Portals in libraries

In 2007, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science issued its report outlining five goals to guide research libraries' burgeoning endeavors in offering e-science services and initiatives [1]. Since 2007 and the ARL report, the library scholarly literature, including recent communications from ARL e-science task force member James Mullins and task force liaison Neil Rambo, has contained a number of discussions on roles for librarians and libraries pursuing e-science initiatives [2–,6]. The ARL report included strategies and actions for libraries to take to prepare and position themselves to support this emerging process of scholarly communication. The report's third outcome states that librarians should seek to become “knowledgeable and skilled research library professionals with the capacity to contribute to e-science and to shape new roles and models of service.” Although the scholarly literature discussing e-science collaboration is growing [7–,10], few articles exist that have actually addressed how and where current and future health sciences and science and technology librarians should turn to develop the specific e-science capacity prescribed in the ARL report. In the summer of 2009, the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School applied for and was awarded funding from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region (NN/LM NER), to begin the construction of an e-science educational web portal specifically for librarians wanting to develop this capacity. The motivation for the portal came from feedback and conversations with librarians attending a regional e-science symposium and subsequent science boot camp, jointly sponsored by the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), the University of Massachusetts Libraries, and the NN/LM NER.

Objective – To investigate whether libraries achieve strategic credibility by assessing if strategic planning goals match the achievements described in annual reports.
 
 Design – Content analysis of annual reports and strategic plans from a sample of Association of Research Libraries (ARL).
 
 Setting – Academic libraries in Canada and the United States of America. 
 
 Subjects – A random sample of 12 Canadian and 16 American academic libraries. All libraries were members of ARL.
 
 Methods – The researcher contacted the directors of 28 ARL libraries and asked for copies of their strategic plans and annual reports. She also visited the websites of libraries to obtain the reports. The contents of the strategic plans and annual reports were analyzed, and trends in the Canadian and American strategic plans were identified.
 
 Main Results – This study found that only 39% of ARL libraries produce annual reports, making it difficult to assess if libraries have strategic credibility, as their strategic plans cannot be assessed against annual reports. The strategic plans gathered in this study were analyzed and emerging themes were identified. These included physical library space (renovations, expansions or new buildings); offsite storage; assessment (both of the libraries’ services, and of information literacy training); development activities such as fundraising and marketing; and personnel issues. Cultural differences also were found in the strategic plans, with American libraries being more focused on trends such as digitization and institutional repositories, and Canadian libraries’ plans being more focused on users’ needs. Trends in annual reports were not reported due to the small number of annual reports in the sample.
 
 
 Conclusion – This study gives a snapshot of the trends in strategic plans of ARL members. It shows that many ARL members do not produce an annual report, and that it is therefore difficult to assess if their strategic plans are implemented successfully. The article hypothesizes that the communication of achievements may now be part of development and marketing efforts, rather than traditional annual reports.

As anthropologists, public intellectuals, and feminists, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead played remarkable roles in twentieth-century life and thought-and far beyond the academy. Their work helped to popularize anthropology while introducing such terms as culture and racism into common parlance. At the same time, they contributed to wider debates about environmentalism, sexuality, the women's movement, and American foreign policy. In this collection, prominent international scholars come together to explore the lives, works, and legacies of two influential figures in American anthropology. The contributions reflect a wide range of topics and perspectives: Benedict and Mead's complicated personal and professional relationship; their activities as scholars and outspoken intellectuals; their efforts to promote feminism and undermine racism; their contributions to (and the challenges they posed to) the imperialist project; and the stories behind their best-known works, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and Coming of Age in Samoa. Together, the essays provide a useful and provocative introduction to Benedict and Mead as well as to the ongoing debate about the legacy they left behind. Contributors: Lois Banner, University of Southern California; Margaret M. Caffrey, University of Memphis; Nanako Fukui, Kansai University; Angela Gilliam, Evergreen State College; Pauline Kent, Ryukoku University; C. Douglas Lummis, Okinawa International University; Nancy Lutkehaus, University of Southern California; Judith Schachter Modell, Carnegie Mellon University; Maureen Molloy, University of Auckland; Louise M. Newman, University of Florida; Dolores E. Janiewski, Victoria University of Wellington; Christopher Shannon, University of Notre Dame; Gerald Sullivan, University of Notre Dame; Sharon Tiffany, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater; Jean Walton, University of Rhode Island; Virginia Yans, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

Library Investment Index – Why is it Important?

The Classic. The Treatment of Ruptured Lumbar Intervertebral Discs by Vertebral Body Fusion

The conference on Exposing Hidden Collections, hosted by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) at the Library of Congress in September 2003, was notable for many reasons. Among these were the focus on special collections in the first place; the representation not only from ARL libraries, but also from institutions included in the Oberlin Group of college libraries and the Independent Research Library Association; the expansion of participants to include special collections administrators, library directors, and representatives of foundations and funding agencies; and the emphasis on our dirty little secret, namely, that our libraries collectively hold millions of items that . . .

