If we built it,would they come? Creating instruction videos with promotion in mind

This article reports on a video project done in an academic library where faculty were included in the production and marketing of the library instruction videos. The videos allowed the librarian to provide a shorter presentation and spend most of her time working individually with each student. The results showed that 97% of the students watched the videos and were able to benefit from the content. The implementation of the videos was a success due to the collaboration of the professors teaching the three courses and the buy-in of the course coordinator; both factors were essential in the success of the video project.     

Managing a Biomedical Library’s Instruction Program: Redefining Scope

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) library instruction program provides training services to staff, clinicians, and researchers across NIH and several Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) operating divisions. The audience, training needs, and training topics are diverse and constantly changing. The NIH library has developed several new services and class topics to meet the needs of its NIH and HHS communities. Context, strategies, and future directions for the NIH library instruction program are described.     

Preparing for Practice: Strengthening Third-Year Medical Students’ Awareness of Point-of-Care Resources

This column describes the development and implementation of a responsive library course designed to train third-year medical students as they begin their clerkships. The course design consisted of a brief face-to-face introduction during third-year orientation and an online course developed in Canvas, an online learning management system. The objective of the course was to not only introduce students to the resources but also to teach them how to effectively use those resources at the point-of-care. Students evaluated the course to assess the overall effectiveness of the instruction. Course development and content, feedback provided by students, as well as suggestions for improvement are discussed.     

OER evaluation as a means of teaching information literacy in individual and small group settings

ABSTRACT

Open education resources represent a great opportunity to reduce textbook costs, but many of them have not been evaluated for quality. Librarians and former students in an introduction to engineering course collected and evaluated open education resources to supplement the course textbook in future semesters. Both searching for and evaluating these resources created opportunities for the librarians to evaluate information literacy skills of these students and to provide instruction to improve these skills.     

Tools and Principles for Effective Online Library Instruction: Andragogy and Undergraduates

The library literature evaluating the efficacy of online tutorial methods and delivery tools is a valuable resource for librarians looking for information to inform their choices for developing asynchronous online instruction. This literature, however, examines a wide variety of delivery tools, methods, and student populations. As a result, it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions about any one tutorial tool or method. This article compares selected research and concludes that the consensus in the literature suggests that applying adult learning principles to library tutorials has a larger impact on effective online instruction than the individual tool.     

The Librarian BFF: A Case Study of a Cohort-Based Personal Librarian Program

This case study presents the development and implementation of a personal librarian program for a cohort-based, executive-style higher education administration doctoral program. Librarians and the program director collaborated to create a student-centered program based on individual research needs. The personal librarian program was designed to build a close relationship between the librarian and individual students; to help identify their research knowledge gaps; and to identify resources to meet each individual students' research needs.     

The IR Has Two Faces: Positioning Institutional Repositories for Success

This article describes the ongoing efforts at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries to evolve the role of the institutional repository (IR) and to effectively position it within the context of the Libraries’ collections, research support, and scholarly communication services. A major component of this process is re-examining the fundamental aims of the IR and aligning it to the Libraries and the campus strategic goals. The authors situate UNLV Libraries’ experience within the context of the current literature to provide background and reasoning for our decision to pursue two, at times conflicting, aims for the IR: one for scholarly communication and another for research administration.     

Technological research in the EU is less efficient than the world average. EU research policy risks Europeans’ future

We have studied the efficiency of research in the EU by a percentile-based citation approach that analyzes the distribution of country papers among the world papers. Going up in the citation scale, the frequency of papers from efficient countries increases while the frequency from inefficient countries decreases. In the percentile-based approach, this trend, which is uniform at any citation level, is measured by the e_p index that equals the P_{top 1%}/P_{top 10%} ratio. By using the e_p index we demonstrate that EU research on fast-evolving technological topics is less efficient than the world average and that the EU is far from being able to compete with the most advanced countries. The e_p index also shows that the USA is well ahead of the EU in both fast- and slow-evolving technologies, which suggests that the advantage of the USA over the EU in innovation is due to low research efficiency in the EU. In accord with some previous studies, our results show that the European Commission’s ongoing claims about the excellence of EU research are based on a wrong diagnosis. The EU must focus its research policy on the improvement of its inefficient research. Otherwise, the future of Europeans is at risk.     

Classical Chinese reading instruction: Current practices and their relationship with students' strategy use and reading motivation

The study examined current practices in Classical Chinese (CC) reading instruction in Hong Kong and the relationship between different instructional practices and students' strategy use and motivation in CC reading. A total of 519 secondary students voluntarily responded to a questionnaire that measured their perception of CC reading instruction, strategy use, and motivation. The findings indicate while teachers frequently teach both the language and content aspects of CC reading, the teacher-centered approach they are now adopting is ineffective in facilitating students' CC reading development. Relations between different instructional approaches and students’ strategy use and motivation in CC reading are discussed.     

回顾与前瞻:用社会主义核心价值体系引领社会思潮的有效途径

自党的十七大提出积极探索用社会主义核心价值体系引领社会思潮的有效途径以来,学术界对此给予了极大的关注,并围绕着提出的必要性、有效途径和制度保障三个部分进行了广泛的研究,取得了丰硕的成果。但还存在着如:基础研究薄弱、宣传解读性成果较多;不同理论观点缺乏碰撞与争鸣等,这些问题还有待于进一步深化和拓展。