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The Architecture Library at Maryland Transitions to a Professional Model

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AASL column – April 2016
Barbara Opar and Lucy Campbell, column editors

Column by Cindy Frank, Architecture Librarian, University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

In the fall of 2014, University of Maryland’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation branch library was preparing to close. An all too familiar story, this plan was the result of permanent, campus-wide budget cuts. But rather than throw in the towel the School and Libraries formed a Task Force to explore other solutions to the budget cuts issue. Consisting of students and faculty, the architecture librarian and library administrators, the Task Force conducted a literature review, SWOT analysis, interviews, and a design charrette to assess possible solutions. The final report, submitted to, and approved by the Dean of Libraries, proposed the conversion of the branch to a professional model library with the following recommendations: 24/7 access for the School community, reduced opening hours for the public, retention of the reference librarian, increased group study space, and acknowledgement of the library as a quiet place to study with great natural light.

Begun in late spring of 2015, the transition included physical alterations to the space as well as changes in access, hours and policies. Minimizing public open hours saved on student labor costs and paraprofessional staff salaries, while providing 24/7 access to the School community served immediate users in a tangible way. Currently the library is open twenty hours per week to the public, down from eighty hours a few years ago. The students, staff and faculty of the School already have 24/7 building and computer lab access. Adding the library to the list of accessible spaces was a relatively simple matter of working with the campus security office.

Next, the large circulation desk was removed, opening up the entryway and floor space in front of a large window. A self-checkout station was installed next to the self-serve hold shelf. An employee desk with a library work computer is now used as a reference desk, work station, and book return desk for patrons during open hours.

The reference librarian works a typical workweek, with her office in the library. Students and faculty are able to consult the librarian, access materials, make appointments for special collections materials, find a quiet place to study, and utilize a group study room created from a former staff office. Gate counts reveal between ten and forty patrons are swiping in between the hours of 4 PM and 11 AM.

Two academic semesters into the transition, there have been a couple glitches. The self-checkout station occasionally does not read an ID card, or a patron doesn’t follow the directions on the screen. Returned books are sometimes left on a reading table inside the library instead of in the book drop. The Dean of the School was left off the swipe access list when 24/7 access was started.

On the positive side, books and magazines are not disappearing overnight. Architecture competition teams have used the group study room for planning meetings. Real Estate Development students now meet in the library with alumni for career advising.  Planning students are already here working when the librarian arrives. Faculty have increased requests for library instruction. Plans for the fall include collection assessments, fresh paint and a special collections open house. Although initiated by budget cuts, the changes have meant a library that is more responsive to its patrons.

The Mobile Library: Taking the Collection on the Road

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AASL Column, March 2016
Barbara Opar and Lucy Campbell, column editors

Column by Robert Adams, Acquisitions and Reserves coordinator, BAC Library

In the past, library collections were often locked up behind brick and mortar, only available to those patrons bold enough to enter. Recently the Boston Architectural College Library, better known as the BAC library, undertook a new initiative to better integrate library resources into studio culture and change the way students accessed the collection. Library staff saw an opportunity to reach out to students who might not be using the library, increase circulation, and boost the library’s visibility with senior administration.

At the beginning of each semester, the BAC hosts an event called Studio Lottery where Faculty pitch their studio classes to the student body. Library staff has been attending these meetings to better understand the core concepts from each studio. Hearing it straight from the faculty, as opposed to seeing it on a syllabus, provides greater insight on future reference questions. The library staff saw additional opportunities–for acquisitions to the collection, outreach for instruction, and creation of specific online course guides.


Studio Lottery

Studio Lottery showed us there were students who had never visited the library. How could we put our great resources in their hands and help them succeed?

A trusty old library cart was liberated and a plan hatched to make book displays mobile. We targeted studios for which we knew we had great resources, over studios where the focus was more on using the woodshop or the materials lab. Each faculty member was emailed a tailored online guide and photos of the proposed mobile library cart stocked with helpful and appealing books. After a ten minute visit that allowed students to check books out right from the cart, we wheeled out of studio, leaving their hands filled with great books to kick off their research.  On average, half the books on the cart were checked out by the students and faculty.


