Ex Corde Ecclesiae and American Catholic Higher Education: The Calm Before the Storm or Dead in the Water?

Amid the struggle that Catholic colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, face as they seek to preserve their religious identities, Rome formally entered the fray on August 15, 1990, when Pope John Paul II promulgated the Ex Corde Ecclesiae (Ex Corde) (literally, “from the heart of the Church”). John Paul II wrote Ex Corde in an attempt to reinvigorate the debate over how Catholic colleges and universities can remain true to their religious missions while being viable institutions of higher learning wherein faculty members are free to work as researchers and teachers who can meet the same objective performance evaluation criteria as their professional colleagues in the world of academics. In reviewing the status of Ex Corde over the more than 5 years that expired since the controversy over the adoption of The Application and The Guidelines designed to implement Ex Corde began, this article is divided into three parts. The first part reviews the basic elements of Ex Corde while the second examines both the events surrounding the adoption of The Application and The Guidelines along with their subsequent (non)implementation in the United States. The third part of the article reflects on the current status of Ex Corde in American Catholic colleges and universities, revealing that its critics have little to fear for academic freedom and/or job safety unless its terms are expressly included in employment contracts—a prospect that is not even remotely on the horizon.     

Web-Scale Discovery: Impact on Library Database Web Page Views and Usage

ABSTRACT

Web page views of databases by title and databases by subject pages, in conjunction with COUNTER Database Report 1 and Journal Report 1 statistics, were examined to determine what impact a migration to Primo, a Web-scale discovery layer, had at Central Washington University Brooks Library. The analysis determined that the first year post-migration (2015) compared to the two years pre-migration (2013–14) saw a decline in Web page views of database Web pages, journal full-text article requests, and database record views and result clicks. The implementation of Primo thus had a noticeable negative impact on both direct database access and overall electronic resource usage during the first year post-migration.     

An ex ante evaluation framework for the regional benefits of publicly supported R&D projects

This paper draws on the knowledge-base implicit in ex post evaluations of publicly funded R&D and other related conceptual and empirical studies to suggest a framework for the ex ante evaluation of the regional benefits from R&D projects. The framework developed comprises two main elements: an inventory of the global private and social benefits which might result from any R&D project; and, an assessment of the share of these global benefits which might accrue to a host region, taking into account the characteristics of the R&D project and the region’s innovation system.The inventory of global benefits separately identifies private and social benefits and distinguishes between increments to public and private knowledge stocks, benefits to R&D productivity and benefits from commercialisation. Potential market and ‘pure’ knowledge spillovers are also considered separately. The paper concludes with the application of the framework to two illustrative case studies.     

由Ex Libris的技术特点看我国图书馆自动化的发展趋势

90年代后期网络技术、数据库技术日渐成熟后，图书馆自动化的内容有了更加丰富的内涵。本文在分析Ex Libris技术特点的基础上，对国内图书馆自动化发展趋势进行了展望。