Map Room to Data and GIS Services: Five University Libraries Evolving to Meet Campus Needs and Changing Technologies

Programs for geospatial support at academic libraries have evolved over the past decade in response to changing campus needs and developing technologies. Geospatial applications have matured tremendously in this time, emerging from specialty tools to become broadly used across numerous disciplines. At many universities, the library has served as a central resource allowing students and faculty across academic departments access to GIS resources. Today, as many academic libraries evaluate their spaces and services, GIS and data services are central in discussions on how to further engage with patrons and meet increasingly diverse researcher needs. As library programs evolve to support increasingly technical data and GIS needs, many universities are faced with similar challenges and opportunities. To explore these themes, data and GIS services librarians and GIS specialists from five universities—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Texas A&M, New York University, North Carolina State University, and California Polytechnic State University—with different models of library geospatial and data support, describe their programs to help identify common services, as well as unique challenges, opportunities, and future plans.     

Cool Collaborations: Designing a Better Library Experience

Academic libraries routinely partner with other campus units in such areas as information literacy or writing support. However, the Georgia Tech library collaborations described in this article step outside the norm in that librarians are involved throughout the process of designing the collaborative projects; the projects are integrated into the undergraduate curriculum and embrace the science, technology, and design campus focus; the library incurs little or no financial commitment; and projects are ongoing or have long-term effects. The projects continue to change campus perceptions of libraries and librarians, and they have made the library a sought after “cool” collaborator on campus.     

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Godard has consistently voiced his disapproval of Spielberg's Schindler's List. Critics have noted this antipathy yet there is currently no detailed analysis of Godard Godard, Jean-Luc and Youssef, Ishaghpour. 2005. Cinema: The Archeology of Film and the Memory of a Century. Trans. JOHN HOWE, New York: Oberg.  [Google Scholar]'s specific objections. This article attempts to remedy this omission. In the first half, the author focuses on the motivation and logic that underpin Spielberg's film, paying particular attention to the qualms expressed in Godard's Éloge de l'amour over the moral and philosophical dubiousness of employing witness testimony as a means of recreating the past in the present. Then, in the second half, the author analyses the politics of identification in a selection of Godard's films to argue that Schindler's List is made ethically palatable for mainstream audiences through the use of manipulative erotic imagery. There, two critiques are brought together to suggest that Godard's primary objection to Schindler's List is that it constitutes an uplifting consideration of the Shoah that precludes a more serious rumination on an event that ruptures the histories of both the cinema and the twentieth century.     

Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research

This article explores the changing relationship between the academy and new public formations of scientific research, which we term “civic technoscience.” Civic technoscience leverages tactics seen in critical making communities to question and transform how and who can make credible and actionable knowledge. A comparison of two case studies is used. The first is a grassroots mapping process that allows communities to generate high-quality aerial imagery. The second is an academic-led project using environmental sensors to engage disparate audiences in scientific practice. These two projects were found to differ in their ability to form strategic spaces for community-based science, and suggest pathways to foster more robust relationships across the public–academic divide. By altering power dynamics in material, literary, and social technologies used for scientific research, we argue that civic technoscience enables citizens to question expert knowledge production through critical making tactics, and creates opportunities to generate credible public science.     

LEA support services for special educational needs provision and management

The National Foundation for Educational Research recently undertook research on the impact of delegation on local authority support services for special educational needs. This paper presents data on the provision offered by these services and the way in which they are managed. In particular, it examines how support is targeted, the extent and profile of service staff, mechanisms for the referral of pupils for support from the services, management structure, staff deployment and the professional development of service staff, and service monitoring, review and evaluation. Ways in which support services have developed in the 1990s, and their challenges for the next decade in the light of developments in the governance of education and the local policy context, are discussed.     

Market forces and diversity: Some evidence from the 14-19 curriculum

Using an economic analysis of market forces in schooling, this paper investigates change and diversity in the 14-19 curriculum of 16 schools in three local education authorities in England. Using qualitative data from interviews with several teachers in each school, it focuses on changes in the schools' curriculum for modern foreign languages, economics, and business studies. During the period studied, schools had some freedom to choose the courses they offered in these subjects. The interaction between the policies of promotion of competition through comparison (i.e. league tables) and the promotion of competition through specialization is considered. Evidence is found of the influence of local schoolingmarket hierarchies on curriculum change in these schools, and this operated chiefly through changes in school enrolment. Some evidence was found of schools' curricula being influenced by trends set by key schools and the occupation of niches pre-empting choices by other schools. These processes were slowly developing and deepening as market changes exert stronger constraints on school behaviour over time. It is concluded that the impact of quasi-markets on schools' curricula may only be apparent when these processes have had the opportunity to develop more fully.     

Relative Efficiency of Several Methods of Direct Observation

The relative efficiency of several observational sampling plans for assessing classroom behavior in an individualized classroom was investigated. A criterion measure was obtained by cumulating all of the recorded activity measurements on a class of thirty-three pupils over twenty class periods. Various designs were built through sampling the “pool” of activity measurements on the following dimensions: 1.) the length of the observation period; 2.) the time interval between recordings; 3.) the number of days (replications) of observing; and, 4.) the number of pupils observed each day. The combinations or designs that evolved from manipulating these four variables were then compared to the criterion measure, thus permitting an examination of the relative offerings of the different sampling plans.     

Soft benefits for hard nuts: the impact of community‐building interventions on ‘anti‐social youth’

This paper emerges from an evaluation conducted by the author into the impact of a community‐based intervention scheme designed to reduce perceived levels of ‘anti‐social behaviour’ amongst young people living in deprived communities. Drawing from this evaluation, the paper discusses the difficulties in assessing quantifiable measures of the impact of intervention schemes such as these; given the complex nature of the communities served, limitations in the realistic achievements of diversionary schemes and difficulties in identifying measureable outcomes. The paper also argues that given the highly problematic nature of such schemes, qualitative and ‘soft’ measures of impact, which although more difficult to assess, should be afforded greater status amongst funders and evaluators.