Collaboration and Organization for Successful Serials Cancellation

Serials cancellations are dreaded equally by librarians and faculty. Previously, faculty reviewed title lists, and librarians canceled what they recommended. Today's cancellation process is more complex; there has to be a context and a timetable. Reports must include at least data about historical pricing and titles associated with e-packages that are not cancellable. Although libraries' workflows differ, there are basic steps necessary to carry out a successful cancellation process. This joint presentation demonstrated how integrated planning and the use of serials management tools are used to organize complex information into useable data. It takes early and collaborative planning between Collection Development, teaching faculty, and Serials Technical Services to make a dreaded process less painful and more effective. This tactics session was delivered in parts by Susanne Clement and Gaele Gillespie, Head of Collection Development and Serials Librarian, respectively, at Watson Library, University of Kansas, and by Sarah Tusa, Coordinator of Collection Development and Acquisitions at the Mary and John Gray Library, Lamar University.     

The Impact of Network Size and Financial Incentives on Adoption and Participation in New Online Communities

The success of online communities depends heavily on the providers' abilities to motivate potential users to adopt the service and to actively participate. Because research in this field of media economics is rare, especially with regard to newly established communities, this study analyzes what drives community adoption and how direct and indirect financial incentives influence user participation. Extending Ajzen's (1991) Theory of Planned Behavior, this article shows, in 2 empirical studies, that network size significantly affects adoption in newly established communities. The results of the first study indicate a strong effect of indirect financial incentives (saving money) on the intention to adopt. The second study indicates that direct financial incentives (earning money) may well help increase the network's size without altering user motivation through crowding-out effects. It is interesting to note that the presence of direct financial incentives attracts new users, but it does not increase usage.     

Agricultural Distance Education in China

Abstract

The writer reports on a project involving the major agricultural distance education institution in China. The Central Agricultural Broadcasting School (CABS) is a relatively new institution organized to address rural development needs as a foundation to the modernization of the country. The project, supported by an international agency, was constructed to assist CABS in strengthening its audio‐visual design and production capabilities. The writer describes the design, activities and outcome of the project, and cites the lessons learned from it. He maintains that the main reason for the positive results of the project stemmed from careful assessment of the needs of the recipient and from flexibility in adapting to different conditions arising from unforeseen circumstances often occurring in international projects.     

Homelessness in the elementary school classroom: social and emotional consequences

This study examined elementary school teachers’ experiences working with homeless students. Specifically, we focused on the psychosocial impacts of homelessness on students and their teachers. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 teachers who worked at designated public schools for family homeless shelters. A prominent theme that emerged from teachers’ accounts was how the instability tied to homelessness affected students’ behavioral, social, and emotional adjustment in the classroom (e.g. externalizing problems, difficulty developing peer relationships, and withdrawn behavior). Teachers’ own social and emotional competencies (e.g. fostering positive teacher–student relationships, and perspective taking) influenced the manner in which they responded to their students’ needs. Findings suggest that critical components may be lacking articulation in the McKinney-Vento Act’s Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program such as guidelines for teacher responsibilities, supports for teachers, and an emphasis not only on children’s academic but also social and emotional needs.     

Willingness to communicate: Antecedents & consequences

Willingness to communicate (WTC) is examined at the trait and state levels, which are viewed as complementary. Measures of trait WTC, extraversion, emotional stability, self‐esteem, communication apprehension, and competence were administered to 226 male and female university students. A structural equation model examined the hypothesized antecedents to WTC and revealed a good fit to the data. Seventy of the participants also volunteered for a communication laboratory. Trait WTC was related to volunteering for the lab portion of the study and state WTC was related to initiating a difficult communication task. Also, state perceived competence predicted both time and number of ideas on an easy speaking task; state anxiety predicted time and number of ideas on a difficult speaking task.     

STEM Bridges: Evolution of an Academic Library STEM Outreach Program

Big Orange STEM Saturday (BOSS) is a sustainable model of outreach that fosters the STEM cycle of discovery and learning experiences. Through this program, the library creates and reinforces a bridge between secondary educational experiences and higher education that facilitates the transfer of knowledge from the classroom to the world. Local high school students are able to engage with experts in several different ways to explore what STEM has to offer and to look beyond their current experiences. This approach creates a venue for STEM teaching spaces outside the school classroom for enrichment and innovation. Over the past 5 years, the variety of experiences offered at BOSS have expanded and the reputation of the program has grown. This article explores the challenges, lessons, and impact that this program has had on its constituents, with a particular focus on the impact the library can have when exploring nontraditional areas of support and outreach.     

Biomedical term extraction: overview and a new methodology

Terminology extraction is an essential task in domain knowledge acquisition, as well as for information retrieval. It is also a mandatory first step aimed at building/enriching terminologies and ontologies. As often proposed in the literature, existing terminology extraction methods feature linguistic and statistical aspects and solve some problems related (but not completely) to term extraction, e.g. noise, silence, low frequency, large-corpora, complexity of the multi-word term extraction process. In contrast, we propose a cutting edge methodology to extract and to rank biomedical terms, covering all the mentioned problems. This methodology offers several measures based on linguistic, statistical, graphic and web aspects. These measures extract and rank candidate terms with excellent precision: we demonstrate that they outperform previously reported precision results for automatic term extraction, and work with different languages (English, French, and Spanish). We also demonstrate how the use of graphs and the web to assess the significance of a term candidate, enables us to outperform precision results. We evaluated our methodology on the biomedical GENIA and LabTestsOnline corpora and compared it with previously reported measures.     

Scientific reasoning during adolescence: The influence of instruction in science knowledge and reasoning strategies

The mechanism linking instruction in scientific topics and instruction in logical reasoning strategies is not well understood. This study assesses the role of science topic instruction combined with logical reasoning strategy instruction in teaching adolescent students about blood pressure problems. Logical reasoning instruction for this study emphasizes the controlling-variables strategy. Science topic instruction emphasizes variables affecting blood pressure. Subjects receiving logical reasoning instruction link their knowledge of blood pressure variables to their knowledge of controlling variables more effectively than those receiving science topic instruction alone—their specific responses show how they attempt to integrate their understanding.