Stacy R. Konkiel

Cross-posted from TheIdealis.org

In August, I stepped down as a Founding Editor of The Idealis to focus on other projects. Nicky Agate is now The Idealis’s Editor in Chief.

The Idealis started out of community conversations around LIS scholarship and open access, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished so far: over 290 recommendations for freely available scholcomm research; more than 44,000 views and 400 subscribers; and most importantly a stellar team of 38 editors who have dedicated their time and expertise to finding the very best scholcomm research and sharing it with the community.

I’m very grateful to The Idealis’s volunteers, especially Nicky, for taking The Idealis forward. I look forward to seeing what The Idealis has in store, and will remain a faithful reader of the site for years to come. Thank you!

The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication just published “Scholarly Communication Librarians’ Relationship with Research Impact Indicators: An Analysis of a National Survey of Academic Librarians in the United States“.

This is the final publication related a topic I’ve been working on since 2013 (!), when I first realized that although academic librarians were interested in research metrics, no one had yet studied the reality of how they were using these kinds of indicators in their day-to-day jobs and in support of their own careers.

Along the way, I’ve been privileged to work with Sarah Sutton and Rachel Miles (and for a short period, Michael Levine-Clark) on a series of publications and presentations that include:

• “Is What’s “Trending” What’s Worth Purchasing? Insights from a National Study of Collection Development Librarians” in The Serials Librarian (which we also presented upon at NASIG 2016 in Albuquerque)
• “Awareness of Altmetrics among LIS Scholars and Faculty” in Journal of Education for Library and Information Science (which we compared to librarians at ER&L 2016 in Austin, TX)
• “What’s used to gauge when engaging?: Determining academic librarian roles in research assessment reporting services“, presented at the 2016 Bibliometrics and Research Assessment Symposium in Bethesda, MD.
• “Scholarly Communication Librarians’ Relationship with Research Impact Metrics,” a panel presentation at ‘Finding Meaning in Metrics’ at ALA Annual 2016 in Orlando, FL
• “Use of Altmetrics in US-based academic libraries,” a presentation at the Second Altmetrics Conference in Amsterdam (summarized on the Altmetrics Conference blog by Ian Mulvaney)
• “Myth vs. reality: Altmetrics and librarians,” a presentation at the Altmetrics15 workshop in Amsterdam

We ultimately learned that:

• Your seniority/years of experience has no effect upon how familiar you are likely to be with various research metrics
• Librarians and LIS educators alike are more familiar with traditional research impact metrics like the JIF than they are with altmetrics
• Altmetrics are least likely to be used for collection development, though this is a use case I’ve been promoting for a long time
• The more scholcomm-related duties you have in your job, the more you’ll use metrics of all kinds
• Altmetric is the most popular altmetrics database used by librarians 😎

Sarah and Rachel plan to carry this path of research forward, expanding the scope of the study to include librarians worldwide, and also possibly looking at library promotion and tenure documents’ discussion of metrics. I wish them the very best and want to once again express my gratitude towards them as collaborators: Ladies, I hope to work with you both again in the future!

Last month, an article I co-authored with Josh Finnell on the challenges of organizing librarians at the grassroots was published in International Information & Library Review.

We librarians love to bemoan the state of our professional organizations. (Who doesn’t?) But as board chair of Library Pipeline–a fledging professional association for librarians–and volunteer for both Pipeline’s Green Open Access Working Group and the Innovation in Libraries Awesome Foundation chapter, I have to say, running a professional organization is often tough and thankless work.

Luckily, it’s also rewarding work. Through Pipeline, I’ve gotten to know our profession’s best and brightest (including my co-author Josh), contributed personally to ‘opening up’ the LIS literature to all readers, and helped others vet and fund some amazing library-based projects from around the world.

The article that Josh and I wrote explains the brief history of Library Pipeline to date and where we’re headed next–while also pointing out some challenges that exist for others who might want to launch a grassroots library professional organization of their own. You can read it on the IILR website or check out the preprint on Figshare.

In case you’re wondering, Pipeline has been mostly quiet for the latter half of 2017 as the board worked to create our bylaws and revise our mission statement, so we’re better positioned to expand our work in 2018. To learn more about Library Pipeline and to become a volunteer, visit our website.

Finnell, J.and S. Konkiel. Building and Sustaining a Grassroots Library Organization: A Three Year Retrospective of Library Pipeline. 2, figshare, 2 Jan. 2018, doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.5727084.v2.

