2022 Abstracts
Keynote by Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe: “The next chapter for research information: decentralised, digital”
More information on the keynote speaker
Poster pitches/ inspirational corner / Meet the speakers
“Onboarding in a Hybrid Work Environment: Questions from a Library Administrator, Answers from a New Hire.”, Scott Richard St. Louis, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, United States of America
Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming organizational cultures across the workforce, with libraries of all kinds being no exception. This poster presentation will focus on the experience of a scholarly communication and discovery services librarian beginning a new job in the United States Federal Reserve System in May 2021, immediately after completing graduate school.
The poster will be organized around answering key questions that participants in INCONECSS 2022 might have in mind with regard to onboarding new colleagues successfully, especially in libraries that have experienced major changes in day-to-day working life over the past two years.
These key questions will include the following, in no particular order:
- What has worked well with remote onboarding as a new employee? Where is the in-person component of working life unmatched by remote work? How can a new employee ensure harmony between their own expectations/preferences and those of their colleagues and supervisor?
- How might the lack of daily spatial proximity to colleagues impact the informal knowledge sharing that orients a new employee to a library/office culture, including the explicit and implicit aspects of that culture? In that ways might new employees compensate for this deficit?
- In a remote working environment, how might a new employee go about building relationships with important “secondary contacts” in a library organization? (The people you need to know, but don’t necessarily need to see or interact with every day.)
The EconDesk Chatbot: Work in Progress Report on the Development of a Digital Assistant for Information Provision, Omid Ghiasvand, Anastasia Kazakova, Alexander Unteutsch, ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany
Abstract:
The Research Guide EconDesk of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics is to be supported by a chatbot in the future. Research Guide EconDesk stuff answers questions on literature search and library services and support users with their individual data search. On the one hand, the chatbot should support the colleagues from the existing EconDesk chat team in processing common user requests, which have increased due to the pandemic, and on the other hand, it should help to expand the range of services to support users from business and economics on the EconBiz portal.
Over the last year, our cross-departmental team has been working with different stakeholders on the use cases and is currently working on our first prototype of the chatbot system. We made use of conversational UX design evaluation methods for designing chatbot persona and conversation flows for later implementation.
Our chatbot has been developed based on NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques. Machine learning and rule-based strategies are the main components of this approach and RASA is our main development framework.
Another essential part of our project is preparing data for training and testing the machine learning algorithms. We labelled manually real chat-logs to make use of this data for our purposes. The data include intents or user inputs, actions or chatbot answers, and stories or conversation flows. Stories structure flows of conversation and are fundamental parts of the chatbot. Intents that are bases for training the NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and are used to indicate users’ purposes. They are created based on users’ intent and librarians’ experience, must be unique, and are then assigned manually in the chat transcripts.
Interactive Virtual Assistant (iVA) – Enabling Data Collaboration by Conveying Legal Knowledge, Markus Herklotz, Lars Oberländer, University of Mannheim, Germany
Abstract:
Collaboration on research data may be restricted by legal regulations in the areas of privacy or copyright law. Researchers face questions about whose data can be reused, which data can be shared, and how results can be stored or published. Still, legal knowledge does not belong to the main skillset of most data-oriented researchers and legal use cases regularly demand an individual assessment. Answering such questions of data collaboration is often time-consuming and resource costly. Further, these uncertainties may even nudge researchers not to share, use or reuse data at all. Even with appointed data protection officers and open science agents addressing these problems on an institutional level, a deliberation of each individual situation may not be possible due to time and staff limits. Out of this melange arises a demand for accessible and easily applicable legal information.
In the Business, Economic and Related Data initiatives BERD@BW and BERD@NFDI we have been developing an interactive Virtual Assistant (iVA) to address this demand for legal information. iVA helps researchers and data service providers to understand the fundamental data privacy regulations and therefore enables them to evaluate their legal possibilities of data usage. With specific questions and the guidance of well-placed bits of information, iVA leads its users through a decision tree to convey the fundamentals of privacy laws. It enables users to contextualize the remaining uncertainties and provides a basis to facilitate further consultation of experts. iVA connects the theoretical knowledge and the user’s custom interest, which increases the expected learning effects and allows its users to apply the acquired knowledge directly to their own projects.
At the INCONECSS Conference, we would like to share how iVA was created as an openly available and self-paced learning module that can be extended to further support data collaboration and FAIR principles.
