Searching across Research4Life collections via Summon or Google Scholar

 Just a reminder of the possibility to search across the Research4Life (R4L) collections. You can either use the discovery tool Summon (which is supplied by R4L) or use Google Scholar.

In the online course on R4L you can find many ppt-guides. One of them addresses the possibility to search across the collections, Search across Research4Life collections using Summon.
You will find the guide in the Librarians hub.

In this blog post we have added the same guide converted to a pdf. Search across Research4Life

Good luck!

Access to content via Research4Life

Many times we have brought up the importance of using Research4Life to access resources which are behind paywalls. In May 2024 we looked especially at databases and collections within the subject field of Medicine available in Research4Life .

In October 2024 we were planning to have a follow up workshop about access to PubMed content. Unfortunately the workshop had to be cancelled due to the events after the elections in Mozambique.

The workshop presentation (Access to articles) includes some facts and figures showing how many more articles you will access if you search PubMed via Research4Life. It also includes some exercises exemplifying how the way to access the resources will decide the number of articles available for you at UEM and in Mozambique.

The intended participants of the workshop were the librarians at the Central library of UEM who work with e-resources. The presentation, or parts of it, could also be helpful when the UEM librarians reach out to their users.

Resources for PhD students at the Faculty of Medicine : which they are and how to use them

In May 2024 the library at UEM was asked if they could train the PhD students of the Faculty of Medicine. We prepared this training with a workshop for the UEM librarians in Zoom.

During the workshop we used a powerpoint presentation, "Resources for the PhD students at the Faculty of Medicine : Which they are and how to use them"

In addition to this powerpoint we looked at the training materials from Research4Life. We used and referred to their powerpoint "Additional discipline-specific resources : Health sciences". Find this powerpoint at the Librarians hub at Research4Life

Webinar on Open Access publishing

 

Research4Life organizes a free webinar on Open Access publishing on Thursday July 15th at 2 PM (CET).

Publishing OA often involves publication fees, Article Processing (or Publishing) Charges (APC). Many publishers offer APC waivers that researchers from lower and middle-income countries can benefit from. 
However, it can be difficult to find the waiver policies and to understand how to use them. In this webinar you will learn more about APC waiver policies, so you can give your researchers better guidance.

The webinar is free, but you need to register.

 

The Lens - a free and open knowledge and discovery platform

 Monday June 7th you can join a webinar on The Lens. 

 In The Lens you can search for patents and scholarly works from all over the world. It's an open resource which you can access via Research4Life (in the portal, click "Databases for discovery") or directly via The Lens website. 

The patents and the scholarly works are interconnected, so you can see if patents have been cited in scholarly works and vice versa.

Take the opportunity to learn more about this resource. It could be a good idea to take the online Feature tour before joining the webinar.

Avoiding plagiarism - a manual

Be inspired by the 28 pages long guide "Manual sobre plágio : um guia para professores e alunos" which is freely available for download.

This guide is published by one of the companies offering an automated plagiarism checker. It contains some promotional materials for the company but apart from that you find good examples of how to avoid unintentional plagiarism. At the end of the manual you find "... vários exemplos para você examinar e aprender o que tende a ser considerado plágio". (Manual sobre plágio p. 18)

Download the manual and use it when you work with your students.

Facilitating meetings and courses online

Now you can register for a free online tutorial, designed to help with facilitation of online courses and events. INASP* created this tutorial last year and it consists of four units which you take in your own pace. The expected time to complete the entire tutorial is twelve hours.

Read more about the tutorial in the INASP blog, or go directly to INASP Moodle where you can create an account just by clicking on Log in. Once you have an account you can register for the tutorial. 

* As many of you know, INASP is a NGO that "aims to strengthen the capacity of individuals and institutions to produce, share and use research and knowledge in Africa, Asia and Latin America".

Learn more about Law and Social sciences in Research4Life

GOALI (Global Online Access to Legal Information) is a Research4Life program. On Thursday March 25th you can participate in a webinar where you can learn more about GOALI.

• Which resources you can find
• How to effectively use the search functions

You have to register for this free webinar, which will be recorded and published in the Research4Life training portal.

Use this link to find more information about the webinar.

https://www.research4life.org/news/goali-webinar-law-and-social-sciences-in-research4life/

Keep up with news and changes

So much is happening in the library world. How can we keep up with all the news and changes? 