Engaged students and a picked over cart.

With this very successful first effort we achieved our goal of reaching students who were not regular library users. Students actually told us how helpful this was–especially international students who felt uncomfortable searching the library catalog in English. In addition, informal polling of participating instructors revealed our Mobile Library visits improved the quality of student work.

One of the surprising outcomes was impact on our Reserve Collection. Prior to the Mobile Library, studio faculty would visit the library and pull books they knew on the topics they were teaching. This often resulted in dozens of books going on reserve in the hope that students would reference them. It was our experience that few would. The few students who did were faced with the sad fact that the book was on reserve and could not be taken home.

Mobile Library visits introduced faculty to additional resources on their topics, which, combined with the fact students were actively checking out books, caused faculty to rethink their reserve strategies. Instead of placing books on reserve, they are now borrowed, passed around, and better absorbed by more students. This has also cut down on the work load for the Reserves Department, and freed up two whole shelves of Reserve space.

Word has spread about the success of our Mobile Library visits. We have given presentations to the Education and Administration staffs at the college. This has prompted our Interior Architecture and Landscape programs to inquire about visits as well. The fall semester will find us rolling into both studios and classrooms.  Now if only we had a better book cart…


Students working in class with their newly acquired books.

Tips

  • We found it best to not over-pack the cart. We provide a sampling, not the whole collection. The students are less overwhelmed. They are then more motivated to visit the library to see what else we might offer.
  • Having an engaged faculty member makes the difference on how many books get checked out. One who points out why certain books are helpful to a student gets them to check books out.
  • We work in teams of two, so that one person can engage the users and answer questions.

Columbia UniversityÕs Avery Library and GSAPP Release Artstor Architectural Plans and Sections Collection

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Columbia University’s Avery Library and GSAPP Release Artstor Architectural Plans and Sections Collection

Margaret Smithglass, Registrar and Digital Content Librarian
Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

Avery Coonley Playhouse, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1907

An ongoing challenge in the architectural community has been the limited availability of plans and sections of significant works of architecture, one that has been particularly pronounced during the architectural education process. The Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), both at Columbia University, have collaborated with Artstor to launch an architectural image set offering an exciting new option. The Avery/GSAPP Architectural Plans and Sections Collection is a two-year project that will ultimately make 20,000 images of architectural plans, sections and related materials available to Artstor subscribers at more than 1,700 institutions worldwide.  The first installment of approximately 10,000 images is now accessible in the Artstor Digital Library.

Based on the History of Architecture curriculum at GSAPP, the primary focus of the collection is 20th century modernism. The majority of images in the collection represent built works, comprising 1,000 projects in 44 countries. Curated by architectural scholars Mary McLeod and Kenneth Frampton, the collection was conceived as a resource that would provide the essential documentation for seminal works of modern architecture, built or unbuilt, in an online format intended to support architectural instruction around the world.

From Professor Mary McLeod: “As a faculty member of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, I am pleased that I have been able to help contribute to Artstor’s collection drawings and renderings of important twentieth-century architectural works, which were scanned by the Visual Resources center from books in Avery Library’s outstanding collection.  As those of us who teach architectural history know all too well, while there are numerous photographic images of buildings available on the web, there is a dearth of hardline drawings and renderings done by architects.”

The complex process of creating this wealth of visual material was executed by the Visual Resources Collection (VRC) at GSAPP, a longstanding student-run resource for faculty and students originally developed as a slide library. Beginning in the summer of 2014, three exceptional VRC student curators worked with Avery staff to establish the project’s technical framework, specifications, metadata schema, and workflows. For each project in the core collection, Avery’s extensive holdings were evaluated to identify and flag drawings and associated images that would best convey a complete understanding of architectural intent.

