Museum Informatics and Information Infrastructures: Supporting Collaboration across Intra-Museum Boundaries

This paper examines the development of an information infrastructure involving collaborative technologies at the Spurlock Museum, a museum of world history and culture at the University of Illinois. It details a socio-technological system that was designed to pack and re-locate 45,000 artifacts across campus to a new museum facility. It addresses the question of how the information infrastructure of the Spurlock promotes collaboration among the various departments at the museum working on this move and encourages the sharing of common data resources across internal museum boundaries.     

Master’s Students’ Experiences in a Multicultural Counseling Role-Play

This study examined the experiences of master’s students in regard to their participation in a multicultural role-play and review process (Jencius et al. 2004). Whereas the literature has supported the use of role-plays as a multicultural training technique (Alvarez and Miville 2003; Vazquez and Garcia-Vazquez 2003), there is a distinct lack of information on the actual role-play experience itself. The data analyzed from participants’ reported experiences about their student counselor and student client roles in this study offers valuable feedback to those who teach multicultural counseling. Participants reported qualitatively different experiences based on which particular role they held.     

New materials by polymerization of olefins and styrene by metallocene/mao catalysts

Metallocenes and other transition metal compounds comprise a new generation of single site catalysts for the production of precisely designed polyolefins and engineering plastics. The discovery of metallocene methylalumoxane (MAO) catalysts has opened a frontier in the area of polymer synthesis and processing. A great number of symmetric and chiral zirconocenes have been synthesized to give isotactic, syndiotatic, isoblock, or stereoblock polymers with increased impact strength and toughness, better melt characteristics or elasticity, and improved clarity in films. Cycloolefin copolymers (COC) and syndiotactic polystyrene can be produced by metallocene catalysts. These are new types of polymers with special properties and a high potential as engineering plastics. Norbornene-ethene copolymers are most interesting for technical uses because of the easily available monomers. Due to different incorporation values of the cyclic olefin in the copolymer, the glass transition temperature can vary over a wide range and reaches 180°C.