Understanding millennial learning in academic libraries: Learning styles,emerging technologies,and the efficacy of information literacy instruction

Abstract

Millennials, or Generation Y learners, are one of the largest constituencies academic libraries serve today. Understanding how and why these technology-savvy students learn increases the efficacy of information literacy instruction and ensures that libraries remain relevant in the digital age. This article addresses the complexity of the millennial learning phenomenon and its implications for instructional design and teaching in physical and virtual library environments. To situate millennial learning in the context of academic library instruction, this paper takes a large-scale, holistic approach that includes consideration of millennials’ learning styles, emerging technologies, and a multitude of other issues affecting Generation Y learning.     

The contemporary librarian: Skills, knowledge and attributes required in a world of emerging technologies

Seventy-six librarians participated in a series of focus groups in support of research exploring the skills, knowledge and attributes required by the contemporary library and information professional in a world of ever changing technology. The project was funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Text mining data analysis revealed three main thematic clusters (libraries, people, jobs) and one minor thematic cluster (community). Library 2.0 was broadly viewed by participants as being about change whilst librarian 2.0 was perceived by participants as not a new creation but just about good librarian practices. Participants expressed the general belief that personality traits, not just qualifications, were critical to be a successful librarian or information worker in the future.     

Relationships, trust and learning: experiences of emerging professionals working in collecting institutions

When emerging professionals start working in archival institutions, libraries and museums (also referred to as collecting institutions), they bring knowledge and skills gained through internships, formal study, volunteer activities and previous work experience. They learn new processes quickly, are passionate about working with holdings or collections and are keen to build their knowledge. They gain exposure to the different disciplines that are reflected in the roles of archival institutions, libraries and museums as they build their professional identity and consider future career directions. What else do they need? A research study about the experiences of a group of individuals embarking on first or subsequent careers and starting new positions in collecting institutions found that relationships were an essential component in developing their skills and knowledge and planning their future directions. The article would be of interest to students looking ahead to working in an archives, library or museum and exploring career paths; supervisors and mentors who work with emerging professionals; professional associations and communities of practice; and educators who have a role in developing curriculum in educational or workplace contexts.     

Combining shallow and deep learning approaches against data scarcity in legal domains

We are recently witnessing a radical shift towards digitisation in many aspects of our daily life, including law, public administration and governance. This has sometimes been done with the aim of reducing costs and human errors by improving data analysis and management, but not without raising major technological challenges. One of these challenges is certainly the need to cope with relatively small amounts of data, without sacrificing performance. Indeed, cutting-edge approaches to (natural) language processing and understanding are often data-hungry, especially those based on deep learning. With this paper we seek to address the problem of data scarcity in automatic Legalese (or legal English) processing and understanding. What we propose is an ensemble of shallow and deep learning techniques called SyntagmTuner, designed to combine the accuracy of deep learning with the ability of shallow learning to work with little data. Our contribution is based on the assumption that Legalese differs from its spoken language in the way the meaning is encoded by the structure of the text and the co-occurrence of words. As result, we show with SyntagmTuner how we can perform important tasks for e-governance, as multi-label classification of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolutions or legal question answering, with data-sets of roughly 100 samples or even less.     

Conceptualizing the interdisciplinary diffusion and evolution of emerging fields: The case of systems biology

This paper contributes to the longitudinal study and representation of the diffusion of scholarly knowledge through bibliometrics. The case of systems biology is used to illustrate a means for considering the structure and different roles of journals in the diffusion of a relatively new field to diverse subject areas. Using a bipartite network analysis of journals and subject categories, a core–intermediary–periphery diffusion structure is detected through comparative analysis of betweenness centrality over time. Systems biology diffuses from a core of foundational, theoretical areas to more specific, applied, practical fields, most of which relate to human health. Next, cluster analysis is applied to subject category co-occurrence networks to longitudinally trace the movement of fields within the core–intermediary–periphery structure. The results of these analyses reveal patterns of systems biology's diffusion across both theoretical and applied fields, and are also used to suggest how the dynamics of a field's interdisciplinary evolution can be realized. The author concludes by presenting a typology for considering how journals may function to support attributes of the core–intermediary–periphery structure and diffusion patterns more broadly.     

