TALON--the first five years.

The South Central Regional Medical Library Program, Region IX in the national network of medical libraries, was one of the last to be organized and funded. The particular makeup of this organization has permitted a good deal of flexibility in the identification and implementation of various types of network services and activities. The following is a brief account of some of these network functions during the first five years relating the successes and failures in network strategies and describing the further evolution of programs and refinement of a regional plan which will advance network services.     

‘The feeling of exclusion’: Young peoples' perceptions of art galleries

This article first looks at the relationship between museums and art galleries and their potential audiences and, in particular, the under-represented sector of young visitors. It examines the main findings from the limited research available on young visitors, and goes on to discuss theories delineating the differences between the cultures, identities and values of culture consumers and culture providers. The second part of the article looks at what specific museums have done towards being more inclusive in their appeal, and then reports the findings of a survey of young people in relation to New Zealand's Auckland Art Gallery. The survey found that young people's ideas of what constitutes modern, relevant art do not match standard art criteria, and that most exhibitions and marketing methods do not mesh with their worldview. The article concludes by using data from the survey to suggest ways of engaging more young people with public art galleries.     

Character N-Gram Tokenization for European Language Text Retrieval

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum has encouraged research in text retrieval methods for numerous European languages and has developed durable test suites that allow language-specific techniques to be investigated and compared. The labor associated with crafting a retrieval system that takes advantage of sophisticated linguistic methods is daunting. We examine whether language-neutral methods can achieve accuracy comparable to language-specific methods with less concomitant software complexity. Using the CLEF 2002 test set we demonstrate empirically how overlapping character n-gram tokenization can provide retrieval accuracy that rivals the best current language-specific approaches for European languages. We show that n = 4 is a good choice for those languages, and document the increased storage and time requirements of the technique. We report on the benefits of and challenges posed by n-grams, and explain peculiarities attendant to bilingual retrieval. Our findings demonstrate clearly that accuracy using n-gram indexing rivals or exceeds accuracy using unnormalized words, for both monolingual and bilingual retrieval.     

Validating the Willingness to Self-Censor Scale: Individual Differences in the Effect of the Climate of Opinion on Opinion Expression

Hayes, Glynn, and Shanahan (2005) defined self-censorship asthe withholding of one’s opinion around an audience perceivedto disagree with that opinion. They argued that people differin their willingness to self-censor and introduced an 8-itemself-report instrument, the Willingness to Self-Censor scale,to measure this individual difference. The results of an experimentalstudy presented here provide further evidence of the constructvalidity of the scale. Each participant in the study was presentedwith a hypothetical scenario that contained information suggestinga group of people the participant was conversing with abouta controversial topic held opinions that were either uniformlysimilar to or different from the participant’s own opinion.Four weeks prior, each participant had responded to the Willingnessto Self-Censor scale and a measure of dispositional shyness.As expected, the manipulation of the climate of opinion affectedwillingness to express an opinion to the group, but more soamong those who scored relatively high on the Willingness toSelf-Censor scale. These results support the notion that somepeople rely on information about the climate of opinion moreso than do others when they decide whether or not to voice theiropinion publicly, and they suggest that the Willingness to Self-Censorscale measures this individual difference.     

Disciplined freedom,branded authenticity,and dependable independence: how tensions enact flexibility in lifestyle blogging careers

Analyzing 219 blog posts from 52 self-employed women lifestyle bloggers in North America, this study shows how these digital professionals navigate tensions and communicatively constitute work flexibility. In their narratives, women bloggers employed tension management approaches such as reframing, continual connections, and reflective practice in response to tensions in enacting temporal–spatial, identity, and financial flexibility. Specifically, women followed oxymoronic constructions – disciplined freedom, branded authenticity, and dependable independence – to embrace and transform competing poles of fluidity?structure, authenticity?marketability, and independence?interconnection. Expanding work–life research to the self-employed digital labor context, this study responds to recent calls to uncover more-than tension management strategies in empirical settings and contributes to a tension-centered, contextual, and processual analysis of workplace flexibility construction.