Social media and research - ALISS conference 20 July 2011

Slides from the conference


For me, the most interesting points from this really useful event were:

1. the use of tools like Netvibes or Mixxt to manage your online life and bring together information from your RSS feeds, blog posts, bookmarks etc on one page which can be your home page. You can also have a 'private' page for personal use and a 'public' one for sharing with your researchers. For an example see Sarah Oxford's page http://ednetwork.mixxt.com./ who explained to us how she had set up a quasi-independent social network, linked from the university pages, to share information with researchers. Several other subject advisors/librarians had effectively moved away from using the formal university website and set up similar networks using the free tools.  This made me think about the future management of the intranet and internet at my research unit.  Sarah was happy to share her guide to setting up Netvibes http://tinyurl.com/3oojf4w  and mixtt http://tinyurl.com/3vjserv
2. Miggie Pickton, University of Northampton  talked us through her Web tools for researchers aimed at helping researchers identify which tools are useful to them at each stage of the research process
3. Paula Ann Beasley and Linda Norbury, University of Birmingham, case study type report detailed their practical experience of basic Web 2.0 training for researchers and lecturers. They had identified a knowledge gap and very varied levels of expertise which the training sought to even out. One point was that the training material could be shared for use in other universities. As logon instructions etc rapidly outdate, an Open Access environment would be ideal for this training material so that it could be amended each time it was used.
4. Anna Drabble's, (Emerald Publishing) presentation http://www.slideshare.net/heatherdawson/coventry2011drabble answered some of the questions about how social media is affecting research. An international survey investigated the use of social media in the research workflow. Concluded that: social media does not yet mark a watershed in the research process, but has increased the tasks and the number of sources that need to be checked; while blogs, wikis, tweets and social networks are being used to disseminate research, the academic journal is still regarded as the most important dissemination channel; this is due to the fact that other tools are not taken into account in REF, but this may change if Open Access campaigners have success.

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