So what exactly is DeepDyve?

It is advertised as the largest online rental service for scientific, technical and medical research.

Why would you want to use the service

You want to use a service like this if you need access to high quality research output for any reason. You would also want to use this service if you are a Librarian or information professional at any company or institution. Most particularly if you work in a place where you do not subscribe to many journals. As we all know journal subscriptions come at a high price which can be more difficult to afford for small scale services.

Who can use the service

The service can be used by individuals or organisations and institutions. They offer a variety of different plans for different users as below:

• Group Plans – for businesses and organisations
• Freelancer Plan
• Professional Plan

Further information coming soon…

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 Major titles

• Inc 
• BusinessWeek
• Harvard Business Review
• Entrepreneur
• Fast Company
• Forbes
• Fortune
• The Economist
• Business Weekly
• Financial Times

Additional country by country business information 

China

• China Daily
• China Economic Review
• China Briefing
• South China Morning Post 

USA

• Bloomberg
• Wall Street Journal

Australia

• Australian Financial Review
• Business Spectator
• Business News
• Business Review Weekly
• Business Acumen

Canada

• National Post
• Canadian Business
• CBC Business News
• Ottawa Business Journal

Philippines

• Business World

Germany

• Deutsche Welle

Hong Kong

• Hong Kong Business

European Business News

• EU Business News and information on each member state

Further items to be added to this list soon…

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As I am currently in charge of upgrading our existing system for the library service where I work in terms of costs it was a clear and sound choice to stay with the provider we currently use and upgrade to the latest version of the software. Although I looked at other systems the implementation costs were too prohibitive and we all know that their can still be a great degree of uncertainty in how any new system will perform when its changed. However, in other services changing to a new system may be the correct route to go down due to other reasons.

To aid anyone who is in a similar situation to in relation to upgrading the system this information might prove to be of some use.

Gather complete information on the upgrade

When you notice that their is an upgrade available for your system you will need to check the benefits of the upgrade and you also need to gather together every cost that will be involved in the upgrade process.

Convince managers and IT staff that upgrading makes sense

Identify relevant staff that need to be involved in this process and convince them initially that it is a good idea to upgrade and get their approval to proceed via formal channels. Remember that you are the person that knows more about this than anyone else and your choices and decisions should always be forward looking for the service you are involved in managing.

Formal process usually required for this type of upgrade 

As you will have all the relevant costs and benefits associated with the upgrade you will also most probably need to go through a formal process of submitting a form that requires some type of business case for the upgrade. At this stage whether the form associated with this requires this information or not make sure you gather the following information:

• Service Level Agreement from your provider
• All over documentation. For example, you may need to install software clients on the computers used by library staff so make sure you get documentation on this in advance
• Details of what will be required by your IT staff in relation to the upgrade. For example, will they be the ones responsible for installing the software clients, or will they be responsible for retiring an old server which is currently being used by your current version of the software. Make sure you list all these tasks and identify who will be responsible for them
• Communicate all this information to managers so that they know exactly what will be required and also communicate this information to other staff that will be involved in the upgrade process so that will know exactly what will be required of them

Additional advice

• This whole process could take many months before you can even go ahead with the upgrade so make sure allow plenty of time for this process
• if an upgrade is available for your system if you can wait some time to make sure any initial problems with the upgrade have been ironed out before you decide to instigate the upgrade process

The post Upgrading your Library Management System appeared first on Paul Rudd IP.

• Trial as many services as possible and get your key staff involved in the trials
• Allow plenty of time to arrange and trial the services – setting up trials can take a few weeks and you should be able to trial a service for a whole month so make sure you leave at least a couple of months for the trial periods.

