Library:Building Your Academic Profile/Content
Be a Content Developer
Developing online scholarly content can often be a daunting task. With the proliferation of social technologies and the pressure to engage in traditional scholarly output, it becomes a question of how to keep up in an ever-changing environment that may not have the impact needed to be considered academically rigorous. While keeping up with technologies is a complicated process, developing scholarly content for the internet can be as simple as posting drafts of articles, commenting on recent scholarship, or uploading previous conference presentations.
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Blogs
Blogs are a space where academics and scholars engaged in new ideas, begin discussions on research findings, and gain feedback on pre-published materials. Blogging gives academics the opportunity to expand the reach of their scholarship by presenting their work to a larger community. This builds opportunities for collaboration and potentially new publishing outputs. Additionally, blogging of research can provide academics with open discussion about their research, a form of interactive peer review that moves beyond the closed models currently supported in traditional publishing models
UBC offers a weblogging platform run on the open-source software Wordpress. Managed through the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTLT), UBC blogs can be created for courses, portfolios, research and publishing. To learn more about developing your own UBC blog, read the documentation developed by CTLT or attend a workshop.
Additional blogging platforms can be found at Best Blogging Platforms.
Examples of Blogs Used for Subject Engagement
- RRR Research Blog @ UBC Biology
- Gradhacker
- Feministing: The Scholarly Feminist
Examples of Blogs Used for Peer Review
- Archaeologist posting draft of dissertation chapter on blog
- Giving It Away: Sharing the Future of Scholarly Communication
Learning About Copyright Permissions
- SHERPA RoMEO - This site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.
- For authors' rights and copyright guidance, make an appointment with the UBC Library Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office.
Videos and Podcasts
A great deal of scholarly output is often difficult to capture. Lectures and conference presentations, while important modes of scholarly output, are not captured as effectively with written notes and presentation documents. Videos and podcasts allow you to capture:
- presentations that may be dependent on audiovisual materials for expressing ideas
- discussion periods that can add clarity to your work
- nonverbal skills associated to effective presentation
Additionally, videos and podcasts can add to your instruction portfolio. You can develop instruction material in multiple formats and use the material as support for your own instruction and/or provide open access to a broader community. Open Education Resources (OER) are a good example of this kind of work.
Examples of Academic Videos
Examples of Academic Podcasting
Presentations
Have you given a presentation at a conference or colloquium that you're exceptionally proud of? Chances are that you also spent a good amount of time making professional slides. Archiving your slides online can give people early glimpses into your research. It can also help maintain your active research presence after the presentation and build interest in your future publications. Get the most out of your slides!
- Slideshare; Example UBC Journalism Professor Alfred Hermida
Digital Repositories
Have you completed original research for a graduate seminar or course? Consider archiving your paper in cIRcle, UBC's institutional repository. You're probably familiar with cIRcle because archiving your thesis or dissertation there is mandatory, but they also accept graduate papers with approval from your course instructor or supervisor. Check out their getting started guide for students.
If you've published an article in your field, you may also want to explore archiving in a subject repository. This varies from discipline to discipline and also depends on the post-publication rights in your author agreement. Ask your subject liaison librarian for help identifying repositories in your area of research.
e.g. EconPapers; Example: UBC Economics professor Mauricio Drelichman
Open Education Resources
Open educational resources (OERs) are freely accessible and openly licensed resources that are useful for teaching, learning, and research. They can include, but are not limited to, syllabi, reading lists, handouts and course readings, PowerPoint slides, and even videos. You can leverage all the time you spend teaching by publishing your teaching materials online for others to use in their own instruction. If you've spent a lot of time developing a new course, sharing the resources openly can help you get more credit for your work. For more information on OER, visit CTLT's resource page.
UBC Examples
- e.g. Arts One Arts One Digital Open, online extension or complement to Arts One that enables anyone to join this voyage of discovery and critical analysis.
- e.g. SPAN 312 Murder Madness and Mayhem wiki
- e.g. Phylo: Biology Trading Card Game by David Ng
OER Repositories
Content Curation
We are presented with a sea of information every day and sometimes the greatest service is to help sort it all in a meaningful way. Content curation takes many forms but usually starts when an interested individual takes it upon themself to help others find related materials. Some ideas for content curation include:
- Twitter lists
- Using Twitter for Curated Academic Content
- Life Science Hashtags Google spreadsheet
- Bibliographies e.g. Bibliography of Research on Social Network Sites
- Open Bibliographies using Zotero or Mendeley
- e.g.Ancient World Open Bibliographies plus related blog Ancient World Open Bibliographies
- Creating an authority page using a Wiki