We provide support to editorial boards who want to launch and publish electronic academic journals. With this relatively new service, the Library wants to use her knowledge of digital publishing and hosting journals to support editors connected to the University of Groningen.  Our support is primarily aimed at the development phase of a new journal. Once the first issue has been published, our support will be mainly technical in nature. We can also support the editorial boards of existing journals who want to make the transition from print to digital.

We use the publishing program Open Journal Systems (OJS) for this, which enables users to easily create a new digital journal. OJS is open-source software and used internationally to stimulate and increase access to research results. This journal management system is used by more than 10,000 journals.

The program supports all editorial activities and provides attractive services for readers, such as a notification service, printable versions of articles and links to social media.

Frank den Hollander and Jan Herman Veldkamp attended a SURF Mobile App Development summer school and designed an app. Thanks to a contribution from the IT Strategy Fund, the app team could be supplemented by developer Konstatin Ignatov and graphic designer Martijn van der Weide.

The app is certainly not going to offer all library functionalities, only those that are frequently used and are handy to have on your mobile device. The features offered by the first release include:

• Opening hours for each library location
• Available workstations at each library location
• Contact details and directions for each library location
• Browsing the catalogue, making reservations, renewing loans and checking your library account
• Library news and agenda
• Push notifications when a loan period expires or when a reservation or requested book has arrived

The app will be made available on iOS and Android.

The Zernike Library is developing a new approach, including, for example, the ‘Teach the Teacher’ project for 2012-2013 for large, intensive research course units at FEB. This new approach involves Nestor and Libguides. The Libguides for FWN in particular underwent some important changes in 2012, when Libguides permanently replaced the outdated literature guides offered on the websites of the aforementioned subject fields.

During the Study Start Week in September, the FEB degree programmes organized an intensive introduction session for their first-year students (more than a thousand in total). This included a short introduction to and tour of the Zernike Library.

• first year: becoming aware of information needs and formulating information requests
• second year: acquiring knowledge of information sources and IT
• third year: selecting, processing, recording and disseminating information

After completing a first-year workshop, students are able to:

• independently search for information in the library and on the internet
• assess whether this information is academic in nature or not

In their second year, students become familiar with:

• the most important bibliographical databases in their field
• how to save search actions

Central themes of the final year include:

• formulating a research question for their Bachelor’s thesis
• learning how to search for literature associated with this research question
• learning how to cite and incorporate these citations and literature references into their thesis with the help of RefWorks

All information skills workshops are part of the course units of the GMW curriculum. In the first two years, the specialization assignments of these workshops are closely linked to the course unit content and count towards the final mark. This embedding motivates students and helps them adopt an active attitude. A further focus on student motivation plays a central role in the implementation of the ‘GMW Library Information Skills Programme 2013’.