Community Impact of Science Centers: Is There Any?

In a competitive environment, established cultural institutions need to justify their activities and to provide measurable indications of success when applying for public and private funds. Science centers are part of the movement striving to enhance public understanding of science. The educational aspects of science centers have been the subject of numerous studies, while there is much less tangible information on the economic, political, or public impact of our institutions. There is clear evidence that learning behaviors occur in non‐formal settings. Crude assessments of the economic contribution by a cultural institution to the local economy can fairly easily be made. These include the direct purchasing power of the institutional budget and the salaries that the employees get, and an estimate of the direct costs related to the visits. An indication of the impact on local communities may be estimated from the attendance figures as a percentage of the total metropolitan population. Science centers tend to attract media attention for the exhibitions, programs, and events that they stage. This can be measured. The impact on the local economy, on political agendas, and on public perception of science has been only rudimentarily studied. Methods have not been developed, nor have the critical questions been clarified. More research, including compilation of existing scattered proprietary data, is needed. An active role in promoting a research agenda, or at least in compiling and accessing relevant data, could be taken by the professional organizations of science centers.     

Textbook Affordability: Is There a Role for the Library?

Try searching the library catalog, as many students do each semester for the latest version of the textbook being used in a class at many universities and you will likely come up empty-handed. Many academic libraries—due to high prices, frequently issued new editions, and a tendency to go missing from the collection—have justifiably chosen to play only a marginal role in the provision of textbooks on campus. However, the dynamics of the textbook market are changing rapidly and this presentation explored the question: Should libraries reconsider the roles they play in the provision of course materials on campus? This session focused on the issue of affordability in the context of the rapid evolution and increased availability of e-textbooks (electronic versions of textbooks). Topics covered included: an overview of the e-textbook market, purchasing options and outlets for e-textbooks, new business models for institutional access to e-textbooks, potential savings from e-textbook adoptions, information on negotiating with publishers and platform providers, and why the library is well-positioned to play a prominent role in the provision of e-textbooks.     

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.     

Is There a Role for the Library in a Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Program?

ABSTRACT

With unique historical resources, academic archives can and should play an active role in support of the teaching and research missions of a college. Not only can archival teaching and collaborative learning teach students the importance of primary resources and how to use them but they also can provide support for the archives. Through partnership with faculty and students, the collaborative research program at Rollins College provides a viable means for enhancing the awareness and use of the unique historical collections, and, therefore, enriching students' appreciation of the liberal arts heritage of the institution while also providing students with a meaningful research experience.     

Self-Dealing or Market Transaction?: An Exploratory Study of Vertical Integration in the U.S. Television Syndication Market

This study explores the programming relationship between vertically integrated station groups and their affiliated syndicators in the context of two frameworks associated with the advantages of vertical integration: the transaction cost and vertical foreclosure theories. The programming sources for various stations that are vertically integrated with syndicators were assessed. The results indicated that leading television station groups had purchased relatively more products from their vertically integrated syndicators. The pattern of internal transfer through vertical integration was especially apparent in the acquisition of newer first-run products that are associated with uncertain quality and less audience information. The findings generally support the transaction cost theoretical perspective. However, the data did not paint a picture of market foreclosure in this industry.     

LibGuides and Web-Based Library Guides in Comparison: Is There a Pedagogical Advantage?

This study investigates whether the platform used to deliver a tutorial matters in online information literacy instruction and assesses the overall quality of an information literacy tutorial assignment given to an undergraduate survey class. The study asks whether there is any pedagogical advantage between information literacy tutorials created in the LibGuides library guide creation software and tutorials created as Web pages. This research question is relevant to current studies of online information literacy tutorials, particularly given the increasingly dominant but under-researched position of LibGuides in the academic library world for delivering guides and tutorials. Two separate groups of students completed LibGuides and Web page versions of the same information literacy tutorial assignment in a university undergraduate communication course. Survey results of these 89 students indicated that both the LibGuides and Web page platforms deliver online instruction content effectively and achieve learning objectives almost equally well. Results also indicated content areas within the assignment that could be strengthened.     

Perceptions of the Future of Cataloging: Is the Sky Really Falling?

Cataloging procedures have evolved in many academic research libraries over the past 10 years. Some predicted trends—outsourcing, original cataloging by paraprofessionals, more digital material—have been borne out. Others, such as a decline in the amount of material to catalog or in the number of professional catalogers, have not. Changes have been mostly procedural and have not affected the catalog itself. Recently, however, the emergence of powerful Internet search engines has allowed researchers to bypass the catalog. This has led some to question the wisdom of continuing it and others to vigorously defend current practice. In 2005–2007 this debate became especially heated, but a consensus appears to be emerging that although the character of the professional cataloger's job will continue to evolve over the next 5 to 10 years there will not be a revolution. The cataloger's basic skills will still be needed and the fundamental nature of cataloging will remain much as we know it.     

Where Does it Hurt? Identifying the Real Concerns in the Ethics of Reference Service

No abstract available for this article.     

