Researcher@Library Blog

Researcher@Library Blog

New Library E-Resources

Image via Pexels

New to The University of Melbourne Library collection are the following electronic resources.

Accessible, comprehensive and relevant. These online dictionaries, encyclopedias, repositories and other resources are great points of reference and invaluable for your research and study.

– The Oxford classical dictionary.

The 4th edition of ‘The Oxford Classical Dictionary’ is the ultimate reference on the classical world.It contains over 6,200 entries with contributions from a team of 364 scholars and 15 specialist subject area advisors, it covers all aspects of the classical world from literature and history to religion, science, and archaeology. As well as providing factual information, the Dictionary contains many thematic entries on subjects relevant to the 21st century such as nationalism, race, gender, and ecology.

Read more about this resource here or access now.

– The Encyclopedia of Ancient History.

Unmatched in scholarship and diversity, The Encyclopedia of Ancient History is the definitive reference work for the study of the ancient world. It provides clear, concise, definitions and explanations of the key people, places, and events in ancient history. This encyclopedia spans the late Bronze Age through the seventh century CE, covering the entire ancient Mediterranean world including the Near East and Egypt. New content is published twice a year (summer and winter), with over 100 new articles per year.

Read more about this resource here or access now.

– Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online.

This online reference work reconstructs the lexicon for the most important languages and language branches of Indo-European. It is a voluminous resource for historical and general linguists. Dictionaries can be cross-searched, with an advance search for each individual dictionary enabling the user to perform more complex research queries. Each entry is accompanied by grammatical info, meaning(s), etymological commentary, reconstructions, cognates and often extensive bibliographical information.

Read more about this resource here or access now.

– The Digital Concert Hall – Berliner Philharmoniker.

1,700 works performed by the who’s who of classical music, 45 live broadcasts per season, Historic recordings, 270 artist interviews, Program introductions, Documentaries and films. The Digital Concert Hall can be accessed on a range of devices, like your SmartTV, your tablet or your smartphone.

Read more about this resource here or access now.

– Medici.tv.

Medici.tv is a unique service producing and broadcasting over 100 live concerts each year and 1,300 programs, in collaboration with the greatest orchestras and concert halls in the world. The programs are available on demand and include concerts, archives, operas, ballets, documentaries, master-classes, educational films and artist profiles.

Read more about this resource here or access now.

– London Review of Books.

London Review of Books provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in detail – from art and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy, fiction and poetry. LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance. Incorporates high quality essays about literature, law, politics and society, and science, by leading scholars, public intellectuals and authors. As well as book reviews and reportage, each issue also contains poems, reviews of exhibitions and movies, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary.

Read more about this resource here or access now.

Keep an eye on the Library Blog, with posts about all of these new resources and more.

Be inspired by the Grainger’s latest exhibition – ‘How it plays: Innovations in percussion’

Recording important innovations in Australian music history over a period of 140 years, the fascinating exhibition currently on display at the Grainger Museum is a must see.

How it plays is a collaborative exhibition and performance project, involving the Grainger Museum, Federation Handbells (Museums Victoria/Creative Victoria), Speak Percussion, the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, and Melbourne School of Design.

Begin by exploring the online exhibition today.

Bell-Field - Federation Handbells on loan from Museums Victoria, and display created by Melbourne School of Design students — Bell-Field – Federation Handbells on loan from Museums Victoria, and display created by Melbourne School of Design students

This exhibition shines a light on selected innovations in percussion, focussing on Melbourne, over a period of 140 years. It brings together a range of percussion instruments that have been created, composed for, and played by radical musicians, who have sought to change the way we can all hear, and play, music. Starting with Percy Grainger’s ground-breaking compositional experiments in ‘tuneful percussion’ in the first half of the twentieth century, How it plays then explores the work of the first truly innovative Australian percussion group, APE, in the 1970s, who experimented on Percy Grainger’s own instruments in the Grainger Museum as they evolved their practice. Jumping to the twenty-first century, the exhibition explores the musical and social phenomenon of the Federation Handbells, which engages acoustic and artistic innovation to bring the playing of bells to a wide range of communities. It concludes with an immersion in the sonic and artistic adventures in sound and performance of Melbourne organisation, Speak Percussion, an international leader in the field of experimental and new music.