Portals in libraries. Library technology and planning for change

R I C H A R D H. C R A C R O F T Brigham Young University Research in Western American Literature The following lists of scholarly works completed or in progress have been gleaned from responses to letters sent to Departments of English across the country and from Dissertation Abstracts. Please send data on any uncited works to Richard H. Cracroft, Associate Professor of English, A-215 JKBA, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84601. I. COMPLETED THESES AND DISSERTATIONS: Aadland, Daniel Arthur “Indian Country, A Novel” (Ph.D.) University of Utah, 1972-73. Allen, David Arthur “Willa Cather: A Critical Study” (Ph.D.) University of Denver, 1972. Allred, Jared Rulon “A. B. Guthrie, Jr.: The Artist in the Wilderness” (Ph.D.) University of Utah, 1972-73. Avery, Charles Wayne “Mark Twain’s Racial Attitudes in Huckleberry Finn and PudcL’nhead Wilson" (M.A.) Wichita State University, 1973. Bolton, Richard Russell “Portrayal of the Garrison Military in American Fiction, 1946-1970” (Ph.D.) Washington State University, 1972. Brauer, Ralph “The Horse, the Gun, and the Piece of Property: Changing Images of the TV Western” (Ph.D.) University of Minnesota, 1972. Briggs, Arlen John “Nathanael West and Surrealism” (Ph.D.) University of O regon, 1972. Burkhardt, Peggy Craven “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Defenders” (Ph.D.) University of Iowa, 1971. Cameron, Alexander J. “The Image of the Physician in the American Novel: 1859-1925” (Ph.D.) University of Notre Dame, 1972. Western American Literature 189 Carpenter, David “Alberta in Fiction” (Ph.D.) University of Alberta, 1973. Cherewick, Janice “Elements of Romance in Selected Fiction of the Canadian West, 1920-1970” (M.A.) University of Alberta, 1973. Codiga, Christopher Robert “The Relationship between Man and Nature in America’s Southwestern Deserts, 1941-1971” (M.A.) University of Oregon, 1972. Coon, Gilbert Dennis “A Study of A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and His Tetralogy” (Ph.D.) Washington State University, 1972. Corser, Cristin D. “The Indian as Symbol of Transcendent Spirituality in Oliver La Farge, Frank Waters, and Edwin Corle” (M.A.) Brigham Young University, 1973. Decker, Sara Josephine Ferris “Violence and Identity in The Deerslayer and Absalom, Absalom!” (M.A.) Wichita State University, 1973. Digbold, Robert Kent “A Critical Edition of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative” (Ph.D.) Yale University, 1972. Dinn, James M. “ ‘Only Two or Three Human Stories’:Recurrent Patterns of Action in the Major Fiction of Willa Cather” (Ph.D.) University of Notre Dame, 1973. Dunnivant, James “Ken Kesey and the Fictive Image of the Western Male in Contemporary American Fiction” (M.A.) Sonoma State College, 1973. Evers, Lawrence Joseph “The Literature of the Omaha” (Ph.D.) University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1972. Farrington, Thomas Arthur “The Control of Imagery in Katherine Ann Porter’s Fiction” (Ph.D.) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1972. Harver, Hyla Hope “The Influence of Scientific Theories of Expression on G arland’s Main-Travelled Roads” (Ph.D.) University of Tulsa, 1973. Hood, Charles E. “Hard Work and Tough Dreaming: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.” (M.A.) University of Montana, 1969. Homer, Taunalee “The Reconciliation of Opposites: Universal Patterns in Five Novels Characterizing the American Indian” (M.A.) Brigham Young University, 1973. 190 Research Ifkovic, Edward Joseph “God’s Country and the Woman: The Development of an American Identity in the Popular Novel, 1893-1913.” (Ph.D.) University of Massachusetts, 1972. Jain, Suevita Gael “John Steinbeck’s Concept of Man” (Ph.D.) University of Nebraska, 1972. Jenson, Sidney LaMarr “The Middle Ground: A Study of Wallace Stegner’s Use of History in Fiction” (Ph.D.) University of Utah, 1972-73. Johnson, Kenneth “The Lost Eden: The New World in American Nature Writing” (Ph.D.) University of New Mexico, 1973. Junzels, William J. “The Use of Motive:American Mythologies in the Poetry of Gary Snyder” (Ph.D.) State University of New York at Buffalo, 1973. Justin, Jeffrey Arthur “Unknown Land Poetry: Walt Whitman, Robert Bly, and Gary Snyder” (Ph.D.) University of Michigan, 1973. Karnath, David Leigh “The Lying Contest (The Meaning of Form in Mark Twain’s Fictions)” (Ph.D.) University of Minnesota, 1972. Kogelmass, Harold “The Search for Identity: The Development of the Protean Model of Self in Contemporary American Fiction...

