Leveraging Technology and Staffing in Developing a New Liaison Program

With nearly all library resources and services delivered digitally, librarians working for the New York University Health Sciences Library struggled with maintaining awareness of changing user needs, understanding barriers faced in using library resources and services, and determining knowledge management challenges across the organization. A liaison program was created to provide opportunities for librarians to meaningfully engage with users. The program was directed toward a subset of high-priority user groups to provide focused engagement with these users. Responsibility for providing routine reference service was reduced for liaison librarians to provide maximum time to engage with their assigned user communities.     

Intrafamily secrets in various family configurations: A communication boundary management perspective

Although extant literature suggests that blended, single‐parent, and biological/adoptive (i.e., nuclear) families differ in terms of the boundaries that separate family members, little systematic research has compared such boundaries. The current investigation examined this issue by focusing on communication boundaries as indexed by intrafamily secrets. As expected, college students in blended families reported that their original parents and siblings were more likely than their stepparents or stepsiblings to know the family secret that they reported in this study. This suggests the presence of a relatively rigid communication boundary between original family members and stepfamily members. Interestingly, participants in blended families, single‐parent families, and nuclear families were quite similar in terms of: (a) the number of intrafamily secrets they perceived in their family, (b) the topics of the secrets they reported, and (c) the functions they reported being served by the secrets. Also, regardless of family form, there was an inverse association between participants’ family satisfaction and their perceptions of how many intrafamily secrets their family held. Overall, in contrast to the literature that often portrays blended families and single‐parent families as particularly problematic, these results suggest remarkable similarities across family configurations in terms of communication boundaries.     

Popular Music

Frank Tirro Jazz: A History (New York: Norton, 1977—$16.95 in trade edition; $12.95 in text edition, both hardback)

Leonard Feather Inside Jazz (New York: Da Capo, 1977—$4.95, paper)

Jim Haskins The Cotton Club (New York: Random House, 1977—$15.00, with paperback edition available)

Jeff Todd Titon Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977—$16.50)     

Consumer attitudes towards mobile marketing in the smart phone era

This exploratory online questionnaire-based study confirms the findings from earlier studies in the pre-smart phone era regarding consumers’ negative attitudes towards mobile marketing communications. This study shows that these attitudes persist despite increasing frequency of use and increased functionality of mobile phones in the smart phone era. Consumers perceive their mobile device to be for personal communication, and prefer to be able to exercise control over their interaction with organisations. Findings suggest that acceptance can be enhanced by permission marketing, trust-building, creating a sense of being in control, and useful and entertaining website content. Accordingly, pull technologies seem to hold particular promise for mobile marketing communications. This study, therefore, proceeds to explore use of and attitudes towards an important pull technology, QR codes. QR codes, two-dimensional bar codes, can be scanned to provide access to websites, information and applications. Despite their potential, uptake is low. Users in this study who had scanned a QR code had used them to access a variety of different content on different types of items and in different locations. The most frequently accessed type of content was information on a web site, the two most common locations for a scanned QR code were a newspaper or magazine advert, or outdoor advert or poster, and the two most common locations at which scanning was performed were in the street and at home. Ease of use, utility and incentives are drivers to continued use whilst lack of knowledge about how-to scan or of the benefits of QR codes may hinder adoption. Recommendations are offered for practice and for further research.     

Teaching Identity and Autonomy

Liberal theorists often link autonomy and identity together, since, these liberals argue, an education that bestows a particular identity on children undermines their autonomy. The charge of schools ought to be to teach children to be open to a variety of identities. Encounters with diversity and cosmopolitanism are good, since they encourage students to think deeply about their own identity, while traditional religions and nationalism seek to impress a particular identity on students. This standard liberal account, echoed in some of the essays in this book, underplays the ways in which education is a cultural practice like many others. Moreover, as other essays in this volume point out, there are good reasons to want aspects of a common culture to be transmitted in schools—in democratic states we want citizens to be able to understand one another, and to have some understanding of important historical events in the country's history. Yet schools that teach an honest history of one's country, and that teach about the country's political principles, will impress upon students only a partially shared identity. That this identity be only partly shared is important: it allows for differences among students, differences that ought to be understood, at least to some extent.     

别都叫2．0了！

这篇博客的作者Jeff Kelly对于目前很多组织机构把新产品、新理念等统统以2.0命名的方法很看不惯。他认为,这种现象能说明一些问题……     

Replication and Pedagogy in the History of Psychology VI: Egon Brunswik on Perception and Explicit Reasoning

Egon Brunswik (1903–1955) first made an interesting distinction between perception and explicit reasoning, arguing that perception included quick estimates of an object’s size, nearly always resulting in good approximations in uncertain environments, whereas explicit reasoning, while better at achieving exact estimates, could often fail by wide margins. An experiment conducted by Brunswik to investigate these ideas was never published and the only available information is a figure of the results presented in a posthumous book in 1956. We replicated and extended his study to gain insight into the procedures Brunswik used in obtaining his results. Explicit reasoning resulted in fewer errors, yet more extreme ones than perception. Brunswik’s graphical analysis of the results led to different conclusions, however, than did a modern statistically-based analysis.