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.     

Kellogg Faculty Seminar: Enriching academic leadership in Adult/Continuing Education

The Kellogg funded Faculty Seminar on Future Directions in Continuing Education was a continuing professional development project for young assistant and associate professors of adult continuing education. The Faculty Seminar was developed and conducted by Jerold Apps, Alan Knox, and Jack Ferver, professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from January, 1987, through March, 1989. Thirty-three early career faculty members focused on enriching their leadership roles within their academic departments and across the field of adult/continuing education, as well as on personal career development. Within each of these areas, participants normatively considered future directions for the field.Judith G. Adrian is completing her dissertation in Adult/Continuing Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also served as Project Assistant for the two year duration of the Kellogg Faculty Seminar on Future Directions in Adult/Continuing Education.Jerold W. Apps of a Professor of Adult/Continuing Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author ofHigher Education in a Learning Society (Jossey-Bass, 1988) and several other books.     

First Year in Higher Education (FYHE) and the Coursework Post-Graduate Student

Research surrounding the First Year in Higher Education has identified and defined the need to support the transition of students during their first year in a tertiary institution. This support not only assists in acculturating students to the Higher Education environment, but also aims to ensure that students develop the foundational skills required for academic success; which enables higher progression and retention rates. However, most of the efforts to date have focused on undergraduate students. The authors assert that postgraduate coursework students require similar support structures. Data collected over a three year study compares the self-reported information literacy skills of postgraduate students within a Faculty of Business to undergraduate students in the same faculty. The data is situated within a broader review of the literature and some recommendations for academic librarians and academic skills advisers are offered.     

Party and Candidate Websites: A Comparative Explanatory Analysis

This study provides a systematic investigation of party and candidate websites across five countries. It examines three prominent features of current online political communication (interactivity, political personalization, and mobilization). Furthermore it assesses to what extent country, party, and source characteristics explain differences in the usage of these features. In total, 63 websites and 416 pages in Germany, Romania, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Great Britain were subject to a systematic content analysis. The findings suggest that differences in party and source characteristics explain variation in levels of mobilization, interactivity, and personalization, with, for example, party websites trying to mobilize citizens while websites belonging to politicians are used as a platform for self-promotion. In general, results show that the division of countries into East and West European is less important.     

Broadening out and opening up technology assessment: Approaches to enhance international development,co-ordination and democratisation

Technology assessment (TA) has a strong history of helping to identify priorities and improve environmental sustainability, cost-effectiveness and wider benefits in the technology policies and innovation strategies of nation-states. At international levels, TA has the potential to enhance the roles of science, technology and innovation towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, effectively implementing the UN Framework on Climate Change and fostering general global transitions to ‘green economies’. However, when effectively recommending single ostensibly ‘best’ technologies or strategies, TA practices can serve unjustifiably to ‘close down’ debate, failing adequately to address technical uncertainties and social ambiguities, reducing scope for democratic accountability and co-ordination across scales and contexts. This paper investigates ways in which contrasting processes ‘broadening out’ and ‘opening up’ TA can enhance both rigour and democratic accountability in technology policy, as well as facilitating social relevance and international cooperation. These methods allow TA to illuminate options, uncertainties and ambiguities and so inform wider political debates about how the contending questions, values and knowledges of different social interests often favour contrasting innovation pathways. In this way TA can foster both technical robustness and social legitimacy in subsequent policy-making. Drawing on three empirical case studies (at local, national and international levels), the paper discusses detailed cases and methods, where recent TA exercises have contributed to this ‘broadening out’ and ‘opening up’. It ends by exploring wider implications and challenges for national and international technology assessment processes that focus on global sustainable development challenges.     

Severe punishment of children by staff in Romanian placement centers for school-aged children: Effects of child and institutional characteristics

The objective of this study was to determine whether children's characteristics and/or institutional characteristics were predictors of severe punishments (including beatings) and/or frequency of punishments that children received from staff in Romanian institutions. The data was hierarchical with institutionalized children (N = 1391) nested within 44 institutions, and the measurement of punishments by the staff and frequency of punishments had a binary distribution. Thus, multilevel logistic regression models were used to examine the effects of individual and institutional level variables on reported punishments and to account for the clustering of the children within institutions. Two general patterns of results emerged. First, regarding individual level variables, it was found that: (1) amount of time spent by children in their current institutions had a significant effect on the probability of being punished by staff and the frequency of this punishment; (2) the probability of being punished was higher for boys than for girls; and (3) having no siblings in the institution increased the odds of being punished several times. Second, regarding institutional level variables: (4) being in placement centers for school-aged children with a traditional type of institutional organization increased the odds of severe punishment compared to a familial/mixed type. The results of the present study highlight the importance of understanding the consequences of institutionalization in a broader way, where children not only experienced early severe psychosocial deprivation as documented in other studies, but also high levels of severe punishments administered by institutional staff.