January 16, 2013

York University Libraries, in conjunction with the Office of the Vice-President, Research & Innovation, are sponsoring the University’s first annual Undergraduate Research Fair, to take place on Feb. 27 in the Scott Library Collaboratory (second floor).

The Undergraduate Research Fair’s Steering Committee requests instructors consider worthy research projects that have recently been graded and encourage qualified students to participate. Student applications are due by Jan. 25.

Students view the poster outlining the Undergraduate Research Fair, which will take place in the Scott Library Collaboratory at York’s Keele campus on Feb. 27

As York’s first multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Fair, participation in 2012-2013 is extended to students in the Faculties of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Environmental Sciences, Fine Arts and Glendon. There is an intent to expand the fair campus-wide in future years.

Undergraduate students in any year of study are encouraged to submit a graded, research-based paper, project or honours thesis prepared between March 2012 and Jan. 2013, along with a 250-word abstract. Projects may be submitted in languages other than English, but the application abstract must be in English.  Fair participants will be selected by the steering committee, comprised of faculty members and librarians.

“I’m excited to see this (Undergraduate Research Fair) developing and expect it will attract a lot of student attention,” says Lisa Philipps, associate vice president of Research & Innovation and fair adviser.

The fair – poster sessions presented in a friendly ‘market place’ environment – is intended to showcase undergraduate student researchers and their work. In addition to gaining valuable presentation experience and earning a chance to win an award of $500 or $600, student participants will receive a signed certificate honouring their contribution to the University’s refereed Undergraduate Research Fair to add to their resumés. Award winners may have their papers published in a journal sponsored by the Libraries and all participants will be celebrated at a reception during the Fair, which faculty, friends and family are welcome to attend.

“We hope that this new fair will support York’s goals to build an engaged university, enhance the local research culture and improve student retention by offering a forum for undergraduates to share their research outside the classroom in a cross-curricular environment,”  explains Associate University Librarian and Fair Steering Committee member, Catherine Davidson.

Visit the Undergraduate Research Fair website for information on eligibility, awards, submission requirements and an application form.

Associate Librarian of Humanities and Religion, Scott McLaren, has been awarded a prestigious Botein Fellowship by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). McLaren will spend the month of November at the AAS in Worcester Massachusetts extending research he began in his dissertation on early Upper Canadian religious print culture. Specifically, McLaren wants to deepen his understanding of the role Upper Canadian Sunday schools played in spreading literacy across the colony.

Receiving the Botein Fellowship for research in the history of the book in American culture will grant McLaren access to the AAS library that houses approximately two-thirds of all American publications produced between 1640 and 1876.

Access to America’s earliest publications may seem counterintuitive to a study of Upper Canadian Sunday schools, but McLaren knows this literature will have a profound influence on his research. “Sunday school libraries in Upper Canada started to take shape in the 1820s and in many ways they functioned as the colony’s first ‘public’ libraries, especially for those living outside of urban regions,” McLaren explains. “However, many of these schools followed American models and imported all their books from New York.” For these reasons, Sunday school libraries functioned as transnational centres for literacy across the Upper Canadian backwoods.

Following the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 it became especially problematic for Upper Canadian Sunday Schools to form libraries around American texts. These books presented a version of history that Canadian political elites were not comfortable with. In the 1840s the colony’s chief superintendent of education, Egerton Ryerson, banned the use of American textbooks and teachers in Canadian schools entirely.

What McLaren is most excited about is the opportunity to pore over literature that was deemed insidious enough to be prohibited by Canadian politicians. “I want to use my time at AAS to read through these ‘subversive’ books and see what people were reading in 1822-1840 – particularly because these texts helped to shape the landscape of early Canadian print culture,” McLaren explains.

These publications will inform a number of scholarly articles as well as McLaren’s book tentatively titled A Reading People: Print Culture and the Methodist Struggle for Social Respectability in Upper Canada, 1800-1850.

“Scott is a great scholar who captures our imagination and certainly demonstrates book history is not boring,” says Cynthia Archer, University Librarian. “How many of us knew Sunday Schools and public libraries in Canada are related and that Ryerson banned American textbooks for use in the classroom?”

The AAS was established in 1812 when the United States was at war with Britain. The founder, Isaac Thomas, wanted to preserve all records that served to inform the American identity outside of Britain’s governance. The AAS also boasts one of the world’s largest collections of early Canadian publications.

June 6, 2012

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 17^th 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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