Author: Jill Cirasella

Jill Cirasella is the Scholarly Communication Librarian and University Liaison at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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Now Hiring: University Systems Librarian for Digital Initiatives

This job at CUNY’s Office of Library Services has several components, a key one of which is managing the technical aspects of Academic Works, CUNY’s new institutional repository.  The application deadline is June 1.

University Systems Librarian, Digital Initiatives
City University of New York

The Office of Library Services (OLS) at the Central Administrative Office of CUNY supports the libraries at the University’s 24 campuses to coordinate and enhance library services for students and faculty in partnership with campus librarians. OLS Library Systems team supports a large portfolio of enterprise library applications and services that support digital repository services, and discovery and access services, and collection management. Systems include Academic Works @ CUNY (Digital Commons Institutional Repository Service), the CUNY Catalog (Aleph integrated library system), CUNY OneSearch (Primo discovery system), SFX (link server and electronic journals discovery tool), EZProxy (remote authentication system), Coral (electronic resources management system), and others.

The Office seeks a University Systems Librarian specializing in Digital Initiatives to provide technical expertise and guidance for CUNY’s cloud-based Institutional Repository, digital collections and shared responsibility for CUNY’s discovery service.

Reporting to the University Director of Library Systems, the Digital Initiatives Librarian will focus on data, platform, and workflow integration and interoperability, metadata extraction, transformation, and reuse, analytics and reporting, search strategies and services, and problem diagnosis and resolution.

Key responsibilities include, but will not be limited to: managing the technical aspects of Academic Works @ CUNY; configuring CUNY digital collections as data sources and normalization rules to support associated encoding schemes (DC, EAD, provenance data, etc.) for discovery in OneSearch; implementing discovery web and X-services for external search service integrations, metadata harvesting and reuse, and user interface redesign and development; determining strategies for integration of thesauri and linked open data in search applications such as the CUNY Academic Works institutional repository and our discovery service.

See the full job description here. (If the direct link doesn’t work, go to http://cuny.jobs/ and search for Job ID 12894.)

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Graduate Center Research Impact: Pin Drops Keep Falling on My Map!

(Déjà vu? This is a very slight reworking of a post from the Graduate Center Library blog.)

Germany. India. England. France. Canada. Poland. Iran. Sweden. China. Turkey. Netherlands. Egypt. Russia. Japan. Those are just a few of the countries where researchers are downloading the works of Graduate Center students and faculty!

Graduate Center Academic Works, the Graduate Center’s new open access institutional repository, tells us more than we ever knew before about global interest in Graduate Center research. The repository is still small — as of today, it holds just 1,125 works, primarily dissertations and master’s theses, faculty articles and other faculty works, and technical reports from the Computer Science program. But its reach is already broad — those 1,125 works have been accessed 31,349 times…and counting! (See the 10 most downloaded items.)

And now we can all watch what’s being downloaded where by visiting the repository’s animated download map (also visible on the bottom of the main GC Academic Works page)!

Map showing some of the downloads from Academic Works on March 11, 2015
Map showing some of the downloads from Academic Works on March 11, 2015

Furthermore, anyone with one or more items in Academic Works receives monthly readership reports with information about how much their works have been accessed. It’s never been easier to track the popularity and impact of your work, or to reach audiences you otherwise wouldn’t have reached — largely through Google and Google Scholar searches.

Lots of East Coast downloads on March 11!
Lots of East Coast downloads on March 11!

GC-affiliated faculty, want to improve the readership and impact of your work? Submit your scholarly and creative works — articles, book contributions, conference presentations, slideshows, posters, data sets, etc. Submitting is as simple as completing a form — see the step-by-step instructions.

Want to raise the profile of your program? Talk to your colleagues about uploading their works as well! Or invite Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication, to a meeting to give an explanation and demonstration of Academic Works.

Want to improve the visibility of your center or institute? Contact Jill Cirasella to inquire about creating an Academic Works section for your center or institute!

A download in Seychelles!
A download in Seychelles!

(Graduate Center students, we’re doing a phased launch and are not accepting student works other than dissertations and theses quite yet. But stay tuned because we will in the near future!)

Have questions? Not sure which publishers allow you to upload copies of your articles? Want to get some one-on-one instruction before you begin? Contact Jill Cirasella — she’s happy to help by email, over the phone, or in person.

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March Workshops at GC: Authors’ Rights and Why & How to Submit to Academic Works

This month, the Graduate Center Library is offering two workshops of potential interest to readers of Open Access @ CUNY:

You Know What You Write, But Do You Know Your Rights? Understanding and Protecting Your Rights as an Author
Tuesday, March 10 @ 2:30-4:00pm
Open to the GC and broader CUNY community: Click to RSVP

When you publish a journal article, you sign a copyright agreement. Do you know what you’re agreeing to when you sign it? Different journals have different policies: Some journals require you to relinquish your copyright. (You then have to ask permission or even pay to share your article with students and colleagues!) Some journals allow you to retain some rights (e.g., the right to post online). Some journals leave copyright in your hands. (You simply give the journal a non-exclusive license to publish the article.)

How can you find out a journal’s policy? How can you negotiate your contract to make the most of your rights as a scholar, researcher, and author? Come learn how to preserve your rights to reproduce, distribute, and display the work you create.

Led by Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication at the Graduate Center. Open to students, faculty, staff, and anyone from the CUNY community who has questions about their rights as authors, open access publishing, or scholarly communication.

Can’t make it? Want a preview of what’s covered? See the materials from the previous authors’ rights event.

Grad Center Faculty Workshop: Why & How to Submit to Academic Works
Tuesday, March 17 @ 2:30-4:00pm
Open to GC and CUNY doctoral faculty and research assistants only: Click to RSVP

The Graduate Center recently launched Graduate Center Academic Works, an open access institutional repository that is the ideal way for faculty to make articles, book chapters, data, etc. available to their research community and the broader public. It’s also the perfect place to satisfy grant funders’ open access requirements!

You might wonder, “Are researchers allowed to make their scholarly journal articles freely available online?” Very often, the answer is yes: a majority of journal publishers allow self-archiving of this kind! (To find the policy of a specific publisher or journal, check SHERPA/RoMEO.)

This workshop will introduce faculty to Academic Works, present the many compelling reasons to post works there, and provide step-by-step instructions for uploading works.

(Graduate students, we apologize, but we’re not ready for you quite yet. We’re doing a phased launch, and the repository is currently only ready to accept faculty self-submissions. But it will be open to student self-submissions in the near future!)

Led by Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication.

Can’t make it? Contact Jill at [email protected] for a one-on-one instruction to Academic Works.