Avery’s general collection is non-circulating, so special arrangements were made to securely stage and transport bibliographic materials to the VRC for scanning and metadata work on a regular schedule throughout the academic year. A team of dedicated graduate student workers created image and data files, after which curatorial and metadata review served to finalize the phase one delivery.  Once VRC work was completed, database files were transferred to Avery for review and enhancement, and then to Artstor for internal image, data and legal evaluation before the collection went live last fall. “It is truly an invaluable opportunity to have a collection selected with the expertise of two GSAPP scholars from the resources of the Avery Library, one of the largest architecture libraries in the world,” said Artstor President James Shulman. “Columbia University’s contribution of plans, sections, and photographs of models to the Artstor Digital Library will be a vital resource for teaching and studying modern architecture at institutions worldwide.”

In celebrating this incredible new resource, Carole Ann Fabian, Director of the Avery Library, shared, “Avery is thrilled to have worked with GSAPP and Artstor to develop this core collection of plans and sections for teaching the history of modern architecture. Our GSAPP faculty advisors, Professors Mary McLeod and Kenneth Frampton, have shaped the record of this history through their scholarship and decades of teaching here at Columbia. Their curatorial guidance, Avery’s incomparable collections and Artstor’s extraordinary Digital Library platform have made this project possible. Our collaboration fulfills a critical need for a shared, authoritative collection of key works that document the masterworks of modern architecture, and is now available to the Artstor community.”

Work continues on phase two, and the complete collection is expected to be available for the beginning of the 2016-17 academic year. View the collection in the Artstor Digital Library.

Strategies for Planning Successful Information Literacy Assignments for Architecture Students

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Barret Havens, Digital Initiatives Librarian and liaison to the School of Architecture, Woodbury University

Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

The NAAB and Architecture Librarians Agree on the Importance of Information Literacy

If you’ve spent any time with your campus architecture librarian, you probably know that we think information literacy is really important. But we’re not the only ones! The National Architectural Accreditation Board does too, and has mandated that the architecture schools assess students’ information literacy skills. They have articulated this explicitly in the Student Performance Criteria (A.3) listed in the 2014 Conditions for Accreditation: “Investigative Skills: Ability to gather, assess, record, and comparatively evaluate relevant information and performance in order to support conclusions related to a specific project or assignment.”  Student Performance Criterion A.3 is a very familiar realm for us architecture librarians—it describes the types of activities we help students accomplish more effectively as teachers and as curators of architectural collections.  Another reason that criterion A.3 sounds familiar to librarians is that it reads like a paraphrasing of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ most recent attempt to define information literacy:

“Information literacy is the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.”

But What Does Information Literacy Actually Look Like?

The definition of information literacy above suggests a variety of processes that scholars from a variety of fields engage in. But what does it really look like when our architecture students do it? The discovery, evaluation, and synthesis of information into “new knowledge” such as an architectural model may take place in the studio, at reviews, or even in a dorm room. But often, the process begins in the library, where students gather information to inform the design process, such as books or journals containing architectural drawings of relevant precedents. Many students struggle with assignments that require the application of information literacy skills and end up seeking out the help of a librarian. Based on my experience working with students in those types of situations, and my examination of hundreds of research-intensive assignments I would like to offer faculty some strategies for designing successful information literacy assignments.

Strategy #1: Work with your architecture librarian way ahead of time to ensure that adequate resources for the assignment are in place

Though architecture librarians do their best to anticipate the needs of architecture students and faculty and strive to develop their collections accordingly, most of us will admit that we aren’t perfect. Occasionally we’ll overlook an important publication or the works of a lesser-known architect. Sometimes, books and journals go missing without our noticing right away. Our budget limitations might prevent us from purchasing important resources. These occurrences may leave little holes in the collection. Providing your librarian with the parameters of assignments such as precedent lists will help to ensure that when your students come to the library, they’ll find what they need. Since receiving and processing items at most libraries can take several weeks, it helps us to have those details at least a month ahead of time.

Strategy #2: Have an architecture librarian provide a hands-on workshop

At most campuses, librarians are available to provide your students with an instruction session geared specifically towards the objectives of any upcoming research-intensive assignments. Often, these sessions will take place in a hands-on environment such as the library’s computer lab where students are able to test drive resources like the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, ArtStor, and the library catalog. Not only will such a session impart skills and techniques that will help your students produce higher quality work, it will also serve to establish a rapport between students and their architecture librarian, who can continue to support their efforts long after the session ends and throughout their academic life. Even if the architecture students at your school are required to take a credit-bearing information literacy course, they will need refreshers throughout their academic trajectory in order to retain what they have learned. A hands-on instruction session can serve to reedify those skills.