“From Information Literacy to Data Literacy. How to progressively introduce students to research data? From search to research”, Deborah Grbac, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, Italy
Abstract:
Research data are becoming of interest also for students, after years spent in doing Information literacy courses, we started to introduce data literacy in courses offered by the Library, by means of a practical example or text analysis practices done on Jstor Archive.
Jstor Archive is an ancient database enabling longitudinal research (very long time-series), it is organized in a way that makes information retrieval simple and possible (indexes, quotation search, keywords, …). Since the last five years, Jstor developers have also been proposing new services (Text analyser and Data for research, Text analyses tools organised in Phyton Notebooks, …) connected to Archive contents. The Jstor Labs’ Platform Constellate is a tool in which open educational materials are offered for free to introduce some text analysis techniques on Jstor Archive and more.
Text analysis connects words to numbers and vice-versa. The data gathered consists of lexicometric measures used to do “distant reading” on texts contained in corpora or to have an idea of entire platforms contents. Jstor Archive is particularly useful for introducing humanists to data, as for humanists’ data are still something not tangible, metadata and distant reading techniques can help to contextualize data.
The Constellate’s features allow explaining to students some data literacy and how to do a search by means of data, or how to build, clean and manage a dataset, how to deposit it to preserve and retrieve it, all activities related to data science, or the “data cycle”.
The aim is to make students aware of data and to give them a first example of how they can use data, starting from bibliographic one (metadata), to do their own search and research.
We didn’t subscribe to the full service, we propose to students to use the free trier of the Constellate service, as the aim is to introduce to text analysis by open education material, to make aware about data and finally to show new ways to do information retrieval.
How to support early career researchers with identifying trustworthy academic events?
Julian Franken, TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library, Hanover, Germany
Abstract:
Early career researchers, especially when lacking good support structures, can have difficulties identifying academic events like conferences that are of questionable integrity („predatory conferences“).
In the ConfIDent project we aim to build a digital platform where researchers can inform themselves about academic events and get support with assessing an event’s trustworthiness. During the project we explored different strategies to evaluate an event’s trustworthiness, means of conveying this evaluation to the users of the platform and helping users to make their own judgements. This poster presentation will expand on those different strategies, discuss the currently preferred solution and highlight challenges.
University Technology Transfer Process and University Libraries,
Terence William O’Neill, Michigan State University, United States of America
Abstract:
This poster will depict the innovation ecosystem relevant to University Technology Transfer (UTT), particularly focusing on the current and potential roles that academic libraries play in supporting and interacting with these functions. In studying the process of UTT, the audience will gain insight into how UTT functions, the potential value their expertise can provide, while also helping develop an understanding of the terminology and metrics for success used in the UTT community. An important challenge for responding to the needs of this group is the constraints on what is available to them through University Libraries due to licensing and budgetary limitations. The poster will explore the opportunities and resources available that map to UTT needs while navigating those limitations, featuring open access and other available resources. Though most informed by the experience of the home country, differences in home-geography governance will also be reflected in the poster.
An ENOEL toolkit: Open Education Benefits, Paola Corti, SPARC Europe, the Netherlands
Abstract:
The ENOEL Toolkit features reusable and adaptable templates for Twitter cards, slides, and leaflets. It can be used at any institution to convey the convincing benefits of Open Education. It results from the work of the European Network of Open Education Librarians in 2021 and the beginning of 2022 and aims to help raise awareness of the importance of Open Education. The Toolkit points out benefits for four stakeholder groups: students, teachers, institutions, and society at large. The ENOEL members have helped translate the Toolkit into 16 language versions to make it more effective and inclusive at the local level in different EU countries.
Great attention has been given to making and keeping the ENOEL Toolkit as open as possible. Thanks to its graphic simplicity and its open licence (CC BY), librarians willing to reuse it don’t need advanced skills to adapt it to their specific needs. ENOEL members designed the Toolkit to welcome the addition of institutional logos, changes in colours, and fonts to adapt to local communication guidelines, standards, and tools. Reusers can change the order of the benefits according to the preferences of each local context and specifically identified target groups. At the beginning of each file, instructions guide users to understand each tool’s structure, correctly attribute it when adapting, and find items in the files themselves. The ENOEL Toolkit is downloadable from Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/record/5906818
Trade Deficit?: An Analysis of Trade News Source Coverage in Business Aggregators and Suggestions for Increased Discovery, Tim Tully, San Diego State University
Abstract:
Trade journals and trade news sources are an invaluable source for business students, entrepreneurs, and job seekers, but there have not been any recent analyses to determine whether these sources are adequately represented in the aggregator databases used by Business Librarians. In this study, the researcher compiled a list of 768 quality trade news sources using the First Research industry reports from ABI/INFORM Collection and compared the full text coverage and the currency of coverage of these sources in Business Source Complete, ABI/INFORM Collection, Business Insights: Global, Nexis Uni, and Factiva using UlrichsWeb. This study identified whether there was full text coverage of these sources in additional aggregator products from EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, and LexisNexis. The results of this study indicate that there is a significant lack of full text coverage and current full text coverage in the business aggregator packages and other aggregator packages available from library database vendors. Lastly, this study offers a few suggestions for how librarians can collaborate to increase the discoverability of trade sources that are not available in these aggregator packages.
