Annual IATUL Conference 2017

Research results presented at scientific conferences are valuable information resources for scientific communities. Traditionally, the results are published in conference proceedings, documenting the current state of research. Additionally, an increasing number of conferences are recorded and the videos are subsequently published. While libraries have well-established procedures for collecting textual conference reports as part of the difficult-to-obtain grey literature, comparable procedures for audio-visual conference recordings have not yet been established.

In most cases these videos are published by the organisers on commercial platforms or directly on the conference website. A systematic search for conference recordings is difficult e.g. because the URL changes or external links lead to nowhere. Usually, conference websites are not maintained on a long-term basis and commercial platforms may remove videos or change the conditions for access for a variety of reasons.

In order to prevent the loss of conference recordings the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) has developed the AV-Portal. The AV-Portal provides the ideal infrastructure to host, find and reuse scientific videos. It’s a single access point for videos from different conferences and years. All videos are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). These persistent identifiers allow for reliable referencing both as stable online links and as correct citations in scholarly work.

This paper describes how sharing scientific results via audio-visual media has become an important part of scientific communication. Further the paper introduces the TIB AV-Portal as a trusted home for conference recordings. It describes the workflow for linking the recordings to the corresponding proceedings in TIB’s extensive collection of conference reports and vice versa via DOIs, thereby fulfilling a key demand of the Pisa Declaration on Policy Development for Grey Literature Resources.

Academics are increasingly required to demonstrate their research activities, ideally via measurable performance indicators. At the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the university library has started a program to support university management and faculties as well as individual researchers in improving the visibility and impact of their research.

In August 2016, the Department of Architecture first approached us for advice on how to change its publishing culture to make it more open, international and competitive. The department struggles to provide evidence of their research output, which does not fit the classical system of scholarly communication. Architectural works come in a wide range of formats and their impact is hard to measure. 

Following our usual course of action, we conducted a survey on profiles and performance indicators of TUM architecture professors regarding their scholarly output. Not surprisingly, a comprehensive analysis on Web of Science and Scopus confirmed that only a small number of the professorate are represented. However, we found various works on Google Scholar and individual lecturers use academic networking sites to present their work and projects.

This led us to the question: Do academic networking sites have the potential to fill the visibility gap for academics with a non-classical publishing culture such as architects and offer them an alternative route to provide evidence about their research activities?

In October 2015, the University Library at the Technical University of Munich started to offer bibliometric services to support researchers, university administration and university leadership. These services are designed to help them understand the meaning, limitations, and applications of bibliometric data as well as improve the visibility and impact of their own work and that of the university as a whole.

Sixteen months later, the University Library evaluated the newly introduced services. With more than 80 requests for bibliometric consultations between October 2015 and January 2017, they were successfully established and well accepted. However, the scope of the requests was much broader than expected, and the bibliometric team found itself becoming a point of contact for a multitude of further questions in the area of performance measurement.

A number of issues turned out to be recurrent and could be dealt with routinely, resulting in the creation of guidelines for author profile improvement as well as impact and visibility. On the other hand, many requests were one of a kind, often unexpected and challenging, and required individual approaches.

Firstly, the paper analyses the total amount of bibliometric requests at TUM during a time period of 16 months (topics, origin, subject specific issues, methodological and communicative challenges) and highlights findings and lessons learned. In the second part of the paper, the results of the evaluation, current issues, and possible next steps are discussed against the background of current bibliometric research.

This study focuses on the citation analysis of the undergraduate thesis on Human Resource Management. It aims to determine the relevance of De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde’s (DLS-CSB) library collection by examining the citation patterns of Human Resource Management undergraduate theses from 1991 to 2013. A total of 612 undergraduate theses which generated 15,275 citations were analyzed. The research design used is descriptive method. Citations were extracted from the reference lists of each of the thesis submitted and sources of data includes; title of the cited material, publication date and type of the cited source of information. The data gathered were checked against the library collection by searching the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) to determine availability in the library of the cited materials and rank the list produced according to the number of times the title has been cited. It was found that students made use of various sources in their research in which books were found to be the most cited information material followed by journals. It was also discovered that majority of the materials cited were published from 1981 to 1990 and the most cited title was Management, a book written by Richard Daft, followed by Journal of Applied Psychology. It was also found that most of the references used by the students were available in the library. The study highlights the information materials used by the students for their research work and those which need to be added to improve the collection.