What are the key considerations:

• Which eBook provider covers your subject area best
• How many eBooks do you think you might purchase per year
• If there is a platform fee to pay on an annual basis and you anticipate low purchase numbers will your managers be fine with this
• Can you pay the platform fee as a percentage of each item purchased if you anticipate low purchase numbers initially.
• Can eBooks be rented from the provider by students and delegates (and are you happy with providing this option)
• How does it work for each eBook you purchase, what is the model used. For example, can you download the item so many times a year and what are the limitations of each service

Having more than one eBook provider 

It could be a necessity to have more than one eBook provider and this is typical in the HE sector as one provider may not be able to provide the title coverage that you need. In an ideal world it could be best to have numerous providers but their may be platform fees to pay for each provider so having more than one could cost more. In addition, you will have to remember the procedure for ordering items for each provider, which could pose a challenge for departments that have a small number of staff.

Authentication

You should also consider in advance what procedures you need to follow to add it to your list of eResources and also double check that the eBook provider will work easily with your currently used authentication system.

Licence agreement 

For every provider you will have to sign a licence agreement generally a named representative from your company will have to be listed on the agreement and that might be you so if you have to sign the agreement make such you check it carefully and ask another member of staff to help you check it over before you sign.

Purchasing eBooks

Organise how you will purchase eBooks and the process involved with their purchase in advance. You will most probably have to set up and account with the provider with your accounts department and you will need to know the purchasing process fully so that when requests for eBooks made you know exactly how to fulfil the request.

Promotion

Think about how you will promote the service in advance. If you have not offered an eBook service to your staff, students and delegates before you might have to spend a lot of time trying to promote the service and get staff, students and delegates on board.

Your web pages

You will need to inform everyone on how to use the eBook service so look for any videos and guides that have already been created by the provider and place links to these items on your web page.

The post Choosing eBook Providers: Top Tips appeared first on Paul Rudd IP.

All the surveys I create are online but the advice in this post will also be useful for paper based surveys too.

Creating the survey 

• Keep it short
• Make sure the questions are easy to understand
• Where possible use a scale to get a more accurate gauge of the each participants views
• Leave space for qualitative feedback with every quantitative based survey by creating a comments box beneath each question
• Test the survey on a selection of people first to make sure that all the questions are genuinely easy to understand and make sense

Using rating scales 

One of my most commonly used rating scales is the Likert scale which measures how strongly you agree or disagree with a statement and I typically use the following choices for my scale:

• Strongly agree
• Agree
• Neither agree or disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly disagree

Often the Neither agree or disagree option is removed as it can be seen as not really being of value, its inclusion in a survey can often lead respondents to not make a proper decision in response to your survey.

The Likert scale can also used to measure the following by just changing the choices from those list above:

• Satisfaction = Very satisfied, satisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, dissatisfied, very dissatisfied
• Extent = To a large extent, to a moderate extent, to some extent, to a little extent, not at all
• Helpfulness = Very helpful, somewhat helpful, neither helpful or unhelpful, not very helpful, not helpful at all
• Interest = Considerable interest, moderate interest, some interest, little interest, no interest
• Importance = Very important, important, moderately important, of little importance, unimportant
• Quality = Excellent, above average, average, below average, extremely poor

Deploying the survey 

If its an online survey its worth doing the following before you deploy the survey to make sure you get as many responses as possible

• Send an email out to survey participants informing them of the date and even time that you will deploy the live survey
• Provide an end date for the survey to try and make sure potential respondents know they need to complete it by a certain date
• Send an email reminder/s out nearer the survey end date

For further information check out the following web pages:

• University of Connecticut Health Centre: Office of Educational Assessment 
• HowTo.gov Basics of Survey and Question Design

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Scope of the Project

The scale of this type of project depends on how advanced you service is and if you have already have the following:

• Previous experience with integrating services with an LMS
• Many electronic resources
• Experience in creating digital learning resources

Identifying what will be needed 

Understanding what will be needed requires you to look at the services you provide the resources you have and essentially trying to enable them to be plugged in into the LMS.

Library Management System

The first area involves systems and you need to decide if you want your Library Management System to integrate with the Learning Management System.