Rethinking university librarianship in the post-pandemic scenario, Arjun Sanyal, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, India
Abstract:
Post-pandemic, the problem with Indian universities was bringing students back to their former academic selves. The fact of being away from the universities, for long, have led to students developing an indifference towards academic curriculum. Secondly, they have developed a strange
problem that goes beyond simple “library anxiety”, as Constance Mellon termed it. I call it “informational anxiety”. This peculiar malady is more about developing a distaste towards the educational informational resources, compounded by the fact of the ubiquitous digital poverty. Thus, being out of touch with the library actually leads to a sort of anxiety, regarding seeking educational information digitally as well as physically, shifting the students’ focus away from academia.
The CUHP (Central University of Himachal Pradesh) library team devised a novel strategy to make students discover their love for their studies as an enjoyable pursuit and not as a tiresome obligation.
- First, we held mind mapping sessions with students on seeking information as regards how library services can be improved. After the completion of the session, we emailed the mind maps along with surveys, to the students, for any improvisations they saw fit.
- Secondly, we started an experimental makerspace-cum-third space where students could do whatever they felt like writing poetry, painting pictures and so on.
- Thirdly, we held some library motivational sessions for students relating to healthy lifestyle.
Within two months, we saw students developing an interest for coming to campuses, particularly to libraries. In fact, the idea of makerspace-cum-third space and the motivational sessions appealed a lot to them in helping to rediscover the joy of learning by thinking passionately about the social milieu. This, I believe, will be a beneficial approach for libraries in general because learning succeeds when the individual thinks creatively, enthusiastically and in a jargon-free manner about things that appeal to him/her.
Presentations: AI, Data and Search
AI-powered software for literature searching: What is the potential in the context of the University Library?,
Solveig Sandal Johnsen1, Julie Kiersgaard Lyngsfeldt2, Lorna Wildgaard3, Anne Vils Møller4
1: AU Library, The Royal Library, Aarhus, Denmark; 2: Copenhagen University Library, The Royal Library, Denmark;; 3: Copenhagen University Library, The Royal Library, Denmark;; 4: AU Library, The Royal Library, Aarhus, Denmark
Abstract:
Introduction
AI-powered search has the potential to analyze large amounts of text and, through the application of algorithms, emulate the way humans search and make decisions. Thus, AI can be a valuable tool for researchers at the University in literature searches.
The aim of the project is to investigate the extent different AI-powered search software support researchers and students in academic literature search.
Method
The methodological design is in 3 stages: 1) desk-top research to identify AI-powered search software, 2) think-aloud tests to test functionality, and 3) a search-hackathon with researchers and information specialists to test relevance and quality.
Major findings/Experience
In Stage 1 the project identified 16 AI-powered search software. Two products met the requirements for AI-software in academic search.
In Stage 2 the functionality of the two chosen software, (https://iris.ai/ and https://www.yewno.com/discover) were investigated by information specialists. The involved information specialists used the same search-case and concluded that the software could be useful in the explorative phase of searching. Transparency, documentation and usefulness were questioned.
In Stage 3, researchers and information specialists met in a hackathon. We observed a cultural change in the approach to searching that without proper training could be detrimental to the scientific integrity of the search. The quality of the output is yet to be evaluated by experts in the area of research.
Conclusion
Findings in the project are valuable for staff at University Libraries because AI-powered search software encourage a user centered approach to searching. It is important that information specialists understand the programmes, routines and procedures that make up the software to be able to teach and help students and researchers use the software with scientific integrity.
