Have 30 minutes to spare? Want to make $5 and help the City Tech Library improve research tools for students?
PARTICIPATE IN OUR USABILITY STUDY!
With the help of Win Sea, our Instructional Design Intern, the City Tech Library is taking a closer look at some of the digital tools that we’ve designed to support student research. We need your input to make sure these tools work for City Tech Students.
Studying Brooklyn’s past
Official Brooklyn borough historian–and City Tech alumnus–Ron Schweiger was in the Ursula C. Schwerin Library yesterday to speak to a class about the history and evolution of Grand Army Plaza.
Adopting Complexion Reduction
Adopting Complexion Reduction.
What does that even mean? It’s a term that UX/UI Designer, Mike Horton, of SWARM coined in a recent blog post on an emerging trend in application (re)design. Mike determined there are three major features of Complexion Reduction in minimalist app design.
The defining characteristics of this hot new trend sweeping across Silicon Valley are:
-
Bigger, bolder headlines
-
Simpler more universal icons
-
Extraction of color
The evidence can be spotted in the major redesigns of apps like Instagram, AirBnB, and Apple Music.
So what does Complexion Reduction look like in practice?
Well in terms of UI, it means departing from the “Card” based design that has been popular in recent years. Adopting instead, an interface that favors more white space over borders and containers. Page elements are now organized by their spacing and relation to Headlines. The goal is to keep distractions to a minimum so the actual content can do all of the shining.
Although this seems to make sense for platforms that favor media heavy content like images, videos, and music, we wonder what it would mean in the context of online learning. We’re thinking about applying Complexion Reduction principles to our learning resources. We have a hunch that if user’s are being introduced to a minimalist web, we need to be ready to meet their expectations when it comes to delivering instructional content.
Donate to the Library’s Fall Book Sale.
Please donate to the Ursula C. Schwerin Library’s upcoming Fall Book Sale, which will be held on Thursday, December 8, 2016, from 12:30-2:30 p.m., outside the entrance of the Library on the fourth floor of the Atrium. We will accept hardcover and softcover books (including paperbacks) in good condition. These may include fiction, literature, travel, leisure reading, non-fiction of all sorts, and recently published textbooks. We are also accepting DVDs, CDs and other media. We cannot accept damaged or heavily annotated books and most technical manuals, directories, or handbooks over three years old. We may select some donations for our library holdings if they meet the needs of our curricula.
To arrange a donation, please contact Prof. Morris Hounion at
mhounion@citytech.cuny.edu .
or at extension 5491.
All donations should be received by Monday, December 5. We will acknowledge your donation with a thank-you letter but we cannot place dollar values on donated items. Information about the Library’s Gifts Policy may be found here.
Have the Overdue Library Book Blues?
CUNY Libraries are running a week long amnesty program. Bring back overdue library books from November 14-23 and have your fines forgiven!
Apply for a Fellowship to Adopt Open Educational Resources
Are you concerned about the cost of textbooks, and students’ inability to afford them? Do you find textbooks inadequate for the instruction you’d like to offer? Then you may be interested in exploring the material available through Open Educational Resources.
The City Tech Library is pleased to announce its call for applicants to the Spring 2017 Open Educational Resources (OER) Fellowship.
About the OER Fellowship:
Approaching its third year, the fellowship funds faculty to replace a required textbook with open educational resources (OERs) in a course they teach.
Faculty accepted for the fellowship will participate in a series of seminars (finding, selecting, adapting OERs, Creative Commons licenses) this coming spring as preparation for assembling the OER, complete the OER in June, and pilot the OER as the sole required course material in their fall course.
*Applications to develop OERs for 1st year courses are strongly encouraged, however, all course levels are welcome to apply!
Results so far:
Initial feedback from 3 sections of City Tech students assigned an OER developed during the fellowship are encouraging!
• 83% of students reported the OER increased their engagement with the course lessons in contrast to a traditional textbook
• 81% of students found the quality of the OER course readings to be somewhat to much better than a textbook
• 88% of students reported the OER increased their exposure to different ways of learning
• 89% of students reported the OER increased their satisfaction with the learning experience
In the first year of the fellowship, 3 courses that assigned OERs saved students nearly $26,000 in potential textbook fees over two semesters.
