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TABLE OF CONTENTS
HKUST PowerSearch - Federated Database Searching User Communications Committee
Proposal to Assess Information Literacy Learning Outcomes Making A Lasting Impression on Library Visitors
Library Seminar on Enhanced Resource Discovery and Delivery
Logs Miner: Portal for Data Mining
Scholarly Publications Index, Knowledge Transfer and Scopus Author ID Form
Citation Workshops - Analyze and Improve Citation Counts IC Workshops: Effective Presentation
An Exhibition Showcasing Cultural Heritage in Hong Kong
Issue No. 75 February 2010 http://library.ust.hk/
HKUST PowerSearch - Federated
Database Searching
he Library has recently launched a federated search
service named HKUST PowerSearch
(http://lbsearch.ust.hk/). It is a specialized discovery tool for finding scholarly content from electronic resources subscribed to by the Library.
PowerSearch sends your query simultaneously to several databases and merges the results returned from each one. PowerSearch has a built-in OpenURL resolver (named
Find@HKUST) that can bring you directly to the full-text of the citations from the search results.
PowerSearch uses the MetaLib software, which is widely adopted by major academic libraries. The Library is pleased to purchase this software to enhance the searching capability of its subscribed electronic resources, including e-journals, e-books and citation databases. Instead of searching resources one at a time using their own heterogeneous interfaces, our researchers, teachers and students can now cross-search them with this specialized PowerSearch tool.
PowerSearch is still in an early "soft launch" stage. Your comments will help us improve on it. Please send your feedback to [email protected].
User Communications Committee
o enhance communication between the Library and our users, a User Communications Committee has been established. The main purposes of this Committee are to promote awareness of Library resources and services and to collect feedback among the various user groups within the University.
The Committee seeks to improve recognition for the contributions of the Library services, initiatives, and innovations to learning, teaching and research at the University. It acts as an advising body and a strategic resource on matters relating to outreach and external communications.
Please send any suggestions you may have to advance communications between users and the Library to
Proposal to Assess Information Literacy Learning Outcomes
n 2008, at the University's request, the Library proposed a broad set of Information Literacy Learning Outcomes (ILLOs) for graduates of the coming 4-year UG program. Based on the "Information Literacy Competency Standards" approved by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) in the United States as well as the graduate attributes (ABC LIVE), these ILLOs encompass the ability to locate, evaluate, and use needed information effectively. The University agreed with the ILLOs, which are important for success in university, career and life.
Last November, the University designated the Library to design a plan to assess students' success in achieving the ILLOs. We submitted our first proposal in December. The Library plans to pilot test the plan before implementation in September 2012.
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fourth years. The entrance and exit test results will be used both to assess new students' information literacy skills and to measure the extent of improvement as a result of their University education.
At present, the Library and CELT are evaluating three commonly used standardized tests from the United States:
"Project SAILS-Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills", created and maintained by Kent State
University in Ohio; "Information Literacy Test", developed by James Madison University in Virginia; and Central Michigan University's "Research Readiness Self-Assessment". All three were based on the ACRL standards and have been assessed for validity and reliability. If the University chooses one of these tests, the Library will try to collaborate with the institution to modify it to fit a Hong Kong or Chinese cultural context. In addition to a standardized test, we suggest developing a general questionnaire to survey students' perceived achievements of the ILLOs.
At the level of individual information literacy related courses, classes and workshops offered to students, the Library recommends assessing their particular learning outcomes with specific tests, assignments, projects or other methods.
Making A Lasting Impression on Library Visitors
group of 18 library directors from technological universities in Australia, Netherlands, Poland, Germany, and a number of Asian countries visited the HKUST Library after their attendance of a seminar on e-science in Hong Kong. In addition to a library tour, these visitors were briefed on recent developments and innovations at the HKUST Library. During the one-hour briefing session, they learned of our quality assurance efforts, renewed organizational and committee structure, as well as some of our IT-enabled services. These convenient user services include advanced online booking of library group study rooms, superb online registration system for library classes and workshops, and novel enhancements to our digital institutional repository (e.g., top 20 most accessed documents of the month, real-time citation counts from Scopus http://repository.ust.hk/dspace/handle/1783.1/191).
The visitors were also briefed on a locally developed system to keep track of our e-resource usage, JURO (http://library.ust.hk/software/juro.html); a newly developed management tool on Library web-based services and applications, Logs Miner; and a new program to monitor occupancy of IC workstations (http://library.ust.hk/serv/ic/) which allows students and other users to remotely check the availability of these high-demand workstations before they come to the Library.