HBSKnowledge: A Knowledge Graph and Semantic Search for HBS, Erin L. Wise, Harvard Business School, United States of America
Abstract:
Like many organizations, HBS has overlapping data in multiple repositories. These data are maintained in different ways for different business purposes, making it difficult to have a unified, cross-silo view of any given HBS-related entity. The library sought to address this challenge by creating a Proof of Concept for a Knowledge Graph that identifies unique entities (including people, companies and faculty works) across HBS repositories and defines relationships among them. This graph drives the data connections on our website, HBSKnowledge (HBSK). With this integrated structure we have uncovered many of the multiple and varying relationships among data across repositories. We have also set ourselves up to implement inferencing in future releases of the product to further enable the discovery of strategic information at HBS.
In addition to structuring our data in graph form, we are using semantic search technology to enhance the search experience. We have leveraged our topic vocabularies, our company authority data, and our faculty & alumni authority data to steer users toward the most relevant information for them. The result is a product that enables discovery of 360 views of entities important to HBS.
The HBSK PoC serves as an excellent product for demonstrating the promise of data integration and semantic search, the value of a Knowledge Graph in delivering on that promise, and the talent that exists in libraries for driving content structure and semantic technology. One of the lessons we (re)learned is that any AI initiative is only as good as its data inputs, and a foundation of well-structured, uniquely identified data is essential. To this end, many of our decisions about ontology and vocabulary development were informed by an understanding of library cataloging principles and practices.
Developing data science skills in student researchers through a regional innovation research project,
Kimberly Ann Buschert, University of British Columbia, Canada
Abstract:
A project examining regional innovation through patents has provided Management undergraduate students with opportunities to develop and apply data gathering, arrangement and analysis skills. Since fall 2020, the Faculty of Management Librarian has been working with student research assistants to collect and publish a dataset of patents originating from the Okanagan region of British Columbia, Canada, as part of a wider regional socio-economic history project.
Students applied tools such as Python, Excel and Tableau to gather, manipulate and visualize data they collected from openly available sources including the Canadian, US, European and World patent databases. This project has provided an opportunity for undergraduate students to apply their data analytics skills and undertake professional development, and has introduced them to the academic research environment and connected them with a network of current and past undergraduate and graduate students and faculty. Student interest in this work shows their strong desire for experiential learning in data analytics.
Stemming from one of those seemingly simple business reference questions, the project also represents a novel way of working with faculty researchers, as the librarian, who is a library employee but embedded in the faculty, managed the project on behalf of the principal investigator, including securing funding for the student hires. This project has been a learning opportunity for the librarian to understand patents research, see data analytics concepts applied in practice, and be introduced to the publishing environment for datasets, as well as to develop managerial skills.
What about data literacy? Business librarians and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy,
Patricia B. Condon, Wendy G. Pothier Twitter, University of New Hampshire, United States of America
Abstract:
To meet current and future workforce needs, business students entering the job market should be literate in working with and using data for a variety of purposes. Our presentation focuses on addressing business librarians as key stakeholders in the development of services to help improve data literacy in business and economics. While general and discipline-specific data literacy competencies have been identified, our work focuses on the data literacy needs seen in the disciplines of Business & Economics. In previous work (2019), we identified seven baseline business data literacy competencies that filled gaps in student and employee knowledge around data and data literacy. More recently, we mapped those data literacy competencies to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (Framework). This mapping helps establish a bridge between foundational library professional documents, business librarianship, and data literacy both in higher education and in the workplace, extending the conversation to how the Framework informs data literacy instruction. In this presentation we summarize the seven baseline business data literacy competencies and outline how they can be mapped to the Framework. From this mapping, we explore how business librarians can incorporate teaching data literacy skills and provide instruction informed by the Framework. This research will provide audience members with both context and foundation to develop strategies that integrate data literacy and the Framework into library instruction specific to the disciplines of Business & Economics.
“Fed in Print: The Past, Present, and Future of Making Federal Reserve System Research Outputs Visible and Easily Searchable.”, Scott Richard St. Louis, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, United States of America
Abstract:
This presentation will focus on fedinprint.org, a web application that makes research outputs from across the United States Federal Reserve System – including twelve regional banks and the Board of Governors – searchable in one location by title, author, abstract, keyword, series, content type, bank, and Journal of Economic Learning (JEL) classification. Fed in Print also presents metadata about these research outputs to major discovery services including Google Scholar and Research Papers in Economics (RePEc).