Here until December, there’s an active program of events to get involved with, so check out the site or drop by for a visit at the Museum, located on Royal Parade.

Want an in depth look at this exhibition, with an expert-led discussion of Grainger’s philosophy and impact?

Join Professor Chalon Ragsdale (University of Arkansas) as he illustrates how Percy Grainger’s philosophy, and his practical applications of that philosophy, helped determine the directions of percussion writing and performance in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Using musical examples ranging from Bach and Grieg to Stravinsky, Bartok, Grainger and Grainger’s pupils, composer Henry Cowell and Bernard Herrmann, Professor Ragsdale will trace the life and work of Percy Grainger, the “Genius from Australia.”

When: Sunday 21 July 2019, 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Where: Grainger Museum, Royal Parade, #13, Parkville, VIC 3052

Book here today.

The Grainger has many more exhibitions on offer, be sure to browse this range online and in person.

See the Grainger Museum Eventbrite for the full program of upcoming events.

The Ultimate List of 21 Free and Open Source Data Visualisation Tools

Visualisation can be effective when communicating complex research. Data visualisations – which may take the form of charts or graphs, diagrams, images, animations and infographics – can be a powerful way of synthesising your research, and representing it in a way that’s understandable even to a non-expert audience. Searching for data visualisation tools, however, is a daunting, time-consuming and costly task that requires research and usually an enterprise-level budget.

Image: Pixel cell idea visualization by manfredsteger via Pixabay

In this Solutions Review article, Timothy King provides an overview of 21 open source and/or commercially free data visualisation tools as a solution to this issue. From basic and common software like Google Charts and Google Data Studio to more complex platforms such as Polymaps (for map making) and dygraphs (for large data sets with statistical components), these tools are summarised and categorised to give readers a glimpse into the possibility of data visualisation tools.

The complete list of tools reviewed is:

Candela Plotly Chart Studio Charted

Candela Chart Studio Charted

Chartist ColorBrewer D3.js

Chartist ColorBrewer D3.js

Datawrapper dygraphs Flot

Datawrapper dygraphs Flot

Google Charts Google Data Studio Highcharts

Google Charts Google Data Studio Highcharts

Leaflet myHeatmap OpenHeatMap

Leaflet myHeatmap OpenHeatMap

Palladio Polymaps RAW Graphs

Palladio Polymaps RAW Graphs

Tableau Software TimelineJS WebDataRocks

Tableau Public TimelineJS WebDataRocks

Read the full review or explore more about data visualisation through one of our 23 Research Things blog posts. Don’t forget to subscribe to Researcher@Library blog to never miss tips and tricks to assist you in your research careers.

How to turn your journal article into an infographic

Image via Pixabay

Translating academic research into visual content with an impact

There is an increasing demand for research to be presented in a visually engaging way, in order to make information accessible and have a high impact. Sharing information by way of infographics is an accessible method to create content.

Hubspot Marketing tells us that Infographics are “liked” and shared on social media 3 times more than other any other content type and that internet readers pay close attention to information-carrying images.

The Journal of Marketing Management (JMM) blog has shared a number of tips for specifically turning your journal article into an infographic.

In her blog post ‘From paper to picture: creating an infographic from your research’, Laurence Dessart records her process of creating an infographic out of her JMM article.

Demystifying the content of heavy academic work is a tough task [but] digital dissemination of research content is increasingly useful.

– Laurence Dessart

Image via Pixabay

Tips on how to create a good infographic out of your research project

from Laurence Dessart

Create a story.
Think of the big idea.
Think of your audience and what they expect from an infographic.
Select a tool to do it.
Visual, always visual.

Steps and considerations:

Storyboard

– Title

– Purpose

– Context

– Approach

– Key Findings

– Implications/Impact

Continue reading “How to turn your journal article into an infographic” →

Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize

The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize is now open

This prize, worth approximately $12,000, is awarded biennially and is open now, for an Irish poet to travel to Australia in 2020.

The Prize was established to commemorate the life and work of the late Vincent Buckley; poet, critic and Professor of English at the UoM. It is a biennial award that is offered alternately to enable a poet writing in Australia to visit Ireland and to facilitate the visit of a poet writing in Ireland, to Melbourne. The Prize, which has been made available through generous donations from family and friends of Vincent Buckley, includes return airfares, and a contribution towards living expenses.

