Automated Classification to Improve the Efficiency of Weeding Library Collections

Previous studies have shown that weeding a library collection benefits patrons and increases circulation rates. However, the time required to review the collection and make weeding decisions presents a formidable obstacle. This study empirically evaluated methods for automatically classifying weeding candidates. A data set containing 80,346 items from a large-scale weeding project running from 2011 to 2014 at Wesleyan University was used to train six machine learning classifiers to predict a weeding decision of either ‘Keep’ or ‘Weed’ for each candidate. The study found statistically significant agreement (p?=?0.001) between classifier predictions and librarian judgments for all classifier types. The naive Bayes and linear support vector machine classifiers had the highest recall (fraction of items weeded by librarians that were identified by the algorithm), while the k-nearest-neighbor classifier had the highest precision (fraction of recommended candidates that librarians had chosen to weed). The variables found to be most relevant were: librarian and faculty votes for retention, item age, and the presence of copies in other libraries.     

EUROPEAN PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE

In this paper we explore the relationships between public interestin, knowledge of, and attitudes towards science and technologyand the level of industrialization in 12 countries of the EuropeanCommunity. Using the 1989 Eurobarometer survey no 31 (N=11,678),we constructed four scales measuring interest, knowledge, generalattitudes to science, and support for EC funded science foreach of the 12 EC countries. We found that overall factual scientificknowledge correlates moderately positively with interest andattitudes to science. For example the Netherlands and GreatBritain have relatively high levels of knowledge, interest,and support for science in general. Spain and Greece have relativelylow levels of knowledge, interest, and support for science ingeneral. However, the simple correlation hides more complexrelationships. First, the variance within and across countriesof knowledge, attitudes and interest increases with nationallevels of knowledge. This indicates greater degrees of polarizationof both support and interest. Second, the data indicates a post-industrialismeffect: knowledge, interest in, and attitudes to science showa curvilinear relationship with levels of industrialization.The decline of interest in science and the less positive attitudesin highly developed countries requires further exploration.Third, we found, that the consistency of the knowledge and theattitude measures declines as the national level of knowledgeincreases. We suggest that this reflects a knowledge-ignoranceparadox and knowledge specialization among informed populations.Support for EC level science follows a different pattern. Wefound that France, Italy, and Spain show high levels of supportfor EC level science. This is not the case in Great Britainand Germany. The pattern suggests that attitudes towards ECscience are formed on the basis of national level scientificstrength: if the national science base is strong, EC scienceinitiatives find less support and vice versa. These findingsrepresent a first step towards a comparative assessment of publicunderstanding of science in EC countries.     

The role of education in Jewish continuity: a response to Jonathan Sacks

Contrasting explanations of Jewish survival form the backdrop to this article. For Jonathan Sacks (1994 Sacks, J. 1994. Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?, Ilford: Vallentine Mitchell.  [Google Scholar]) the crucial factor has been the role played by Jewish education; indeed, he claims that the demographic threat currently facing Anglo‐Jewry is largely the result of the community having neglected the Jewish education of its children over the past 200 years. He advocates reinstating this communal responsibility as the sovereign Jewish value in order to deal with the threat. In my view, the influence that Sacks attributes to education and particularly to Jewish schools is overstated. It stems from a misreading of modern Anglo‐Jewish history and from a failure to take fully into account the ways in which Jewish schools impact on their pupils’ ethnic and religious identity. These considerations apart, I contend that prioritising education will not necessarily strengthen the commitment to Jewish continuity that is the sine qua non of survival.     