The presentation will focus on the history of Fed in Print, the System-wide cooperation required to successfully populate Fed in Print with timely, high-quality item metadata, and future plans for Fed in Print. Such future plans relate to API development, automation in content contribution, possible new RSS feeds, and keyword quality control. These future plans will necessitate an exploration on the poster of the agile software development processes used to articulate, refine, and prioritize forthcoming enhancements to Fed in Print, in balance with multiple other digital products maintained by the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Presentations: Free Access to Information
“ebooks licences/copyright, and the future of Open Access books as an alternative”, Caroline Ball, University of Derby Library, UK, Lucy Barnes, Open Book Publishers, UK
Abstract:
This presentation will provide a brief overview of the issues that drive the #ebookSOS campaign and possible developments to improve the accessibility of ebooks for the future, featuring Caroline Ball from #ebookSOS and Lucy Barnes from Open Book Publishers.
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the tensions and dysfunction of the academic publishing industry as never before – issues that had been bubbling under the surface for years were brought to a head in 2020 by the sudden closure of universities and libraries and the resulting pivot to exclusively digital learning provision. The unavailability of many ebooks, the high prices, restrictive licences and bundling practice of many publishers meant that librarians were hamstrung by the impossibility of providing all the required resources for our users digitally.
The #ebookSOS campaign was born out of this situation and has been campaigning on several fronts – for an investigation into the practice of academic publishers, wider awareness for staff and students on the impact of these issues, copyright reform that will prioritise educational and research uses over corporate profit margins, via controlled digital lending, the reduction of restrictive licences to control use, and moves to allow libraries to own content, rather merely licence access, and an increased move towards Open Access alternatives. Today’s talk will dive deeper into these issues and explore possible solutions.
“Open Access enables new tools and features”, Aaron Tay, Twitter, Blog, Singapore Management University Libraries, Singapore
Abstract:
Open Access levels are now at a tipping point. According to Digital Science’s Dimensions for the year 2020, Open Access surpassed subscription publication globally for the first time (Hook, 2021).
Similarly in Dec 2020, with Elsevier agreeing to deposit open references to Crossref (the last major publisher to do), over 90% of Crossref references are now open (Hutchin, 2021). The combination of these two trends, both Open Access to full text and Open Scholarly metadata as well as Machine learning techniques has led to a rise of new tools in areas such as literature mapping , new indexes and new features like automating detection of citation context. In this short session, we will show some of these tools and discuss the possible implications for librarians and research community as a whole.
Hook, D. (2021). Open access surpasses subscription publication globally for the first time. Dimensions blog
Hutchins, B. I. (2021). A tipping point for open citation data. Quantitative science studies, 2(2), 433-437.
The spectrum of e-lending transactions in Europe, Giuseppe Vitiello, EBLIDA, Italy
Abstract:
Why are there so many different models of e-lending in Europe? Despite the progressive development of the e-book offer, libraries still encounter many difficulties in implementing e-lending. For some expert librarians, e-lending is mainly considered under a legal perspective. A valuable approach, this methodology has nevertheless some limits. Any legal reflection around e-lending should revolve about two principles: the principle of free access to information which is essential for the functioning of libraries and the principle of appropriate remuneration to authors. In legal terms, a balance should be found between citizens’ right to use culture and content in a way that facilitates their individual educational and cultural development and the requests made by right holders. This balance is what EBLIDA calls: sustainable copyright.
Merely legal considerations, however, are analytically limited and do not help find appropriate solutions to the problem raised in libraries. The institutional background and the economic environment surrounding e-lending include the number of transactions of e-books in libraries, the content of the policy of public powers, the nature of the e-book trade (e.g. the popularity of e-books among young people), the practices linked to e-book acquisitions in libraries and the quality of publishers-libraries interrelation. All these factors are determinant in the structure of an e-book economy which, in the book trade, is mainly shaped by the national language(s) spoken in different countries and by their cultural development in terms of reading skills and access to knowledge.
This holistic approach – legal, economic, institutional – has often been neglected in professional library circles as well as in sectorial studies. This EBLIDA survey on e-lending in the context of the book economy, whose results will be known in Spring 2022, has the general objective to lay the foundation of a „sustainable copyright“ in public libraries.
Panel Discussion
Abstract:
„Potential of AI for Libraries: A new level for knowledge organization?“
What kind of support do researchers need from libraries? How might support and services benefit from AI? How can libraries best support the research process and add value using AI? What might be potential drawbacks? How will the work of librarians and researchers change? AI and humans working together: what will AI excel at and what will humans excel at?
On the panel we will bring together experts from different backgrounds: Research, AI, Libraries, Thesaurus/ Ontology.