There are many benefits to integrating the two and a key benefit is shown below:

• Enable the automatic import of records into the LMS so that you do not have to regularly manually import files such as CSV files.

How the user will access and the search the Library Management System when logged into the Learning Management System

• You also have to consider how the Library Managment System will be made available to users of the LMS.

  how the Library Managment System will be made available to users of the LMS.

  For example, will there just be links to the Library Management System in the LMS, or will you try to create something more advanced like a widget that enable users to enter a search term without the need to click on a link first to open a search box.

Policy and strategy changes

Digital resources 

If you need to now change collection development to begin to purchase more electronic content that can be accessed easily through the Learning Management System you will need to think about that types of services. In my project I have had to try and change the culture of the institution by moving more to ‘e’. which meant I also had to trial, configure and set up an eBook platform in preparation for the implementation of the new LMS. If you also need to do this allow plenty of time as it could take you many months to organise and sort this out.

 Authentication and SSO

Would your users prefer to be able to use the Single Sign On to access the Learning Management System and the library’s electronic resources and if so do you have the correct type of authentication to enable this to happen? For my project I investigated what was needed for this but this was not considered a priority at this time. It would only mean that users’ would have to also login to their electronic resource account when they wanted to access the library resources when logged into the LMS.

Identifying and creating digital learning resources 

It could be useful to also create videos and other type of resources that can be embedding in the LMS but you need to consider what videos or screencasts would be useful and you will also need to think about the type of software you will use to create them. Again this might be time consuming but overall it will offer a more enhanced user experience of the service. Typical types of video or screencasts could show:

• How to search for items using the Library Management System

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One of the first problems you might encounter even before you look for company information is identifying the name of the company. This you would imagine would be a simple task but you might get asked to find company information on a single word company name that when when searched for brings up a large list of companies all containing that word/name but with different prefixes and suffixes.

So how exactly do you discover what the actually company name is?

You can try to see if the person asking you for the company information knows the actual full name of the company or if they have a web address for the company or even a letter or email.

If they do not have any further information you can always search for their company website and this might not be so difficult because you will most probably know roughly what the business does (as it will probably be related to something specific your company is doing). If you locatea web site for the company look at the bottom of the site to see if it provides a full name for the company or go to a contact page and see if the full company name is listed there it normally is).

If you have further problems your search should have provided you with an address and you can use that address to help you find the company name when you are actually trying to search for their business information.

Word of warning
Make sure you find the correct business name and if you have any doubts whatsoever always express these doubts to the person you are providing the information to so they know that it might not be correct.

So you have the correct company name or at least you think, so you do what do you do now?

You now need to start using business information services. I commonly look for business information in my role I have so far found the following services extremely useful:

Companies House

Companies House is probably the most well known place to locate information on businesses and information on companies can be found on their Find Company Information web page. On this page you will be presented with the ability to search via the company name or by the company number.

Company Check

Company Check is very easy to use and because of this its one of the first places I choose to look for my initial business information. The service offers lots of information on companies for free and there is also the option to upgrade to their Pro account if you wanted to. All the information on their site is displayed in a nice clean layout and its easy to move between screens using their clearly labelled tabs to find the information you want.

DueDil

Duedil is an information aggregator service that offers business information from Companies House but I find it easier to use. You can register for a free account then pay for the content you want to download. The site is very easy to use and that’s the main reason I often choose to use Duedil over other services.

Information Videos on Duedil:

DueDil Trust Video

This is DueDil

DueDil Search Overview

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So why use email marketing?

• It’s often the way commercial companies send information to users to keep them informed of their products and services
• It looks more professional
• It has greater impact than sending normal emails
• emails can be scheduled for delivery
• You can add images and links into the campaign template and create text in a range of fonts sizes and styles to improve the impact and readability for the users’

There are many software types and services you can use but one of the most well known is MailChimp.

