
Library and computer science staff at the University of Minnesota have been thinking about how students create and manage a ‘personal reference library’ as they go about their scholarly work:
“Digital library users collect, enhance and manage their online reference collections to facilitate their research tasks. These personal collections, therefore, are likely to reflect users’ interests, and are representative of their profile. Understanding these collections offers great opportunities for developing personalized digital library services, such as reference recommender systems.” (Extract from “Resolvability of References in Users’ Personal Collections,” published in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, October 2007) (hat tip to Lorcan Dempsey)
Amazon.com and Google, university and public library systems “have low gravitational pull, they do not put the user in control, they do not adapt reflexively based on user behavior, they do not participate fully in the network experience of their users.”
The Minnesota study provides empirical evidence that investing in enhancements to library systems could provide substantial benefits to our students and academics.