A fair history of the Web? Examining country balance in the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, an important initiative that maintains a record of the evolving Web, has the promise of being a key resource for historians and those who study the Web itself. The archive's goal is to index the whole Web without making any judgments about which pages are worth saving. The potential importance of the archive for longitudinal and historical Web research leads to the need to evaluate its coverage. This article focuses upon whether there is an international bias in its coverage. The results show that there are indeed large national differences in the archive's coverage of the Web. A subsequent statistical analysis found differing national average site ages and hyperlink structures to be plausible explanations for this uneven coverage. Although the bias is unintentional, researchers using the archive in the future need to be aware of this problem.     

Verbal Aggression,Race, and Sex on Reality TV: Is This Really the Way It Is?

This content analysis examines verbal aggression, race, and gender presented in a composite week of popular reality TV programming on cable and broadcast television. Results show that African Americans were found to be overrepresented and depicted disproportionately as more verbally aggressive and more likely to be victims of verbal aggression than other races/ethnicities. African American women were more likely than men to be involved in verbal aggression, both as aggressor and victim. The results are discussed in terms of the potential effects of exposure to verbal aggression and the accompanying contextual factors found in reality TV programming.     

Meaning at the Interface: New Genres,New Modes of Interpretative Engagement?

As audience reception scholars commute from audiences to literacies, both of which share the concept of interpretation, this article sets out to draw together themes around the changing nature of interpretive work, from 6 texts that have reflected recently, in different ways, on interpretation in new media environments. In reviewing a multithreaded conversation across 4 books from literacy studies, media and communications, and user studies, I select 2 essays, written at a crucial moment for reception studies, to provide her a narrative. Speaking from diverse fields, these works suggest a widespread agreement that there is a need to rethink terminologies and concepts from mass-mediated communication in the age of interactive media, not because they no longer prove useful, but because they provide constructive intellectual challenges in thinking through the changing natures of texts and readers, genres and interpretation, literacies, and legibilities, as we await new modes every day, for all of these, but also perhaps, new modes of interpretative engagement.     

Recent Romanian Cinema: Is It a Real New Wave or Just a Splash in the Water?

This article demonstrates that recent Romanian cinema manifests the features of a new, coherent, and strong film movement that was correctly tagged as a late new wave in the context of postcommunist significant changes that have shaped the Romanian society and its artistic milieu over the past two decades. By discussing the general characteristics of new waves and the legacies of the most influential cinematic movements of the 20th century, several common features are highlighted, as is the Romanian directors’ capacity to integrate and restate these influences through innovative techniques and an original approach to reality. The analysis is exemplified through the exploration of some of the most representative films of the recent Romanian cinema, prizewinners at prestigious international film festivals.     

The Archival and Library Viewpoints of a Collection in a Digital Environment: Is There Any Room for Compromise?

ABSTRACT

This article explores the archivists' and librarians' definition of a collection, and how they respectively arrange their collections in the context of collection development and collection management issues in a digital library. It centers on possible cooperative solutions and highlights, as a case study, the efforts of the Auburn University Digital Projects Committee to meet these challenging collection issues.     

Is It a Small Publishing World After All?: Media Monopolization of the Children's Book Market, 1992-1995

This study considers how the trend toward media conglomeratization affected the little-studied industry that provided books to millions of children between 1992 and 1995. Two hypotheses are proposed that test different aspects of competitive market theory. The first predicts that the size of the publisher' s ultimate parent company will influence sales, and the second predicts that children's books that have ties with other media products will sell more copies than books that have no such ties. The second hypothesis is supported and the implications for the concentration of this segment of the publishing industry are discussed. In particular, this question is asked: In an environment of continuing media concentration, where are the measurable effects of that concentration in this market?     

The restructuring of the national archives of New Zealand: An ideological experiment?

This article examines the proposal for restructuring of the National Archives of New Zealand using the functional model in which policy advice and service delivery are separated, a public sector reform principle in widespread use. The proposal results from a report in 1994 by consultants, McDermott Miller Ltd., commissioned by the Treasury and the Department of Internal Affairs. Its contents, recommendations, and later amendments are examined in some detail. Particular attention is paid to the effectiveness and appropriateness of the model for a public archives agency, and the constitutional and legal implications.     

Digital Publishing in Developing Countries: The Emergence of New Models?

In developing countries, where traditional publishing faces enormous challenges, digital may work as an accelerator that could help local actors to skip a stage and position themselves at a much more advanced level. However, for domestic players to really benefit from the electronic era, it will be essential for them not to adopt systems implanted from outside on an as is basis, but rather to invest in new models better suited for the local people’s expectations and requirements.     

Creativity in science and the link to cited references: Is the creative potential of papers reflected in their cited references?

Several authors have proposed that a large number of unusual combinations of cited references in a paper point to its high creative potential (or novelty). However, it is still not clear whether the number of unusual combinations can really measure the creative potential of papers. The current study addresses this question on the basis of several case studies from the field of scientometrics. We identified some landmark papers in this field. Study subjects were the corresponding authors of these papers. We asked them where the ideas for the papers came from and which role the cited publications played. The results revealed that the creative ideas might not necessarily have been inspired by past publications. The literature seems to be important for the contextualization of the idea in the field of scientometrics. Instead, we found that creative ideas are the result of finding solutions to practical problems, result from discussions with colleagues, and profit from interdisciplinary exchange. The roots of the studied landmark papers are discussed in detail.