Subject searching of monographs online in the medical literature.

Searching by subject for monographic information online in the medical literature is a challenging task. The NLM database of choice is CATLINE. Other NLM databases of interest are BIOTHICSLINE, CANCERLIT, HEALTH, POPLINE, and TOXLINE. Ten BRS databases are also discussed. Of these, Books in Print, Bookinfo, and OCLC are explored further. The databases are compared as to number of total records and number and percentage of monographs. Three topics were searched on CROSS to compare hits on BBIP, BOOK, and OCLC. The same searches were run on CATLINE. The parameters of time coverage and language were equalized and the resulting citations were compared and analyzed for duplication and uniqueness. With the input of CATLINE tapes into OCLC, OCLC has become the database of choice for searching by subject for medical monographs.     

How do public libraries function as meeting places?

How are libraries used as meeting places, and by whom? Through survey data, six categories of places are identified: the library as a “square,” as a place for meeting diverse people, as a public sphere, as a place for joint activities with friends and colleagues, as a metameeting place, and as a place for virtual meetings. Representative samples of the population in three townships in Oslo, each with a markedly different demographic profile, are surveyed. Multivariate regression analyses are performed to analyze why some people use the library for a range of meetings and others do not, as well as to examine variations in the use of the library for different kinds of meetings. Public libraries are shown to be used for a variety of meetings. Community involvement is more important than township and demographic variables in explaining variations in use of the library as a meeting place. Correlations between low income and low education and high use of the library as a meeting place were found, indicating that the library as a meeting place plays a substantial role in equalizing the possibilities of being an active citizen across social and economic differences. The study contributes to understanding the role of the public library in a multicultural context. The public library as a unique and complex meeting place has important implications for future librarianship.     

基于心理契约的编者与作者关系优化

融洽的编者和作者关系促进双方的心理平衡、尊重、理解和认同,彼此间起激励作用;心理契约遭到破坏,编者和作者间产生失望、挫折和欺凌感,影响编者工作积极性和作者信任,甚至产生懈怠、报复或不端行为。本文基于心理契约,从微观视角,探讨编者和作者信任关系的构建与承诺履行机制,分析彼此间心理期望的内容、心理契约违背的感知、违背的危害及基于心理契约的编者和作者关系优化策略。     

新农村建设中农业期刊的功能开发与拓展

结合我国社会主义新农村建设中存在的问题,主张使科技期刊智库、桥梁、转化器的社会功能达到进一步开发与拓展,在科技推广中扮演裁判、教练、媒人角色,当好“龙头”,培养新型农民,以技术链延伸产业链和价值链,形成资源节约型、环境友好型农村技术体,提升我国农业强国的地位。     

Addressing the sublime: space,mass representation,and the unpresentable

Mass representations of the sublime use apostrophe as a mode of address that normalizes a moment of expected failure of discourse. Regardless of whether a viewer experiences “sublimity,” mass representations of what is supposedly beyond discourse embody the expected limits of communication, aestheticizing conditions of impossibility for discourse, and thereby constituting a space wherein the humanist subject may become a recognizable self in a public sense. Constituting a relationship between the spectator as human and the sublime objects as greater than human, a mass reproduced sublime thus helps establish discursive spaces of humanism. Although the aesthetics of the sublime can be exceptionally varied, the essay applies these ideas to popular Ansel Adams photographs, which illustrate the problems of attempting to represent the unrepresentable and the invocation of a particular kind of subjectivity as a commonplace.     

The Role of a Scene in Framing a Story: An Analysis of a Scene's Position,Length, and Proportion

A scene is proposed as the unit of analysis in broadcast news studies as a way to measure a more accurate representation of perspectives and arguments of a story. Based on film studies, a scene is defined as a unit that represents continuity in time, place, character, ideas, or themes in a news story. The role of a scene in a news story is analyzed by examining how the position, length, and proportion of a scene frame and valence are related to story frame and valence.     

