民国时期中美图书馆交流史序说:研究综述、理论基础与历史分期

民国时期的中美图书馆交流史不仅是理解中国图书馆与图书馆学缘起的重要议题,在回应图书馆领域史学研究的“双重困境”方面,也具有其特殊的价值。梳理民国时期中美图书馆交流史的相关文献和研究主题发现,本课题难点在于庞杂的线索、社群与诸多政治、经济因素的介入等。由此,本研究吸收“世界体系理论”“书籍交流圈”等跨学科的思想和方法,提出一个由宏观、中观和微观三个层次组成的理论视角,并阐述这一理论视角如何转化为具体的研究方法,以提高学界对民国时期中美图书馆交流史研究的整体理解和把控能力。研究发现,“专业交往”到“文化外交”的视角渐变是民国时期中美图书馆交流的核心轴线,以此可以将这段历史分为四个时期,帮助我们把握不同时期的交往脉络、主要成就和基本特点。表1。参考文献73。     

谢拉的文献工作教育思想与实践

在1952—1970年担任西储大学图书馆学院院长期间,谢拉积极探索文献工作教育:在学科理论方面,进行文献工作学科理论建设;在学术研究方面,设立美国图书馆学院第一个专门的文献工作研究中心“文献工作与交流研究中心”;在教学活动方面,在图书馆学教育项目中引入文献工作相关课程,强化以文献工作为重点的专业图书馆人才培养。谢拉的文献工作教育是对传统图书馆学教育的改造,适应了图书馆学教育专门化的发展趋势,其立足点是以文献工作提升图书馆职业的社会价值,服务于图书馆人才培养,体现出明显的图书馆本位立场。谢拉领导下的西储大学图书馆学院的文献工作教育是一种过渡形态的早期情报学教育,促进了20世纪美国图书馆学教育向图书情报学教育格局的转型。参考文献62。     

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.     

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.     

Worn Grooves

Drawing from visual, material and written archival sources, this article critically explores some of the functions, uses and perceived values of recorded sound during the First World War and in its aftermath. An instrument of communication as well as commemoration, the gramophone helped bridge geographical (and, in some cases, cultural) distances between the home front and the rear, providing civilians with the fleeting illusion of presence, proximity, or even sentimental communion with the front. The article analyses (a) the affective and connective, but also propagandist, values of commercial wartime recordings as they circulated between the home and the front, (b) the popular notion of gramophones as regulatory instruments of civilisation, (c) the commemorative exploitations of recorded sound in the interwar period. The article focuses on the British experience, contrasting it with examples drawn from French and German experiences.     

Is There a Future for Journalism?

A functionalist perspective on the future of journalism would posit that because human society needs journalism, we will find ways to support this communications practice. Yet such a perspective, however consoling, assumes a teleology that is far from guaranteed. What will happen is far from easy to predict; nevertheless, this paper pinpoints several key issues that impact on the future of journalism. It also advances some general propositions and a broad periodisation around UNESCO’s historical role in relation to these issues. The analysis gives particular attention to political and economic matters, the safety of journalists and internet governance. Each of these dimensions entails existential threats to journalism, but some opportunities are also noted. Four paradoxes are also identified, with tensions that may lead to change in one direction or another.     

Google Scholar and Web of Science: Examining gender differences in citation coverage across five scientific disciplines

Many studies demonstrate differences in the coverage of citing publications in Google Scholar (GS) and Web of Science (WoS). Here, we examine to what extent citation data from the two databases reflect the scholarly impact of women and men differently. Our conjecture is that WoS carries an indirect gender bias in its selection criteria for citation sources that GS avoids due to criteria that are more inclusive. Using a sample of 1250 U.S. researchers in Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Cardiology and Chemistry, we examine gender differences in the average citation coverage of the two databases. We also calculate database-specific h-indices for all authors in the sample. In repeated simulations of hiring scenarios, we use these indices to examine whether women's appointment rates increase if hiring decisions rely on data from GS in lieu of WoS. We find no systematic gender differences in the citation coverage of the two databases. Further, our results indicate marginal to non-existing effects of database selection on women's success-rates in the simulations. In line with the existing literature, we find the citation coverage in WoS to be largest in Cardiology and Chemistry and smallest in Political Science and Sociology. The concordance between author-based h-indices measured by GS and WoS is largest for Chemistry followed by Cardiology, Political Science, Sociology and Economics.     

Investigating the quality of interactions and public engagement around scientific papers on Twitter

This study explores science communication on Twitter by investigating a sample of tweets referring to academic papers in five different scientific fields. The specifications of science communicators on Twitter, the characteristics of those who initiate actions (by tweeting), the extent and quality of reactions (retweeting), individual and group interactions, and the distribution of tweets across types of engagement in the process of science communication (i.e., dissemination, consultation, and evaluation) were explored. A broad array of actors is involved in the communication of science on Twitter, with individual citizens and individual researchers playing an important role. In principle, this is promising for creating direct interaction, which can be difficult through more traditional mass media. The vast majority of communication activities regarding academic papers is undigested dissemination with almost no sign of debate, contestation, or collective reflection. Another general finding of this study is that bot accounts play a major role in the science communication landscape on Twitter.     

Impact Factors and the Central Limit Theorem: Why citation averages are scale dependent

Citation averages, and Impact Factors (IFs) in particular, are sensitive to sample size. Here, we apply the Central Limit Theorem to IFs to understand their scale-dependent behavior. For a journal of n randomly selected papers from a population of all papers, we expect from the Theorem that its IF fluctuates around the population average μ, and spans a range of values proportional to $\sigma /\sqrt{n}$, where σ² is the variance of the population's citation distribution. The $1/\sqrt{n}$ dependence has profound implications for IF rankings: The larger a journal, the narrower the range around μ where its IF lies. IF rankings therefore allocate an unfair advantage to smaller journals in the high IF ranks, and to larger journals in the low IF ranks. As a result, we expect a scale-dependent stratification of journals in IF rankings, whereby small journals occupy the top, middle, and bottom ranks; mid-sized journals occupy the middle ranks; and very large journals have IFs that asymptotically approach μ. We obtain qualitative and quantitative confirmation of these predictions by analyzing (i) the complete set of 166,498 IF & journal-size data pairs in the 1997–2016 Journal Citation Reports of Clarivate Analytics, (ii) the top-cited portion of 276,000 physics papers published in 2014–2015, and (iii) the citation distributions of an arbitrarily sampled list of physics journals. We conclude that the Central Limit Theorem is a good predictor of the IF range of actual journals, while sustained deviations from its predictions are a mark of true, non-random, citation impact. IF rankings are thus misleading unless one compares like-sized journals or adjusts for these effects. We propose the Φ index, a rescaled IF that accounts for size effects, and which can be readily generalized to account also for different citation practices across research fields. Our methodology applies to other citation averages that are used to compare research fields, university departments or countries in various types of rankings.     

美国科技博物馆展览开发中公众参与的研究及启示

展览开发是博物馆展览的基础问题,随着公众参与逐渐被提上研究议程,也促使我们去思考展览开发过程中如何引入公众参与。美国的科技博物馆展览开发已经建立了较为完善的公众参与体系:明确的参与者角色、系统的参与理念和阶段式的参与行为,已经获得了普遍的应用。借鉴美国博物馆的经验,我国博物馆展览的开发,应在构建展览评估体系的基础上,进一步了解和认识公众,拓展公众参与的方式,并不断寻求公众的声音。