Why are they not accessing it? User barriers to clinical information access

The Medical Library Association''s InSight Initiative provides an open and collaborative environment for library and industry partners to discuss vexing problems and find solutions to better serve their users. The initiative''s fifth summit, continuing work from the previous summit, focused on understanding how users discover and access information in the clinical environment. During the summit, participants were divided into working groups and encouraged to create a tangible product as a result of their discussions. At the end of the summit, participants established a framework for understanding users'' pain points, discussed possible solutions to those points, and received feedback on their work from an End User Advisory Board comprising physicians, clinical researchers, and clinical faculty in biomedicine. In addition to the pain point framework, participants are developing MLA InSight Initiative Learning content with modules to educate librarians and publishers about critical aspects of user behavior. The 2020 Insight Initiative Fall Forum will serve as a virtual home for constructive dialogue between health sciences librarians and publishers on improving discovery and access to information.     

Language and culture: Critical components of multicultural teacher education

This article identifies components of a course on multiculturalism in teacher education. The course proposes four stages of awareness: ethnic identity exploration; development of knowledge in language and literacy acquisition; refinement of a repertoire for cultural ways of teaching and learning; and selection of a teaching style. A variety of readings and activities for teacher education are proposed.     

Rummaging through dustbooks: An analysis of independent small presses

Conclusion Small presses are a colorful and wildly variegated lot. They offer materials on every imaginable topic to suit almost any taste and are springing up in towns and hamlets all over the country. New presses are being founded at a furious rate, though their ability to survive is as yet unknown. Clearly, many presses exist for other than purely commercial reasons. Our analysis suggests that only about a sixth of the 1700-odd publishers for which we have data are serious commercial enterprises; well over half, perhaps as many as two-thirds of them, exist for other reasons—personal interests, hobbies, or special causes.     

State-of-the-art in biomedical literature retrieval for clinical cases: a survey of the TREC 2014 CDS track

Providing access to relevant biomedical literature in a clinical setting has the potential to bridge a critical gap in evidence-based medicine. Here, our goal is specifically to provide relevant articles to clinicians to improve their decision-making in diagnosing, treating, and testing patients. To this end, the TREC 2014 Clinical Decision Support Track evaluated a system’s ability to retrieve relevant articles in one of three categories (Diagnosis, Treatment, Test) using an idealized form of a patient medical record. Over 100 submissions from over 25 participants were evaluated on 30 topics, resulting in over 37k relevance judgments. In this article, we provide an overview of the task, a survey of the information retrieval methods employed by the participants, an analysis of the results, and a discussion on the future directions for this challenging yet important task.     

Content and use of colonial archives: an under-researched issue

Namibians often find themselves in situations of litigation where they need person-related records to defend their rights and privileges. Such person-related records include birth, adoption, marriage, or divorce or deceased estates. It has been observed that the institution where such records should be expected, the National Archives of Namibia often cannot retrieve person-related records of persons previously classified as non-whites under colonial and apartheid laws. Many native Namibians end up losing property or have problems claiming their constitutional rights due to lack of evidence. The purpose of this paper was to explore whether the existing archival literature can guide National Archives of new and emerging African nations on how to handle challenges brought about by gaps in inherited colonial archives. Using a literature survey to explore the state of what is written on the content and usage of colonial archives in post-colonial era, this article argues that the content and use of colonial archives in Africa do not feature prominently in the literature of archival science. Although there has been a rising interest on the subject during the last decade, none of this emerging literature has systematically studied archives in depth with a view on what these archives contain for the non-academic user, what they neglect and what they lack altogether in serving the needs of all citizens in post-colonial states. It recommends that archival scholars as well as archival institutions increase research into this neglected area. Raising awareness may produce academic discourse to help archivists in newly decolonised countries to competently support users whose inquiries currently cannot be answered by the inherited colonial archives collections.     

In practice: The strategic retention initiative: Theory‐based practice to reduce college student departure

The dean of students at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College calls every first‐year student twice during the school year. The high‐touch approach, as resource‐intensive as it is, has proven well worth the effort.