“A Home for Me When I Am So Far from Home”: Perceptions of Libraries by Immigrant Mothers in Language Acquisition and Cultural Acclimation

This phenomenological study examines the unique perceptions of immigrant women concerning the public library as a meeting place, a support to integration into American culture, and a provider of programs for acquisition of the English language. The library offers a place for observing the culture of the new country from a distance to active participation; it is an arena for comfort and consolation in a difficult life situation as well as an arena for activity and participation. It provides support in developing friendships, acclimating to a new culture, learning a new language, and providing avenues to employment. Three mothers, who fulfilled the criteria for the study, were selected from an initial focus group. Women from Kurdistan, Mexico, and Indonesia were interviewed individually to gain an understanding on the issues brought forth in the focus group. They participated in interviews over the course of 6 months. These programs became a fortuitous blending of an established community with a group of families looking for a support community in a new country. This study has implications for institutions serving immigrants as they look to find a community of support, to learn English, and to acclimate to American culture as they create a comfortable identity that blends their home country with the new country.     

Face the Books: A Leadership Journey

Leadership, as a topic, has seen a lot of interest in academics as well as with practitioners. The search, however, has not yielded a concrete formula, though there are quite a few theories which have worked well in certain contexts. The context of special libraries is one such area which has a huge potential in discovering what leadership actions have worked well and what can be a framework for success in other special libraries, especially when the utility of special libraries is being questioned in a corporate environment. The dearth of leadership and leadership development literature in special libraries, from a practitioner's point of view, provides a good opportunity for sharing a small journey of success. The column builds upon the application of leadership actions deriving from diverse and merging fields like learning and development, organizational behavior, marketing, and human psychology of reading in making a case for the utility of corporate libraries in the development of employees.     

Organizational network analysis: A study of a university library from a network efficiency perspective

A library is a particular kind of organization. It plays a valuable role and is dedicated mainly to the development and growth of society. Analyzing a library from the perspective of a network of relations and ties, which exist between social and technical network nodes, contributes to a more nuanced assessment of effectiveness. Building on social network analysis and going beyond human relations in a library, this study examines perceptions related to knowledge and skills, resources, and tasks, identified through a survey conducted at the university library in Warsaw. Overall, the analyzed library is characterized by redundancy and congruence of knowledge, resources, and tasks required at the library (organizational) level and at the particular node (employee) level. Analyzing the network efficiency of a library is a new and valuable research design which uses a unique network measurement that should attract more interest in the future. This form of analysis gives managers the tools to dynamize relations and understand the flow, use, and sharing of resources or knowledge within a library context. However, more studies in the public sector would be invaluable in order to formulate new theories or conclusions.     

Scientific discovery and topological transitions in collaboration networks

We analyze the advent and development of eight scientific fields from their inception to maturity and map the evolution of their networks of collaboration over time, measured in terms of co-authorship of scientific papers. We show that as a field develops it undergoes a topological transition in its collaboration structure between a small disconnected graph to a much larger network where a giant connected component of collaboration appears. As a result, the number of edges and nodes in the largest component undergoes a transition between a small fraction of the total to a majority of all occurrences. These results relate to many qualitative observations of the evolution of technology and discussions of the “structure of scientific revolutions”. We analyze this qualitative change in network topology in terms of several quantitative graph theoretical measures, such as density, diameter, and relative size of the network's largest component.To analyze examples of scientific discovery we built databases of scientific publications based on keyword and citation searches, for eight fields, spanning experimental and theoretical science, across areas as diverse as physics, biomedical sciences, and materials science. Each of the databases was vetted by field experts and is the result of a bibliometric search constructed to maximize coverage, while minimizing the occurrence of spurious records. In this way we built databases of publications and authors for superstring theory, cosmic strings and other topological defects, cosmological inflation, carbon nanotubes, quantum computing and computation, prions and scrapie, and H5N1 influenza. We also built a database for a classical example of “pathological” science, namely cold fusion. All these fields also vary in size and in their temporal patterns of development, with some showing explosive growth from an original identifiable discovery (e.g. carbon nanotubes) while others are characterized by a slow process of development (e.g. quantum computers and computation).We show that regardless of the detailed nature of their developmental paths, the process of scientific discovery and the rearrangement of the collaboration structure of emergent fields is characterized by a number of universal features, suggesting that the process of discovery and initial formation of a scientific field, characterized by the moments of discovery, invention and subsequent transition into “normal science” may be understood in general terms, as a process of cognitive and social unification out of many initially separate efforts. Pathological fields, seemingly, never undergo this transition, despite hundreds of publications and the involvement of many authors.     

