When Glass and Metal Corrode Together,V: Sodium Copper Formate

A sodium copper formate, first described in 2002, can also form on copper alloys with sodium originating from soda glass hydrolysis. The frequent occurrence (50% of 250 cases of glass-induced metal corrosion) is due to the presence of formaldehyde emissions in storage and its direct reaction to formate in the alkaline surface films. The compound can be produced without the presence of acetate when chalconatronite or metal coupons immersed in soda solution are exposed to formaldehyde vapours. The crystal structure, derived from X-ray powder diffraction, yielded the sum formula Cu₄Na₄O(HCOO)₈(OH)₂·4H₂O. Except for the absence of acetate in the structure, this is in good agreement with the 2002 publication. To assess which kind of combined glass/metal objects are affected, a number of large museum collections were surveyed. Sodium copper formate was detected as a corrosion product using mainly micro-Raman spectroscopy, for instance, on 18 painted Limoges enamels, eight glass vessels with metal mountings, glass beads on metal wire from 11 bridal crowns, nine Christmas tree balls with wire decoration, 40 pieces of jewellery with glass gems, three daguerreotypes, and one miniature with cover glasses.     

What publishers can take away from the latest early career researcher research

Key points

• Early career researchers (ECRs) consider journals the central form of communication – but are concerned about pressure to publish.
• ECRs want to share but currently accept the closed publishing system because of the need to build a traditional reputation.
• ECRs know – and appear to care – little about publishers but trust them as publishing and reviewing facilitators.
• Editors are criticized for not managing peer review with better selection of reviewers.
• Megajournals are not seen as the future journal form and criticized for lack of selectivity.
• ECRs want open access/science in principle but are circumspect about their contribution to it.
• ResearchGate is a key force for change as ECRs consider it a mainstay communication and reputation platform.

     

A study of untrained models for multimodal information retrieval

Operational multimodal information retrieval systems have to deal with increasingly complex document collections and queries that are composed of a large set of textual and non-textual modalities such as ratings, prices, timestamps, geographical coordinates, etc. The resulting combinatorial explosion of modality combinations makes it intractable to treat each modality individually and to obtain suitable training data. As a consequence, instead of finding and training new models for each individual modality or combination of modalities, it is crucial to establish unified models, and fuse their outputs in a robust way. Since the most popular weighting schemes for textual retrieval have in the past generalized well to many retrieval tasks, we demonstrate how they can be adapted to be used with non-textual modalities, which is a first step towards finding such a unified model. We demonstrate that the popular weighting scheme BM25 is suitable to be used for multimodal IR systems and analyze the underlying assumptions of the BM25 formula with respect to merging modalities under the so-called raw-score merging hypothesis, which requires no training. We establish a multimodal baseline for two multimodal test collections, show how modalities differ with respect to their contribution to relevance and the difficulty of treating modalities with overlapping information. Our experiments demonstrate that our multimodal baseline with no training achieves a significantly higher retrieval effectiveness than using just the textual modality for the social book search 2016 collection and lies in the range of a trained multimodal approach using the optimal linear combination of the modality scores.     

Project Management Techniques at the Complutense University: Academic Librarians' Perceptions

This study examines how academic librarians at the Complutense University (Spain) perceive project management techniques that are becoming increasingly popular in library and information centers due to the need to comply with their strategic planning and services. To reach this goal, a quantitative and qualitative methodology was applied and a survey, in the form of a questionnaire, was used as a data gathering tool. The response rate was 31.2%. The key findings are based on respondents' education regarding project management skills and their expertise managing projects, as well as the presence of project management courses in the Library and Information Science Spanish curriculum. This study revealed that over one third of the academic staff completed their project management training by self-directed learning. Additionally, over half of them stated that they had not participated in any library project in the last five years, and almost half of the library staff concluded that project management techniques are quite important as formal courses in the Library and Information Science university programs. The study is interesting and revealing for those library and information services professionals who are facing day-to-day to users' demands and Library and Information Science challenges.     

The Promise of the Transparency Culture

In 2013, with the introduction of the Transparency Law in Spain, a number of Spanish newsrooms started working with data journalism methods. In Sweden, which has one of the oldest Freedom of Information acts in the world, newsrooms invested in the skill development of data journalism at approximately the same time. Because previous research suggests that access to public data has been one of the key driving forces for the development of data journalism worldwide, it is important to understand how legislation is actually shaping the practice of data journalism. Based on a survey of 66 key informants in Spain and Sweden and ten in-depth interviews with data journalists from five media companies in each country, we conducted a comparative study, building on the frameworks of media systems to explore data journalism practices in these two countries. The differences found indicate that the national and EU legislation in both nations shape journalistic strategies for accessing data, turning journalists at times into activists fighting for the right to access public data. Beyond the law, data journalists advocate for a transparency culture among the civil servants, in order to secure public accountability.     

Academic Libraries and Copyright: Unveiling Inadequacies of Current Law Through the Analysis of Processes Included in Quality Management Systems

Most information resources that make up university library collections are copyrighted works, which means that conflicts between such rights and the activities of libraries are common. The development of the digital setting has affected both sectors. On the one hand, it has led to changes in copyright legislation; on the other, it has affected the services provided by libraries, as they adapt to the new needs of users and to the characteristics of digital information. This paper aims to discover where the main points of collision between the two sides lie, and to what extent they are adequately resolved by the present legislation governing copyright. To this end we use a list of the main processes of academic libraries taken from quality manuals of a sample of Spanish university libraries. The results make manifest that the evolution of both sides is not yet balanced, and important maladjustments interfere with an adequate provision of services in academic libraries. Some are resolved through new legal proposals, but for many others there is no proper solution in sight.