Health science libraries in Sweden: new directions,expanding roles

Librarians in Sweden are facing huge challenges in meeting the demands of their organisations and users. This article looks at four key areas: coping with open science/open access initiatives; increasing demands from researchers for support doing systematic reviews; understanding user experiences in Swedish health science libraries; and the consequences of expanding roles for recruitment and continuing professional development. With regard to changing roles, there is an increasing shift from the generalist towards the expert role. The authors raise the issue as to how to prepare those new to the profession to the changing environment of health science libraries.     

Spatial Discovery of Linked Research Datasets and Documents at a Spatially Enabled Research Library

Current publishing practices in academia tend to result in datasets that are difficult to discover. This is because datasets are not well-integrated across academic domains and they are often not linked to the documents that reference them. For these reasons, discovering datasets across domains can be challenging; for example, discovering archeological observations and biological specimens using the same search is not widely supported, even if both datasets share a similar spatial extent, like Mesoamerica. It is also challenging to retrieve relevant documents that reference datasets; for example, retrieving a series of field reports that reference archeological observations is typically not supported. Our work develops an extensible method for: (1) geographically integrating collections across disciplinary repositories and (2) connecting datasets to related documents. We describe a collection of spatially-referenced researcher datasets, capturing their metadata elements and encoding them as linked open data. We then leverage existing library services to formalize links from datasets to documents. The system described in this work has been deployed, resulting in an experimental open data site for the UCSB campus. Results indicate that this system can be scaled-up with support from an institutional repository in the near future.     

The Formation of Swedish Media Studies, 1960–1980

Around 1960, the politics of the emerging media society in Sweden tended to fixate the formative functions of mass communication. The monopoly of public service broadcast media, press subsidies and new tendencies in film policy were some of the issues around which uncertainty prevailed. New methods to provide reliable data were sought by politicians, since empirical facts were required as arguments for an updated media policy. This article examines the different ways that the field of media studies was introduced in Sweden between 1960 and 1980. We argue that Swedish academic media studies departed from, and emerged within, a rather diffuse borderland between industry, politics and academia. The formation of national media research in Sweden can partly be seen as an effect of politicians and the media industry wanting to be better informed on issues such as media influence, media ownership and the habits and composition of the media audience.     

Granularity of algorithmically constructed publication-level classifications of research publications: Identification of topics

The purpose of this study is to find a theoretically grounded, practically applicable and useful granularity level of an algorithmically constructed publication-level classification of research publications (ACPLC). The level addressed is the level of research topics. The methodology we propose uses synthesis papers and their reference articles to construct a baseline classification. A dataset of about 31 million publications, and their mutual citations relations, is used to obtain several ACPLCs of different granularity. Each ACPLC is compared to the baseline classification and the best performing ACPLC is identified. The results of two case studies show that the topics of the cases are closely associated with different classes of the identified ACPLC, and that these classes tend to treat only one topic. Further, the class size variation is moderate, and only a small proportion of the publications belong to very small classes. For these reasons, we conclude that the proposed methodology is suitable to determine the topic granularity level of an ACPLC and that the ACPLC identified by this methodology is useful for bibliometric analyses.     

Rapid mask prototyping for microfluidics

With the rise of microfluidics for the past decade, there has come an ever more pressing need for a low-cost and rapid prototyping technology, especially for research and education purposes. In this article, we report a rapid prototyping process of chromed masks for various microfluidic applications. The process takes place out of a clean room, uses a commercially available video-projector, and can be completed in less than half an hour. We quantify the ranges of fields of view and of resolutions accessible through this video-projection system and report the fabrication of critical microfluidic components (junctions, straight channels, and curved channels). To exemplify the process, three common devices are produced using this method: a droplet generation device, a gradient generation device, and a neuro-engineering oriented device. The neuro-engineering oriented device is a compartmentalized microfluidic chip, and therefore, required the production and the precise alignment of two different masks.     

Stress,Adaptive Coping,and Life Satisfaction

The authors examined the relationship between stress, adaptive coping, and life satisfaction among college students who reported having a friend or family member with eating disorder symptomatology. A hierarchical regression confirmed the study's hypotheses. Higher stress was linked with less life satisfaction. After stress was controlled, plan coping had a beneficial influence on life satisfaction. College counselors can use these findings when choosing interventions for clients who are close to someone with an eating disorder.