Creating Access to Invisible Special Collections: Using Participatory Management to Reduce a Backlog

The University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries used participatory management to reduce a special collections backlog. Without an increase in budget or staffing, technical and public services departments designed a pilot project to redeploy internal human resources in a collaborative manner. The process of backlog management is discussed.     

Consolidation of Black-dyed Māori Textile Artefacts: Evaluating the Efficacy of Sodium Alginate

Black-dyed artefacts are found in museums worldwide, many produced using an iron-tannate compound. Deterioration of iron-tannate dyed artefacts is an international preservation issue: in New Zealand the deterioration of paru (iron-tannate) dyed Māori textiles is widespread. This article reports experimental work testing the efficacy of sodium alginate, a consolidant developed for deteriorated paru-dyed muka (fibre from harakeke; Phormium tenax). The colour stability, strength retention, and acidity of paru-dyed muka consolidated with sodium alginate (0.25, 0.5, and 1% w/v in water) was tested pre- and post-artificial light ageing. This study found that sodium alginate had no negative effect on paru-dyed muka and in some cases provided benefit. Interestingly, the colour of paru-dyed muka is substantially more stable in UV-filtered light than previously recognised. Also microfading results were in agreement with visual assessments of colour change at 1 Mlux hour exposure, providing confidence in this relatively new technique to assess colour change.     

Research trends and collaborations by applied science researchers in South African universities of technology: 2007–2017

This paper analyses the publication patterns of researchers in the field of applied sciences at Universities of Technology in South Africa. Aspects investigated include publications in SCOPUS-listed journals; number of citations and countries of publication. Collaborative research patterns at national and international levels were also investigated. A bibliometric analysis approach was followed using SCOPUS as the main source of data and analysing the articles published in selected applied science disciplines. Results show that researchers in the field of applied sciences in universities of technology have increased their number of publications over the past 10?years and are also working in conjunction with other researchers both nationally and internationally. The analysis is an important addition to the field in South Africa which helps in measuring how institutions are positively responding to government incentives in research. The results are also important to information professionals who are increasingly playing an important role in research impact assessments.     

Interdisciplinary scholarly collaboration in data-intensive,public-funded,international digital humanities project work

The information practices of collaborative interdisciplinary researchers, especially in distributed environments, remain understudied. Embracing the naturalistic paradigm, this qualitative case study relies upon semi-structured interviews, snowball sampling, and grounded analysis. Based on interviews with 53 participants from 11 Digging Into Data 3 (DID3, 2014-2016) projects, this study examines the working practices of scholars (library and information science professionals, humanists, and computer scientists) engaging in collaborative, international, data-intensive, publicly-funded interdisciplinary research. Benefits of such work include avoiding redundancy, exploding disciplinary silos, and more ambitious, larger-scale outputs. Challenges and lessons learned center on innovation, flexibility, and failure, translation, intermediaries, divisions of labor and delegation of responsibilities and tasks, conflict resolution, technology, outputs and publication, and timeframe, sustainability, and infrastructure.     

Investigating married adults’ communal coping with genetic health risk and perceived discrimination

Increased genetic testing in personalized medicine presents unique challenges for couples, including managing disease risk and potential discrimination as a couple. This study investigated couples’ conflicts and support gaps as they coped with perceived genetic discrimination. We also explored the degree to which communal coping was beneficial in reducing support gaps and ultimately stress. Dyadic analysis of married adults (N?=?266, 133 couples), in which one person had the genetic risk for serious illness, showed that perceived discrimination predicted more frequent conflicts about alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency-related treatment, privacy boundaries, and finances, which, in turn, predicted wider gaps in emotion and esteem support, and greater stress for both spouses. Communal coping predicted lower support gaps for both partners and marginally lower stress.     

Juggling competing activities: academic staff as doctoral candidates

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences of a group of established academic staff in New Zealand and the UK, as they undertake a doctorate in their home institutions. Our interest is in how individuals negotiate this dual status from a cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) stance that explores how rules, tools, community and divisions of labour, and interacting activity systems, shape doctoral experiences. The focus in this article, having analysed their detailed narrative accounts, is on how academics experience three interdependent activity systems: those surrounding the thesis, the institutional context, and the home-life spheres. Issues related to time, workload and supervision issues, variability in collegial support and impact on personal priorities and time emerged. There is a range of particularities – from easy access to resources/supervisors to inflexible institutional regulations – applicable to this group of doctoral candidates. Negotiating life as an academic with concurrent doctoral candidature provides positive outcomes in terms of teaching, research confidence and general personal and professional development. However, a range of difficulties can also be encountered, particularly in relation to personal and professional relationships, and workload management.     

A Campus-Wide Investigation of Clicker Implementation: The Status of Peer Discussion in STEM Classes

At the University of Maine, middle and high school teachers observed more than 250 university science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classes and collected information on the nature of instruction, including how clickers were being used. Comparisons of classes taught with (n = 80) and without (n = 184) clickers show that, while instructional behaviors differ, the use of clickers alone does not significantly impact the time instructors spend lecturing. One possible explanation stems from the observation of three distinct modes of clicker use: peer discussion, in which students had the opportunity to talk with one another during clicker questions; individual thinking, in which no peer discussion was observed; and alternative collaboration, in which students had time for discussion, but it was not paired with clicker questions. Investigation of these modes revealed differences in the range of behaviors, the amount of time instructors lecture, and how challenging the clicker questions were to answer. Because instructors can vary their instructional style from one clicker question to the next, we also explored differences in how individual instructors incorporated peer discussion during clicker questions. These findings provide new insights into the range of clicker implementation at a campus-wide level and how such findings can be used to inform targeted professional development for faculty.