entering the world of online collaboration: a case study of librarians on ethicshare.org

This research was supported in part by an appointment to the NLM Associate Fellowship Program sponsored by the National Library of Medicine and administered by the Oak Ridge

Institute for Science and Education.

Entering the World of Online Collaboration

A Case Study of Librarians on EthicShare.org

Amy Donahue, NLM Associate Fellow

Kate McCready, EthicShare Project Director

EthicShare Partnerships

Governance Partners

Funding

Other Partnerships

Virtual Research Environment Components

Collection Development

Content aggregationIngest mechanismsHarvestingExtract-Transform-Load

CONTENT

Discovery Tools

Automated ontologyCommunity vettingFaceted searching

Drupal, SolrACCESS

Policy & Sustainability

Editorial policiesCommunity participation

User privacyIntellectual Property

GOVERNANCEEngagement & Collaboration

Social tools to add valueEditorial participationDrupal

COMMUNITY

EthicShare’s History

• Converging Interests: o 2004 Scholarly Communications Instituteo 2005-2006 U of MN Libraries’ Researcho “Helping Hands” project

• Converging Strengths o Librarians o Bioethicists o Computer Scientists

EthicShare - Today2009 - 2010 EthicShare Program Development

Phase: • Expand the “collection” of materials• Development collaboration tools and features• Sustainability planning• Ongoing marketing

A New ModelEthicShare – the “experiment” – Can we:

• Build a “collection” that is free and accessible to anyone?

• Give scholars a place to share and collaborate?

• Help researchers communicate better about their work?

• Let scholars help shape the “collection”?

• Leverage librarian involvement?

1260 User Accounts:

7% are librarians. How do they use EthicShare? Who are they serving?

Librarian Survey

• SurveyMonkey

• Survey sent to 136 librarians with some connection to bioethics.

• 52 people responded (~38% response rate).

• Each question had a different response rate.

Librarian Survey ResultsNo“Did not know it existed.”

“Because of lack of time, not lack of interest.

Yes“I only use the site for information purpose as a way to learn about faculty/student interests, since I am a liaison for the department.”

“I will be visiting it routinely now.”

Librarian Survey Results#

of R

espo

nden

ts

Name of Feature

1. Basic Search2. Advanced Search3. Ethics in the News4. Access full text5. Groups

Librarian Survey Results

Percent of Respondents

Eth

icS

hare

Act

iviti

es

Most likely activities:1. Mention

EthicShare2. Point to

EthicShare from resource page

3. Look for resources for patrons

Least likely:1. Contribute

keywords2. Contribute

citations3. Contribute

events4. Participate

in general groups

Librarian Survey ResultsHow/Why?• “I will be mentioning it at

my next two historical resource instruction classes to undergraduate history of health sciences students”

• “I mentioned it to faculty at a meeting.”

• “EthicShare can be a useful tool for research, so I want these groups to be aware of its existence and basic functions”

Group

# of

Res

pond

ents

Is EthicShare helpful to librarians in other capacities (e.g., networking)?

• “Yes, especially as it becomes more widely used. It would be a good resource for finding experts or for getting feedback on library issues such as search strategies or collection development.”

• “No. Networking feature is more appropriate to long-term researchers.”

• “No. Librarians are too busy being librarians. We do not have time to be ethicists too.

Is EthicShare helpful to librarians serving their users?

• “…there are no abstracts or other information about the indexed resources, again, reducing the value.”

• “yes. Can lead to content, groups, and discussions that would be hard to find otherwise.”

• “Probably not a lot. Between PubMed's "bioethics" subset, Philosopher's Index, and Google Scholar, we probably have it covered…”

“The Right Tool”

Emily Barney, http://bit.ly/aH1cJY

Survey Results - Demographics

Median birth year: 1956

Bioethics Dept: Yes

No?

Conclusions• Some librarians will be better served than others by EthicShare.

• Librarians may be involved in the collaboration aspects in different ways.

• Librarians are likely to post EthicShare up on resource pages and talk about it in classes, increasing the number of people who then know about the site. The EthicShare team will try to take advantage of this in a “teach the teacher” approach.

• The EthicShare experiment will continue!

Questions?

Many thanks to the EthicShare Dev Team and the NLM Associate Fellowship Program, and to all the librarians

who participated!

Amy Donahue- adonahue@umn.edu

Kate McCready - mccre008@umn.edu

Thank You!

EthicShare: http://www.ethicshare.org Background: http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/ethicshare