Academic Library News ALL THE LATEST FROM THE LIBRARY IN SUPPORT OF LEARNING, TEACHING AND RESEARCH

New Name!

From 1st March the Library service has now been renamed Libraries and Learning Skills, to better reflect our key role in helping our students develop their information/digital literacy and academic skills.

Events and Workshops

Did you know that the Library has an Events Calendar, listing all the upcoming workshops, webinars and live chats that your students might find useful?

View the calendar via this link or visit the Library home page. Coming soon: Ask a Subject Librarian (live chat or face-to-face); Skills for Success in Second Year; Critical Writing and Literature Review webinars.

Assignment Toolkit and Study Skills Checklist

A new Assignment Toolkit has been created to help students think through all the steps needed to complete an assignment. It covers what skills are needed for each step, links to resources to help, and how to get support from Writing Development and the Academic Subject Librarians. We hope this will contribute to student success and good academic practice! Please share it with your students as appropriate.

To help students understand the gaps in their study skills knowledge, we've created a Study Skills Checklist. Students can rate how confident they feel in each area, and find out where to get help if needed.

Decolonisation and EDI - how the Library can help you

Are you thinking about decolonising your curriculum and wondering where to start? To get your creative juices flowing, take a look at the Decolonising@Lincoln toolkit. You'll find useful readings on decolonisation and what it means; a round-up of what the Library has been doing to extend decoloniality into every day practice and a helpful guide to decolonising reading lists.

The Library is key to the decolonising initiatives of the Decolonising@Lincoln project and strategic planning process. Library team members sit on the Steering Committee to work collaboratively with academic colleagues and professional services staff. Do get in touch if you would like to have a conversation about any of the above.

Alongside the decolonising work, are the EDI initiatives. The Library has set up a dedicated Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: Diverse Library Resources page which includes links to the One Community Values, recommended texts, articles in the Library Blog and the opportunity for staff and students to recommend a resource for purchase to be more representative of marginalised voices.

We have ongoing displays, reading lists and blog posts for various history months including Black History Month and LGBTQI+ History Month. Currently it is Women's History Month where we celebrate the women our University buildings are named after - the first being Dame Sarah Swift, English nurse and founder of the RCN in 1916 . Pop into one of the libraries and take a look!

In addition to a fantastic display and reading list, there have been blog posts by students, academic staff and external zine makers. Keep up with the latest blog posts at https://library.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/.

#EbookSoS

The #ebookSOS campaign was launched by a small group of university librarians in 2020 as an open letter asking the Education Select Committee for an investigation into the academic ebook publishing industry. There have always been challenges with academic ebooks - not all books can be purchased in an ebook format by academic institutions, some academic ebooks are very expensive, some are only available with restrictive licences and some can only be purchased in bundles rather than individually. The Covid-19 lockdowns and the increased reliance on ebooks at this time exacerbated the situation. Some publishers took the opportunity to increase ebook prices enormously and prohibitively (one example is that a £42.99 print book costs £800 for a three-user licence ebook) and the situation was further compounded by reductions in university book budgets. Ebooks that have previously been available in ebook collection subscriptions can suddenly be withdrawn, creating challenges when these titles are core readings for modules.

The open letter received thousands of signatures of support, but the Education Select Committee declined to investigate. The #ebookSOS campaign now has a wider focus in raising awareness and taking action with regards to the practice of publishers within the UK and internationally.

More information on the #ebookSOS campaign is available on their website: https://academicebookinvestigation.org/.

Things you can do to help:

When negotiating a book publishing contract ask publishers about their ebook policies. Guidance is available on the Can my students read my books? guide on the #ebookSOS site.

When selecting readings for modules, please consider referring to multiple books, chapters and articles instead of relying on one single essential text for core readings, as specified in the Library’s Reading and Resources List Policy. Contact your Academic Subject Librarian if you have any queries about availability / affordability of titles that you would like to add to reading lists.

A Librarian's view of ChatGPT

How will AI search change the way students and researchers locate and use information? What are the possibilities and limitations of using AI in the university classroom? As an AHRC-RLUK-funded professional practice fellow and the librarian for the School of Humanities and Heritage, Hope Williard seeks to ask questions and share knowledge about generative text tools and AI search on her blog, Learning Experiences. Recent posts have explored the work of ‘internet librarian’ Phil Bradley and the use of Chat GPT in the humanities classroom. With a research background in medieval history, she is particularly intrigued by the use of these tools to investigate the distant past. Hope is interested in working collaboratively with students, lecturers, and fellow librarians to understand how to use new technologies ethically, effectively, and responsibly. Please contact her at hwilliard@lincoln.ac.uk if you would like to share ideas or collaborate.

RefWorks Citation Manager is here!

For those of you who use the reference management software RefWorks, it is now possible to get access to the RefWorks Citation Manager (RCM) add-on if you log into Microsoft Word with your University of Lincoln credentials. This enables you to add citations and references to your Word document as you write. RCM will already be installed on Microsoft Word and can be accessed on the Word ribbon by clicking on RCM and then selecting RefWorks Citation Manager to open the sidebar.

To use RCM you will need to make sure you have set up a separate alternate password in your RefWorks account to log into RCM and to sync references between Word and your RefWorks account. More information on RefWorks Citation Manager is available on the RefWorks Citation Manager (RCM) page on the Library website.

To find out about and log in to RefWorks go to the RefWorks page which can be accessed by selecting Referencing Tools from the Find menu of the Library website.

Endnote Guide

EndNote is a piece of reference management software that allows you to create your own personal reference database for your assignments, dissertation and research projects by importing information from online sources, such as the library website, journal article databases, and Google Scholar.

It is available to all University of Lincoln staff and students, and enables you to organise and manage your references, and automatically create in-text citations whilst writing, along with a corresponding reference list/bibliography in your selected citation style.

A new updated guide to EndNote has been created, which now includes instructions on both EndNote X9 (the one you download to your own device) and the new EndNote 20 (the one you access through Apps Anywhere), along with instructions on all of the basic functions, including installing the UoL Harvard style, to mirror what we cover in our library webinars.

Easter opening times

The main University Library will be open 24/7 over the Easter break. The Ross Library in the Medical School building, and NCFM Library at Holbeach will be closed on the bank holidays.

Keep an eye on our opening times web page for up-to-date details.