Teja Koler-Povh

Institutional repository as an important part of scholarly communication

Institutional repositories have been established as a good practice for quite some time. The European Commission requires archiving of research articles in institutional repositories in order to grant international project funding. Therefore, the interest in institutional repositories should increase in Slovenia as well. In 2011 the institutional repository DRUGG was built at the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering of the University of Ljubljana. By the end of 2012 more than 1400 scholarly publications (B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. theses) and nearly 150 research articles were archived in it. The repository DRUGG provides open access to scholarly publications and increases the visibility of the Facultys scientific publications. Building a repository is a complex project, in which the whole institution has to be involved. Library offers all technical support to the authors by archiving publications to the repository. Thus, the importance and the reputation of the library have increased, since it brings a significant added value to the quality of all activities at the faculty. The statistics of repository visits and downloads confirms its importance in Slovenia and abroad.

Information literacy of doctoral students in engineering and the librarian’s role

After a reform of the doctoral study programme at the authors’ faculty in Slovenia, an introductory course on scientific research methods became mandatory. It includes the topic of information literacy and covers its five main elements according to ALA 2000 standards. A librarian/researcher runs the practical part. As this course has been running for seven years we were interested in its impacts: (1) what are students’ subjective impressions about the course and (2) if and how such a systematic education on information literacy topics objectively impacts their publishing and citations. The paper first presents the results of the questionnaire among 120 PhD students (the response was 67.5%, i.e. 81 of them) conducted immediately after the completion of the information literacy course. Four indicators were measured to address Question 1. Question 2 was approached by examining students’ citation practices in their own PhD theses and their publishing results. The hypothesis was that the information literacy course increased students’ competence. It was tested using quantitative parameters, such as the number of references in PhD theses and the number of scientific publications written during the study and shortly after it, separately for reformed programme students who attended the information literacy course, and for pre-Bologna reform students who did not take this course. We found that although pre-reform students on average cited a few more references than their post-reform colleagues, there were smaller differences among post-reform than among pre-reform students. Also, the median/typical post-reform students cited more references, what can be attributed to the information literacy course.