Brock University will open a new SIF-funded facility in the spring of 2019 dedicated to transdisciplinary research, commercialization and entrepreneurship. The new Rankin Family Pavilion at the front door of the campus is home to Brock LINC, a collaborative approach to innovation. Brock Library's Digital Scholarship Lab and Makerspace will join other units in the facility, such as BioLINC (incubator), the Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute’s Virtual Reality Consumer Lab, the Goodman School of Business Consulting Group, and the Centre for Innovation, Management and Enterprise Education (CIMEE). This session will focus on the role of the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) within the context of this new innovation ecosystem. Digital scholarship is by its nature collaborative, multi-disciplinary and draws upon a broad range of expertise in areas such as data science, research data management, high performance computing (HPC), data visualization, virtual objects and simulations, geospatial technologies, and computational textual analysis. The Digital Scholarship Lab in the new facility will be a hub to explore, discover, create, and play with data and visual tools, methods, and objects. Programming, is offered by the Library in partnership with central IT, Brock's Compute Canada/SharcNet representative, and the Centre for Digital Humanities. We also collaborate with the other Brock LINC units. Drawing on technical expertise from both inside and outside of our own domain enables us to offer a more robust suite of services for our users. Attendees of this session will: 1) learn about models of digital scholarship, 2) learn about the role of collaboration and partnering in an innovation ecosystem, and 3) learn about some of the challenges of developing a digital program in a collaborative context. Presentation Material from Ontario Library Association (OLA) Superconference 2019.

So, you want make sure you publish your research in a “good” journal? Maybe your role includes advising others on how to select appropriate publication venues? It’s tricky navigating the complex and rapidly shifting terrain of scholarly publishing, where traditional hallmarks of quality such as Impact Factor no longer reign supreme. The rise of predatory journals makes the publishing environment even more challenging. This session explored strategies for evaluating the quality and relevance of academic journals, maximize the reach of one’s research and avoiding problematic publications.

Librarians face many challenges when planning instruction for graduate students. Masters and PhD students typically arrive in their programs with wide ranging research skills and backgrounds. They may have assumptions about how research should be conducted or, conversely, they may feel out of their depth in the research of their discipline. The nature of threshold concepts—that they are transformative, integrative, irreversible, bounded, and troublesome—make them an ideal way to connect with students at the graduate level. Not only can librarians use these concepts to inform their teaching, but they can use threshold concepts to challenge and engage students in their thinking about how research is created, produced, and disseminated in their field(s). Join Brock University liaison librarians Jennifer Thiessen and Justine Cotton as they share how they have integrated concepts from the Framework into library workshops for graduate students. Jennifer has successfully used several of the threshold concepts to rework thinking among educators about critical thinking and credibility assessment. As co-instructor for a second-year PhD Humanities course, Justine has incorporated the threshold concepts into the design of three library workshops on the topics of resource discovery, information management, and publishing. While the instructional content does not change significantly, incorporating threshold concepts paves the way for deeper understanding, provocative discussions, and a more collegial atmosphere.

What impact does a classroom space have on learning outcomes for students? Does a perfect library teaching space exist? This presentation highlights the findings of a 2014 survey of teaching librarians and library staff at Ontario universities and colleges exploring the effect of library/learning commons learning spaces on instructional design and learning outcomes.

OpenURL has been a stalwart in the arsenal of Librarianship for many years now, but it is getting a bit long in the tooth, and cracks in the façade are showing. How well does it still stack up? In the fall of 2013 Brock University Library started looking at the reported errors generated through our OpenURL system to answer this question. By making a clever hack [1] to the error report mechanism it was possible to log all the malevolent OpenURLs in a database to see what the problem was. The end result is a corpus of around 1000 reported URLs [2] that were meticulously examined [3] to find the problem. In the end numerous things were discovered: - Some of the OpenURLs worked just as they were supposed to - Some databases provide really bad OpenURL requests - Some databases don't know how to resolve OpenURL requests properly - Punctuation in metadata often breaks OpenURL - Forget citations to supplementary material - DOI's can't save the day This poster will outline the details of the process and present visualizations of the results of the analysis. OpenURL looks great on paper but there ends up being many obstacles in the actual implementation that both frustrate users and leave Libraries feeling helpless as many of the fixes are out of their hands. [1] http://elibtronic.ca/content/20130823/tracking-sfx-error-reports-sans-effort [2] http://hdl.handle.net/10864/10653 [3] https://github.com/elibtronic/metadata-cruncher/tree/master/open_url_breaker