Strategy #3: Give students enough time to take advantage of your library’s inter-library loan service

Many academic library catalogs are capable of searching the holdings of thousands of other libraries. Likewise, the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals will display records for journals your library may not own. Through inter-library loan programs, libraries are able to obtain these items from other libraries faster than ever. But, even though articles may arrive in as little as 2 days, some items such as books can still take 10 to 14 days to arrive. If you will require your students to do in-depth research using a wide variety of sources, it will benefit them greatly to have enough time to take advantage of this service (and to be forewarned that thorough research takes time!).

Strategy #4: Require that students use a variety of sources to ensure that they engage with different formats and perspectives

If students aren’t required to seek out academic and professional sources, they tend to rely heavily on their old friend Google. Don’t get me wrong–there are some great sources of architectural images from reputable sources on the open web, such as the images of the rock-cut churches at Lalibela available through the Zamani Project. But we all know the pitfalls students can fall into while researching on the open web. (For instance, trying to make sense of architectural images posted on Pinterest with absolutely no metadata to suggest which project is depicted, whether the drawing is to scale, whether it is the version that was actually built, etc.) To ensure that students engage with reliable resources, it may be necessary to spell out for them explicitly the gamut of sources they are expected to use to inform their work. For instance, 3 architecture periodicals, 3 books, 2 blogs by experts in the field, etc. Requiring students to locate a variety of sources also exposes them to different perspectives on a topic offered by different types of sources and gives them a more well-rounded understanding of the research process.

Strategy # 5: Encourage your students to explore their library’s physical and online collections

Physical libraries and digital libraries are arranged for the maximum possibility of serendipitous discovery! Encourage your students to spend time exploring both. There’s no telling what they might find, or how it might inform and inspire their design work.

Strategy #6: Invite your architecture librarian to reviews, student presentations, and other exhibits of student work

When librarians can experience the final product of all the research that your students have been doing, they gain an understanding that will help them to focus their efforts most effectively on guiding students through the research process in future iterations of the course. Librarian attendance at such events may also help to reinforce, for students, the idea that their architecture librarian is involved and engaged in the culture of their school, and that we librarians are not just there to save students from defeat, we are there to celebrate their victories as well!

The AASL Core Reference List

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Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

Navigation tabs of AASL Core Reference List organized by research category.

Need to identify the key publications or databases to refer to for a variety of specific architectural research needs? Do you need to quickly distribute a list of major technical handbooks and standards or other resources to your undergraduate class?  Then check out the AASL Core Reference List for help!

AASL would like to share with you the results of this important team effort. The Association of Architecture School Librarians has just completed a project designed to benefit faculty and students in schools of architecture as well as our fellow librarians. For several years, task force members Kathy Edwards (Clemson), Janine Henri (UCLA), Barbara Opar(Syracuse) and Amy Trendler (Ball State) have been creating a list of core reference resources needed for academic programs in architecture.

First, the task force identified essential categories of reference tools and then developed a list of corresponding resources for each category which would aid researchers from beginner to advanced. The list includes the following categories:architecture schools; bibliographies/guides to research; biographical resources; building codes and regulations; cost estimating; dictionaries and encyclopedias; graphic standards and drawing guides; surveys and histories of architecture; special collections; indexes and databases; professional practice; specifications and trade literature; guides to architectural styles; technical handbooks and standards; and finally visualresources. In addition to the original categories the authors added a section listing publications relevant to each of the NAAB Student Performance Criteria and related subcategories. The authors collaborated using Springshare’s online LibGuides platform, which facilitated compiling the resources for each category, reviewing each other’s selections, and eventually publishing the Core Reference List.  Overall editing of the AASL Core Reference List was completed by Barret Havens, Outreach Librarian at Woodbury University in Burbank.