So why use a service like MailChimp?

• It’s makes it super easy for you to design you campaign
• It allows you to create lists of people you want to target with your campaigns
• It’s used by many company’s
• Its a slick service that works well
• It allows you to send good number of campaigns for free per year (other paid options are also available)

What other specific benefits does this have for Information Professionals’?

• It can enable you to limit the number of emails you send out as these types of email can also contain more content
• You can create a campaign about a new service you are offering (my first campaign was on a new eBook platform I had configured and recently added to the list of eresources)
• You could use them to create a newsletter containing key information on your information service that could be sent out periodically

The post Using MailChimp to Communicate Effectively with Different User Groups appeared first on Paul Rudd IP.

• To create a simple and functional type of online diary (Keeping a note of all CPD activities)
• To gain experience with running a website and all the aspects that involves (Most particularly for the future possibility of managing a library and information service website)

To start to write about WordPress it would be a good idea to find out what WordPress is – so what is WordPress?

Well WordPress was originally a blogging platform but over the years it has become to be used more and more as a content management system. It is currently used by many companies and businesses for their corporate websites. In some instances it has also been used by library and information services to provide content and information to university and college students and staff.

An example

At the time of writing the Information and Library Services of Cambridge Judge University were using a WordPress website that was separate to their main site to convey information to their staff and students. Their website used a Pico theme that has been modified by a company called MaltPress. It provided users with an alternative experience to the more commonly found information service web pages generally located on the main institutions website (CMS). A great advantage of this type of separately hosted and managed site is that it enables information professionals to manage and create content for the site without the need for non-librarians such as web designers to have any involvement in the process (unless of course extra help is needed). Since that time their main institution site has changed and now it contains contains information on their library service and they also have a library blog site, which contains further information for users’.

So how do you create a WordPress site?

To create a WordPress site it is incredibly easy as you can create a site for free at http://wordpress.com/. This free service is excellent as you  have a choice of a myriad of themes and WordPress will also host your site for you for free. So for no cost you can easily set up a site and start writing and posting content to a site, and this is how I originally started with this WordPress site.

What if you want more than the free WordPress site offers?

The Pico theme I used to use for my website

Eventually you may want to have your own domain name, and you may also want to use a custom themes for you site. Although WordPress provides you with a fantastic choice of themes, as you learn more you will want to try to do more with your site. The main advantage of hosting your site with a separate hosting company is that it will provide you with more flexibility with what you can do with it, and this in turn will enable you to learn more.

Choosing a hosting company

Choosing a hosting company can be a confusing process and this may require you to do some research. You have a big choice of hosting companies and they seem to fall into the following two basic camps:

• Many that offer you a certain level of bandwidth each month
• Many that offer you unlimited bandwidth

Bandwidth

You may not know how much bandwidth each month your site will be using, so initially hosting that has set amount of bandwidth appears to be a negative aspect (especially as you will have to pay for any bandwidth over your allocated amount each month). However, alternatively you may not know how efficient the hosting companies that offer unlimited bandwidth are going to be. For example, with a company that offers unlimited bandwidth will it always offer the same level of hosting at times of high demand? You will never really know how the hosting will work out until you take the plunge and choose a contract with a hosting company. There are guides to help you understand how much bandwidth you might use so they are worth checking out. Moreover, once you have chosen a hosting company and you have hosted your site you can always check how much bandwidth you are using. This can be done via the hosting management software you use to manage the hosting of your site.

My personal experience

The company I use for this site is Zen Internet. I opted for a set amount of bandwidth per month and this has worked out well for me so far. I also chose Zen Internet because they are reputed to offer good levels of support and if this of concern for you their datacentre is in the UK. So far, I have never had a problem with Zen Internet so I certainly would recommend them. They also offer a range of contracts and it makes it easy to know what you are getting for your money. Another good aspect of this company is the fact that you sign up to monthly contracts so you are not locked in for a long period of time. (I really like the fact you have the option to stop the contract with only a months notice if you ever wanted to).

