Consortial Ebook Archiving Environmental Scan

Academic libraries and consortia are spending the vast majority of their material budgets on digital content, including ebooks. A review of ebook preservation activities for the North American library consortia is provided along with a look at the major preservation services such as Portico, CLOCKSS and HathiTrust. Publishers and ebook aggregators are also examined to provide a broad environmental scan of the current ebook preservation activities and risks.     

The Information Nature of Culture

This paper explores the information nature of culture. It is represented as an extragenetic and nonorganizational information process and system. Information is regarded as a universal property of matter that is essentially associated with development processes and realizes various forms and ways of storage and circulation at various development stages of global evolution. The socio-cultural principle of exogenous accumulation, transmission, and transformation of information is analyzed in the context of the continuing growth of the information content of material systems on the superhighway of global-universal evolution. It is noted that the information concept of culture evolves into a new area of cultural studies, that is information and cultural studies, advancing our understanding of the nature of culture and cultural genesis.     

Diversity on U.S. Public and Commercial TV in Authorial and Executive-Produced Social-Issue Documentaries

Where are diverse makers and subjects most likely to be found in U.S. TV documentary? This study compares commercial and public TV series, and also anthology formats (“authorial” series) and executive-produced formats. A content analysis for characters and makers showed that public TV authorial series are more diverse than either commercial or other public TV series. Independent documentaries have diversity value both in commercial and public TV settings.     

Library Staff Development: How Book Clubs Can Be More Effective (and Less Expensive) than Traditional Trainings

Employee book clubs are simple, inexpensive tools for professional development that may be more effective than traditional training methods. Library staff at Brigham Young University participated in professional development book clubs, and they reported that they found these trainings to be more enjoyable than classroom-style trainings and more effective in helping them understand, retain, and apply the principles learned. This article will discuss the success of these book clubs and suggest ways that other libraries can implement cost-effective book clubs to develop professional and leadership skills.     

Extending validity evidence for multidimensional measures of coaching competency

This study extended validity evidence for multidimensional measures of coaching competency derived from the Coaching Competency Scale (CCS; Myers, Feltz, Maier, Wolfe, & Reckase, 2006) by examining use of the original rating scale structure and testing how measures related to satisfaction with the head coach within teams and between teams. Motivation, game strategy, technique, and character building comprised the dimensions of coaching competency. Data were collected from athletes (N = 585) nested within intercollegiate men's (g = 8) and women's (g = 13) soccer and women's ice hockey (g = 11) teams (G = 32). Validity concerns were observed for the original rating scale structure and the predicted positive relationship between motivation competency and satisfaction with the coach between teams. Validity evidence was offered for a condensed post hoc rating scale and the predicted relationship between motivation competency and satisfaction with the coach within teams.     

Cultured pearls—commercialised biomineralisation

At the turn of the last century there was an ever increasing world demand for pearls while at the same time their known fishing grounds were becoming exhausted. Some way of artificially increasing their production was obviously desirable, and the problem attracted considerable effort. It was an attempt to exploit a scientifically poorly understood phenomenon, and it is interesting, in retrospect, to relate these attempts to recent concepts of biomineralisation. Pearls are, of course, the layers of aragonitic calcium carbonate secreted by molluscs.