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UST Authors Shine Nationally via UST Research Online

Did you know that UST has an institutional repository where faculty and student research is showcased? Did you know that the papers displayed there are highly discoverable online and are being viewed by scholars across the country?

I was just notified that our content is among the most popular in the country in the Digital Commons Network, which contains over a million works from 358 institutions. Digital Commons is the vendor that hosts our repository, UST Research Online. At last count, we have 1,016 papers available, which have been downloaded over a quarter of a million times, 134,797 in the last year alone. This content is aggregated into the national Digital Commons Network, who aggregate the papers into common disciplinary combinations based on the content, which helps researchers discover new content and new scholars.

Disciplines where our researchers shined in September 2014 included:

Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics 8th place out of 89 institutions (see also the broader Business Commons).
Information Literacy 8th place out of 74 institutions (see also the broader Social & Behavioral Sciences Commons).
Developmental Psychology 9th place out of 76 institutions (see also the broader Social & Behavioral Sciences Commons).
Clinical and Medical Social Work 5th place out of 25 institutions. UST authors Kendra Garrett, Barbara Shank, David Roseborough, and William Bradshaw were all listed as among the most popular authors. (see also the broader Medicine and Health Sciences Commons).
Mental Disorders 2nd place out of 52 institutions (see also the broader Medicine and Health Sciences Commons).
Comparative Methodologies and Theories 1st of 41 institutions (see also the broader Arts & Humanities Commons).
Practical Theology 8th place out of 34 institutions (see also the broader Arts & Humanities Commons).

Congratulations to all of our authors for this impressive performance! If you go to either the Digital Commons Network or UST Research Online, you can use the discipline wheel (pictured below) to explore the content, or search and browse using other tools.

I’d be remiss in not recognizing the efforts of my recently retired colleague, Linda Hulbert, who was the brainchild and primary architect of conceiving our repository and working with the departments to get content loaded.

If you have any questions about the repository, please let me know. (John Heintz, jpheintz@stthomas.edu, 2-5018).

Digital Commons Network

September 25, 2014 by

Libraries, News & Events

Summon 2.0 debuts!

We’re excited to announce a new version of our library content search engine! Dubbed Summon 2.0, it’s the newest version of the default search we’ve had on the library home page for the last several years.

Features of the new version include:

a three-pane layout, with search results in the center, search refinement facet options on the left, and featured content or summary information on individual results when you hover over them
a more modern display: visually pleasing, clustering of content types like images and news articles to better organize results, plus continuous scrolling (no more next page, next page, next page, etc.)
search suggestions, plus automatic expansion of queries to get all versions of the key terms in the search
a new “Discipline” facet to filter results: may be useful for when the prof says “I only want you to use articles from psychology journals”
responsive, mobile-friendly design

Note also that the display now includes a CLIC consortium view of holdings, so you’ll see availability information on books and other CLIC items right in the results display–hit the “More” link if displayed to see all versions of the item. You can use the main search to discover catalog items in line with journal articles and other content, or you can use the “CLICnet Catalog” facet in the left pane to limit to that content.

There’s a screenshot below of the new results screen. Please check out Summon 2.0 at your convenience, and ask your librarian for more tips.

Summon 2.0

June 9, 2014 by

Kudos, News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library

Shannon Heitkamp ’15 Selected for ICPSR Internship

Shannon Heitkamp ’15

UST Economics and English major Shannon Heitkamp ’15 was recently selected for a summer internship at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan.

This prestigious and highly competitive program (8 awarded from an applicant pool of more than 240) provides students with graduate level coursework and research project opportunities in quantitative methods of social research. View the press release.

This summer, in addition to graduate level coursework and seminars at ICPSR in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she’ll be engaged in a research project with ICPSR’s extensive social science data archives, likely working on longitudinal research in education.

Shannon applied for the internship in January, submitting an online application and references. She then participated in 2 rounds of interviews, and was notified of her award about 3 weeks ago. The internship carries a $4,000 stipend, room and board in university housing, and a scholarship covering the cost of fees, texts, and materials for coursework in the ICPSR Summer Program.

She worked with UST Econ professor Monica Hartmann on her application and some ongoing course research. Dr. Hartmann says of Shannon: “I am thrilled that Shannon was selected for this honor. Her work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and maturity made her a highly qualified candidate. Last summer, Shannon conducted qualitative research with my colleague Dr. Susan Callaway in the English Department. Through this research, Shannon learned that ESL students were interested in having opportunities to meet American students to practice their English. In response to her findings, the English Café was started with collaboration with her research advisor, Academic Counseling, International Student Services, and the library. This blending of research and practical action will serve Shannon well in her future endeavors.”

At UST Shannon has also served as a student writing consultant with the Center for Writing and is an Excel! Research Scholar.

UST is a member institution of the Consortium, and subscribes to the ICPSR database, an extensive archive of political and social research data. ICPSR works with researchers to deposit, archive, and preserve their data, and makes the data sets and documentation available to subscribers for download and analysis using statistical software.

The Libraries congratulate Shannon on this most impressive accomplishment!

May 15, 2014 by

Business & Economics, News & Events

UST Faculty Publications Getting Some Love Nationally

Kudos to the OCB faculty, whose publications are among the most downloaded this month from the Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods Commons. Earlier this year, UST faculty works have also ranked highly in the Feminist Philosophy Commons, the Clinical & Medical Social Work Commons, and the Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons. Our congratulations to all involved!

The Commons are part of a national network of universities that provide access to faculty research via an institutional repository. UST’s institutional repository is called UST Research Online. Faculty can arrange to upload and display their published or unpublished scholarly work in their department’s section of the site. In addition, the repository can be used to publish online journals (like the UST Law Journal), and is also used by several programs for electronic publishing of graduate student theses and dissertations.

We’re sometimes asked why faculty should bother making their work available through UST’s repository, especially if it’s already been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The answer is simple: it multiplies the visibility of the articles.

The citation (and article copy or link) is published in UST Research Online, and Digital Commons, which powers our repository, aggregates and makes available works from all participating institutions via their Digital Commons network, from which the works are organized into disciplinary collections (like those linked above) available for searching and browsing. Perhaps the paper gets published in a journal, and also in one or more disciplinary sites like SSRN, etc. Then the search engines crawl these sites, discover the articles and the connections between them, which in turn raises their placement in online search results.

Fame, fortune, and scholarly ninja status are sure to follow.

BTW, OCB faculty aren’t the only ones who can get in on this action: the repository is open to all faculty members. For more information, contact your department chair or Linda Hulbert, Associate Director for Collection Management Services at the Libraries.

August 21, 2013 by

News & Events, Recently Read

Access to employee benefits in the U.S.

Ok, just when you were getting bored, here comes the Bureau of Labor Statistics with another page-turner! They’ve just released the latest National Compensation Survey, an annual effort to compile data on who has access to various kinds of employee benefit programs in the United States. Among the findings:

Employer-provided medical care was available to 85 percent of full-time private industry workers. By contrast, only 24 percent of part-time workers had medical care benefits available.
Retirement benefits followed a similar pattern: in private industry, 74 percent of full-time workers had access to a retirement plan, significantly higher than 37 percent of part-time workers.
Paid sick leave benefits were also more commonly offered to full-time workers and those in medium and large establishments in private industry. Plans were offered to 74 percent of full-time workers and 24 percent of part-time workers.

Breakdowns of the data are available by type and size of employer, full-time vs. part-time worker, employee/employer shares of costs, and for other benefit programs like life insurance. Read the current press release and see the program home page for more information.

July 22, 2013 by

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