What about domain names who do you purchase them from?

You can purchase (or pay for on a yearly basis) a domain name from a separate company to your hosting company and it should be easy to use a domain name with a separate hosting company. Alternatively, you can purchase the domain or pay annually for a domain from the same company. (This is what I have done just to keep things simple).

Are there other things to consider?

One of the main aspects you need to decide on if you plan to host a site yourself is what platform to run it on. Generally companies will offer you a choice of either Linux or Windows hosting. Most of the information I have read on the web recommends Linux hosting for WordPress so that is what I chose for this site.

When you create and set up a free WordPress site from WordPress.com you do not have to install the WordPress software but when you want to host the site yourself you are more involved in the process of installation. This is actually a good thing because you will learn more from being involved in this process. The two choices you normally get with Linux hosting are to completely set it up yourself by creating a MySqL database or using something called Fantastico. Neither option is really difficult and its worth having a look for online videos that show you how to do this.

If you have set up a free account and you want to move the contents to self-hosted site can you do this easily?

There appears to be various methods to do this and I used the export and import functions that are within WordPress. I had no problems with this method. (This literally took me about 10 minutes to do and it actually takes less time to do in reality. I was just trying to do it slowly and cautiously- just in case I made a mistake).

This is an image of the Elemental theme with my content straight out of the box.

How do you choose a theme that is right for you?

Finding a theme you like is not easy just because you have such a choice especially if you are hosted the site yourself. This is because you can choose from the freely available themes on WordPress’s site and also from free custom themes and paid for themes. The choice of theme you choose will be heavily influenced by what you want to do with the site and what you personally think looks best visually. I wanted to have a type of diary content and I also wanted to have information about me on the site such as qualifications and brief work history content. On WordPress.com I changed the theme many times, because it was so easy to do, and because I wasn’t entirely sure what I actually wanted. When I hosted the site myself I found a theme that had two menu bars that was a kind of basic magazine style and this was the Pico theme.

This is an image of the Elemental theme with some changes made to it using the supplied child theme.

However, after some time I wanted to change the theme again and I also wanted a theme I could really mess around with and easily change so I then decided to purchase a theme framework named Elemental from Pro Theme Design. This is a really good theme to use if you want to practice changing the look of the site as it also already comes with a basic child theme, which you can use to start changing the site. I have been playing around with the child theme and will probably use it at some point in the future for this site or another. (At the time of writing this I am using the Vidunder theme, which was designed by Morten Rand-Hendrikson). Incidentally, Morten Rank-Hendrikson is somewhat of an expert on WordPress so if you are using WordPress you really should view his Mor10 website regularly.

Linux hosting uses cPanel to manage hosting and this is the login page for cPanel

You can perform a wide range of management tasks using the control panel, such as setting up email accounts, checking you bandwidth usage and more.

To change the look and functionality of a WordPress site the easiest way to do this is to install plugins. This enables you to change aspects of the site without necessarily getting involved with any code.

Plugins

This site uses a variety of plugins to add functionalities to the site. The following plugins are used on this site and they are also highly recommended:

• WPtouch (This plugin provides a mobile theme for your site that should work on the majority of mobile devices on the market – although this plugin does not support the iPad).
• Contact form 7 (This plugin enables you to easily create a contact form for your site that you can configure to enable emails sent by the form to go to any chosen email address).
• Slickr-Flickr (This plugin enables you add a feed from your Flickr account into your website so that you can display photos of your choice on your website. There are also many display options for you to choose when you configure this plugin.
• WordPress Tinymce Visual Editor Buttons (This plugin enables you more control over formatting content you place in the editor in WordPress)
• Really Simple CAPTCHA (This plugin provides your contact form with a CAPTCHA functionality)
• TinyMCE Advanced (Enables the advanced features of TinyMCE)