A brave new world?—Understanding U.S.-China coproductions: collaboration,conflicts, and obstacles

The unprecedented growth in U.S.-China film coproductions and Chinese companies’ high-profile investment in Hollywood studios and U.S. cinemas signal a shift in global power relationships and a reshaping of the global media structure. Combining textual and document analysis with interviews of policy makers and film professionals in China and Hollywood, this article explores the implications of U.S.-China coproduction for global communication. The article proposes three ways of understanding coproductions: as a market-driven and profit-seeking partnership, as a policy and power negotiation, and as a brave experimental adventure. This article contends that the current state of U.S.-China coproduction manifests the contradiction between desire and reality. Although coproductions have the potential to create a space for a new global culture, to develop innovative communication models, and to achieve a China-U.S. consensus, the fulfillment of these potentials will require a steadfast effort and the commitment of more than one generation of filmmakers from both China and the U.S.A. Nevertheless, a global culture and a reshaping of the global media structure are in the making.     

Measuring engagement on twitter using a composite index: An application to social media influencers

Engagement on social networks is a complex concept, in which many interconnected, difficult-to-assess components interact. It is precisely this complexity which motivated this work, which proposes a composite index as a tool to measure engagement. Using TOPSIS, a multicriteria method that bases its ranking on minimizing the distance to the ideal point and maximizing the distance to the anti-ideal, a mix of indicators based on two approaches is used: the tweet approach and the follower approach. The former reflects engagement based on user production, and the latter measures engagement by popularity. This index was applied to a group of Social Media Influencers and a general ranking was obtained, as well as a ranking by each approach to measuring engagement. A comparison of the rankings generated by the different approaches shows the suitability and pertinence of both, as it is confirmed that they measure different aspects, and that both are needed to offer a holistic view of the engagement generated by a user on Twitter; this is a new finding compared to prior studies, which only focused on one approach or the other.     

Measuring Search Engine Quality

The effectiveness of twenty public search engines is evaluated using TREC-inspired methods and a set of 54 queries taken from real Web search logs. The World Wide Web is taken as the test collection and a combination of crawler and text retrieval system is evaluated. The engines are compared on a range of measures derivable from binary relevance judgments of the first seven live results returned. Statistical testing reveals a significant difference between engines and high intercorrelations between measures. Surprisingly, given the dynamic nature of the Web and the time elapsed, there is also a high correlation between results of this study and a previous study by Gordon and Pathak. For nearly all engines, there is a gradual decline in precision at increasing cutoff after some initial fluctuation. Performance of the engines as a group is found to be inferior to the group of participants in the TREC-8 Large Web task, although the best engines approach the median of those systems. Shortcomings of current Web search evaluation methodology are identified and recommendations are made for future improvements. In particular, the present study and its predecessors deal with queries which are assumed to derive from a need to find a selection of documents relevant to a topic. By contrast, real Web search reflects a range of other information need types which require different judging and different measures.     