AASL hopes that this guide will prove useful to faculty, students and fellow librarians in quickly ascertaining core reference works in the field of architecture. As a catalog of key resources, it could become part of the NAAB accreditation used to evaluate architecture libraries. AASL’s core periodical list– which is in the process of being updated- has been used in this way. We welcome your input and feedback on this and other lists we develop and update in the hopes of benefiting the field of architectural education.

 

Journal Impact: Real, Imagined or Manipulated?

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Written by Barbara Opar
Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

 

In the past few years, the term “impact factor” has become increasingly important in the tenure process in schools of architecture. However, the concept is not new. In 1975, the term was coined by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information. During this time period, ISI began producing the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the Social Science Citation Index as well as the Science Citation Index. These sources were used to ascertain how often certain articles were cited in the literature. But particularly in the humanities, this was just one factor used to determine the importance of a specific author’s work and research.

Impact factors are now weighted much more heavily in tenure deliberations. Our ever growing reliance on the internet and the ease of tracking citations is partially responsible. But certainly publishers have actively fostered this practice. Journal titles with high impact factors are viewed as more important publication venues than those with lower impact.

The impact factor is essentially a citation measure. ISI products include the Journal Citation Reports Database which annually publishes impact factor- but only for those journals indexed in the ISI databases.

How are impact factors determined? Traditionally, the impact of a specific journal is determined by the number of times specific articles from a two year period were cited. The number of times an article was cited is divided by the total number of articles published during that same time period.

The calculation of impact factors in itself presents some debatable practices. How does the number of times an article was cited relate to its research quality? The journal impact factor only tracks the first few years of a publication. Currently, impact factors take into account more than just article citations. They track citations or the mere mention of an article in reviews, letters, editorials, meeting abstracts, and even notes. There is uneven coverage in many different disciplines and between disciplines.

But now, the November 5, 2015 editorial in Inside Higher Education is alleging that journal impact factors have lost their credibility.  Practices noted include editor coercion and online queues.

See the full editorial at: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/05/editorial-says-journal-impact-factors-have-lost-credibility

The journal impact factor is likely to remain in place. But perhaps academia will turn to a more comprehensive way of evaluating research quality and consider other measures in addition to the journal impact factor.

 

How Can I Retain Copyright...

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Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

 

October column prepared by Amy Vanderlyke Dygert, Esq., Director of Copyright Services, Cornell University

 

How can I retain the copyright in my publication?

 

This is an issue, which should be of prime importance to new as well as seasoned authors, including architecture faculty. However, many faculty, feeling tenure and promotion pressure, are willing to give up certain rights in order to have their work published.

But federal copyright law grants authors six exclusive rights relative to their work, including the rights to make and distribute copies of their work and to make derivative works based on their original scholarship. This exclusivity means that only the creator of the work is entitled to engage in those activities. Unfortunately, that exclusivity is often lost when authors, eager for publication, sign publishing agreements that unilaterally transfer copyright to the publisher. Many authors simply skim the boilerplate contracts without the specificity required to catch the copyright transfer.

Such consequences can be significant. At a minimum, authors may not be able to distribute copies of their work to students, colleagues, in course packs, or on their own websites. They may not be permitted to creative derivative works based on their original research and scholarship. Publishers can repackage or repurpose the scholarly works without attribution to the original author because they now legally own all rights in the work.

To prevent the loss of their scholarly work, authors should read all publishing agreements carefully before signing. Upon discovery of a copyright transfer or assignment clause, authors should negotiate with the publisher to retain their copyrights. Ideally, authors should explicitly retain all copyright ownership of their work. Publishers may pressure authors to transfer some rights, such as the right to reproduce and distribute, which are necessary to publish and distribute the journal and authors’ content therein. However, authors need not transfer these or any of their exclusive rights outright to achieve publication. They can instead grant an exclusive or non–exclusive license to the publisher. Granting such a license gives the publisher the right to engage in some of the authors’ exclusive copyrights, while simultaneously allowing the author to retain ultimate control over his or her work.

At present, a number of groups, including The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), are engaged in helping authors to understand and retain rights over their publications. SPARC is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. For more information about negotiating publishing agreements, as well as sample documents to convey particular rights, see The Author Addendum at http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum.

