An Update on COUNTER and SUSHI

Since its inception in 2002, COUNTER has given hope to many librarians charged with collecting usage data for their online collections. This hope turned to optimism in 2007 with the release of SUSHI (Standardized Usage Harvesting Initiative) as a NISO standard (Z39.93). In 2009 release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases takes effect and with it are some significant advances that will turn hopes and optimism into realities. This article describes the changes and their implications.     

Improving OpenURL Linking

Ever since OpenURL linking was introduced in 2000 by Herbert van de Sompel the link resolver has played an important role in providing users with access to the online resources they have rights to. From the start, one of the criticisms of OpenURL linking has been that it is not 100% successful—sometimes the user is presented with a link to full text, but that link fails. In 2010 a new National Information Standards Organization (NISO) workgroup was created to tackle the issue of OpenURL quality. This column will discuss this NISO initiative and look in detail at the proposed “Completeness Index” that promises a means of measuring the quality of OpenURLs being submitted by various content providers. The article will also discuss how some OpenURL quality issues may be more perception than reality and how librarians can configure their links and link resolvers to overcome these negative perceptions.     

ONIX-PL License Encoding Project

ONIX for Publication License (ONIX-PL) was introduced in 2006 with great hope that it would simplify the licensing and license management aspects of e-resource management. However, after several years this standard has not seen significant commercial adoption. Believing this standard still holds promise, the National Information Standards Organization, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and support from Jisc and EDItEUR, has launched the ONIX-PL License Encoding Project. The goal of the project is to accelerate adoption by creating and making publicly available a set of publisher licenses encoded to the ONIX-PL standard. In this column we provide more details on the project, its goals, challenges, and prospects.     

Perfecting COUNTER and SUSHI to Achieve Reliable Usage Analysis

The Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) Code of Practice and Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) are two standards whose successful adoption will greatly assist librarians in performing accurate and timely usage analysis of their online collections and thus make more informed collection management decisions. Variations in how these standards have been applied by content providers to their SUSHI and COUNTER implementation are currently impacting their widespread adoption. The standards themselves are not broken—what is needed is concise guidelines on their implementation. This column reviews some of the roadblocks that impede consistent implementation of these standards as well as proposes recommendations that could form the basis of a community profile for these standards.     

Editors' Preface: Media Bias and the Effect of Patriotism on Baseball Viewership

This article establishes a 2-sided media market in which readers have heterogeneous beliefs, media outlets choose their reporting biases, and advertisement prices are determined by bargaining between media outlets and advertisers. The authors have shown that the presence of advertisers strengthens the reporting bias. The bias is increasing in the advertisers' bargaining power and is generally stronger if the advertisers can advertise in multiple outlets. Finally, the authors present an extension of the model on the formation of joint operating agreements for advertising sales among competing newspapers and show that the media bias will be mitigated.     

‘Just Be Quiet and Listen to Exactly What He's Saying': Conceptualising power relations in inquiry-oriented classrooms

Interest in inquiry-based science education (IBSE) often pays little heed to the complex power relations that exist within classrooms. A common obstacle to inquiry is that it strongly diverges from current classroom culture and hence, is outside the sphere of teachers' and students' experiences. Teachers and students bring expectations to the classroom that are entrenched in traditional practices and influenced by dynamics of power that exist within all teacher–student relationships. This study, which emerged during a wider study of the use of a Virtual Chemistry Lab in supporting IBSE, explores how classroom discourse constructs and maintains power relations that either stifle or facilitate inquiry-based approaches in two science lessons. Research methods included teacher interviews, student focus groups, video-recorded lessons, and student self-assessments. Findings indicate distinctive features of power inside the classroom that impact on inquiry-based instruction, such as predominant teacher monitoring on task completion over task understanding, lack of student engagement in ownership of scientific ideas, and prevailing norms of what effective teacher questioning is. We discuss implications for IBSE change efforts, highlighting that well-established power relations currently represent an important limiting factor in the capacity of teachers' IBSE implementation.     

AN EXPERIMENT IN ADOLESCENT WORSHIP

The purpose of this column is to keep religious educators abreast of the relevant significant research in the general field of psychology. Its implications for methods and materials in religious education are clear. Religious educators may well take advantage of every new finding in scientific research.

Each abstract or group is preceded by an evaluation and interpretative comment, which aims to guide the reader in understanding the research reported.

All of these abstracts are from PSYCHOLOGICAL ABSTRACTS, and used by permission of that periodical. The abstract number is Volume 29, Number 3, June, 1955.