This is an image of the cPanel’s control panel that is used to manage your website with Linux hosting

Aspects to note about your site and any changes you make to it

If you perform any changes to your site using the Editor section of WordPress (This is where you can gain access to the code used on your site) you will also need to test the site in a variety of browsers and also on mobile devices, including the iPad. I made many changes to Elemental’s child theme and the changes I made were fine on browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, but on an iPad it displayed the site in an unusual way. (The site spacing and layout were not displayed in the way I wanted) It appears that you have to account for the iPad as a separate and unique device when you are creating developing a site. There are many ways to do this and it appears many web designers place code in their sites to detect iPad users. The users are then redirected to a separate iPad friendly version of the site. Originally Judge Business School’s Information and Library Services website directed you to a completely differently themed website when you tried to view it on an iPad, as it detected iPad users and then displayed a more appropriate theme for these users that was iPad friendly. Although this was a way to make sure a site worked well on the iPad it was less than ideal as it created a very different experience of the site for a user in comparison with a desktop user.

Onswipe

One service that could offer a simple solution to making your site iPad friendly is called Onswipe. Onswipe takes the articles/blog content from your site and then changes its appearance to a magazine type style. I currently have Onswipe enabled for this site so it does make the site more interesting to view on the iPad but it was not as easy to set up. I installed the Onswipe plugin to my site but that alone did not make it work. When I viewed their support website they informed me to also download a redirect link, which I then had to upload to my WordPress site. However, I could not Activate the Onswipe plugin and the link together because a message displayed a fatal error. This was not a problem though as Onswipe worked even with only the Onswipe plugin being activated. However, this service only displays your post/articles and does not display the other pages of your website. (It maybe possible to show the other pages and it might just mean you somehow have to add some code to each of these pages but so far I have not investigated this any further.

Responsive themes

Since the time of writing this article to enable a consistent user experience for users on different types of devices web designers have moved to creating responsive themes that scale appropriately to the size of the viewing area of each device used to view the content. My site now also uses a responsive theme and this really is a leap ahead from the days when you had to have a separate plugin to allow your site to be viewed easily on a mobile device, or when you had to have a completely different theme set up just for users of iPads.

The post Using WordPress: Experiences and Useful Information for New Users appeared first on Paul Rudd IP.

However, there are also other additional types of software that can be used instead of EndNote or Refworks and one of them is Zotero. Zotero is a product I came across whilst conducting research on information found on American library/information services websites. I was also fortunate to meet a research student who provided a testimonial for Zotero at a conference held at the university where I work. Interestingly enough he used Zotero for the total period of his PhD at Exeter University. He originally used one of the well known and previously mentioned research products but he preferred Zotero and subsequently began to use Zotero when he began his PhD.

Since discovering Zotero I have also been using and evaluating it and I can say that it really is fantastic to use. So why is it so good, why should you try it out and what are its essential features? Well perhaps its key feature is that it is free to use and that it is located in your browser, making it extremely easy to use when conducting searches. However, there are more aspects to it than that and the list of its other key features below demonstrates how useful it is as an aid to managing research – as it can perform the following tasks for any source of information you may discover:

• Collect
• Manage
• Cite
• Share

More specifically Zotero will enable you to do all of the following:

• Collect data on books, journals and other resources
• Archive web pages in your library
• Store data in the form such as PDF’s, images and links
• Take notes alongside your items
• Tag items
• Cite in all major styles and with many additional styles freely available
• Drag and drop bibliographies anywhere such as in a blog or an email

There are only a two main drawbacks from to using Zotero and they are the following:

• You have to use Mozilla’s firefox browser
• For additional online storage capacity there is a charge.

Although, these aspects do not seem to be drawbacks in comparison to this products wealth of features they need to be considered. Overall I would encourage anyone to start using Zotero I am sure you will find it a great research product that will save you time and most importantly enable you to always locate the information sources that you discovered during the course of your research.

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