These university library directors were quite impressed with our quality assurance efforts and innovative approaches. After their visit, some of them wrote for more information on how and what we do to optimize library services to our users.
Library Seminar on Enhanced Resource Discovery and Delivery
oining hands with Ex Libris Asia Pacific, a library software developer, the Library hosted a public seminar on 9 November 2009 to discuss the timely topic of "Delivering User Centric Library Services".
As with previous HKUST Library programs, the seminar attracted the attention of many librarians and professionals in the field interested in knowing more about the latest trends and technological developments in library service delivery.
On the day of the seminar all the seats in the Library Classroom were taken up. Ms. Tamar Sadeh, Marketing Director of Ex Libris Group, spoke of shifting the traditional library paradigm to creating unified resource discovery and delivery. She then moved on to discuss how new models and current technologies of database aggregation help enhance navigation of scholarly content on the Internet. Participants responded enthusiastically to her presentations with interesting questions. The seminar ended with light refreshments when participants chatted and exchanged ideas.
It was a gratifying experience for the Library to have organized this seminar with a software developer to bring in new ideas and to learn what is going on in the market. Holding this kind of seminar helps achieve one of our missions of contributing to Hong Kong and its regional development in information sharing and exchange. We are pleased to see that our efforts benefit not only the library community but also others in the information technology sector.
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Details about the seminar can be found at http://library.ust.hk/info/other/nov2009/.
Logs Miner: Portal for Data Mining
eb access logs record individual mouse clicks from the end user - which results in a mountain of data. By analyzing these data, we can discover user access patterns to improve user interfaces and provide statistical data for collection management.
Developed by HKUST Library staff, Logs Miner is a portal for mining the web access logs of multiple applications. It gathers logs from more than 20 library servers including the main Library Web Server, Library Catalog, Institutional
Repository, Digital Archives, SmartCAT, ILLiad, Streaming Video Server, etc. It is built on top of AWStats - an
open-source tool for analyzing web access logs.
Logs Miner provides three types of report. AWStats reports include a wide range of information such as number of visits, usage by months, days of week and hours of the days, domains/countries of visitor's hosts, most viewed entry and exit pages on the web site usage, etc. Logs Miner further enhances the AWStats functionality by allowing real-time querying of the data for constructing statistical access reports. Users can deeply mine the logs by using 'regular expressions'. Lastly, built-in customized reports provide a full picture of page visit figures of similar pages, e.g. usage of all subject guides.
For more information about Logs Miner, please view Mr. Andrew Wong's presentation Logs Miner: portal for data
mining web access logs, available at (http://hkiug.ln.edu.hk/meetings/am2009/docs/IUG%202009%20presentation.ppt).
Scholarly Publications Index, Knowledge Transfer and Scopus
Author ID Form
Recently the VPRDO and the Library have embarked on a joint knowledge harvesting project (http://library.ust.hk/info/harvestproject.html). As VPRDO is committed to implementing knowledge transfer on campus, and the Library is dedicated to capturing the University's research output, a collaborative effort will save resources and speed up the process.
According to Prof. Matthew Yuen, Acting VPRD, in order to implement knowledge transfer the University needs to identify its intellectual strengths and harvest intellectual products; then mechanisms will be put in place to protect intellectual property and manage these products. An open knowledge transfer platform will be created to generate funding support for innovation and business opportunities.
In this connection, the Library sees its contribution to this knowledge harvesting process. Previously the Library created the HKUST Scholarly Publication Index (SPI) (http://lbapps.ust.hk/hkir/handle/9999/116999) which captures the University's intellectual strength. It contains 14,961 citations of scholarly publications of HKUST researchers dating back to 1990 from the Web of Science database. The citations are linked to full text articles in subscribed resources via link resolvers. Some papers have a real-time citation count message showing how often they have been cited in Scopus. Harvesting from Web of Science is only the first step. The next step is to harvest from a multitude of databases including
Scopus, a comprehensive multi-disciplinary database which assigns a unique author ID to a researcher. The Library has
developed the Scopus Author ID Verification Form (http://lbxml.ust.hk/ir/scopusid.pl) to facilitate this harvesting work. Once a researcher has filled in the form, an Automatic Programming Interface will be invoked to harvest articles from Scopus into the SPI database. Researchers may also submit articles missing from the Scopus list. This harvesting will also be extended to other databases and will cover metadata from the OCGA's database. A campus-wide knowledge harvesting exercise will be launched soon.
