Staff development planning in an academic health sciences library.

OBJECTIVE: A staff development committee (SDC) was convened to implement staff development opportunities for an academic health sciences library system comprised of three separate facilities. The charge for the SDC was to: (1) develop programs to enhance workplace skills and personal growth, (2) communicate the availability of existing programs at the university and medical center, and (3) encourage the staff to participate in these opportunities. PROGRAM: The committee created goals and objectives and developed a survey designed to give staff the opportunity to provide input for this initiative. With an 80% response rate, the survey results were used to plan 15 events based on staff needs and preferences. First-year attendance for SDC-sponsored events was 459. Committee members served as liaisons for each event. Two forms were developed to facilitate event planning. A monthly announcement sheet, email reminders, and the library's local area network are used to communicate upcoming SDC events and encourage attendance. CONCLUSION: This approach can serve as a useful model for similar program planning in any organization.     

Google Scholar's Coverage of the Engineering Literature 10 years Later

In 2008 Meier and Conkling first tested Google Scholar's coverage of the engineering literature against citations gathered from the Compendex database. Since that time, other studies have used the same methodology and found improvement in Google Scholar's coverage. This study uses engineering dissertations from Proquest Dissertations & Theses to create a data set of citations for the comparison of fee-based databases, Compendex and Scopus, against Google Scholar. From 1950 to 2017 Google Scholar outperformed both Compendex and Scopus in discoverability of citations in nine engineering subjects. These results have implications for collection management and information literacy program planning for librarians.     

The Professional Career and Life of Valerie Bross

ABSTRACT

The career path and significant professional accomplishments of librarian Valerie Bross (1954–2016) are described in this article. The awards and recognition she received are recounted and the influence of outside activities on her career is assessed. An attempt is made to capture what she was like as a professional, as well as what her unique characteristics were. A bibliography of her writings and a photograph are included.     

Russian Science Citation Index: Areas for Development Identified by Active Users

The current state of the Russian Science Citation Index is analyzed. Several areas for its further development identified by long-standing active users, such as data searching, refinement, and storage; current user alerts; data input with the Science Index license; patent information; and the application programming interface (API) are investigated.     

The Role of Consistency in Detecting Deception: The Superiority of Correspondence over Coherence

Inconsistency is often considered an indication of deceit. The conceptualization of consistency used in deception research, however, has not made a clear distinction between two concepts long differentiated by philosophers: coherence and correspondence. The existing literature suggests that coherence is not generally useful for deception detection. Correspondence, however, appears to be quite useful. The present research developed a model of how correspondence is utilized to make judgments, and this article reports on four studies designed to elaborate on the model. The results suggest that judges attend strongly to correspondence and that they do so in an additive fashion. As noncorrespondent information accumulates, an increasingly smaller proportion of judges make truthful assessments of guilty suspects. This work provides a basic framework for examining how information is utilized to make deception judgments and forms the correspondence and coherence module of truth-default theory.     

Critical communication pedagogy and service learning in a mixed-method communication research course

ABSTRACT

Course: Mixed-Method Communication Research Methods

Objective: The purpose of this semester-long activity is to provide students with opportunities to cultivate mixed-method communication research skills through a social justice-informed service-learning format. Completing this course, students will be able to: recognize the unique strengths of quantitative and qualitative research methods; locate, evaluate, and utilize scholarly literature for a literature review; conduct an original research project using quantitative and qualitative research methods to gather and analyze data; and raise self and community awareness about a social issue through collaboration with a community organization.     

A CRISPR/Cas12a-empowered surface plasmon resonance platform for rapid and specific diagnosis of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was partially due to the challenge of identifying asymptomatic and presymptomatic carriers of the virus, and thus highlights a strong motivation for diagnostics with high sensitivity that can be rapidly deployed. On the other hand, several concerning SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron, are required to be identified as soon as the samples are identified as ‘positive’. Unfortunately, a traditional PCR test does not allow their specific identification. Herein, for the first time, we have developed MOPCS (Methodologies of Photonic CRISPR Sensing), which combines an optical sensing technology-surface plasmon resonance (SPR) with the ‘gene scissors’ clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) technique to achieve both high sensitivity and specificity when it comes to measurement of viral variants. MOPCS is a low-cost, CRISPR/Cas12a-system-empowered SPR gene-detecting platform that can analyze viral RNA, without the need for amplification, within 38 min from sample input to results output, and achieve a limit of detection of 15 fM. MOPCS achieves a highly sensitive analysis of SARS-CoV-2, and mutations appear in variants B.1.617.2 (Delta), B.1.1.529 (Omicron) and BA.1 (a subtype of Omicron). This platform was also used to analyze some recently collected patient samples from a local outbreak in China, identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This innovative CRISPR-empowered SPR platform will further contribute to the fast, sensitive and accurate detection of target nucleic acid sequences with single-base mutations.