 

Seeking Input: Information Seeking Habits of Architecture Faculty Survey

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Written by Lucy Campbell, Librarian, NewSchool of Architecture and Design
Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

What if architecture faculty could research five times faster? What if all their information needs were right at their fingertips, readily available from their academic libraries? That may seem like an unattainable dream for most architecture librarians, but if librarians and faculty communicate more openly about the research needs of faculty, and how best to meet them, we could get closer to realizing it.

To that end, I am surveying architecture faculty across the United States about their information seeking habits in order to help librarians be even more efficient and helpful than they already are now. Student needs are surveyed, scrutinized and analyzed repeatedly in our field. Studies abound that tell us how they search, where they search, and what they search. However faculty can have very different interests. Librarians can analyze library usage statistics and engage in one-on-one research consultations with faculty, but if they don’t ask faculty about their research habits as a group, they are missing a key part of the story.

Architectural research is a peculiar multi-headed beast. As a profession, and field of study encompassing the arts, sciences, social sciences and humanities, architecture is all of these and yet none of them. Design encompasses an indefinable combination of disciplines which makes it both fascinating and frustrating. Because of this unique cross-disciplinary nature, I am especially interested in how information needs differ when applied to pedagogy, trends in the field, and personal inspiration.

This survey won’t provide all the answers, but I hope it will shed some light on the particular and unique aspects of how faculty engage with research on a daily basis. So I am asking architecture faculty to take the survey, and for AASL members to share my short survey with their faculty so we can gain some valuable insight. It will remain open through October 31st and results will be shared with all.

Librarians who send out the survey: please email me to let me know a rough number of recipients so I can keep tabs on response rates. Thanks in advance for your support.

Survey: Information Seeking Habits of Architecture Faculty
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/architectureinfo

Author email: lcampbell@newschoolarch.edu

AASL Online Resource Review -- Tectonica-online

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Written by Monica Kenzie, Architecture, Art & Design Library Specialist at the Littman Architecture & Design Library, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, Column Editors

Tectonica-online bills itself as “the first architectural website to associate construction details directly with products.” It is a Spanish subscription-based resource, with the majority of the content available in both English and Spanish. Subscription costs are very reasonable. As advertised on the site, an individual membership costs twelve euros ($13.22) for three months, or 32 euros ($35.25) for one year, with institutional memberships available as well. According to the “About Us” page of their site, the resource investigates “solutions for achieving the best quality construction possible” through access to articles, project analyses and a continually expanding database of information organized under three main categories: products and details, projects, and topics.

Begun in 1996 as a printed journal, Tectonica made the transition to the web in 2009. Archived versions of the older print journals are available on the site, but only in Spanish. The information contained in Tectonica lends itself well to the web format, and the visual presentation of the site is excellent, with a clean, well-organized layout making it easy to navigate between, and within, categories.

Tectonica-online home page. The disclaimer in the text box is the publisher’s (Tectonica-online), not the author’s addition.

A main focus of the content of Tectonica-online is on materials, products and construction systems. ‘Product’ entries provide information on material properties, application, and uses, as well as contact information for the manufacturer/supplier where applicable. Multiple high-quality, zoom-able images are included to show product details (some down to the microscopic level), the application process and the material in its environment, giving a full picture of how the material performs in all stages. ‘Detail’ entries show schemas of construction elements from real buildings, with links to full articles on the projects to add context. Browsing categories for both ‘products’ and ‘details’ include subjects like waterproofing, facades, solar protection and many others, and are structured in nested tables making for easy navigation and discovery, with a keyword search available as well.

Tectonica-online product profile

Given the emphasis on commercial products, it is somewhat reassuring that it is noted clearly on the homepage that, “the products that appear on the website have been selected for their interesting and innovative character, with no commercial interest.” However, more could be done to further explain the relationship between the site’s publishers and the companies whose products are represented. Advertisements can be purchased for the site and companies can sponsor new or old projects, or purchase the rights to add documentation to previously published projects. A more detailed disclaimer could help users better understand the criteria used in choosing products to represent on the site, and the role advertisers and companies play in the process.

