Vaccination rates in the United Kingdom hit a low of 80 per cent in the early 2000s, leaving children unprotected from serious diseases. The repercussions are still being felt today, with Dr Wakefield being hailed as a hero by vaccine sceptics.
ExLibris Report: “Exploring the Challenges of Researchers and Research Offices”
COVID-19 has affected research funding significantly, with STEM fields seeing an increase in funding, while in the humanities, social sciences, and arts, funding is declining.
Funding remains a key challenge for researchers.
The showcasing of research and expertiseis increasing inimportance
Research office members and researchers differ in the way in which they measure research impact.
The administrative burden on researchers continues to be a major challenge. Seven out of 10 researchers spend at least 30% of their time on administrative tasks. The core expertise of libraries and research offices is still underutilized.
Interdisciplinary collaboration is high on researchers’ agenda, with 37% of researchers saying that most or all of their work involves interdisciplinary collaboration. This figure aligns somewhat with research office priorities; 25% of research office leaders stated that promoting interdisciplinary collaboration is a priority.
Researchers expect more from their library than in 2020. Although 61% of researchers expressed satisfaction with the support they receive from their institution’s library, they expect more assistance than in 2020, especially with data-related services and services such as publication depositing.
Collaboration between research offices and libraries has risen in 2021.
Published on: April 10, 2016 | Last Updated: April 10, 2016 1:06 PM PDT
It’s been repeated so often it’s become a mantra in certain circles, and it was hauled out again recently in an opinion piece that wondered how we can get Canada’s health research “out of the lab and into the market.” Their solutions are always the same: reject investments in purely academic research in favour of market-driven research.
The thing is, that mantra is built on a myth.
It is in our post-secondary institutions where innovation begins, where fresh ideas are created, and where inspiration and excitement — not the dollar — is the mother of invention.
Of course, the academia-industry connection is important, too, because industry helps basic researchers apply their ideas to marketable products. Several funding agencies already recognize this and offer collaborative grants. Corporations could help further this collaboration by helping to support co-ops for undergraduate students and internships for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.
Data Architecture: I was an active member of the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee, the ARLIS/NA Artists’ Books Thesaurus project, and an OCLC initiative on Web archiving metadata. I used to contribute to development of international schemas, controlled vocabularies, and content standards for free, as a service activity. Meanwhile, I could have earned $134,677 as a data architect.
Web Development: I developed applications and customized discovery layers to help library patrons find resources. I learned several markup and scripting languages in order to take on this extra work for the library, in the hot-hot pursuit of grant funding to list on my CV. I could have earned $88,285 as a front-end developer (the folks who use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build the parts of a website that you see), or $101,021 as a back-end developer (the folks who work with APIs, and transfer data to/from databases).
Data Engineering: Libraries are constantly integrating data from publishers, digitization projects, legacy catalogs, union catalogs, and more. I became a whizz at data wrangling and transformation. I developed countless data pipelines and ETL processes to combine disparate data streams. I should have been earning $112,935 as a data engineer.
User Experience Research: To inform cataloging guidelines, and to better design catalogs and finding aids to meet user needs, I spent a lot of time in libraries researching information-seeking behaviors. I became intimately familiar with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. I ran focus groups, conducted usability tests, and led card-sorting exercises in order to gather insights on how to improve our discovery interfaces and their navigation. As a user experience researcher outside of libraries, I could have earned $140,985.
Fundraising: As a special collections professional, I was routinely asked to give tours and host events, with the goal of building relationships with donors. I cultivated skills in storytelling, and learned to quickly craft narratives about my projects’ efficacy and impact. As an academic and a gig worker, I helped develop numerous grant applications, and served as a principal investigator on several large-sum projects. Overall, I honed techniques that are crucial to fundraising and philanthropy. In the nonprofit sector, I could have earned between $98,765 as a development managerand $102,546 as a director of development.
Project Management: In libraries, I never had less than five major projects going at once. I oversaw several large-scale database and website migrations, making sure that each of my team members’ contributions were completed in sequence and on time, while I myself served as a project contributor. In the tech sector, I could have been working as a project manager — someone whose sole job is to hold others accountable to the development timeline — and earned $87,086.
an interdisciplinary group of librarians and researchers from Virginia Tech, Indiana University, and the University of Oklahoma convened to develop a series of three national forums on this topic, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), as a project titled Developing Library Strategy for 3D and Virtual Reality Collection Development and Reuse (LIB3DVR) [8]
in addition to these ethical and legal concerns, there are also intellectual property issues identified that could impact how VR content is used in the future.
3.Participants identified a range of possible preservation strategies for dealing with these challenges and preservation considerations. Selection and documentation were seen as important activities for ensuring the long-term preservation of 3D/VR content.
Richard Arum is dean of the School of Education and professor of education and (by courtesy) sociology, criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine. He recently served as senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2013-2015; and director of the Education Research Program at the Social Science Research Council from 2006-2013, where he oversaw the development of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, a research consortium designed to conduct ongoing evaluation of the New York City public schools.
To find more information about the Future Trends Forum, including notes and recordings of all previous sessions, click here: http://forum.futureofeducation.us/.
Lischer-Katz, Z., & Clark, J. (2021). Institutional Factors Shaping XR Technology Accessibility Policy & Practice in Academic Libraries. Survey. The EDUCAUSE XR (Extended Reality) Community Group Listserv <XR@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>. https://uarizona.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1Ya9id4uCXoktLv
participate in a survey is being sent out to those responsible for managing and providing XR technologies in academic libraries. This survey is part of a study titled “Institutional Factors Shaping XR Technology Accessibility Policy & Practice in Academic Libraries.” The principal investigator (PI) is Dr. Zack Lischer-Katz, PhD (Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Arizona) and the co-principal investigator (Co-PI) is Jasmine Clark (Digital Scholarship Librarian, Temple University).
