Library Newsletter Issue 17

In this Issue

A new chapter of your learning and research @HKBU Library 2023

Editor’s note

It’s about a month into the new academic year. If you are reading the newsletter for the first time, a hearty welcome to the HKBU community! The Library is here for you, and I hope you will find it a good partner on your learning and research journey.

Talking about learning, we have an article about all the learning events you need to know to give yourself a good start. Learning what electronic resources you can use is a really critical part of that and Maggie Wong is going to let us know which top five databases received the most usage in 2021/22.

Digital Scholar Lab is a powerful tool for the digital humanities scholars that allows you to find, organize and analyse research data. Read more and have a go to see what it can do for you.

Of course, we can’t put out a newsletter without an update on the space enhancement work on L6 and 7 of the Main Library. And last but not least, a report about the School of Communication digitization project rounds up this issue of the newsletter. Happy reading!

Wan Yu Wong
Special Collections and Archives Librarian

A new chapter of your learning & research @ HKBU Library 2023

Welcome back to campus! The Library is always here to support your learning and research at the University.

New students may have already met with the corresponding Liaison Librarians through the Library Orientation arranged by your own department, or the compulsory online U-Life Orientation Workshop (UOW) 3: Get Ready for University Research for all Year 1 Undergraduate Students.

Slides from UOW 3 Workshop on 24 August 2023

As a current HKBU staff or student, you can use your staff / student card to access the Au Shue Hung Memorial Library (AML, Main Library), Dr. Stephen Riady Chinese Medicine Library (CML), and Shek Mun Campus Library (SMCL), to use our Library facilities and collections.

Besides the physical tours held from September 5-7, you can also watch the virtual Main Library Tours led by our University Librarian, Mr. Christopher Chan, to get to know the facilities available at the Main Library.

Mr. Christopher Chan (University Librarian) in front of Au Shue Hung Memorial Library (Main Library)

Another fun way to get to know the library is to play the Library Mystery Challenge, which requires you to find Angela, a missing student. This interactive treasure hunt game will help familiarize yourself with useful library services and facilities, plus a chance to win a $100 book coupon!

Remember that using OneSearch, the Library’s one-stop search engine, will help you find print or electronic books and online articles easily and quickly. For further in-depth research, our subscribed Electronic Resources and Databases will help you get news and journal articles, conference papers, and other publications.

What’s more? Feel free to join Library Survival Skills Workshops to enhance your information skills! Stay tuned for more of our Library Learning Events, such as EndNote Workshops in October. With EndNote (a citation management software), you can organize your references and create in-text citations or reference lists automatically and instantly when writing assignments, papers or dissertations in Microsoft Word.

Lastly, Ask a Librarian whenever you need any library assistance. See you around in HKBU Library!

Nancy Chan
Head of User and Information Services

Gale Digital Scholar Lab

Calling all scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences – have you ever found yourselves consumed by the tasks of searching, preparing, and formatting historical texts for analysis? We understand that this process can be time-consuming and not always efficient.

From now until 31 August 2024, the Library offers a free trial of Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a powerful platform that streamlines the process of finding, cleaning, organizing, and analyzing data through natural language processing and text mining. Users can create content sets by selecting valuable primary sources from Gale’s vast digital archives or uploading their documents to the Lab.

The Lab empowers you to delve into extensive corpora with the following functionalities:

Curate and clean OCR texts of primary sources
Categorize and group documents with similar sentiments and textual attributes via Document Clustering and Sentiment Analysis
Identify frequently appearing terms and entities, such as persons and places, with Ngrams and Named Entity Recognition
Group terms into topics that co-occur frequently revealing hidden patterns within the content set with Topic Modelling
Conduct lexicographical analysis via Parts of Speech tagging
Retrieve overlooked primary sources that may be essential to your research
Visualize and download your findings in graph format for effortless sharing

The digitization of archival materials coupled with tech-based text analysis has changed the field of humanities research. The Lab is designed to transform the way researchers access and analyse primary sources, promising to unlock new avenues in digital humanities.

To learn how this tool is used in practice, the Library has developed two use cases for your reference:

An example for modern Chinese history about Sun Yat-sen
An example for religious studies and linguistics about Martin Luther King

Wait, there’s more…..

If you are eager to develop valuable digital literacy skills and have your work recognized, and are an undergraduate or master’s student in a relevant discipline, we invite you to participate in Gale Digital Scholar Lab Essay Prize. Craft an engaging 1,500-2,000-word essay using the Lab and submit it by December 15, 2023. Prizes include US$250 for 1st place, US$150 for 2nd place, and US$100 for 3rd place. All prize-winning and commended essays will be published on Gale Digital Scholar Lab Showcase, giving you valuable exposure.

Cecilia Chung
Assistant Officer
Digital Initiatives and Research Cluster

Update on the Space Enhancement Project for L6&7, Main Library

It has been almost 5 months since Levels 6 and 7 of the Main Library were closed to patrons for the renovation project. What has happened since then? Let’s take a quick look!

First of all, we moved 60,000 high-usage books to Level 1 of the Main Library. Level 1 is not accessible to patrons because it is mainly used for storage. The high-usage books that used to live on Levels 6 and 7 are now on these blue and red compact shelves on Level 1, shown in the photos below. These books are still available for borrowing (click here to see an example), you will still be able to find them in the OneSearch, all you need to do is to click on the Request button.

We have also added 200,000+ e-books to our collection, covering different disciplines and subjects! These e-books can be found via the Library OneSearch or on ProQuest Ebook Central.

Now let’s take a quick peek at the construction site!

Our University Librarian, Chris, is visiting the site

New windows are being installed. These are vital to the Library as we need to ensure no water will leak in during the rainy season! The old ventilation ducts were stripped out in August and the new ones are being installed in September. A modern looking ceiling is starting to take shape.

The photo on the right shows the location on Level 7 where a lifting platform will be installed. One of the purposes of this renovation is to increase the accessibility of study space inside the library. This lift will allow patrons with physical disabilities to be able to use both wings on Level 7 previously could only be accessed via staircases.

We also spotted a new study table on the site! – see the photo on the left. Please note that this might not be the final furniture used, but we are just as excited as you are to see what the new study furniture might look like!

This is what we have to share so far, we will continue posting the latest photos and news of the renovation project on its dedicated webpage – Library Space Enhancement. Do check in here anytime to see if there are any updates!

Maggie Wong
Information Services Librarian

Truth is Virtue: history of HKBU School of Communication through its publications

Last year the School of Communication began a partnership project with the Special Collections and Archives team in the Library to digitize some of the School’s publications for online access. Each party made the effort to locate as many publications as possible, and eventually about 250 items were earmarked for scanning. At the end of July, 43 publications were uploaded to the Collection Discovery space on the Library’s website. They cover the period of 1980s to date, as well as a wide range of topics, including:

official publications such as bulletin, course proposals and annual reports
commemorative publications such as the School’s 10^th, 30^th and 40^th anniversary commemorative books
exhibition catalogues of students’ creations
reports of the Pulitzer Prize Winners Workshops
books on the local mass media or current affairs
stylebooks for The Young Reporter

There are also some serial publications made available online for the first time, notably:

傳理
新報人財經
The Young Financial Post

From the Library’s perspective, this is an outstanding example of using the Library’s digitization capabilities to enhance access to publications important to the School’s history. Current students and staff, as well as alumni and the general public, will be able to learn more about the historical development of this discipline in the university and the impact it has made on the profession in Hong Kong.

The Library always welcome opportunities to work with schools, faculties and offices to collect and digitize their publications. We are grateful to the School of Communication for taking the lead to be our first partner.