Browsing Tag

scholarly communications

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

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

Database Highlights & Trials, New Materials

Now Available! BrowZine Journal Browsing App

BrowZine is a tablet application that allows you to browse, read and monitor content from the library’s academic journals just as you would any other ejournal.

browsable-newsstand-librarys-journals

UST’s subscription currently includes over 3,000 UST-owned titles, browsable by general subject area. BrowZine is a free app — by Third Iron — for accessing and reading content from academic journals on the iPad and Android tablets. The app allows users to

select academic journals from a “shelf” display
browse complete journal issues,
read individual articles,
collect favorite journals on a shelf of one’s own,
save favorite articles,
and perform additional tasks with journal content.

To get started, search for “BrowZine” in the App Store or Google Play store and download the app for free; when initially launching BrowZine, select the University of St Thomas from the drop-down list, use your UST credentials to log in, and start browsing.

BrowZine is growing fast and will continue to expand, adding new titles and features as time goes on. Work is progressing to include RefWorks integration, as well as content from many more publishers. If a favorite title isn’t available now, it is very possible it might become available in the near future!

More information about the UST libraries’ subscription is available on the library website. You can find more information about BrowZine in general – along with an introductory video – on the Third Iron website.

Please let us know what you think! Send any comments or questions to Laura Hansen.

June 11, 2013 by

Kudos, Libraries, News & Events

Welcome, Dr. Sullivan!

We at UST Libraries are excited to welcome our President-Elect and share with her our tradition as “the intellectual and technological crossroads of information resources, teaching, and learning at UST.”

To get started, here are some highlights we hope Dr. Sullivan will find helpful and interesting as she transitions into her new position (and that we thought you library-lovers out there might like to check out, too!):

Our Newly-Designed Website and Online Resources

Providing easy-to-use mini research portals to through our Google-like Summon search engine, catalog, research Subject Guides, and more. Read more about it here.

Great Scholarship

USTRO

UST Research Online, our online reseach repository, is a wonderful place to familiarize yourself with the work being done by faculty and students

Virtual Tours and Histories of St Thomas

University Archives Photograph Collection contains a fascinating array of images related to the school’s history

Historic Walking Tour of the Saint Paul campus is a great way to get oriented with the history of the campus – can you find the pictures of Lake Mennith?

Written Histories of St. Thomas and the Saint Paul Seminary:

There have been many books written about UST. Here are two of the most popular:

Journey Toward Fulfillment (1986) by Joseph Connors
To Work for the Whole People (2002) by M. Christine Athans

More can be found in the University Archives.

*For more information about our President-Elect, Dr Julie Sullivan, please visit the St Thomas Newsroom.

February 14, 2013 by

Database Highlights & Trials, News & Events

Journal of Visual Experiments (JoVE) Available Online via UST Libraries

JoVE The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice article on the online Journal of Visual Experiments (JoVE). JoVE is an entirely new scholarly publication format, combining journal article and video documentary of scientific experimental methods.

The UST Libraries recently subscribed to this video journal to support our science disciplines. Note that while the Chronicle article mentions that JoVE is published in five topical and one general section, UST at this time can only afford to subscribe to the general section (watch for the “G” icon in search results). Articles from JoVE are indexed in PubMed and other indices.

Each article presents citation information, an abstract, links to video “chapters”, and other features in addition to the video article itself. JoVE is available via our databases page, the Journals A-Z list, several science discipline research guides, and directly at: http://www.jove.com.ezproxy.stthomas.edu/general.

JoVE article

JoVE cartoon

October 31, 2012 by

News & Events, Recently Read

When Scholars Weigh Publication Options, Tradition Counts

From the Chronicle of Higher Education. (by Jennifer Howard)

“Although more and more scholars are interested in trying out new technologies as a way to share or publish their research, the traditional cultures of their disciplines and the high regard accorded to peer review still tend to have the strongest influence on them, according to a substantial new report on scholarly communication from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley.

The report, “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines,” focuses in depth on the fields of archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science. Produced with the help of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the report draws conclusions from interviews conducted over several years with 160 scholars from 45 “mostly elite” research institutions.”

February 1, 2010 by