An Institutional Review Board (IRB) responsible for human subjects research at The University of Arizona reviewed this research project and found it to be acceptable, according to applicable state and federal regulations and University policies designed to protect the rights and welfare of participants in research
Please feel free to share this survey widely with colleagues.
Introduction
Over the past five years, many academic libraries have begun systematically integrating innovative technologies, including virtual reality (VR) and other “XR” technologies, into their spaces and services. Even though schools, libraries, and the library profession all stress equitable access to information and technology for all community members, accessibility – understood in terms of the design of spaces, services, and technologies to support users with disabilities – is rarely given sufficient consideration when it comes to the design, implementation, and administration of XR technology programs. Because XR technologies engage the body and multiple senses they show great potential for providing enhanced means for disabled users to access information resources; however, without accessibility policies in place, the embodied aspects of XR technologies can create new barriers (e.g., chairs and other furniture that cannot be adapted, controllers that cannot be adjusted for different degrees of dexterity, etc.)
Purpose of the study
The purpose of this study is to develop new understanding about the current landscape of accessibility policies and practices for XRtechnology programs and to understand the barriers to adoption of XR accessibility policies and practices.
The main research objective is to understand what policies and practices are currently in place in academic libraries and their level of development, the existing beliefs and knowledge of library staff and administrators involved with XR technology programs and spaces, and the institutional factors that shape the adoption of accessibility policies for XR technology programs.
The survey will be open from February 1, 2021 to April 30, 2021. More information regarding confidentiality and consent can be found at the beginning of the survey.
analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013.
Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics.
Young researchers need to publish in prestigious journals to gain tenure, while older researchers need to do the same in order to keep their grants, and, in this environment, publishing in a high impact Elsevier or Springer journal is what ‘counts’. In this general context, the negative effect of various bibliometric indicators in the evaluation of individual researchers cannot be understated. The counting of papers indexed by large-scale bibliometric databases—which mainly cover journals published by commercial publishers, as we have seen in this paper—creates a strong incentive for researchers to publish in these journals, and thus reinforces the control of commercial publishers on the scientific community.
Got a new open access article out on the ways AI is embedding in education research. Well-funded precision education experts and learning engineers aim to collect psychodata, brain data and biodata as evidence of the embodied substrates of learning. https://t.co/CbdHReXUiz
This article presents an examination of how education research is being remade as an experimental data-intensive science. AI is combining with learning science in new ‘digital laboratories’ where ownership over data, and power and authority over educational knowledge production, are being redistributed to research assemblages of computational machines and scientific expertise.
Research across the sciences, humanities and social sciences is increasingly conducted through digital knowledge machines that are reconfiguring the ways knowledge is generated, circulated and used (Meyer and Schroeder, 2015).
Knowledge infrastructures, such as those of statistical institutes or research-intensive universities, have undergone significant digital transformation with the arrival of data-intensive technologies, with knowledge production now enacted in myriad settings, from academic laboratories and research institutes to commercial research and development studios, think tanks and consultancies. Datafied knowledge infrastructures have become hubs of command and control over the creation, analysis and exchange of data (Bigo et al., 2019).
The combination of AI and learning science into an AILSci research assemblage consists of particular forms of scientific expertise embodied by knowledge actors – individuals and organizations – identified by categories including science of learning, AIED, precision education and learning engineering.
Precision education overtly uses psychological, neurological and genomic data to tailor or personalize learning around the unique needs of the individual (Williamson, 2019). Precision education approaches include cognitive tracking, behavioural monitoring, brain imaging and DNA analysis.
Expert power is therefore claimed by those who can perform big data analyses, especially those able to translate and narrate the data for various audiences. Likewise, expert power in education is now claimed by those who can enact data-intensive science of learning, precision education and learning engineering research and development, and translate AILSci findings into knowledge for application in policy and practitioner settings.
the thinking of a thinking infrastructure is not merely a conscious human cognitive process, but relationally performed across humans and socio-material strata, wherein interconnected technical devices and other forms ‘organize thinking and thought and direct action’.
As an infrastructure for AILSci analyses, these technologies at least partly structure how experts think: they generate new understandings and knowledge about processes of education and learning that are only thinkable and knowable due to the computational machinery of the research enterprise.
Big data-based molecular genetics studies are part of a bioinformatics-led transformation of biomedical sciences based on analysing exceptional volumes of data (Parry and Greenhough, 2018), which has transformed the biological sciences to focus on structured and computable data rather than embodied evidence itself.
Isin and Ruppert (2019) have recently conceptualized an emergent form of power that they characterize as sensory power. Building on Foucault, they note how sovereign power gradually metamorphosed into disciplinary power and biopolitical forms of statistical regulation over bodies and populations. Sensory power marks a shift to practices of data-intensive sensing, and to the quantified tracking, recording and representing of living pulses, movements and sentiments through devices such as wearable fitness monitors, online natural-language processing and behaviour-tracking apps. Davies (2019: 515–20) designates these as ‘techno-somatic real-time sensing’ technologies that capture the ‘rhythms’ and ‘metronomic vitality’ of human bodies, and bring about ‘new cyborg-type assemblages of bodies, codes, screens and machines’ in a ‘constant cybernetic loop of action, feedback and adaptation’.
Techno-somatic modes of neural sensing, using neurotechnologies for brain imaging and neural analysis, are the next frontier in AILSci. Real-time brainwave sensing is being developed and trialled in multiple expert settings.
