RSP Preservation Day

27 May 2010

The day focused on the higher level workings of digital preservation, engaging the right stakeholders, creating a high level preservation policy and getting preservation on the agenda at University level. It also showcased a number of toolkits and audit checklists to help organisations with preservation.

Summon increasing usage

Marshall Breeding reports on a study by Michigan’s Grand Valley State University which shows how intoducing Summon has increased usage of their resources. Full article here which has a range of impressive stats including:

Summon is enabling students to go directly to full-text, boosting the use of a variety of databases. For example, Academic Search Premier saw a usage increase of 92% and ABI/INFORM rose 354%.

NoWAL Sustaining Digitisation Projects

I attended this event at Liverpool University on 27/05/10.

The main themes for the day were engaging with stakeholders, creating and maintaining policies, advocacy, staffing, and preservation.

Converis Demo

Matt Bowell (Research and Graduate College) organised a demo of Converis, a Research Information System. The Research Information System will potentially replace SEEK and help to integrate University functions more effectively, including HR, SIS, Finance and of course USIR.

Lynne and I have written some notes which can be found on the V:Drive at:
V:\ILS\aCustomerServices\UniResearch\Projects\Research Management Systems\Converis Notes.doc

Demo slides are also availale from the same location, document is titled Converis Demo Slides.

Encore Synergy

III have released Encore Synergy which provides access to articles as well as the existing catalogue functionality. It differs from Summon, EDS etc on that it doesn't use a harvested index to provide article results but instead uses web services to dynamically generate the results from the content providers. It also doesn't interfile the article results but presents a small set in the initial results list, with links to more.

Marshall Breeding has given a write up and a few early adopters are already using Encore Synergy including the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.