Exploring new information habitats : the information specialist as guide in the e-research environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A strategic focus of the Academic Information Service, University of Pretoria (AIS), is to develop and implement an effective Information Service for Research. The university’s mission statement states that it strives to be the leading research university in South Africa and the AIS would, therefore, play an important part in helping it to achieve this aim. The need to increase research output as well as obtaining an optimum postgraduate through-put rate is the foundation of this Research Strategy. A focus group was formed in 2004 to investigate all facets of such an information service for research, consisting of the leaders of 3 service units of the AIS, covering the Humanities, Natural Sciences/Agriculture and Engineering and the Built Environment, and Veterinary Science. Leading research universities were identified after consultation with other AIS leaders and considering information from the institutions’ web pages. Their library directors were contacted for their inputs. These included the University of Alberta and University of Calgary in Canada, and Sheffield University in the UK. Group discussions were held with Information Specialists and with a group of top researchers at the University of Pretoria to gain further insights. It became clear that the role of the Information Specialist and the competencies needed in the Information Service for Research focus would be a central feature of this project. Facets that were identified as being essential role players were: E-information developments, including building e-resource collections and the use of metadata for optimum retrieval Scholarly communication and e-research support IT support and skills Relationships, networking, communication and facilitation of knowledge networks (COPs/ Communities of Practice) Flexibility in an ever-changing information and research environment Training skills (both giving training and receiving training), not only in database searching but also in e-publishing and managing their own reference databases The findings of this focus group and developments based on these findings will be discussed, the implementation actions described and future plans mentioned. Introduction A strategic focus of the Academic Information Service, University of Pretoria (AIS) is to develop and implement an effective Information Service for Research. The university’s mission statement (1) states that it strives to be the leading research university in South Africa and the AIS would, therefore, play an important part in helping it to achieve this aim. The need to increase research output as well as obtaining an optimum postgraduate throughput rate is the foundation of this Research Strategy. A focus group, consisting of the leaders of 3 service units of the AIS, covering the Humanities, Natural Sciences/Agriculture and Engineering and the Built Environment, and Veterinary Science, was formed in 2004 to investigate all facets of such an information service for research. The traditional research process has been documented in the literature (2) as consisting of the following steps: • Planning the research • Literature survey • Formulating the research problem • Formulating the research design • Writing the research proposal • Writing the proposal for a research grant
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.033 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".