The prize winner will be an honorary fellow of the University associated with the Australian Centre.

The value of the prize is $12 000 AUD, applications close on Monday 8 July.

Are you eligible?

To be eligible for this scholarship, you need to:

present a group or volume or volumes or oeuvre of poems written in English by yourself
have been published for commercial distribution
be an Irish citizen

What is involved in the application?

You must submit your application online with the following information / documents to support your application:

200 word outline of activities to be undertaken in Australia
Group or volume/s of recent poems for consideration by the judges
List of publications (one page)
Brief curriculum vitae (up to four pages)
Copy of proof of Irish citizenship (Passport, Birth Certificate, Citizenship Certificate)

Entries must be received by midnight on the closing date.

Outcomes

The winner will be announced at the Australian Centre and Faculty of Arts Literary Awards event at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Saturday 7 September 2019.

Find more information here.

Melbourne University Digital Newspaper Access

Access the major newspapers online via the library

Image from Sole Treadmill via Flickr

Library resources

The homepage of the Melbourne University library has many different areas to explore.

Under Resources, they have available a selection of Current Newspapers free for students and staff to access.

Some big names include

THE AGE
AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
THE CONVERSATION
TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Newest additions

The university’s newspaper collections now includes digital access to The Australian and the Herald Sun.

The access lasts until 23 April 2020 as part of a campus subscription offer. This was a collaboration between Chancellery, Student Communication and Collection Development, and is funded by Chancellery.

To gain access, follow this set up link via a University of Melbourne network computer. Enter your information, using your university email. Once you have this account, you can log in directly to the Herald Sun or Australian web pages for full access.

This complimentary digital campus subscription gives you:

Unrestricted digital access to Herald Sun and The Australian both on and off campus
Editorial newsletters for updates throughout the day (including The Australian’s Higher Education newsletter)
Email alerts for breaking news
Custom curated monthly newsletter for University of Melbourne subscribers from The Australian

Newspapers and research

Newspaper articles are a valuable starting point for research. As part of the research process, or for inspiring research, Newspapers:

can provide multiple points of view
become historical sources
show events within context
exhibit biases that are interesting to analyse

Whether to enrich your research, or just to have a read – have a look at the Newspaper selection today.

Dimensions for Faculty Research Managers and research support staff

Last week on the Researcher@Library blog, we re-introduced Dimensions. This is a research insights platform that brings together grants, publications, citations, alternative metrics, and policy documents. The University of Melbourne has a subscription for the platform – using your University of Melbourne email address, all staff and students can create an account for Dimensions and then login to the ‘standard’ access level. Access can also be retrieved via the Library Catalogue.

Some examples of the ways in which Dimensions can be used include:

Discovery of the latest publications, awarded grant funding, clinical trials or patents on any topic of interest, worldwide.
Bench-marking of research organisations, funders, publications or researchers in a particular topic, or across all research activity.
Identification of new sources of research funding for future funding applications
Analysis of the research activity at our own organisation, and how this is changing over time.

The Research Impact Library Advisory Service (RILAS) group at the University of Melbourne Library is hosting an one-hour session for Faculty Research Managers and other research support staff*. This workshop will outline how this very useful tool can help these staff in their roles at the University.

Date and time: Wednesday 12 June 2019 11am-12pm (AEST).

Venue: eLearning Studio 1, 1st Floor Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.

* The session dedicated to HASS researchers will also be held on 6 June 2019 – more information. The session for STEMM researchers was held on 16 May 2019. See full program for UoM students and staff.

Register to this session and learn more about Dimensions through one of our old posts – don’t forget to subscribe to Researcher@Library blog for research tips straight to your mailbox every Monday!

Access to Mendeley Institutional Edition

Staff and students of the University of Melbourne have been granted access to Mendeley Institutional Edition.

Mendeley Institutional Edition is the premium upgrade of Mendeley, a reference manager and academic social network for organising research, collaborating online and discovering the latest research.

What benefits does this upgrade include?