Presentations: Research Support
BERD@NFDI – Structuring unstructured data for business, economic and related research
Anja Busch1, Dirk Fernholz2, Ulrich Krieger2, Atif Latif1, Fidan Limani1, Irene Schumm2, Ahmed Saleh1
1: 1 – ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics; 2: University Library, University of Mannheim
Abstract:
In addition to structured data, which is often collected explicitly for research purposes, unstructured data is increasingly becoming relevant for research in economics and social sciences. These data often come from non-standard sources, such as websites, digital business reports, social media, etc., and they come in diverse formats (audio, video, text, image or multimodal) and large scale.
This heterogeneity in data sets and their underlying unstructured formats give rise to new challenges for research data management such as adequate computing and storage resources, deeper knowledge of programming languages and machine learning methods for data collection, selection of appropriate metadata standards for data representation, and pre-processing and analysis. Thus it can be difficult for researchers and infrastructures to manage the complexity of re-usability of unstructured data and algorithms. To this end, the BERD@NFDI consortium will address these challenges as a contribution to the development of the National Research Data Infrastructure.
The aim of BERD@NFDI is to build a powerful centralized platform for collecting, (pre-) processing, analyzing and preserving Business, Economic and Related Data. We will facilitate the integrated management of data, algorithms and other related resources and provide support in terms of services along the whole research cycle. We will dedicate special focus to unstructured (big) data, in line with the FAIR principles for research data.
The presentation gives an overview of the starting position, the mission as well as the composition of the consortium and shows why the usage of unstructured data requires an extended model of empirical research. After a preliminary analysis of the community needs, we present the work program of the (entire) project.
Systematic Literature Review – Enhancing methodology competencies of young researchers
Franziska Klatt, Technische Universität Berlin, Economics and Management Library, Germany
Abstract:
Background and objectives
The Economics and Management Library of Technische Universität Berlin, adapted the independent academic method Systematic Literature Review (SLRM) from its original medical context to the field of Economics. A website with information on the SLRM and a toolkit are provided for researchers in German and English. The over 12,4000 website views in 2021 and several requests for advice emphasize the increasing relevance of the method. Other information institutions may refer to the website to enhance the methodology competences of academic staff.
Method and approach
Systematic literature reviews aim to reduce biases and redundancies in academic research by using a formalized, transparent and replicable process. The SLRM was adapted to the Economics context and information about it has been provided on the library’s website, which has been structured along the SLR process. In addition to a detailed description of each phase, a toolkit has been developed consisting of SLR sources, learning videos (“Understanding retrieval bias” and “Understanding publication bias”), feedback on example SLR articles, as well as individual advice.
Findings
The amount of articles using the SLRM published by the academic staff of the faculty for Economics and Management has increased since the publication of the library’s SLR website. Researchers especially need support with developing an appropriate research string as well as the conduction of a content analysis. Only a handful of libraries provide information on the SLRM.
Implications
Information about the SLRM is relevant for young researchers and can improve their methodology competences. Other information institutions can also refer to the website. We are currently working on a SLR online course.
Support Services for Systematic Literature Reviews in Economic and Business Studies – How Can Business Librarians Cooperate
Sabine Rauchmann, Universität Hamburg, Germany
Abstract:
Whereas systematic literature reviews have become a standard in the health sciences, the method has usually been neglected by researchers in economic and business studies in favor of creating and working with primary data. In the last few years, business librarians have received an increasing number of consultation requests for systematic literature reviews. Due to Corona restrictions, the collection of new data in face-to-face or group settings was limited, prompting researchers to focus on aggregating results from previous research. Business librarians by themselves face the challenge of finding very few subject-specific resources or guides on sophisticated search options or the quality of source materials in databases for economic and business literature as well as subject specific reporting standards, frequently falling back on guidelines and best practices from medical libraries.
This presentation starts by establishing key service components for supporting students and researchers in conducting systematic literature reviews by looking at best practices from all fields. Then, the presentation identifies knowledge mountains and gaps, i.e. in regard to functionalities and source quality of databases, information seeking behavior, analyzing and managing data as well as reporting guidelines in the economic and business studies. Given the enormous amount of knowledge needed, the presentation thirdly looks at options how business librarians can cooperate on an international level for creating space and infrastructure for sharing findings, insights and materials not only with fellow librarians but also with researchers. The presentation concludes with encouraging business librarians to combine forces for providing better support and teaching services for conducting systematic literature review in economic and business studies.