Our latest major initiative is the JoVE Librarian Travel Award, which encouraged academic librarians from North America, Europe, and the Middle-East to share their ideas on outreach methods to faculty and students.
Four submissions for the award were from STEM university librarians in Israel. The judges from the JoVE Library Advisory Board granted an award to Dorit Van-Moppes, the Librarian of Natural and Engineering at Ben-Gurion University, and three other participants from the U.S. and France.
Dorit is a great ambassador and advocate for our video publication. As she says: “One of the most important tools at my disposal for teaching students how to find and filter information is JoVE. It provides a visual display of academic material of high quality and reliability in a large variety of STEM fields.”
Hand in hand with librarians
JoVE typically enjoys strong relationships with STEM librarians in Israel. The librarians understand the unique value of JoVE, and give us an opportunity to provide the premier science video content to scientists and students at their institutions. Among 60-something countries served by JoVE, Israel is a strong adopter of our innovative video publication, currently having 15 institutional subscribers.
Another statistic: Eight of the country’s nine large universities subscribe to JoVE. This past year alone, we saw nearly 42,000 users from Israel utilizing the JoVE website for their research and education. This underscores the fact that despite Israel’s relatively small population, it’s a major global innovation leader with a great focus on STEM research and education.
Strong library and personal connections
The popularity of our video publication at Israeli universities resonates with JoVE’s leaders. Dr. Moshe Pritsker, co-founder and CEO of JoVE, was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Weizmann Institute of Science. He finds it exciting to bring the best science video publication to Israel and the international scientific community.
There are already 120-plus articles published from Israeli institutions. The latest publication just came out this month from the group of Dr. Raz Zarivach at Ben-Gurion University describing a method to measure iron content in plants.
According to our Director of Sales Eran Zait, some Israeli universities have even purchased a JoVE Unlimited license, which provides them complete access to all JoVE content anytime, from anywhere. He says: “Researchers tell us they love using our journal to learn new methods. It’s because our videos increase the productivity of their work and save them a lot of time, resources and money. They also enjoy using our Science Education library to teach their students, while improving overall class and lab performance.”
Here at JoVE, we really enjoy having such relationships with the international research community and STEM librarians worldwide.
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