Pricing and Licensing for Museum Digital Content

Museums' rights and reproduction departments are overwhelmed by and underprepared for requests for image use in electronic media. This article will evaluate related models for pricing and fees used by non-art industries, and provide some interim guidelines for museums while they make the transition to supplying requests for electronic media.     

Tablets: A Survey of Circulation Policies at Academic Libraries

This article presents the results of a Web-based survey regarding the circulation of tablets in academic libraries. The survey, which was completed by 61 respondents, identifies the most common circulation policies and procedures used. These results will help other academic institutions develop their own policy or update existing ones. Areas of disagreement raised by the survey are also discussed and avenues for further study are identified.     

Identity,Narrative and Practitioner Research: A Lacanian perspective

This paper sets out to show how some theoretical concepts derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis might be put to work in the business of reflective practitioner research in education. It seeks to offer a more sophisticated, reflexively produced account of researcher identity built out of the narrative generated within a research enquiry. It illustrates, with reference to examples of writing from a specific research project, carried out within the context of a higher degree, how one teacher-researcher has used the concepts in forging a more productive understanding of her own evolving identity as a researcher through a process predicated on developing her own professional functioning. Shifting perspectives are provided on what the researcher wants from the enquiry as the researcher herself unfolds and analyses the successive phases of her narrative.     

How prior knowledge affects word identification and comprehension

While prior knowledge of a passage topic is known to facilitate comprehension, little is known about how it affects word identification. We examined oral reading errors in good and poor readers when reading a passage where they either had prior knowledge of the passage topic or did not. Children who had prior knowledge of the topic were matched on decoding skill to children who did not know the topic so that the groups differed only on knowledge of the passage topic. Prior knowledge of the passage topic was found to significantly increase fluency and reduce reading errors, especially errors based on graphic information, in poor readers. Two possible mechanisms of how prior knowledge might operate to facilitate word identification were evaluated using the pattern of error types, as was the relationship of errors to comprehension. Implications of knowledge effects for assessment and educational policy are discussed.     

How word decoding skill impacts text memory: The centrality deficit and how domain knowledge can compensate

We examined text memory in children with word reading deficits to determine how these difficulties impact representations of text meaning. We show that even though children with poor word decoding recall more central than peripheral information, they show a significantly bigger deficit relative to controls on central than on peripheral information. We call this the centrality deficit and argue that it is the consequence of insufficient cognitive resources for connecting ideas together due to these children’s resources being diverted from comprehension to word decoding. We investigated a possible compensatory mechanism for making these connections. Because a text representation is a synthesis of text information and a reader’s prior knowledge, we hypothesized that having knowledge of the passage topic might reduce or eliminate the centrality deficit. Our results support this knowledge compensation hypothesis: The centrality deficit was evident when poor readers did not have prior knowledge, but was eliminated when they did. This presents an exciting avenue to pursue for possible remediation of reading comprehension in children with word identification difficulties.