Hierarchical organization of topics within the database

‘Projects’ features articles on architectural projects from around the world, providing a formal description and analysis of buildings with rationale on why certain materials were used. Large images of the sites along with plans and structural details accompany each article, making this a visual resource as much as an informational one. Projects can be browsed by geographic location or structural elements, among many other facets, making it easy to look through despite the lack of a keyword search function for this particular category. Articles are displayed as a series of images in a reading viewer which is intuitive and easy to use, but does not offer an option to download content.

‘Topics’ offers articles organized by general subjects like ‘interiors’ and ‘structure’, with broad coverage ranging from daylighting to fire safety. This section lacks a keyword search function as well, but as with ‘projects,’ browsing is easily facilitated by the well-ordered menus. The fully cited articles are written by practicing and teaching architects, offering insights from professionals on both practical and theoretical subjects.

Other noteworthy features on the site include the option to share a limited number of product and construction detail entries with others who don’t have a subscription, and, for individual users, the option to save content to a personal file. There is also a robust, regularly updated blog containing short articles along with high quality images and plans which can be accessed by anyone, though it is only available in Spanish.

The combination of practical, technical information and thoughtful, professionally written articles packaged in an easily navigable site gives Tectonica-online the unique quality of being ideal for both professionals and students. Here at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, faculty have implemented this resource in their courses with great success, and we have received positive feedback from students as well, who are always looking for good images of building details and plans. Despite the language barrier for accessing some of the content and the lack of a keyword search function in certain areas of the site, the real-world information on products, materials and construction, along with the wealth of images and plans, not to mention its affordability, makes Tectonica-online a worthwhile resource for any architectural program.

 

Author email: monica.kenzie@njit.edu

 

The Tools at Hand: Using Citation Metrics Databases for Assessing the Impact of Scholarship in Architecture and Design-related Disciplines

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Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Submitted by Rose Orcutt, Architecture and Planning Librarian, University at Buffalo Libraries 

 

In Maya Gervits’s article “Citation Analysis and Tenure Metrics in Architecture and Design-Related Disciplines,” she articulately defines the issues surrounding the growing trends in citation metrics and analysis and how they apply to architecture faculty. Her article acknowledges that many existing systems of citation metrics do not provide as complete a view of the scholarly output of faculty in architecture and design-related disciplines as they do of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines.

Though citation metrics tools each measure scholarly output in different ways, most tend to focus on the impact of publications in traditional formats. However, a new wave of “altmetrics” citation metrics tools, which include Plum Analytics and Scopus,  go beyond traditional scholarly publications such as journal articles to track a wide variety of non-traditional works.  The definition of altmetrics, according to altmetrics.org is “the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analyzing and informing scholarship.” Altmetrics bridges the gap in current citation analysis by capturing alternative publications and “real-time metrics of scholarly impact” (Sutton, 2014). This article will present several citation metrics tools widely used in academic settings today, including some of the more traditional variety along with a few that employ altmetrics.

In addition to assessing the impact of a single scholar’s publications and other works, a growing trend in higher education is the use of citation metrics systems by administrators to evaluate the impact of scholarly output at the institutional or departmental level (Hazelkorn). Two examples of subscription-based citation tools that provide measurable data for assessing institutional, departmental, and faculty performance are Academic Analytics and Plum Analytics. Both tools are prorated based on the institution’s full-time equivalent (FTE) but are expensive.

Academic Analytics is known as a “business intelligence” software tool or database that collects data on scholarly citations. It compares a university’s productivity discipline-by-discipline and tracks the institution’s overall performance. The database tallies faculty activities in these five areas of research: journal articles, citations, books, research grants, and awards. The citations are derived from Scopus. The database offers a number of different visualization tools to show data trends, patterns, and the strengths and weaknesses of the institution.

Plum Analytics (PlumX) is an EBSCO database and is similar to Academic Analytics as it also measures scholarly productivity discipline by discipline and the overall performance of the university by tracking traditional publications. However, it also tracks output using altmetrics, which take into account evidence of impact garnered from social media discussions, article views and downloads, news media mentions, conference proceedings, videos, blogs, tweets, grants, patents, presentations, clinical trials, book chapters, and more. The citations originate from PubMed Central, Scopus, and USPTO.  Individual author records are used to populate the citation data. Graphs and comparison charts are easy to generate from the statistical output.