The ‘White Man’s Game’? West Indian Cricket Tours of the 1900s

The 1900s saw two tours of the United Kingdom (UK) by a mixed race cricket team representing the West Indies. This paper argues that the tours were part of a concerted cultural campaign largely organized by the West India Committee to raise the profile of the British West Indian colonies in the Mother Country in the light of competition for favour among the settler colonies. It analyzes the selection of the team and its reception in the UK to argue that the existing literature has been mistaken in portraying the team to have been subject to consistent hostility due to the inclusion of black players in the touring party. Rather it is argued that the team of 1900 was largely welcomed as a truly representative West Indian team but that by 1906 a tightening of the definition of who could represent the empire on the sports field, influenced by the settlement of the South Africa War, meant that mixed race cricket would be rejected and the West Indians unjustly excluded from the Imperial Cricket Conference, which became an all whites club.     

Perceptual learning in human and nonhuman animals: A search for common ground

Perceptual learning has been extensively studied in both human and nonhuman animals, but the two lines of research have, for the most part, developed independently, addressing seemingly rather different issues by rather different methods. It has been argued, however, that analysis of the disparate phenomena studied in experiments on perceptual learning reveals that in all the studies, the essential feature is that appropriate training allows behavior to come to be controlled by the unique features, rather than by the common features, of similar stimuli. It has further been argued that experiments with nonhuman animals have established the existence of a range of learning processes that allow this to occur, and that these processes have general relevance, applying to humans as well as to animals.     

Book reviews

Zwartjes, Otto, ed. La Sociedad andalusí y sus tradiciones literarias (Foro Hispánico, 7). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

Brincat, Joseph M. Malta 870–1054: Al‐Himyai's Account and its Linguistic Implications. Malta: Said International Ltd., 1995. 52pp.

Sells, Michael A. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. 316 pp., US$18.95 (paperback), US$49.91 (cloth).

Diem, Werner, Arabische Geschäftsbriefe des 10. bis 14. Jahrhunderts aus der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek in Wien (Documents Arabica Antiqua 1), 2 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995. Textband ix+518pp., Tafelband 76 plates.

Coope, Jessica A. The Martyrs of Cordoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. xvii+113 pp., US$ 25 (cloth).

Edwards, John. Religion and Society in Spain, c.1492 (Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS 520). Aldershot and Brookfield: Variorum, 1996. x+351 pp., US$ 97.00 (cloth).

Tolan, John Victor, ed. Medìeval Christian Perceptions of Islam. A Book of Essays (Garland Medieval Casebooks, Volume 10). New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. xxi+414 pp., US$60.00 (cloth).     

The role of habituation of the response to LiCl in the US-preexposure effect

In two experiments, rats received preexposure consisting of six intraperitoneal injections of lithium chloride (LiCl). This treatment reduced the magnitude of the unconditioned response (UR; suppressed consumption of a novel flavor) evoked by an additional injection (Experiment 1) or by oral consumption (Experiment 2) of LiCl. In both experiments, preexposure also attenuated the acquisition of a conditioned aversion with an LiCl injection as the unconditioned stimulus (US) but had no effect on the aversion produced when the US was oral consumption of LiCl (Experiment 2). These results are consistent with the view that the reduced ability of the preexposed US to serve as a reinforcer depends on blocking by injection-related cues and is independent of habituation of the UR recorded in the present study. Possible interpretations of this dissociation are discussed.     

The influence of pictures on the derivation of meaning from children's reading materials

This discussion is a review of experimental work designed to determine whether pictures have an effect upon the derivation of meaning from the text printed in children's reading materials. Many reading schemes emphasize the use of illustration, but for a number of different purposes ranging from the provision of a referent for a specific word, to the provision of' contextual support, and the generation of motivation for reading. Experimental studies of the interactions between pictures arid words in the cognitive system go some way to supporting three uses of illustration in (a) the provision of meanings against which the print may be compared, (b) in the development of an organized understanding of the meaning of the text, and (c) in the enhancement of subsequent recall. The danger of distraction arising from the pictures has also been investigated, and been found to lead to decoding errors in young children presented with one word at a time. An analysis of mutual interference effects between pairs of pictures and words leads to the conclusion that the cognitive representations of meanings arc organized in a semantic system common to pictures and words. Thus, any decoding errors due to interference effects are of more than local importance—they can affect comprehension and influence the stored representation.