Dr Ally Crockford works as the Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). This post is the first its kind in Scotland, and is part of an attempt by the NLS to lay the groundwork to improve open access to the library’s resources.
Last night Ally gave a presentation on her work at an SLA Europe event that was sponsored by Springer and hosted by the NLS. Her focus was the “real facts” about Wikipedia.
I’ve recently contributed to a couple of internal workshops at Edinburgh Napier University on using social media to promote research. The purpose these sessions was:
The home page of the Thesis Whisperer web site
What do you do when you hear that the Thesis Whisperer, Dr Inger Mewburn, is coming to town? If you’re my colleague Karen Strickland, you do all you can to tempt her onto the Edinburgh Napier University campus to share with colleagues her enthusiasm for social media as a means of marketing academic research.
Since January 2012 I’ve been a member of Blipfoto. If you haven’t come across this site before, Blipfoto is a simple concept. You set up a journal on the site, where you post a maximum of one photo a day. There is no obligation to post daily, but many blippers (yes, this is what they are called) do so, myself included. When they share their pictures, blippers also have the option of sharing text, such as stories, commentary and metadata to go with the picture of the day. As well as contributing their photographs and narrative, blippers enjoy looking at the postings of others, regardless as to whether or not they know these contributors beyond the online environment.
Tracking scholarly digital footprints
Like many I communicate my scholarly research over multiple platforms in a range of activities that have now become routine for research-active academics. These include, for example:
Screenshot of link listings on Hazel Hall’s About.me page
Dushko with his summer 2013 colleagues Tracey Binnie (L) and Cheryl Cairns (R)
Dushko Stanoeski joined us this week at Edinburgh Napier University to help complete a summer project.
Dushko is a final year student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia where he specialises in Informatics and Computer Engineering.
Patrick Notz
At the exam boards this week it was announced that one of the projects that I supervised in 2012/13 has won the Institute of Informatics and Digital Innovation award for knowledge exchange.
The winning work examined the application of social media in the heritage sector, drawing on a case study of social media practice at the National Museum of Scotland. It was completed by final year undergraduate student Patrick Notz.
Yesterday I posted information about the AHRC-funded studentship that we are currently advertising within the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University. The studentship is associated with an AHRC-funded project entitled Informing the Good Society (InGSoc), led by Dr Alistair Duff.
ASIST2012 was a conference experience like none other. I’d been so busy with my work that before I set off from Edinburgh for Baltimore last Saturday I hadn’t paid heed to the news reports of a hurricane about to hit the east coast of America. In fact, the first I heard of it was when I bumped into fellow UK academic Dr Christine Urquhart at the reception of the conference hotel. Thereafter we heard tale after tale of delegates who had abandoned their plans to come to the conference for fear of becoming stranded, and of others who had arrived, stayed a short while, then turned around again to head home before the hurricane hit. I had no option but to ride out the storm with the few delegates who actually made it to Baltimore and stuck it out.
Hazel Hall 