The PhD Abstracts Collections in FLAX: Academic English with the Open Access Electronic Theses Onlin Home : #OER17

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Wed, Apr 5 2017, 11:20am – 12:40pm

Authors: Alannah Fitzgerald, and Chris Mansfield

Room: Seminar 4

Theme: Inst/Org Politics

Type: Presentations

Description

We intend to give a presentation showcasing the new PhD Abstracts Collections from the open-source FLAX project (Flexible Language Acquisition flax.nzdl.org), which reuse digital content and metadata from the Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) managed by the British Library. These collections have been developed to provide learners, practitioners and researchers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) with greater access to and reuse of the artefacts of the academy. We will also present a discussion on the growing sense that organisations such as the British Library and the Oxford Text Archive (who manage, for example, the British Academic Written and Spoken corpora) are interested in non-commercial educational reuse applications of digital content in learning, teaching and research. Indeed, by far the biggest impact of openness in the higher education sector has been with open access, showing the importance of government agencies in promoting accessible research (Finch Group, 2012) to ensure “enhanced availability of discoverable, reusable and repurposable academic open content.” (JISC, 2011).

We will also present a discussion on the growing sense that organisations such as the British Library and the Oxford Text Archive (who manage, for example, the British Academic Written and Spoken corpora) are interested in non-commercial educational reuse applications of digital content in learning, teaching and research. Indeed, by far the biggest impact of openness in the higher education sector has been with open access, showing the importance of government agencies in promoting accessible research (Finch Group, 2012) to ensure “enhanced availability of discoverable, reusable and repurposable academic open content.” (JISC, 2011).

In this proposed presentation, we will present interview data with collections curators and managers at the British Library responsible for helping to change the institutional culture toward one that is more open and inclusive of the culture of reuse. We will also demonstrate the perceived value that academic English language resource stakeholders place on authentic open access research texts, which can be mined with data-driven learning systems like FLAX for developing academic literacies in EAP teaching and learning programmes.

Some research has been conducted into abstracts and the writing of abstracts (Hyland & Tse, 2005; Swales & Feak, 2009; Bondi & Lores Sanz (Eds.), 2014). Where abstract corpora have been deployed in research, however, they have been limited to only a few disciplines and are often inaccessible for querying purposes by researchers as well as EAP teachers and learners due to copyright restrictions. In response to this lack of accessible abstract corpora, the FLAX project has developed the largest open access research abstract corpora that are inclusive of all subject disciplines. EThOS at the British Library uses the Dewey decimal classification system, which organizes library materials by discipline or field of study. Here with the PhD Abstracts Collections in FLAX, abstracts are directed into one of four overarching discipline divisions to make up the following sub-collections: Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences and Life Sciences. The authors were recently awarded the runner-up prize in the 2016 British Library Labs Awards for their work in the Teaching and Learning category for the reuse of digital content managed by the British Library.

References:

Abstracts in Academic Discourse: Variation and Change, Marina Bondi, Rosa Lores Sanz (Eds.). Peter Lang, Bern (2014). 361 pp.

Finch Group (2012). Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications. Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings. Retrieved from http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/

Joint Information Systems Committee. (2011). JISC Grant funding 18/11: OER rapid innovation. Retrieved from http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140616011838/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2011/11/oerrapidinnovation.aspx

Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2005). Hooking the reader: a corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts. English for Speciﬁc Purposes, 24(2), 123e139.

Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2009). Abstracts and the writing of abstracts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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