基于关键词共现的可视化技术的精神病专科医院文献主题分析

应用关键词共现的方法对全国发文量居前5位的精神痛专科医院发表的论文进行关键词词频及共现关系分析,并采用社会网络分析软件Ucinet形成可视化的共现网络图,对文献的内容进行挖掘分析。发现这5家医院在精神疾病的研究方面的侧重点各有差异。     

The emerging Web 2.0 social software: an enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and health care education

Web 2.0 sociable technologies and social software are presented as enablers in health and health care, for organizations, clinicians, patients and laypersons. They include social networking services, collaborative filtering, social bookmarking, folksonomies, social search engines, file sharing and tagging, mashups, instant messaging, and online multi-player games. The more popular Web 2.0 applications in education, namely wikis, blogs and podcasts, are but the tip of the social software iceberg. Web 2.0 technologies represent a quite revolutionary way of managing and repurposing/remixing online information and knowledge repositories, including clinical and research information, in comparison with the traditional Web 1.0 model. The paper also offers a glimpse of future software, touching on Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) and how it could be combined with Web 2.0 to produce the ultimate architecture of participation. Although the tools presented in this review look very promising and potentially fit for purpose in many health care applications and scenarios, careful thinking, testing and evaluation research are still needed in order to establish 'best practice models' for leveraging these emerging technologies to boost our teaching and learning productivity, foster stronger 'communities of practice', and support continuing medical education/professional development (CME/CPD) and patient education.     

From conventional governance to e-democracy: Tracing the evolution of e-governance research trends using network analysis tools

The adoption of e-governing practices has revolutionised the administrative machinery of governments worldwide by improving efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Researchers and administrators often aim to identify emerging research fronts and the timeline of the evolution to forecast and implement technology. In this work, we systematically investigate the trajectory of the global evolution and emerging research fronts as well as the prospects for e-governance using citation network analysis. The growth curve fitted to the number of articles published per year shows that the research activities are still in the ascendant phase. We visualise the global main path of the citation network and investigate the patterns to trace the knowledge diffusion path, major milestones, and emerging research fronts. The cluster analysis identifies the major topics of research as administration and information system management, e-governance framework design, efficiency or quality evaluation, and the application of social networks and open data leading to e-democracy. The adoption of open data and social networking for user interactions with government that leads to participatory governance are the emerging research trends. We also identify research that can have a future impact based on network parameters. The results contribute to the literature by setting the focus of future research, and assisting administrators in selecting suitable models and methodologies, and manufacturers with the development of required technical devices suitable for the upcoming phase of symbiosis.     

Communication apprehension and cognitive learning: An experimental analysis

This 2×3 factorial design was employed to test the relationship between communication apprehension and cognitive learning. The results of this quasi‐experimental study indicate that highly apprehensive students scored higher on an objective (written) test than they scored on an equivalent oral test. Scores on the objective exam did not differ across levels of communication apprehension. In addition, a small negative correlation between communication apprehension and learning was observed in the oral testing condition. The expected curvilinear relationship between communication apprehension and learning under the oral testing condition was not observed. A negative linear relationship between communication apprehension and learning was observed.     

Stochastic block model reveals maps of citation patterns and their evolution in time

In this study we map out the large-scale structure of citation networks of science journals and follow their evolution in time by using stochastic block models (SBMs). The SBM fitting procedures are principled methods that can be used to find hierarchical grouping of journals that show similar incoming and outgoing citations patterns. These methods work directly on the citation network without the need to construct auxiliary networks based on similarity of nodes. We fit the SBMs to the networks of journals we have constructed from the data set of around 630 million citations and find a variety of different types of groups, such as communities, bridges, sources, and sinks. In addition we use a recent generalization of SBMs to determine how much a manually curated classification of journals into subfields of science is related to the group structure of the journal network and how this relationship changes in time. The SBM method tries to find a network of blocks that is the best high-level representation of the network of journals, and we illustrate how these block networks (at various levels of resolution) can be used as maps of science.     

A quantitative measure to compare the disciplinary profiles of research systems and their evolution over time

By modeling research systems as complex systems we generalize similarity measures used in the literature during the last two decades. We propose to use the mathematical tools developed within the spin-glasses literature to evaluate similarity within systems and between systems in a unified manner. Our measure is based on the ‘overlap’ of disciplinary profiles of a set of research systems and can readily be integrated in the framework of traditional bibliometric profile analysis. The investigation of the distribution of the overlaps provides useful insights on the dynamics of the general system, that is whether it converges toward a unique disciplinary structure or to a differentiated pattern.We illustrate the usefulness of the approach by investigating the dynamics of disciplinary profiles of European countries from 1996 to 2011. We analyze several bibliometric indicators (including publications and citations) of European countries in the 27 Scopus subject categories. We compare the disciplinary profiles of European countries (i) among them; (ii) with respect to the European standard; and (iii) to the World reference.We find that there is a convergence toward a unique European disciplinary profile of the scientific production even if large differences in the scientific profiles still remain. The investigation of the dynamics by year shows that developing countries are converging toward the European model while some developed countries are departing from it.     

