We recently arranged a subscription to Academic Charts Online, a new tool that slows users to perform analytics on popular music chart data from around the world.
Academic Charts Online contains tools that allow you to interpret, graph, analyse, compare and contrast musical trends and interactions. You can also listen to audio samples for each track and album.
We recently added Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966 to our collection of Adam Matthew Digital products.
Spanning the full era of the modern European colonisation of Africa, from the occupation of Algeria by France, through increasing British presence on the west African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope in the south, the Berlin Conference which set off the ‘Scramble for Africa’, the high-water mark of economic exploitation of Africans in the Congo Free State, rivalries amongst European powers and the era of withdrawal that followed the Second World War, Confidential Print: Africa serves as a resource for academics, students and researchers studying modern Africa and its recent history.
Business librarian Xuemei Li has become one of the first librarians to ever have a study validating the usefulness of altmetrics published in an academic journal. Her first research study was published in April, 2012 in Scientometrics and Li’s second study was accepted by the 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators which will be taking place in September 2012.
Altmetrics is the study of social media metrics used for analyzing and informing scholarship. “Researchers are integrating various social media tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social bookmarks into their research processes to save, organize, share, and disseminate various research sources. It is even more difficult for traditional bibliometric indicators to capture the totality of research influence on the web,” Li explains. “Nevertheless, the traces left by researchers and the general public through those social media tools hold big potential for measuring different research influences, and this is what altmetrics aims to measure. Altmetrics can be used to complement traditional citation-based measurements.”
Li’s first study of altmetrics sampled 1613 papers published in Nature and Science in 2007 and compared citations with reader counts. Li found significant statistical correlations between citations from Web of Science and Google Scholar and reader counts from the social media bookmark tools CiteULike and Mendeley. The findings suggest that the type of scholarly influence one’s research has, as measured by these social media tools, is related to traditional citation-based impact.
Li’s second study compared nearly 1400 Faculty of 1000 (F1000) post-publication peer reviews, and Mendeley usage data, with traditional bibliometric indicators. This study suggests that F1000 –a database that stores only the best quality biomedical articles after they’ve been published, as selected by over 10,000 faculty members worldwide – is good at acknowledging the merit of an article from (the F1000) experts’ point of view while Mendeley reader counts are more closely related to citation counts.
“Faculty are striving to demonstrate the impact of their research in a world where the web has become a critical communications channel,” explains Cynthia Archer, York University librarian. “Li’s ground-breaking research serves to validate the usefulness of social media based altmetrics to monitor and track faculty research impact.”
Li and other researchers are working hard to identify, monitor, and evaluate potential social media tools towards building reliable altmetric indicators.
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When asked about his overarching goal for writing his autobiography, A Struggle to Walk with Dignity – The True Story of a Jamaican- born Canadian, Gerald A. Archambeau responds, “To inspire youth to never give up on the goodness of human beings regardless of race.” With this aspiration in mind Archambeau has donated a collection of his works – him memoir and three scrapbooks – to Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections.
The scrapbooks narrate Archambeau’s life through a series of photographs, postcards, and newspaper clippings pertaining to race relations and his employers the Canadian National Railway (CN), Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), and Air Canada. The scrapbooks refer to the collective fight for human rights equality and Archambeau’s quotes written throughout add personal reflections of his own struggle. These scrapbooks, chronicling his life, served as the catalyst for writing the book A Struggle to Walk with Dignity – The True Story of a Jamaican-born Canadian.
Catherine Davidson, associate university librarian of collections, believes that Archambeau’s donation will be a valuable instructional resource for undergraduate humanities programs, specifically courses in Canadian history and race relations. “Archambeau’s memoir and scrapbooks shine a light on the racial segregation and inequality that were prevalent in Canada at the time. Archambeau’s scrapbooks in particular are a fascinating read; they bring the issues to life for the reader.”
About Gerald A. Archambeau
Archambeau was born in Jamaica B.W.I. to a Panamanian father of African, French, and Aboriginal ancestry and mother of Caucasian and African ancestry – although he was raised by his grandmother and three aunts.
As a teenager Archambeau was forced to immigrate to Canada by his mother and stepfather, a Barbadian who fought for the Canadian army in WWII and for that reason was granted Canadian citizenship. Archambeau moved to Canada so the three could qualify for veteran housing in Montreal.
Because of his love for trains Archambeau was employed as a porter for CN and CPR for over 15 years. He writes next to a newspaper clipping about the porters in one of his scrapbooks, “The true gentlemen of the rails – service with a smile even though we were insulted at times.” Despite racial clauses in some union contracts, Archambeau’s time on the rails was quite happy. “We served Canada’s wealthy who could afford to ride in sleeping cars, club cars, parlour cars, and eat in the dining cars. Porters who provided good service were tipped and always had money in their pockets. Very few incidences of open racism occurred on the railways and if there were any problems (the porters) could report it to the train conductor who would handle it according to railway rules.”
In the 1960s the railway business started to decline in popularity and in 1967 Archambeau began working for Air Canada as a station attendant, later being promoted to lead ramp foreman. It was at this point that Archambeau had to fight for equality because of improper workplace practices and behaviours.
When Archambeau retired in 1993 his wife Marion encouraged him to write his autobiography. A Struggle to Walk with Dignity –The True Story of a Jamaican- born Canadian was published in 2008 by Dr. J. Patrick Boyer, President of Blue Butterfly Publishing. His book can be summed up best by Archambeau himself, “The most important thing to me in life is my integrity as a human being – not as a race or a colour, but as a person. My book is a very humanistic story about interactions between people of the human race.”
For more information about Gerald Archambeau’s donation or how to integrate it into coursework and research, please contact: Anna St.Onge, Archivist of Digital Projects and Outreach, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Room 305, Scott Library, astonge@yorku.ca.
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