100 GB personal storage instead of 2 GB with the ‘free account’
100 GB shared storage instead of 100 MB with the ‘free account’
Unlimited private groups of up to 100 collaborators instead of 5 private groups of up to 25 collaborators

To upgrade from free to institutional access, all you need to do is:

Create a free account at Mendeley using your unimelb.edu.au email address. (If you have a personal username and password for another Elsevier product, such as ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal or ClinicalKey, the same login details will work here in Mendeley)
Upgrade to the Institutional Edition by visiting the University of Melbourne Mendeley group page
You should then receive an email which confirms your account has been upgraded and will be able to access your Institutional Edition account at Mendeley

For more information on Mendeley, visit the self-help guide.

Australasia Preserves Monthly Meetup – June 2019

Since the beginning of Australasia Preserves in February 2018, the Digital Scholarship team in Scholarly Services at the University of Melbourne has been running monthly meetups for the community, featuring wonderful practitioners and academics working in the field of digital preservation in the Australasian region.

The June monthly meetup for 2019 is a rather special occasion: it has been organised in collaboration with the National and State Libraries Australia (NSLA) digital preservation community of practice. This meetup will be held on Friday 7 June, 9.30am-12pm (AEST), and we’ll be welcoming guest speakers Micky Lindlar  and  Melanie Swalwell.

Micky (Michelle) Lindlar leads the Digital Preservation Team at TIB, the German National Library of Science and Technology. Responsibilities of that role include the oversight of a digital preservation system which is used for TIB’s own holdings as well as for a Digital-Preservation-as-a-Service solution. Micky’s main research interest revolves around file formats in the evolving preservation context and how we as a community can better identify, monitor and mitigate risks and changes associated with formats. Micky has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Open Preservation Foundation since 2012, leads the Rosetta Digital Preservation Working group and is involved with various other national and international digital preservation working groups and initiatives.

Drawing on experiences made in different digital preservation roles, Micky’s talk, A decade in digital preservation – a personal, institutional, national and community view, will give a brief overview of the past 10 years of digital preservation from four perspectives: a personal, an institutional, a national and a community perspective. It will highlight what TIB’s digital preservation approach looks like, give an insight into the German digital preservation landscape and show how the OPF as a leading community within the domain has evolved over the years. The talk will conclude with thoughts on current and future challenges in digital preservation.

Melanie Swalwell is a scholar of digital media arts, cultures, and histories and an advocate for born digital heritage. Her research is concerned with complex digital artefacts such as videogames and media artworks: their creation, use, preservation, and legacy. Melanie assembled and lead the multi-disciplinary “Play It Again” team, an ARC Linkage Project focused on game history and preservation of Australian and New Zealand game titles for 1980s microcomputers. Melanie is the author of many chapters and articles on the histories of digital games, and co-editor of The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on cultural history, theory and aesthetics (McFarland, 2008), and Fans and Videogames: Histories, fandom, archives (Routledge, 2017). She is currently completing a monograph, Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (MIT Press) and editing another collection, Game History and the Local. Melanie is Professor of Digital Media Heritage in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University in Melbourne.

In this talk, Melanie will outline the participants in two recently-funded ARC Linkage projects: “Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s”, and “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a best practice method and national collection”, discussing the directions in which the teams are planning to head.

Please note: Tea and coffee will be available at the meetup from 9am. This is a meetup organised in collaboration with National and State Libraries of Australia (NSLA), main event hosted off-campus with limited capacity.

If you’re interested but cannot make it on the day, please register for the webinar.

“Re-imagining discovery and access to research”: Dimensions for HASS researchers

Dimensions is a dynamic, easy to use, linked-research data platform that re-imagines the way research can be discovered, accessed and analyzed. Within Dimensions, users can explore the connections between grants, publications, clinical trials, patents and policy documents – all in one place. Dimensions is designed to help anyone involved in research to get better knowledge about what is going on in their research area, and how this is changing over time.

Students and staff at the University of Melbourne has access to Dimensions using their unimelb email address to access the tool via the Library Catalogue. Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences researchers (including graduate researchers and academic staff) are invited to a session designed for HASS research (STEMM researchers have enjoyed a session dedicated to them on 16 May 2019):

Date and time: Thursday 6 June 2019 3pm-4pm (AEST).

Venue: Dulcie Hollyock Room, Ground Floor Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.

* Another session designed for research support staff will also be held on 12 June 2019 – more information.

Get your tickets now for this session and check out the full research support program offer from the UoM Library!

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