In Iran

Here is a preview of In Iran, an ebook that Adam Jones, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, has made available to the UBC community.

In Iran is protected by copyright, but “All photos linked in the text are published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.” We are currently working on making this ebook discoverable within our Summon Discovery tool.

FIRE Talks are a new series of interdisciplinary research discussions and exchanges run by graduate students for graduate students. They are operated out of the new Graduate Research Commons and provide an opportunity for graduate students (and faculty, staff and undergrads) to share and discuss their own research or ideas relating a significant range of themes.

Your attendance at today’s FIRE Talk will enter you to win a $50 gift voucher to Chapters Indigo!

Applied Academia - Attend and be entered to win a $50 gift card!
Thursday, 28 February 2012, 2 to 4pm
Do academics have a responsibility to apply their research, take part in community outreach projects, or extend the impact of their work beyond ‘pure research’? Is it even possible to conduct pure research, or will all research eventually be applied? Are application, activism or knowledge translation essential parts of being an academic, or a hindrance to scholars’ ability to fully and fairly consider multiple perspectives?

Presenters will be discussing topics as seemingly disparate as Wendell Berry and electrical engineering. Come to this FIRE Talk to learn about and discuss academic work in the diverse ways in which it is applied. Light snacks will be provided! Please register to attend.

In case you missed it, a new modular storage facility is being built to accommodate the future growth of the University of British Columbia’s Library collections. Some of the top FAQs of the new BC Integrated Research Library (IRL) include:

Will students and researchers be able to access the IRL like any other UBC Library branch? Is the IRL open to non-UBC students and researchers? How will items be selected for the IRL? How quickly will items be retrieved? And, of course, the biggest question: When will the IRL be completed?

More details about the BC IRL are available at: http://about.library.ubc.ca/changes/bc-integrated-research-library-bc-irl/.

Did You Know?

There is “a partnership with SFU, UVic, UBC and UNBC to program a Speaker Series that supports scholarship, fosters learning and brings awareness to our respective communities on emerging issues in the information landscape”. Visit the British Columbia Research Libraries Group (BCRLG) community in cIRcle at: https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/24061.

Starting a business is always risky, but being an entrepreneur also has the potential for great rewards. Keeping tabs on industry trends can help you strike while the iron is hot.

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UBC Library stands behind Dale Askey and McMaster University in advocating intellectual freedom and the pursuit of knowledge as core values essential to academic research libraries.

In line with the statements of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the Canadian Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries and other libraries and library associations, we believe that librarians should be able to express their academic freedom and opinions, and that this freedom be protected and upheld without the fear of intimidation. In a competitive and fluid vendor market, libraries make acquisition decisions that they deem to be the most valuable for their user community. This is the heart of librarianship – our role of evaluating and mediating the connection between the user and the resources at their disposal.

For this reason, we join others in asking Edwin Mellen Press to cease its legal action against Mr. Askey.

Read more:

Canadian Association of Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries statement

Canadian Library Association statement

Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries statement

British Columbia Library Association statement

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS). As social creatures, our online lives just like our offline lives are intertwined with others within a wide variety of social networks. Each retweet on Twitter, comment on a blog or link to a Youtube video explicitly or implicitly connects one online participant to another and contributes to the formation of various information and social networks. Once discovered, these networks can provide researchers with an effective mechanism for identifying and studying collaborative processes within any online community. However, collecting information about online networks using traditional methods such as surveys can be very time consuming and expensive. The presentation will explore automated ways to discover and analyze various information and social networks from social media data.

Biography

Anatoliy Gruzd is Assistant Professor in the School of Information Management and Director of the Social Media Lab at Dalhousie University. His research initiatives explore how social media and other web 2.0 technologies are changing the ways in which people disseminate knowledge and information and how these changes are impacting social, economic and political norms and structures of our modern society. Dr. Gruzd is also actively developing and testing new web tools and apps for discovering and visualizing information and online social networks. The broad aim of his various research initiatives is to provide decision makers with additional knowledge and insights into the behaviors and relationships of online network members, and to understand how these interpersonal connections influence our personal choices and actions.

Select Articles Available at UBC Library

Gruzd, A., Staves, K., Wilk, A. (2012). Connected Scholars: Examining the Role of Social Media in Research Practices of Faculty using the UTAUT model.Computers in Human Behavior 28 (6), 2340-2350. Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321200204X

Gruzd, A., and Sedo, D.R. (2012) #1b1t: Investigating Reading Practices at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Journal of Studies in Book Culture, Special issue on New Studies in the History of Reading 3(2). Link: http://www.erudit.org/revue/memoires/2012/v3/n2/1009347ar.html

Takhteyev, Y., Gruzd, A., and Wellman, B. (2012). Geography of Twitter Networks. Social Networks, Special issue on Space and Networks, 34(1): 73-81. Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378873311000359 

UBC Library Research Guides

Library, Archival, and Information Science

Marketing

Code.org is a non-profit organization committed to growing computer programming education. The founders (Hadi and Ali Partovi) published an article in today’s Huff Post Education that argued that one of the ways to fix the (American) economy is to teach students how to code. What do you think?