Please join us Friday, March 13th, 2015 from 10:30 am - 12:30 pm for the Windsor-Western Research Day for Librarians and Archivists.
Please see schedule below for a list of presenters and their topics.
SCHEDULE
10:30 WELCOME
10:35 SESSION A
The three presentations in the session will be followed by time for questions or comments.
OCR for Large Collections of Digitized Images
Art Rhyno, Windsor
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a process to convert images into machine readable text for better utilization in digital environments, such as full text indexing. The accuracy rate and throughput of OCR applications can be key metrics for successful digitization projects. This research attempts to provide high rates of accuracy through image preprocessing in combination the Tesseract OCR project, and to utilize the Hadoop processing framework via the library's public workstation environments.
A Snapshot of Web Harvesting in Canada
Joanne Paterson, Western
Websites are ephemeral things, with a web page having an estimated life expectancy of between 44 and 100 days. Unique information resources, such as digital scholarship, political sites and government documents, may be available only in a web-based format and are at risk of loss if they are not actively preserved through a process of web harvesting and archiving. What is the state of Web Capture in Canada today?
Effective Librarian and Faculty Collaboration: Assessment-Based Reflections
Marg Sloan, Western
I will report the implementation and results of a library instruction assessment plan, and discuss the challenges to effective librarian and faculty collaboration that emerged throughout the project. Challenges were experienced in gathering all assessment data, however results did suggest places where students most struggled, possible revisions to instruction based upon this finding, and problematic areas related to librarian and faculty collaboration. I will report results of this research along with the challenges experienced and suggestions for strengthening librarian and faculty collaboration.
11:10 SESSION B
The three presentations in the session will be followed by time for questions or comments.
Neoliberal Language in Canadian Academic Library Strategic Plans: A Critical Discourse Analysis
Courtney Waugh, Western
This research combines content analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the impact of Neoliberal discourse, specifically market rhetoric, in three Canadian academic library strategic plans. The theme of customer service is explored and tied to broader social discourses that underscore the tension between libraries as a public good and libraries as a marketized commodity.
Campus Attitudes towards Open Access Publishing
Monica Fazekas, Liz Hill, Joanne Paterson, Western
We are developing a survey to solicit information from faculty regarding their attitudes towards open access (OA) publishing. Data from our Open Access Publication Fund applications suggests that the sciences have embraced OA in general but other disciplines have not wholeheartedly accepted the precepts of OA. We want to discover the concerns of faculty regarding OA and OA mandates. Our presentation will highlight our progress to date and our plans related to our research on this topic.
Academic Publishing Folklore
Dave Johnston, Windsor
Changes in the scholarly communications landscape require faculty and graduate students to pay more attention to questions about author rights and publishing. The answers that faculty and graduates pass on to one another are part of a tapestry of academic publishing folklore that can provide both useful information and misinformation. Librarians seeking to provide helpful information need to work to understand this folklore in order to provide competent guidance to their users.
11:45 SESSION C
The three presentations in the session will be followed by time for questions or comments.
Being Open: What Research I Did and Didn't Do During My Sabbatical
Mita Williams, Windsor
Before I made my application for my 2014 sabbatical in 2012, I sought the advice of those who had gone before me. They told me to make room in my proposal for changes that I might not be able to foresee. In this presentation I will share with you some of the results of my research as well as some of the reasons why I was very glad to follow the advice I was given.
Bibliographic Data is Research Data
David Fiander, Western
Our library catalogues are not just finding aids for our collections, they are also premier collections of potential research data. Or they would be, if they were easy to use. What research are we NOT doing because we can't treat the catalogue like a large dataset suitable for mining?
The Library is Our Lab: The Case for Print Books in an Academic Library
Fran Gray and Peggy Ellis, Western
Peggy Ellis and I are investigating attitudes of Humanities scholars toward e-books. Our specific research questions: Do Humanities scholars prefer print over e-book formats?, Does book format impact research and teaching activities? and, What would assist researchers to make optimal use of e-books? In November, we surveyed faculty and graduate students in the Arts and Humanities and in the History department. We have begun analyzing the survey responses https://melbournerx.com and will summarize them in our presentation.
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