King of the Hill? Seeking the New in Audience Research

This article looks at the ways of finding novelty in communication and audience research and questions the necessity to seek constant innovation in conquering new territories in audience research. Based on both personal experiences and those from the PhD students across Europe, the article maps five Basic elements where novelty in audience research is sought—new technologies, new countries, new audiences, interdisciplinarity and cross-media. The article argues that despite the constant pressure to innovate, there are important elements of value in traditional audience research that need to be kept, including methodological diversity and often repeated feel for the triangulation of audiences, producers and text. In this combination of keeping the old and seeking the new in audience research, the discipline can be seen growing richer and more diverse with every added contribution.     

Diasporas and Audience Studies: A Fruitful Match? Reflections From a Media Ethnographic Study on Turkish and Moroccan Film Audiences

Diasporic communities, especially in urban multicultural settings in the West, have emerged as one of the major sites for innovative audience research. This growing body of research connects media sociological questions with the study of global and transnational media flows. In this contribution, some of the main studies on diasporic audiences are revisited, exploring in which ways diaspora studies and audience studies have turned out to be a fruitful match. This is linked to and further exemplified by the discussion of a media ethnographic study of film reception among the Turkish and Moroccan communities in Antwerp, Belgium. It is demonstrated how the ‘diasporic turn’ reformulates traditional boundaries in audience research, proposing banal yet meaningful engagements with media texts. Finally, it is argued that a focus on diasporic audiences has revealed that ethnicity and nationality intersect with other social and cultural determinants such as gender, generation and religion, putting the diasporic proposition itself into perspective.     

From scraps to reams to mobile screens? An update on printing services in academic libraries

As a follow-up to their 2001/2002 study on printing services in academic libraries, the authors explore how the provision of printing services has changed over the last twelve years. This article explores how libraries are choosing to fund printing services as well as how technology, such as scanning and mobile devices, has changed the way printing services are provided. The results of the 2013 survey find a greater percentage of libraries are using a fee-based system for printing, and, while some technology is providing greater data and control for printing services, other technological advances are having unintended consequences for libraries’ printing infrastructure.     

From Archive,to Access,to Experience––Historical Documents as a Basis for Immersive Experiences

Libraries have been the key to preserving culture and historic legacy for centuries. One such treasure cataloged in The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) Libraries is a collection of over 33,000 Sanborn? Fire Insurance Maps. Originally kept safe in metal drawers, the library has embarked on a journey to digitize this abundance of information, combine it with other media such as photographs, and make it accessible through a web interface. Inspired by these efforts, we accessed this information and took it to the next level. Using state of the art 3D modeling and immersive technologies, we created a historic 3D model and immersive experiences of Penn State, exemplarily for the 1922 campus. The resulting experiences can be accessed through the web but also through head mounted displays (HMDs) and mobile phones in combination with VR viewers such as the Google Cardboard. Additionally, they can be used anywhere in the world or on the campus itself as a way to enable remote and in situ experiences and learning. Immersive experiences let us connect to the past, the present and the future, and as such offer value to digital cultural heritage efforts.     

Student as Communication Skills Trainer: From Research to “Concept Keys”

Objectives: (1) Students will become familiar with academic research; (2) students will understand that communication training should be based on sound research

Course(s): Interpersonal Communication, Public Speaking Fundamentals, Business and Professional Communication (or Any Skills-Based Course)     

From Paper to Internet: Academic Libraries in Transition

This paper examines the current trends, challenges, and issues facing all libraries, and discusses the strategies that academic libraries, in particular, are taking to transform their services, manage their organizations, and preserve their digital assets. It demonstrates how a network of distributed services, resource sharing, co-investment, and access integration contributes to sustainable library development.     

Interlibrary Loan's Efficacy in Meeting Students’ Expectations to Acquire Textbooks: Results From a Study Conducted in a Large Research Library

Students look to interlibrary loan (ILL) as a mechanism for acquiring textbooks. What are the students’ expectations of ILL and can ILL meet those expectations, especially given that textbooks are perceived as difficult to borrow? This article reports the findings of a survey designed to determine the expectations of students who had placed ILL requests for textbooks. By analyzing the records for those students’ requests using data from ILLiad, the degree to which students’ expectations can be met was determined. Students’ flexibility with editions provides ILL staff methods to increase fill rates and improve service.     

Readability: A Factor in Student Research?

Readability assessments of works cited in freshmen informative and argumentative speeches were performed with the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease assessment tools available in Microsoft Word. Students selected their sources independently, and their sources were grouped as journals, magazines and newspapers, and websites, which were then subdivided by domain type. The wide range of readability scores in sources cited in freshman speeches raises questions related to college freshmen's reading abilities and how that affects student's selection of sources when performing research for class assignments.     

The Integrated Library System: From Daring to Dinosaur?

ABSTRACT

The automated library system (ALS) has undergone significant changes since its inception in the 1970s. It is no longer simply a database to house and retrieve a library's holdings. It has become an integrated library system (ILS) comprised of robust clusters of systems involving every process and module related to libraries.

The Internet, open source, the increase in electronic resources, and the rising expectations of library users are changing the nature of the ILS. Library vendors are at times struggling to keep up with the demand for new services while providing support for existing services.

This article details the evolving role of the ILS and discusses where it could and should be headed.     

Will Undergraduate Students Play Games to Learn How to Conduct Library Research?