I’ve recently launched a fun new project, @SociologyBot. It’s a Twitter account that recommends recently discussed research in the field of (you guessed it) sociology.

I’ve been wanting to explore the “altmetrics as a filter” idea for a long time. Being able to find not only disciplinary research but also the conversations surrounding research appeals to me, and I bet that other researchers would like access to that kind of information, too.

So, now I’m experimenting with a prototype “bot”, @SociologyBot. What sets @SociologyBot apart from other research recommendation bots on Twitter are a few things:

• It’s a social sciences bot (which are surprisingly rare!)
• It tweets out new and old research alike (not just the “recently published” stuff)
• It surfaces both research and the conversations surrounding research
• It’s not actually a bot (yet)!

I’m prototyping @SociologyBot right now, meaning it’s powered using a mix of manual and automated means. (Hence the scare quotes I keep putting around “bot”.) That’s because I want to understand if people actually care about this kind of a bot before I put a lot of time and energy into coding it! I guess you could call @SociologyBot a “minimum viable product”.

Here’s how @SociologyBot currently runs:

1. I set up a search in Altmetric Explorer to find articles from the top ten sociology journals (as identified by SCImago Journal Rank) that have been mentioned in the last day. I use the journal shortlist as a basis this not because I particularly care for finding only research published in the “top” journals, but because it makes the list of articles much more manageable.
2. Explorer sends me a daily email summary of said articles.
3. Based on the shortlist provided in the summary email from Explorer, I schedule new daily tweets using TweetDeck that include both the article with the highest Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) and a link to the Altmetric details page, where discussions of the articles can be found.
4. Using TweetDeck as automation, @SociologyBot then tweets out one scheduled article daily, at 8 am Mountain time.

Here’s how I plan to build @SociologyBot so that it’s fully automated:

1. I write a script to query the Altmetric API every 24 hours to find sociology articles that have been mentioned online in the past day.
2. The script takes the article with the most mentions and checks whether it’s already been tweeted about in the past month, as a safeguard against the same popular articles being constantly recommended.
3. If it hasn’t, the script then composes a tweet that links to the article and its Altmetric detail page. If it has, the script will then check for the article with the next highest AAS that has not been recently tweeted, and will compose a tweet for that one instead.
4. The script then posts the article and its Altmetric details page immediately to the @SociologyBot Twitter account.

Whether or not @SociologyBot gets a lot of followers, and whether or not those followers actually click on the Altmetric Details Page links, will determine whether @SociologyBot is a success (and thus whether I should bother coding it to be a proper bot!)

So: if you’re interested in sociology research and want to see this little guy come to life, please give @SociologyBot a follow!

CC-BY Nicky Agate / Medium

I’m excited to announce that the HuMetricsHSS research team–which I was a part of at the 2016 TriangleSCI conference–has received the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue our work of encouraging the discovery and use of “humane” research evaluation metrics for the humanities and social sciences.

HSS scholars are increasingly frustrated by the prevalence of the use of evaluation metrics (borrowed from the sciences) that do not accurately capture the impacts of their work. Our grand vision is to develop better metrics, ones that are rooted in the values that are important to scholars. This grant-funded research is a start.

From the press release:

“We are reverse-engineering the way metrics have operated in higher education,” said Christopher P. Long, Dean of the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University and one of the Principal Investigators (PIs) of the Mellon-funded project. “We begin not with what can be measured technologically, but by listening to scholars themselves as they identify the practices of scholarship that enrich their work and connect it to a broader public.”

We’ll be sharing updates on the HuMetricsHSS project from our website and on Twitter, so please follow along!

Much gratitude to the Mellon Foundation for supporting HuMetricsHSS.

I’m super excited to announce that the Innovation in Libraries grant is now accepting applications: http://www.awesomefoundation.org/en/chapters/libraries

A core group of Library Pipeliners has been working hard for months to recruit rank-and-file librarians worldwide, many of whom are funding this grant out of their own pockets (!). Each month through August 2017, our Awesome Foundation chapter will award a $1000 USD grant to prototype library-based innovations (both technical and non-technical in nature) that are inclusive, daring, and diverse.

I am so proud of this grassroots effort to support risk-taking in librarianship. This is a great step towards building community through organizing, and I’m really excited to be a part of it.

Special recognition goes to Josh Finnell (Los Alamos National Lab), Robin Champieux (OHSU), and Bonnie Tijerina (Data & Society/ER&L), all of whom were crucial to getting this project off the ground.

For more information on the grant, please do visit the grant webpage or apply via the Awesome Foundation.