The second cycle of the fellowship is piloting 7 new courses that have obviated another $26,000 in textbook fees in this semester alone. Savings will grow as semesters progress, and more sections adopt OERs.
Potential Applicants:
Please review the fellowship program information and guidelines and submit your application online – due 11:59 p.m. EST, Friday, November 18th.
Contact Prof. Cailean Cooney, Chair of the Library OER Committee with any questions. ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu
Three types of guides
Let’s define our content.
After surveying the current versions of our LibGuide materials we discovered that our guides might be trying to accomplish too much in their limited molds! For the most part, each guide is created by a different instructor or faculty member that has a specialty in the subject matter. The variety of authors has lead to the creation of many different looking research guides. However, amongst the diversity of guides, we’re starting to see that their functionality falls into three main groups: discipline guides, class guides, and task based guides.
Discipline based guides are meant to help students get started researching in a specific academic subject. They provide tailored lists of journals, articles, and databases that are relevant to the field. In addition they contain book recommendations and links to websites that are popular in the field. These guides are often general, and aim to serve as a survey for research subjects like Chemistry, English, History, etc.
Class based guides are linked to specific courses that are offered at the college. These guides contain more in depth resources on how to begin researching for assignments relevant to the course. These guides contain a diversity of content types, ranging from images, professional resources, directories of local resources, to links to relevant articles and publications. Class based guides contain the most variation from guide to guide because they are tailored to meet very specific research needs. Their aim is to dig deep, unlike the wide reaching discipline based guides.
Task based guides are designed to help students manage a executing a specific task such as citing sources, or using CUNY Academic Works. These guides have the most straightforward, non-negotiable information. They serve as information walkthroughs on how to do a very concrete action that has a clear proven result.
So what does this means? We need to identify the strengths of each guide based on what their intended goal is. In our search to understand best practices, we need to honor the differences in how we deliver information. What works well for a Discipline based guide won’t necessarily make sense for a Class based guide.
Dramatic Growth of Open Access
Heather Morrison regularly tracks on reports on the growth of open access. On September 30, she posted this update:
As of Oct. 6, 2016, a Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) search includes over 100 million documents! Globally the collections of open access archives are now collectively an order of magnitude larger than the 10 million articles and books claimed by Elsevier for Science Direct. Congratulations to BASE and everyone in the repositories movement that is making this happen!
In spite of a vigorous weeding process, new get-tough inclusion policy and negative growth in the past year in journal numbers, the Directory of Open Access Journals showed an amazing 11% growth in the past year in articles searchable at the article level – about half a million more articles today than a year ago. This past quarter DOAJ showed a healthy growth rate of 135 titles or added 1.5 titles per day.
For every journal added by DOAJ in the past quarter, another repository was added to the vettedOpenDOAR collection of repositories.
The Internet Archive now has more than 3 million audio recordings.
The Directory of Open Access Books added over 2 thousand titles in the past year for a current total of over 5,000 titles (60% annual growth rate) from 161 publishers (41% annual growth rate in publishers).
The number of journals actively contributing to PubMedCentral continues to show strong growth in every measure: there are 212 more journal active participants in PMC today than a year ago, a 10% growth rate; 170 more journals provide immediate free access, an 11% growth rate; 113 more journals provide all articles as open access, a 9% growth rate; and the number of journals with some articles open access increased by 123, a 31% growth rate.
Full data is available for download from here.
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.
What’s new in Academic Works? Works by Despina Lalaki
What’s new in Academic Works? Despina Lalaki, Social Sciences, recently added four of her articles. Read them here:
Voter Registration on 10/13 is a go!
NYPIRG is here to help the City Tech community register to vote. They will have a table outside the library entrance.
They’ve just told us that they will be here on Oct. 13 from 12:00-2:30 pm.
Your vote counts! If you are not register, take advantage of this opportunity.
