Open University Research Online

Around 18,500 research publications are freely available to view and consult via Open Research Online (oro.open.ac.uk/), one of the largest and fastest growing research collections in the UK. 35% of the publications in ORO have the full-text attached and we are encouraging academics to submit the full-text of items as it enables interested parties to gain access to their research more easily. The ORO blog gives details of the monthly top 15 downloaded publications (http:// www.open.ac.uk/blogs/ORO/).  According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories, Open Research Online (ORO) ranks third among UK HEIs level of sustained deposits and deposit activity.  Since its launch in 2006, ORO has had more than 1.6 million visits, from over 200 countries. ORO played an important role in the Open University’s recent Research Audit and will be used to support the publications part of the REF submission.

International M-Libraries Conference

OU Library Services co-hosted the Third International M-Libraries Conference in Brisbane in May. Our partners were Athabasca University in Canada, the Emerald Publishing Group and the University of Southern Queensland. The conference was attended by 170 delegates from all areas of the globe and provided a forum for exchange of ideas, experience and expertise in the growing field of providing library resources and content to students via their mobile phones and other devices.

Delegates were treated to a broad range of papers demonstrating the creative ways in which this technology is being used by libraries worldwide. In some countries in the developing world, mobile phones are the predominant vehicle for accessing the Internet (where network infrastructure is poor) and therefore very important for delivering information and learning. In other countries they are used as adjuncts to conventional online delivery in order to engage students and to provide more flexible services to an increasingly mobile audience.

The OU Library Services’ mobile developments were among the 40 or so presentations, and there was particular interest in the development of the mobile recommender service under development as part of our JISC funded RISE project http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/RISE/ .  Links to abstracts and presentations are available on the m-Libraries conference programme https://www.usq.edu.au/m-libraries/program/confprogram .

We look forward to hosting the next conference here at the Open University, 24^th to 26th September 2012.

Library Shorts – new animated video series

Library Shorts is a series of animations that follow OU student Bob (and his goldfish Fin) as he explores and learns more about the range of library services and resources that will support him and other OU students with their studies.  We have released two further animations in this series, “Evaluating information: knowing what to trust” and “Searching with One stop search” which can be viewed at http://www.open.ac.uk/library/bob

Transcripts for all the videos can be found on the Open University podcast site: http://podcast.open.ac.uk/pod/LibraryShorts