Architecture and C++-programming environment of a highly parallel image signal processor

A highly parallel single-chip image signal processor architecture has been derived by analysis of image processing algorithms. Available levels of parallelism and their associated demands on data access, control and complexity of operations were taken into account. The RISC-architecture, called “HiPAR-DSP”, consists of a control unit, 16 parallel ASIMD-controlled datapaths with autonomous addressing and instruction selection capability, a local data cache per data path, a shared memory with matrix type data access and a powerful DMA-unit. The proposed architecture was designed by assessing the results of an analysis of characteristic algorithm properties with respect to their inherent parallelization resources, achievable speed up and implementation costs. This resulted in a proper balance between the degree of parallelism and flexibility, leading to a high performance for a wide field of applications. Additional measures were taken to support an efficient high level programmability of the processor. This was achieved by the concurrent implementation of special architectural features and a C++-programming environment. It consists of an adaptation of the GNU C++-compiler and an optimizing assembler, supporting all levels of concurrence offered by the hardware. While most levels of parallelization are kept invisible to the programmer, data-level parallelism is expressed by the programmer using special new data types added to the standard C/C++-data-types. A sustained performance of about 2.0 Gigaoperations per second is achieved by the 100 MHz clocked processor for numerous image processing algorithms, leading to a processing time e.g. for a normalized correlation of a 512 × 512 image with a 32 × 32 correlation mask of 450 ms. Thus, a performance is achieved with a programmable parallel processor architecture that hitherto required the application of a dedicated integrated circuit.     

图书馆学家的"八大品格"

文章列出了图书馆学家应该具备的八项条件 :知行结合的笃行者、鲜活知识的创造者、动态智慧的探索者、现实问题的发现者、学科体系的创立者、禁区盲区的拓荒者、陈规陋习的反叛者、长于理性的思辨者。     

The spatial bonds of WikiLeaks

This article analyses control of the Internet from a spatial perspective, on the intersection of social and political geography, and law. Inspired by the story of WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange, who is presently confined in a room of a diplomatic mission, this article examines such control through a spatial perspective, using the example of the paradoxical coexistence of whistle-blowing, aided by modern technology, and efforts to control the circulation of information on the Internet. Modern states can and do exercise their sovereignty normally upon a rather precisely delimited portion of land, while a variety of actions performed on the Internet remain rather hard to be associated with a single location on Earth. We use here a variety of spatial concepts, but in particular territory (and jurisdiction) and place as parameters for understanding the link between sovereignty (and, more precisely, control), resistance, and the Internet. This article demonstrates the importance of these spatial concepts for the policy and practice of Internet governance.     

Using the Internet to Teach U.S. Business Research to Students of English as a Second Language

Abstract

The American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird) has an extensive English as a second language (ESL) program for graduate students. As a component of the content-based aspect of this program, students have a semester-long project involving finding information about a U.S. company and its place in its industry. The students must include information about corporate finance, marketing, corporate history, and an industry and competitor analysis. A business librarian at another institution created a website for a course in competitor analysis. A business librarian at another institution created a website for a course with a similar assignment; this website included hot links to sources of U.S. corporate and industrial data. This article discusses the structuring of the course, the creation of the website, the collaboration between the classroom instructor and the business librarian, and the effects of the website on the quality and quantity of the ESL students' research.     

On Being a Virtual World Librarian: Experiences in Offering Live Reference Services in a Virtual World

The reference collection holds an important place within the library. The proper maintenance of this collection through weeding is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of collection management. This article offers a case study describing a reference collection weeding project, including the development of a reference collection policy, a review of standing orders, the goals and outcomes of the review, and a discussion of the benefits of the project.     

Creating an Institutional Repository: Elements for Success!

ABSTRACT

The institutional repository (IR) can be a dynamic, online collection of research, writing, and projects conducted by a university’s faculty and students. IRs are also important tools that allow a library to create a connection with faculty and students. This report will identify the services and content essential to a successful institutional repository, discuss how to build a team of talented experts to build and market the repository, address the creation of a business plan and strategies for marketing and building social media presence, and conclude with thoughts on how to develop, process, and publish journals locally and sustainably.