Entering the World of Online Collaboration: A Case Study of Librarians on EthicShare.org
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Transcript of Entering the World of Online Collaboration: A Case Study of Librarians on EthicShare.org
This research was supported in part by an appointment to the NLM Associate Fellowship Program sponsored by the National Library of Medicine and administered by the Oak Ridge
Institute for Science and Education.
Entering the World of Online Collaboration
A Case Study of Librarians on EthicShare.org
Amy Donahue, NLM Associate Fellow
Kate McCready, EthicShare Project Director
EthicShare Partnerships
Governance Partners
Funding
Other Partnerships
Virtual Research Environment Components
Collection Development
Content aggregationIngest mechanismsHarvestingExtract-Transform-Load
CONTENT
Discovery Tools
Automated ontologyCommunity vettingFaceted searching
Drupal, SolrACCESS
Policy & Sustainability
Editorial policiesCommunity participation
User privacyIntellectual Property
GOVERNANCEEngagement & Collaboration
Social tools to add valueEditorial participationDrupal
COMMUNITY
EthicShare’s History
• Converging Interests: o 2004 Scholarly Communications Instituteo 2005-2006 U of MN Libraries’ Researcho “Helping Hands” project
• Converging Strengths o Librarians o Bioethicists o Computer Scientists
EthicShare - Today2009 - 2010 EthicShare Program Development
Phase: • Expand the “collection” of materials• Development collaboration tools and features• Sustainability planning• Ongoing marketing
A New ModelEthicShare – the “experiment” – Can we:
• Build a “collection” that is free and accessible to anyone?
• Give scholars a place to share and collaborate?
• Help researchers communicate better about their work?
• Let scholars help shape the “collection”?
• Leverage librarian involvement?
1260 User Accounts:
7% are librarians. How do they use EthicShare? Who are they serving?
Librarian Survey
• SurveyMonkey
• Survey sent to 136 librarians with some connection to bioethics.
• 52 people responded (~38% response rate).
• Each question had a different response rate.
Librarian Survey ResultsNo“Did not know it existed.”
“Because of lack of time, not lack of interest.
Yes“I only use the site for information purpose as a way to learn about faculty/student interests, since I am a liaison for the department.”
“I will be visiting it routinely now.”
Librarian Survey Results#
of R
espo
nden
ts
Name of Feature
1. Basic Search2. Advanced Search3. Ethics in the News4. Access full text5. Groups
Librarian Survey Results
Percent of Respondents
Eth
icS
hare
Act
iviti
es
Most likely activities:1. Mention
EthicShare2. Point to
EthicShare from resource page
3. Look for resources for patrons
Least likely:1. Contribute
keywords2. Contribute
citations3. Contribute
events4. Participate
in general groups
Librarian Survey ResultsHow/Why?• “I will be mentioning it at
my next two historical resource instruction classes to undergraduate history of health sciences students”
• “I mentioned it to faculty at a meeting.”
• “EthicShare can be a useful tool for research, so I want these groups to be aware of its existence and basic functions”
Group
# of
Res
pond
ents
Is EthicShare helpful to librarians in other capacities (e.g., networking)?
• “Yes, especially as it becomes more widely used. It would be a good resource for finding experts or for getting feedback on library issues such as search strategies or collection development.”
• “No. Networking feature is more appropriate to long-term researchers.”
• “No. Librarians are too busy being librarians. We do not have time to be ethicists too.
Is EthicShare helpful to librarians serving their users?
• “…there are no abstracts or other information about the indexed resources, again, reducing the value.”
• “yes. Can lead to content, groups, and discussions that would be hard to find otherwise.”
• “Probably not a lot. Between PubMed's "bioethics" subset, Philosopher's Index, and Google Scholar, we probably have it covered…”
“The Right Tool”
Emily Barney, http://bit.ly/aH1cJY
Survey Results - Demographics
Median birth year: 1956
Bioethics Dept: Yes
No?
Conclusions• Some librarians will be better served than others by EthicShare.
• Librarians may be involved in the collaboration aspects in different ways.
• Librarians are likely to post EthicShare up on resource pages and talk about it in classes, increasing the number of people who then know about the site. The EthicShare team will try to take advantage of this in a “teach the teacher” approach.
• The EthicShare experiment will continue!
Questions?
Many thanks to the EthicShare Dev Team and the NLM Associate Fellowship Program, and to all the librarians
who participated!
Amy Donahue- [email protected]
Kate McCready - [email protected]
Thank You!
EthicShare: http://www.ethicshare.org Background: http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/ethicshare