Bridging the Gap Inside … Inside Document Delivery

Abstract

Librarians today are faced with many choices when acquiring information and directing their users to the sources they need. This is most evident with serials. The choices have become more confusing with new options requiring libraries to determine what a full text purchase actually buys, how to be sure users can identify the material needed, and then how to acquire the actual material in the most appropriate media. Providing access by the piece is a valid solution that can help lead to the transition to full text online journals. This article critiques the use of the British Library Document Supply Centre's “inside” service and its use at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library (UIUC). The article concludes with a review of the components of a good document delivery system.     

A New Approach to Library Service Discovery and Resource Delivery

In this vision session, Daniel Chudnov discussed how current specifications in development and use, including COinS and unAPI, could improve service discovery and resource delivery. The speaker focused on the benefits of each spec and examined each from a critical perspective. He concluded that each spec could not deliver the ultimate performance of current commercial counterparts such as iTunes. The specs combined, however, contribute to a preferable ideal to which libraries should aspire. Throughout his talk, Chudnov built on a strategy libraries can utilize to begin implementing that ideal.     

Radical Relocation: Adapting Print Collections to an E-Centric World

With the advent of e-journal preservation projects and publisher digitization of journal backfiles, academic libraries have begun to move their corresponding print volumes of these titles to storage to avoid duplication and save space. This article examines the supporting justifications, outreach mechanisms, and logistical procedures undertaken at American University Library to relocate the entire bound journal collection to offsite storage in order to address severe physical space constraints and to support patron use of and preference for electronic journal content. In addition, the article presents preliminary data regarding the use of bound volumes sent to storage and an overall analysis of this transformational project.     

Taking sides in the war on news: exploring curvilinear associations and group differences related to perceptions of news media as threat

ABSTRACT

The free press performs essential democratic functions, but widespread negative attitudes toward the press threaten its legitimacy and effectiveness as a check on formal institutions. In order to combat these attitudes, media organizations must understand who holds them and why. A survey-based study of U.S. adults (N?=?2052) focuses on associations between perceptions of the news media industry as a threat to political performance and a range of politically oriented behaviors (i.e. news media exposure, political talk, political participation). Analyses reveal a series of non-monotonic relationships. Group differences between those who hold the most extreme views concerning news-media-as-threat are also explored. The opposing groups are distinct in some important ways (e.g. ideology, race), but are also found to be surprisingly similar (e.g. income, education, gender, news media exposure). The results suggest new strategies for maintaining and restoring confidence in media organizations.     

Growth,development and performance of the Philippine and Brazilian telecommunications sectors: A contextual analysis

The direct determinants of an industrial sector's success is usually taken to be ownership, market structure, and the regulatory structure in place. However, Mody (1987) has noted that frequently the performance of communication technology has more to do with economic, political and cultural contextual factors than with technical efficiencies. In the light of this observation, this comparitive case study seeks to assess the importance of the contextual forces that have influenced the development of the telecommunication sectors in the Philippines and Brazil.     

To name or not to name: a cross-cultural comparison of on-air attribution in US and Chinese TV news

This study investigates the Sino-US difference in the journalistic practice of providing on-air attribution for those interviewed in television news. Through a content analysis, this study compares how CBS News, a premier US TV network, and CCTV, China's most watched network, attributed their interviewees with on-screen name credits (names, titles and affiliations). The findings show that US journalists were more likely to provide on-screen name credits than their Chinese colleagues who, in turn, were more likely to give credits to interviewees who were older, male and government officials. This study should contribute to a better understanding of how cultural values and political ideologies may affect the way interviewees are treated in television news.     

Negotiating fragmented women's news: state,market and feminism in contemporary Chinese media

This study aims to explain the reasons for the transformation of women's news in contemporary China. It concludes that in comparison with women news's in the Maoist period, present-day women's news is represented in a fragmented way. This article analyses the differences among the individual, professional, and institutional aspects in news production, while emphasizing the complicated interaction among feminism, state, and market to illuminate the reasons behind women's news transformation. Due to the immanent masculinity of both state and market, feminism in China has to face a state–market complex, that is, double pressure. Comparing with state and market, the influence from feminism to journalism is quite weak and there is a long way to go before feminism realizes its own agenda for media transformation.     

Reinvention of the Public Library for the 21st Century,edited by William L. Whitesides,Sr.

Abstract

A first-person account of the drama inside the CNN newsroom on the day the Hurricane Katrina rocked the US Gulf Coast. Elliot Masie's document shows how the gathering and reporting of the news has become more eclectic, technical and under the influence of citizen-journalists who shape the news by what they send electronically to news outlets and to each other. In the librarian's job of helping researchers access information about the news has become more complex because the traditional linkage of reporting, editing and publishing has broken down.     

Experimental Linguistic Indexing for Information Retrieval

Abstract

The primary goal of the ELIXIR project was to achieve improvements in the performance of text-retrieval systems by confronting some of the challenges presented by the indexing of full-text documents. We explored two hypotheses involving the use of linguistic analysis to improve the automatic creation of indexes: (1) if it is possible to develop algorithms that index only the words which most closely capture the document's content-not the complete text, as is done in existing sys-tems-the retrieval of irrelevant documents might be minimized; (2) if it is possible to create indexing algorithms that perform a minimal syntactic parse required to capture important phrases, the index may represent the document's content even more accurately, increasing the likelihood that the article can be retrieved by a relevant query.     

Searching the Literature of Veterinary Science

This article is an exploration of techniques used to retrieve items in the veterinary science related literature using the MEDLINE, CAB ABSTRACTS, AGRICOLA and BIOSIS databases. The discussion is database and not vendor-specific and is directed at the medical reference librarian or information specialist currently engaged in online searching. Search aids in the form of tables are presented.