Open access for local studies?

Just over a year ago at the University of Leicester Library, we were looking at the download stats for our online PhD theses and noticed that a study of the village of Wrangle in the early modern period was the most downloaded item that month.

This got us thinking. Of all the open access theses and research publications in our online archive what is actually popular with users? Medicine and health related items do well, presumably from people searching for information on illnesses and conditions. The other studies that consistently attract downloads are those about a particular place. Broadly speaking these are from geography, archaeology and history.

Open access policy has been driven by the sciences and has tended to assume that freely available publications are an unproblematic ‘good thing’. It has paid less attention to what is popular, with whom and why.

Inspired by the example of Wrangle, we decided to explore creating a new resource to promote the open access local history material we had. The Centre for English Local History Theses Collection is the result. The website makes available all the PhD theses completed by students at the Centre for English Local History. The collection comprises 100 theses covering subjects from medieval moats to hunting in Northamptonshire. The full text is available to read and download in the majority of cases. Founded in 1948, the Centre pioneered local history as an academic discipline in Britain. Research students have been central to its activities, and the theses are important research publications in their own right. We hope that improved access and discovery tools make this collection a useful resource for local historians and local studies librarians, among others.

English local history mapped

In design it is similar to the concept of an overlay journal which has been kicking around for some years. The challenge was to present the theses in an attractive and coherent way. We decided to use Omeka, a platform designed to publish digitised primary source material. However, we found it worked well for our purposes. As the pdfs were already hosted on another site, we could just point readers to the existing full text rather than uploading lots of files. This made the site much ‘lighter’ as a result. A range of plug-ins allows you to add extra features to aid discovery and interpretation, the most useful being the interactive map.

There are great free resources for local studies, but they tend to be collections of primary sources (like British History Online) or long-standing publication series (like Victoria County History). Recent research publications can be harder for the public to access, due to the cost of books and journal subscriptions. Some areas, such as archaeology, are also ‘messy’ with a large amount of grey literature and small society publication. There are journals like the Local Historian and Local Population Studies who have made their archives freely available, but the discipline as a whole could have better coordination.

In principle then, the model we used could be applied more widely. Could we have a single website that allowed people to search and browse all the local studies publications in university repositories? It would need more people and resources that were used for this project, but it does seem feasible.

You can now export multiple citations from Google Scholar

You can now export multiple citations from Google Scholar if you have a Google Account. Go to Google Scholar and sign into your Google Account. Conduct your search. Click on the Star icon (Save) under each reference you want to export. Then click on My Library in the top, right of the screen. Select all the references and click on the Export option: Click the Star/Save Icon Choose Export Option To Export into EndNote Choose the EndNote option. Open the EndNote file that is created. The references should automatically import into EndNote. To Export into RefWorks Choose the RefMan option. Save the RIS file that is created. Login to your RefWorks account. Click on the plus (+) button. Choose Import References. Add the RIS file you just saved. Set the file import option to RIS - Reference Manager. Click import and your references will be imported. --- Good Practice Tip: Always check that all the reference information you need has been

Searching ABS Journals in Business Source Premier

In Business and Management Studies, researchers undertaking a literature review sometimes search across a defined group of journals. This is a way of focusing the literature search to make the results more relevant to the questions in hand. Groups are often chosen from the Association of Business Schools (ABS)'s Academic Journal Guide . Read more how about how they put together the guide here . There are several ways to search across ABS journals. Here is how to do it in Business Source Premier, a leading literature database for this subject area. 1. Login into the ABS journal guide. If you have never used it before you will need to create an account. 2. You can use the guide to draw up a group of journals either by using the Rankings information or the Fields. Fields divides up the journals into categories of research focus e.g. Accounting, Finance etc. In this example we will use the Fields. The field we are interested is ‘Operations Research and Marketin

Advanced Search Tip: Proximity (Adjacency) Searching

Proximity (Adjacency) Searching vs Phrase Searching When you're searching literature databases you might want to find a phrase. The easiest way to do this is to put the phrase in "speech marks". E.g. "heart disease" This will find that exact phrase - with the words next to each other in that order. BUT... You may be interested in variations on that phrase e.g. heart disease, disease of the heart, diseases of the heart, diseases of the human heart. In that case it might be better to use a proximity/adjacency search - this allows you to find one keyword next to another. Or one keyword within a specified number of words of the other keyword. When using a proximity search the keywords can be in any order. Different Databases Use Different Proximity Operators In Ovid Medline : heart adj disease finds the word heart next to the word disease, in that order. (This is the same as searching for the phrase, of course) heart adj2 disease fin

DWLresearch

Search This Blog