Sandrine Gropp: "Multimedia resources for everyone".
Once again this year, the shared documentation service is offering new resources accessible to students, lecturers and staff. Whether you're looking for professional documentation, training and teaching aids or simply leisure activities, the BU opens the doors to a physical and digital universe that's richer than you ever imagined. Find out more with Sandrine Gropp, SCD Director.
Some people at the University don't know it yet, but every year the shared documentation service offers new resources - for whom are they intended?
The fundamental mission of common documentation services is to contribute to training and research activities, by providing the necessary resources for students, but also for lecturers, researchers and staff - and I do mean all staff. Historically, these were paper resources, books, journals, etc., but today we're talking mainly about digital resources, and in recent years we've been offering more and more multimedia resources.
Among this year's new additions to the catalog are Arte Campus and Jove Education. Can you tell us more about these platforms?
ArteCampus is a documentary portal offered by the Arte channel and specially dedicated to higher education and adult training. Environment, medicine, arts, sciences... This platform offers over 2,300 videos and multimedia resources covering just about every discipline. Jove Education is more focused on scientific disciplines: chemistry, biology, statistics and more. There's content to help you deepen your knowledge from undergraduate level upwards, as well as video tutorials for organizing practical work, taking samples in the field or using specific types of equipment. And these are videos made by professionals.
How can teacher-researchers use these resources to enrich their courses? Do they use Moodle?
Yes, they can integrate them, in whole or in part, into the Moodle course, or distribute them during their face-to-face classes. In terms of rights, the subscription taken out by the University of Montpellier gives unlimited access and consultation rights to these resources, on or off campus, via the ENT.
And in practice, how do you access these platforms?
Whether you're a student, teacher, researcher or staff member, there's one entry point you'll want to use: the ENT, via the library tile. It works equally well on and off campus.
Of course, there's always a wide range of current events on offer?
Europresse lets you read the major daily and weekly headlines, some of them in PDF format. To access articles directly from Google, users can now install a browser extension called Ophirofox, which will then display a "Read on Europresse" button on the article. There's also Factiva, which covers more foreign press, although it also includes French titles, particularly in the economic field.
A new offer has appeared in the news, Brief.me. Can you tell us about it?
Yes, for several weeks now, at the request of students and staff who say they don't have much time to keep up to date, we've been offering Brief.me, supplemented by Brief.eco. Brief.eco is an independent, generalist daily newspaper that deciphers and summarizes the day's news. It takes less than 10 minutes to read, and you can subscribe to the newsletter to receive a summary of the news. Brief.me is responsive, so it can be accessed on a computer, tablet or smartphone.
There are also professional bases such as Cobaz. What is Cobaz?
Cobaz is one of the so-called professional databases, in the sense that it is not designed to explore a subject, but to search for specific information. In this case, all standards, including Afnor standards, are accessible. We initially subscribed to this resource at the request of the three IUTs (Montpellier-Sète, Béziers and Nîmes), which have a real need for it in their teaching, but we've found that it's also used by central departments, such as the Real Estate Department, for standards relating to buildings, or the Scientific Culture and Historical Heritage Department, which can find all the standards on archive management, the conditions for conserving old collections in buildings, etc. We also make available databases of standards relating to the management of archives and the conservation of old collections. We also provide IT databases, including Eni on application development, server management and data management.
There's also Biblio on Demand, which gives access to all school textbooks from primary to high school. Who uses this database?
Since last year, Biblio on Demand has been available as part of the monographs market. It's a market that doesn't just concern textbooks, but also the purchase of books on a title-by-title basis. As far as textbooks are concerned, this was initially a request from the Faculty of Education for the training of future schoolteachers and teachers, but it can also be used by all University staff with children in primary or secondary school to help them revise. Parents can access both the student's book and the teacher's book.
Another under-recognized resource at university is the preparation for language certifications such as the TOEFL or TOIC...
Yes, in fact, we provide multimedia resources for everyone to practice for these certifications, to revise grammar rules, but also pronunciation, by listening to texts. You can practice for the TOIC or TOEFL exams, check your level and identify areas for improvement.
We haven't even mentioned professional intelligence or preparation for competitive examinations for agents. How can SCD help them?
We offer books (paper and digital) to prepare for competitive examinations, which can be found in the BU catalog. As for the professional watch, this will depend on the professional field of the staff concerned. Depending on the department and the scope of its activities, it won't necessarily be the same databases. For example, we have databases and resources in law: Dalloz, LexisNexis, we've already talked about Cobaz for standards, and there are other resources in scientific fields... Often with the possibility of creating alerts on subject words or fields. Don't hesitate to ask the librarians for help, even online, from the ENT, Ubib tile. For doctoral students and teacher-researchers, we've also taken on The Meta News. It's a format that young researchers obviously really appreciate for their news monitoring.
Since you're talking about science, perhaps you'd like to say a word about the open science policy at the University of Montpellier?
Yes, the University of Montpellier is committed to a policy of deploying open science and promoting open science to ensure that research work is disseminated freely and accessible to all. There is an economic issue at stake. There is also a social issue at stake. The SCD, in collaboration with a number of departments and more particularly with the Research and Doctoral Studies Department, is working on two aspects of access to documentary resources. The first involves deploying and feeding open-access databases such as UM's Hal portal for scientific publications. The second is to encourage publishers to open up their paying and private resources via appropriate business models. Contrary to popular belief, open science is not free.
Let's not forget that the SCD also offers students and staff a range of leisure activities. What does this offer consist of?
We often forget that university libraries are also public libraries. So we'll never be media libraries with all the content they can have, but our BUs do have leisure collections for everyone, including staff (and even their children). We offer novels in French and English, comic books, DVDs of films and TV series, etc. We also loan readers to staff members. We also lend out DVD players. It's still early days, but we can already announce the third edition of l'Instant Noël! Surprise themed packs to be picked up in the BUs to discover a book, DVD or comic on loan. And just like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, discover the golden ticket that entitles you to a gift!