This exploratory study examines whether undergraduate students will play games to learn how to conduct library research. Results indicate that students will play games that are an integral component of the course curriculum and enable them to accomplish overall course goals at the same time they learn about library research.     

The Role of Patriotism in Explaining the TV Audience of National Team Games—Evidence From Four International Tournaments

In the literature addressing the determinants of TV audiences in sports, both the absolute and relative playing strength of the opponents play a prominent role. Regarding national team competitions, however, this study conjectures that patriotism matters as well. Analyzing the Swiss TV audience at 2 World Cups and 2 European Football Championships, this study finds strong evidence that TV ratings are highly affected by the sizes of the groups of foreign residents affiliated with the teams playing on the field.     

Convincing Family Caregivers to Participate in Research: “Does that Count as Caregiving?”

This essay details lessons learned in the completion of a dissertation on family caregivers. The four central lessons address challenges with scheduling for caregivers, caregiver understanding of their own activities, the culturally situated nature of caregiving, and the importance of advocating for one's research. Each lesson includes context for how the lesson emerged from a significant problem in applied research and tactics for improvement in similar or related work.     

To talk or not to talk? From Telkom to Hellkom: A critical reflection on the current telecommunication policy in South Africa from a social justice perspective

With the development of new information and communication technologies, the right to communicate assumes new dimensions, since it is almost impossible to fully participate in the globalized world without access to modern information and communication technologies. South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994 and has subsequently returned to the international arena. Its citizens should rightly expect to be able to participate in all that this return offers, not only politically, but also economically and socially. Telecommunications are vital to making such participation possible. In recognition of this fact, the newly elected government developed policies and enacted legislation to ensure that the telecommunications sector, and specifically the sole fixed line service provider Telkom, provides South African citizens affordable access to the telecommunications infrastructure whilst providing acceptable levels of service. However, rather than meeting its obligation to the government and the people of South Africa, Telkom has misused its monopoly. The social injustice that this situation creates is critically examined against the background of the right to communicate based on Rawls' principles of social justice and Sen's capability approach.     

How Much Do We Really know About Equity's Impact on Relational Communication? Issues in Measuring Equity in Communication Research

This study examined the question of whether the short global measure of equity that is typically used in communication research has fidelity to the manner in which equity was originally conceptualized. Participants were 100 pairs of college students in close relationships. They reported equity in their relationships using Hatfield's 1-item measure and also a component measure calculated with Walster et al.'s original formula for computing equity. The two measures correlated only r = .28 (students) and .26 (partners). Correlations between these measures and other relational properties that are theoretically related (e.g., satisfaction, closeness) did not provide definitive support for either measure as being a valid measure of equity. These findings have significant implications for study of equity and relational communication, especially relational maintenance, because they cast question on how valid our measurement of equity has actually been.     

Retrospective on Latin@ Rhetorical-Performance Scholarship: From “Chicano Communication” to “Latina/o Communication?”

This essay is a retrospective of Latina/o rhetorical and performance scholarship in which relevant themes and directions from the past 30 years are discerned. Identified are four periods beginning in a stage of recognition, progressing to integration, marked by a (re)turn and currently at re-politicalization. Within these periods two areas have been made explicit, namely, “Chicano communication” and “Latina/o communication” which I argue are parallel endeavors pursuing different yet complementary objectives that participate in reconstitution.     

Open Access to Research Outputs—Institutional Policies and Researchers' Views: Results From Two Complementary Surveys

This paper presents the results of two complementary surveys undertaken in 2008 as part of a wider project investigating the effects and impact of open access to research outputs in the UK. The institutional view, from a survey of academic librarians, is compared to researchers' perceptions and practices. Researchers were largely unaware of their institutions' policies with regard to open access, or whether they had an institutional repository. Reasons for making research outputs available on open access, or not doing so, were sought, and the role of open access material as a research resource investigated. The surveys found that many researchers maintained a suspicion of open access publications, both as authors and as users of scholarly material, together with a degree of ignorance about open access and the role of institutional repositories. This suggests that a degree of culture change may be needed, as institutions develop repositories with a view to future research assessment requirements, and more funders adopt open access mandates for the outputs from research which they fund.     

Audience Research Trends in Mainland China: An Analysis of Three Major Journalism and Mass Communication Journals, 1985–2002

This paper employed quantitative methods to explore the trends of audience research in Mainland China by analyzing research articles in three major journalism and communication academic journals. The author analyzed research approaches, research methods, medium of focus and theoretical frameworks in these audience research articles from 1985 to 2002. Unlike findings derived from the analyses of mass communication research articles in major international journals, most of the research articles in Mainland China used qualitative methods. Chinese scholars tend to adopt behaviorist and structural approaches towards the study of audience. The number of research articles that dealt with broadcast and print media exceeded any other media, while more and more studies on Internet users are being conducted. Chinese scholars began to develop theories in recent years. The future study will continue based on analysis of other research materials and comparison with audience research articles in leading international journals.     

Does Audience Participation on Facebook Influence the News Agenda? A Case Study of The Rachel Maddow Show

Social media have been theorized as being able to break the press' monopoly on agenda-setting, giving the public greater influence over which stories are covered in the news. This study uses a cross-lagged panel analysis to determine to what extent audience conversations on The Rachel Maddow Show's Facebook Page may have influenced the selection of issues covered in the TV broadcast. Results show a positive correlation between stories discussed on Facebook and the subsequent airing of similar stories on TV. The evidence also suggests that social media may enable many factors that influence both the media and the public agendas.