Scopus and Web of Science are both library subscription-based databases that analyze author output by tracking citations. As competing products, they cover all disciplines but have origins in the STEM disciplines. The cost of each is prorated based on the institution’s FTE.

Scopus is a relatively new database by Elsevier. It was introduced as a citation tool in 2004. The database tracks scholarly citations from peer-reviewed journals, books, patents, and conference proceedings from all disciplines and has a large international coverage. The metrics tracking covers author’s total citation and document counts, citations per year and h-index. Charts and tables can be manipulated easily. Altmetric, which will be discussed further along in this article, is a third party web application that has been integrated into Scopus. The application runs in a sidebar within the abstract page, providing additional altmetrics statistics. Scopus also announced the creation of their own Article Metrics app that will be made available at the end of this summer.

Web of Science (WOS) was created from the Science Citation Index which began in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield (Aghaei Chadegani et al., 2013). WOS includes the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Index, Current Contents, conference proceedings, and two chemistry indexes. Citation reports are created on an author, displaying the number of times the author is cited, the average citations per item and the h-index in graph and chart form. The results of the reports are based on only those journals that are indexed in the Web of Science database collection. In March 2015, a press release on the WOS Thomson ISI website announced a collaboration with Google Scholar to enable citation count cross-checking.

Google Scholar generates statistics from the author’s own articles and then tracks their published work. The author creates and maintains his/her own profile which can be made public, graphs citations over time and generated reports on a publication’s h-index number. Google Scholar Metrics is free, and covers a large portion of scholarly articles published in the last five years but “only includes publications with at least a hundred articles” from that same time period.

Harzing Publish or Perish is a free, downloadable software program that retrieves raw academic citations from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. In addition to capturing journal citations in English, Harzing also includes LOTE (Language Other Than English) citations and book chapters. The reports include the total number of citations, number of citations per year and the h-index. Along with the Author Impact Analysis, another feature is the Journal Impact Analysis.

Altmetric, a fee-based tool, was founded in 2011 and according to its website, its mission “is to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly literature.” Data is collected from newspapers, government policy documents, and mentions of scholarly publications in online conversations on social media sites and elsewhere. A score is given based on volume of mentions, number of sources, and how often that author is discussed unless the article was published before 2011 then the score may be inaccurate. An embedded API donut badge displays a color-coded visualization of each social media type represented in the score and the number is placed in the middle of the donut.

ORCID is an open, community-driven platform where a scholar can create their own research profile and add publications and other works including “research objects such as datasets, equipment, articles, media stories, citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks.” An author creates a record of their scholarly work which is tracked by an ORCID iD, a unique digital identifier assigned to each author. This digital identifier distinguishes one author from another and is used by other platforms such as PlumX, Academic Analytics, and Scopus to enable cross-platform sharing of metrics data. ORCID maintains a public registry of the all the ORCID iD profiles which is searchable in order to facilitate communication and collaboration among researchers

Used together, altmetrics and traditional citation metrics systems provide a holistic profile of an author’s body of work. The use of citation metrics is an established trend with a tangible impact within the academic community in some disciplines and an emerging methodology among others. Statistical analysis of faculty and departmental performance is critically important to higher education administrators as they seek to demonstrate productivity and compete for funding. Architecture and design subject librarians can play a vital role in faculty tenure and promotion by advocating for the adoption, support and use of altmetrics as a way to produce a more well-rounded profile of the scholarly output of architecture and design faculty.

 

References

 

Aghaei Chadegani, A., Salehi, H., Yunus, M. M., Farhadi, H., Fooladi, M., Farhadi, M., & Ale Ebrahim, N. (2013). A comparison between two main academic literature collections: Web of Science and Scopus databases. Asian Social Science, 9(5), 18-26.

 

Hazelkorn, E. Rankings and the reshaping of higher education : The battle for world-class excellence (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

 

Sutton, S. W. (2014). Altmetrics: What good are they to academic libraries? Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings, 4(2), 1-7.

 

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