卫生信息管理专业学生学习动机影响因素与提升策略

目的：研究卫生信息管理专业学生学习动机影响因素及其提升策略.方法：采用自评问卷调查法,调查了蚌埠医学院卫生信息管理专业136名本科生的学习动机及其影响因素.实结果：不同性别和年级分组学生的外生学习动机存在差异,高考志愿分组学生的内生学习动机存在差异,＂喜爱所学专业＂、＂了解所学专业＂、＂了解就业去向＂、＂对信管类课程有信心＂和＂认可所学课程与就业的联系＂是卫生信息管理专业学生学习动机的主要影响因素.结论：建立健全学习激励机制、加大就业宣教、提高专业主干课程的教学质量,是提升卫生信息管理专业学生学习动机的有效措施.     

Information access company: The evolution of InfoTrac multi-source databases and their importance to library end-users

Throughout the last twenty years, Information Access Company has partnered with libraries to develop a wide range of electronic databases for patron reference needs. The multi-source database, one which incorporates several different source types, has emerged as the premiere reference tool in assisting patrons with research projects from start to finish, from the general idea to precise detail. Information Access Company is organized into three separate divisions, serving library, corporate, and home users. This article will focus on Information Access Company’s multi-source databases for libraries, and includes coverage on the rationale behind development to production and usage in the library setting.     

LINQing librarians for better practice: using slack to facilitate professional learning and development

ABSTRACT

Public librarians face various factors that can affect professional practice: socio-cultural nuances of diverse information needs, isolation due to system-wide location and/or geography, and systemic disconnection from professional networking and learning opportunities. To address these factors, an inquiry-based professional development model called The Librarians’ Inquiry Forum (LINQ) was devised and employed with a select group of Hawai’i-based public librarians via the cloud-based collaborative workspace platform, Slack, as a means of building a community-of-practice for professional learning and development. This article reports the evolution and early implementation of the LINQ model. Inquiry-based research often reveals data that raises more questions than answers. Questions raised from the reflective research performed with LINQ revealed ways in which the LINQ librarians learned “better” ways/approaches of practice. LINQ was found to be a viable method for enhancing public librarian professional development.     

Combining new technologies for effective collection development: a bibliometric study using CD-ROM and a database management program.

Librarians have used bibliometrics for many years to assess collections and to provide data for making selection and deselection decisions. With the advent of new technology--specifically, CD-ROM databases and reprint file database management programs--new cost-effective procedures can be developed. This paper describes a recent multidisciplinary study conducted by two library faculty members and one allied health faculty member to test a bibliometric method that used the MEDLINE and CINAHL databases on CD-ROM and the Papyrus database management program to produce a new collection development methodology.     

使用USMARC进行著录的若干疑问及解析

本文对使用USMARC从事文献编目工作中经常遇到的疑难问题进行了归纳总结，同时，结合作者本人对USMARC格式使用规则的学习和理解，给出了相应的分析说明和解决办法。     

Organic residue analysis of Egyptian votive mummies and their research potential

Vast numbers of votive mummies were produced in Egypt during the Late Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods. Although millions remain in situ, many were removed and have ultimately entered museum collections around the world. There they have often languished as uncomfortable reminders of antiquarian practices with little information available to enhance their value as artefacts worthy of conservation or display. A multi-disciplinary research project, based at the University of Manchester, is currently redressing these issues. One recent aspect of this work has been the characterization of natural products employed in the mummification of votive bundles. Using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry and the well-established biomarker approach, analysis of 24 samples from 17 mummy bundles has demonstrated the presence of oils/fats, natural waxes, petroleum products, resinous exudates, and essential oils. These results confirm the range of organic materials employed in embalming and augment our understanding of the treatment of votives. In this first systematic initiative of its kind, initial findings point to possible trends in body treatment practices in relation to chronology, geography, and changes in ideology which will be investigated as the study progresses. Detailed knowledge of the substances used on individual bundles has also served to enhance their value as display items and aid in their conservation.     

浅析我国档案文献编纂学的历史演进

一、理论的产生和积累 档案编纂理论来源于档案编纂实践.我国档案编纂历史悠久,古代和近代的史学家和文献学家在大量实践的基础上,对档案编纂进行了有益的研究探索,为档案文献编纂学的形成积累了有价值的理论.     

A new method of using student self-assessment: Bridging gaps between teaching content and student learning

ABSTRACT

This longitudinal pilot study developed and tested an instrument to assess students’ perceptions of the extent to which they accomplished the learning objectives that were listed in a number of communication course syllabi. In addition to students’ perceptions that they had improved from the start to the end of the semester in achieving course objectives, the findings revealed that students’ assessment was related positively to their ratings of professors’ teaching effectiveness. The instrument provides valuable information about students’ accomplishment of teachers’ course learning objectives.