You can subscribe to newsletters or follow blogs from organisations such as INASP (International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications), Research4Life and eifl (Electronic Information For Libraries).

Using Facebook or Twitter is another way to keep up with what's new. 

@inasp.info 

@R4Lpartnership 

@eIFL.net

Do you have any other ideas of how to keep up with what's new? Feel free to share them with us in the team working with the Central Library Programme and then we can publish your ideas on the blog.

Research4Life adds presentations in Portuguese

These Powerpoint presentations can be used by librarians in Research4Life training activities with library users.

Most of the presentations are available in English and Spanish, but there are some presentations in Portuguese as well:

Discipline-specific browsing and searching:

• Hinari: Research for health
• Citation databases

Additional discipline-specific resources:

• Health sciences
• Health and evidence-based medicine
• Interdisciplinary resources

"This material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). The logos used in the course are exempt. This CC BY-SA 4.0 license allows trainers to modify and adapt the material for specific training purposes at the host institution to meet the group’s specific needs."

https://www.research4life.org/training/resources-for-information-specialists/presentations/

Materials from Information literacy workshop at UEM - October 2019

In October, Anna Stockman from Blekinge Institute of Technology facilitated two workshops for library staff. The participants from UEM came to the first workshop which was a follow up of the 2018 information literacy workshop.

The second workshop, "Introduction to information literacy" was organized for participants from libraries outside UEM.

The presentations used during the workshops have been combined into one single PDF-document.

Course on how to use Research4Life. APPLY NO LATER THAN NOVEMBER 5th!

Interesting possibility to learn more about Research4Life.

"Research4Life is [...] launching a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that will equip existing and future users of the Research4Life programs (Hinari, AGORA, OARE, ARDI and GOALI) with the knowledge and skills required to access and use the information efficiently. The call for applications to attend the MOOC is now open, and the course will take place between 11 November to 15 December 2019."

"Participants are expected to spend on average six to eight hours per week on lessons and activities, such as contributing to discussion forums and webinars."

Read more about the course.

Study visits

For three days I was given the opportunity to visit libraries at universities and institutions in Maputo, Matola and Chibotu. I would like to thank all the people who made this possible! It has been some very interesting and important days.

Here are just a few photos from the visits.

Two workshops on information literacy

Last week, a follow up workshop on information literacy for UEM library staff took place in the computer lab of the library. The participants were coming from several UEM libraries in Maputo.

It was a follow up of a workshop held in 2018 and it included different aspects of information literacy. An important part of the training is to learn how librarians can help library users to get to a higher level of information literacy in an academic context.

Examples from the content are: information retrieval, search techniques (like Boolean searches), evaluation of results, scientific articles, references, citations and diagnostic tests.

Materials from the workshop will be posted soon in this blog.

Participants from the UEM Library

October 28th-29th a workshop was organized for librarians from other institutions of higher education as well as government agencies. The content was similar to the content of the workshop for UEM librarians, but with more focus on the databases made available in Mozambique. Which are they, what do they include and how do you search those databases in an efficient way?

In addition to this, Dr Horacio Zimba gave a presentation of the research library consortium of Mozambique.

Some of the librarians from other universities and institutes.

Annual Planning Meeting

The partners within the Sida supported cooperation between Universidade Eduardo Mondale and the Swedish universities meet up for administrative meetings twice a year. This week, Principal Investigator Dr. Horacio Zimba from the Central Library and Deupy Team Leader Anna Stockman from the Blekinge Institute of Technology Library share the plans for the next year with the UEM management, Sida, the Swedish Embassy, the coordinators from ISP (the International Science Programme at Uppsala University) and all partners at UEM and Swedish universities.

Our plans for next year, when it comes to capacity building where Swedish partners are involved, are to: continue the training programme consisting of workshops and short courses in the areas of customer service/users (step 2), information literacy, academic writing and e-resources; to continue supporting the six masters's students to the defence of their thesis; and to start the process of selecting a candidate for PhD studies in library and information science at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås.

Deputy Team Leader Anna Stockman and Principal Investigator Horacio Zimba.
Picture taken by Therese Rantakokko, ISP

We have planned for a long list of other activities as well, that we will inform you about shortly.

Anna holds workshops with librarians from Maputo and from around the country this month as well.  Next month, the focus will be on the Master's students, when professor Elena Maceviciute and lecturer Fershta Westin will be in the country.

