Library-Specific Uses of the Dialog Databases Through Westlaw Academic Passwords

Academic law libraries now have access to many Dialog databases through the transparent interface of Westlaw. This is available at a moderate charge under the academic contract with West. Many of these databases are of special interest to librarians, and are being underutilized. This paper surveys some available databases with special library uses, and notes special aspects of searching the Dialog databases through the Westlaw interface.     

Web Mirror Sites

SUMMARY

Libraries can play a key role in ensuring permanent access to primary legal information, both domestic and international. Web mirror sites present a particularly efficient and cost-effective way to collect, disseminate, preserve, and ensure accessibility to information far into the future. Through partnerships with the issuing governments and organizations, databases of official information can be loaded on a local server, updated directly from the issuing site, and captured at regular intervals to get a snapshot of the status of legal instruments as of a certain date. The result is similar to adding the various editions of a print book. The Cornell Law Library has recently made freely available two Web mirror sites for researchers and the public. These are the ILO (International Labour Organization) and the ICJ (International Court of Justice) mirror sites. The Law Library is archiving these sites every six months, thereby providing access to previous versions of a treaty article, or other information that was superseded, or amended. The many additional advantages of creating these partnerships with domestic and international institutions are discussed, as well as the process used to create the mirror sites, and maintaining them. The article ends with a proposal for collaboration among libraries to create the research library of the future. The preservation of digital law is a critical issue because information is disappearing. Libraries have a role to play because it is part of their fundamental mission to preserve information for future researchers.     

Advancing communication as a science: Research opportunities from the federal sector

The centrality of communication in health promotion is described in Healthy People 2010: Objectives for Improving Health, which noted that "health communication can contribute to all aspects of disease prevention and health promotion." In this paper we build on this argument by suggesting that communication science can be advanced by pursuing a "big-science" strategy where important and challenging questions about the role of communication in modern life are studied through rigorous research designs and research findings are applied to addressing significant social issues and problems. A significant dimension of a "big-science" strategy is the pursuit of programs of research using longitudinal designs and large samples with adequate controls. Given that such large-scale studies necessarily involve funding, we review some major funding initiatives and programs in different agencies of the federal governmental.     

Discursive Struggles in Families Formed through Visible Adoption: An Exploration of Dialectical Unity

This study is the first to provide best practices exclusively for communication about crises that involve issues of culture, ethnicity, and/or race from expert crisis managers' perspectives. Using complexity theory as a framework, this study provides an in-depth, theoretically grounded understanding of managing issues and crises involving culture, ethnicity and/or race through the experiences of 34 senior crisis communicators. Complex insider perspectives suggest that responsibility for crisis management must move beyond any managerial bias to become more organic, normative, inclusive, and community spirited. First, issues and crises involving culture, ethnicity, and/or race are defined, laying a foundation for future theory development on ways these issues can become or exacerbate crises. Second, research participants’ stories coalesce to produce best practices and a useful decision-making framework for practical application in organizations.     

Wikipedia as Public Scholarship: Communicating Our Impact Online

Although computer-mediated support groups have been argued to be beneficial for individuals coping with health-related stigma, few studies have explored how communication processes may moderate perceptions of stigma and health outcomes. Increasing our understanding of the relationships among these variables may help to inform social support interventions for individuals facing stigmatized health issues. Drawing from the optimal matching model, the reported study examined the relationships among strong-tie/weak-tie support network preference and health-related stigma for stress and depression among members of health-related computer-mediated support groups. The results indicated that health-related stigma was positively associated with preference for weak-tie support, and preference for weak-tie support was found to moderate the relationship between stigma and both stress and depression. The implications of the findings for the role of on-line weak-tie network supportive relationships in reducing stigma and its application to developing support-focused health interventions and segmenting potential intervention participants are discussed.     

The Value of Communication Science

In communication science, the distinction between applied and basic research is often accompanied by a discussion of the relative value of each. However, the idea that there is a value distinction to be made between applied and basic research is fundamentally inconsistent with scientific epistemology. Rather than different modes of inquiry with different relative value, communication science is a whole, constituted by applied and basic researchers who focus on different goals of science: to explain, to predict, and to control. An example is provided of a highly successful communication intervention created via the cooperation between applied and basic scholars.     

Speaking into Silences: Autoethnography,Communication, and Applied Research

Editor's Note: Given the rare use of autoethnography in the field of communication, I invited Dr. Tillmann to discuss autoethnography as a valuable tool in applied communication research. This discussion serves as a prelude to her essay “Body and Bulimia Revisited: Reflections on ‘A Secret Life.’”

In 2004, two articles in the Journal of Applied Communication Research (Ashcraft & Tretheway, 2004; Goodall, 2004) celebrated the merits of auto- and narrative ethnography, methods of research grounded in lived experience and evocative modes of representation that seek to engage readers emotionally, aesthetically, ethically, and politically. Despite these and other persuasive calls for auto- and narrative ethnographic works, few have been published in communication journals. More than four years ago, JACR offered readers arguments for this kind of scholarship, yet no full-length autoethnography appeared in its pages—until now. This essay, a prelude to its companion, “Body and Bulimia Revisited,” speaks into that silence.     

Accommodating Translational Research

This is an article in a series illustrating the way scholars in communication have pursued translating their research into practice. The translational nature of communication accommodation theory and examples of its application are the focus of this contribution.     

Using Communication Infrastructure Theory to Formulate a Strategy to Locate “Hard-to-Reach” Research Participants

In health-communication research, participants who are disproportionately affected by health disparities are often “hard-to-reach,” making them difficult to identify for formative research. This study used communication infrastructure theory (CIT) to create a strategy for locating a specific subset of residents—those who use 911 for healthcare—within a low-income Atlanta community. Findings suggest the need for strategies that involve employing both the communication channels that are part of the neighborhood storytelling network and the community's discursive spaces, more specifically the communication hot spots and community comfort zones located within the community's built environment.     

Parental Self-efficacy and Sensitivity During Playtime Interactions with Young Children: Unpacking the Curvilinear Association

Although scholars and service providers typically assume that parental self-efficacy (PSE) facilitates sensitive parenting, this study finds that the association between PSE and observer ratings of parents' sensitivity during free play actually is curvilinear. Parents (33 mothers, 5 fathers) from an intergenerational learning program serving low-income families completed the Self-Efficacy for Parenting Tasks Index and were videotaped during a 15-minute play period with their infant/toddler at program entry. Parents' self-reported PSE is positively, albeit weakly, associated with observer ratings of parental sensitivity from low to moderate levels of self-efficacy but inversely associated with sensitivity from moderate to high self-efficacy. Qualitative analyses show that mothers who report high PSE but are rated as low in sensitivity introduce toys when their child is already engaged, restrict their child's access to toys, physically manipulate their child, and violate their child's proximal space. Parenting education programs need to develop strategies for reaching parents who enter with high levels of confidence but lack knowledge of competent parenting practices.