Citation Workshops - Analyze and Improve Citation Counts
ublishing research ideas in high-impact journals is a primary concern of researchers. But once their works are published, they are concerned if their research ideas are being cited in their research fields. To explore recent developments of bibliometrics in academia, four individual workshops to "Analyze and Improve Your Citation Counts" were held between 7-10 December for the Schools of Business and Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, Science and Engineering. Over 70 faculty and staff members joined the workshops at the Library.
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began with a welcoming note by Dr. Samson Soong, the University Librarian. A lively discussion then took place with our distinguished guests - Prof. Matthew Yuen, Acting VPRD and Mr. Ken Cheng, Knowledge Transfer Manager - who shared the University's strategies on knowledge transfer together with their valuable insights and experiences. This was immediately followed by presentations by Ms. Diana Chan, the Associate University Librarian and the subject librarians, Kevin Ho, Victoria Caplan, Steve Yip and Eunice Wong.
The presentations covered a wide spectrum of topics including recent developments in citation metrics, finding
citation counts from Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar and other sources, capturing book citations, using Publish
or Perish ® software, and the ways to improve and keep track of citation counts. The workshops were very well received,
arousing a lot of discussions and positive feedback from the participants.
Presentations from the workshop are available at the HKUST Institutional Repository
(http://repository.ust.hk/dspace/handle/1783.1/6184.
IC Workshops: Effective Presentation
re you afraid of giving presentations? Almost all students, both UGs and PGs, are required to present in front of classmates or peers at some points of their study. At the Information Commons, a core element is support for students' need for classroom presentations. In November, the IC Coordinator offered a 2-part workshop on presentation skills at the new IC Learning Space. The workshop covered 8 essential tasks for preparing and delivering effective presentations, including audience analysis presentation purposes information research content structure appearance visual aids audience interaction rehearsing
These tasks look obvious and simple to do, but mastering these skills requires learning, conscious planning and practice. For example, most presenters fully realize the time limit they are given, yet have difficulty selecting the material to focus on. Another common weakness is presenting oneself confidently in front of the audience. This workshop cannot turn all the participants into presentation experts, but it serves as a roadmap for them to present effectively. In the coming semester, the workshop will be offered again with more in-class exercises.
If you have questions about the workshop, contact Gabi Wong, the IC Coordinator, at [email protected].
普天同慶 : 傳統節慶與香港社會
An Exhibition Showcasing Cultural Heritage in Hong Kong
For this Chinese New Year of the Tiger, visitors to the Library Gallery will experience a colorful celebration - the staging of a special exhibition on traditional festivals in Hong Kong. The exhibition will run from 4 February until 31 March. Featuring a rich array of photos and texts, stunning artifacts and a multi-language video program, this exhibition showcases Hong Kong's unique cultural heritage while displaying the social and religious activities held during traditional festivals in Hong Kong. Visitors will be able to have a taste of some traditional festivities; such as the Fire Dragon Dance of Tai Hang, the Deities' Parade in Tai O's Dragon Boat Festival and the Jiao Festival of Cheung Chau, which were recently submitted for an application of the third national list of intangible cultural heritage in China.
Welcoming visitors at the Gallery entrance is the giant traditional lantern, "Grand Three Crowns (大三元)", which was especially made for this exhibition. As a folk custom, on the 15th of the first lunar month, villagers in rural areas of the New Territories light up lanterns in their ancestral halls while reporting the birth of their newborn sons to the ancestors. The "Dragon Boat Head and Tail" and the "Fire Dragon" artifacts are certainly highlights of this exhibition. Their
spectacular appearance and unique features are as impressive as the charming beauty of the local festivities.
Not-to-be missed is the display on "Cantonese Opera" - Hong Kong's first UNESCO intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Also known as "Guangdong grand theater play", Cantonese Opera has always been a key element in different traditional celebrations.
In conjunction with this special exhibition the Library has prepared a Collection Highlights on Cultural Heritage in Hong Kong (http://library.ust.hk/res/highlights/hk-heritage.html). Books and media items are shelved next to the New Book Shelves on the Ground Floor.
Don't miss this extraordinary exhibition showcasing cultural heritage in Hong Kong. More information can be found at
http://library.ust.hk/info/exhibit/.
This exhibition is co-organized by HKUST Library, South China Research Center of HKUST and Hong Kong Museum of History.
Note: This is an archival version - information and links will not be updated.
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