Referencing guides

As a librarian supporting the research process, or the learning processes of the students, good academic writing and anti plagiarism guides are very useful. Both BTH and the University of Borås have open guides in English that may be of use for you, if you want to refresh your own knowledge and if you want to share with students discussing these issues.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) provides an online Handbook on academic integrity including different aspects of academic writing.

Click on the pictures to come to the respective gudes. 

University of Borås Anti-Plagiarism Guide

Blekinge Institute of Technology Writing Guide

The above guides have been developed together with university partners: Jönköping University, Umeå University, Linnaeus University and Kristianstad University.

Research4Life Newsletter

Research4Life in Portuguese

In the latest newsletter from Research4Life we can read that they have launched a Portuguese interface!

New resources in Research4Life

SPIE - optics and photonics

Since the first quarter of 2019 the SPIE Digital Library has been included with content like journals, books and conference proceedings from the SPIE Digital Library, covering applied research in optics and photonics.

CAB Abstracts - agriculture

The CAB Abstracts database, an important resource for agriculture and the applied life sciences.

If you want to subscribe to news from Research4Life yourself, you can register here.

Customer Service, workshop - Day 2

After a summary of Day 1 we continued with a session about the user. What characterizes the ideal user and how does that differ from the reality, the user who really shows up in the library. Is he/she always nice, thankful and happy, can express his/her needs, used to handle technology and understands our library rules, or…?

We talked about the value of the user. Even if they sometimes can be difficult to handle and does not follow our rules “without the users the librarian’s don’t have to be there”.

What qualifications and tools does the librarian need to help, serve and tackle the everyday variety of users with different needs and different experience of using a library.  What can we do to strengthen the librarians role, and profession? How can we perform a reference interview in a good way so that the user will get the best possible help? To know the value of the profession – “know why we are better than Google”. These were questions we constantly lifted during the day(s).

We also experienced how important it is to listen. That you can be a good or bad listener. What difference it makes for the one who tries to explain or ask something.

Sidra Nhacudime tries to tell Alda Cossa something but she was a very bad listener 😉

The presentation from Day 2

Customer Service, workshop – Day 1

Tove Lekselius and Malin Utter

We, Tove Lekselius (University Library) and Malin Utter (School of Library and Information Science) from the University of Borås in Sweden, held a workshop with focus on Customer Service and UX (user experience) in libraries for around 30 librarians from UEM. Three days with a lot of discussions, exchange of experience and practial exercises - and a lot of smiles and laughter. 

Here is a short summary of what we did in Maputo 23-25 April

We started by getting to know each other with a short presentation round, where we also talked about where we come from, and why we were invited to hold this workshop.  This was followed by discussions of where a meeting between a user and the library takes place. It’s not just face to face but also in the library room, on the web, by phone and email. Next came discussions of what a good and poor treatment of users could be. A device that we used constantly was “Good treatment can weigh up poor knowledge, but poor treatment barely weighs up anything”. 

The day ended with a session about the use of common guidelines and what such guidelines could content. Guidelines is to be used to make the work at the reference desk easier and more quality controlled. 

The presentation from Day 1

Customer Service, workshop - Day 3

This day was a practical day, where we talked about and tried the joy of UX. "User Experience or UX, as it is defined in the library context, is a suite of techniques based around first understanding and then improving the experiences people have when using the library services"

First we tried an evaluating tool called Love/Brake up Letter, where you write a letter to something that you either love or don't want to have anything to do with anymore. Some examples from the participants that was read aloud with a lot of smiles and laughter:

Love - The Book, The Trainers 😊
Break up - The Salary, A Papaya Tree, The Bus

Next on the agenda was Observations in the library room. The participants went out in the library looking for things that could be improved, took photos and the discussed what they do to to make it better for the users and the library staff.

A mix of things that could be improved, part of which can be explained by ongoing work.
Some easy to fix and some maybe a bit more complicated.

We also tried Cognitive Mapping, where you ask a user to draw a picture of what he/she e.g. like to do when coming to the library - no words just pictures. This could be used as a basis for a deep interview with the user for a deeper understanding of how the library really is used.

The final exercise was Guerilla Testing, where you ask users what they think about the library in general or a specific topic. The entire group went out and talked to the students that was in the library at the time and came back with many interesting thoughts and ideas.

Thank you all - participants, Democrito, Bruno, Horacio and the rest of the library staff at UEM for an amazing week. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

Tove & Malin

The presentation from Day 3