The Robotics Education Workshop (http://projects. csail.mit.edu/rss/RobotEd/) took place in connection with the 2005 Robotics Systems and Science (RSS) symposium (http://www.roboticsconference.org/) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 11 June 2005. It was organized by John Leonard, Una-May O'Reilly, Nick Roy, Daniela Rus, and Seth Teller. The workshop’s main goal was to discuss what it would take to turn robotics into a core course that can be taught in every accredited CS, ME, and EE undergraduate program in the United States and elsewhere around the world. We were inspired to organize this workshop during an introductory robotics course we have been developing as a team (http://courses.csail. mit.edu/6.141) and were encouraged by Hal Abelson. There are many reasons why we believe now is an important time to consider teaching robotics broadly. The computing revolution is bringing computers closer and closer to interactions with the physical world. We have seen the progression from mainframes to desktops to laptops to pervasive computing by networking. Most of today’s computers have integrated sensors, such as microphones, primitive motion sensors to park the disk drive, light sensors to detect when to automatically illuminate the keyboard or dim the screen, and cameras to collect images from the surrounding environment. Recent advances in the cost, size, performance, and capabilities of actuators show us that actuation will become native to a computing environment so that today’s personal computers (PCs) will become tomorrow’s personal robots (PRs). Robotics brings an interesting perspective to computer science education as it naturally puts together continuous and discrete computation and provides an opportunity to reason about error and uncertainty, an important new topic in the study of computation at the undergraduate level. Last but not least, the love of robots is as pervasive as can be. Robotics is hard to teach because the expertise in robotics is concentrated at a few institutions. And, there are no established curricula, no robust and inexpensive teaching platforms, and no collections of labs and projects with solutions. Teaching robotics well relies on integrating together ME, EE, and CS topics; creating a balanced syllabus is a huge challenge. Yet, robotics provides the perfect educational tool for introducing students to embedded systems and computation for interacting with the physical world, and to making intelligent autonomous machines. Several universities have already introduced special topics courses on robotics. The curricula and hardware platforms for these courses are quite varied, and the goals of the courses differ across ME, EE, and CS departments. We wished to leverage this excellent body of knowledge and discuss how to develop an integrated approach to teaching robotics that would train students simultaneously in foundational aspects of designing, controlling, and programming robots and embedded systems. To this end, the discussions at the RSS education workshop were focused on 1) evaluating the state of the art for undergraduate robotics education, 2) discussing how to build on this experience toward a broad integration of robotics in the undergraduate curricula, and 3) discussing how to best share course materials. Over 30 professors from universities and colleges in the United States, Europe, and Asia met for a full day. The program alternated presentations on existing courses and educational material with lively discussions on the key issues of integrating robotics in an undergraduate curriculum. The workshop program included presentations by Gaurav Sukhatme (University of Southern California), Mark Yim (University of Pennsylvania), Illah Nourbakhsh (Carnegie Mellon University), Brad Nelson (ETH-Zurich), Jonathan Bredin (Colorado College), Holly Yanko (University of Massachusetts, Lowell), Matthew Stein (Roger Williams University), Matt Mason (Carnegie Mellon University), John Hollerbach (University of Utah), Nick Roy (MIT), and Stewart Tansley (Microsoft). Three discussion sessions focused on 1) hardware kits, software packages, and lessons learned (moderated by Una-May O'Reilly, MIT); 2) integrated syllabus and projects (moderated by Seth Teller, MIT); and 3) what to share and how (moderated by Daniela Rus, MIT). The presentations were all exciting, inspiring, and filled with interesting lessons learned, and workshop participants were highly engaged in the discussion sessions. The most important outcome was a general goal of creating an open repository of robotics course materials in order to better coordinate the teaching of robotics across universities. Such a repository would enable the sharing of course materials. By providing easy access to teaching materials, the teaching of introductory robotics courses everywhere will be facilitated, and robotics will become a core component of computer science and engineering academic programs. This will strengthen the education and research activities for our field. More specifically, the participants discussed the possibility of developing an open repository of robotics course materials similar to MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative. This repository would contain a suite of robotics curricula for teaching all aspects of robotics, ranging from undergraduate introductory courses E D U C A T I O N

Special Section on Gender and Medicine Marta Hanson Two articles in this issue of Late Imperial China pay intellectual tribute to the illuminating scholarship on the history of gender and medicine in China of Charlotte Furth. Yi-Li Wu's contribution, "Body, Gender, and Disease: The Female Breast in Late Imperial Chinese Medicine," carries out an unpacking of the layers of meaning of the diseased and lactating breast comparable to that done by Furth for the gendering of blood and the body in Chinese medical history. Hsiu-fen Chen's analysis, "Between Passion and Repression: Medical Views of Demon Dreams, Demonic Fetuses, and Female Sexual Madness in Late Imperial China," does for the gendering of emotions, dreams, and madness among non-reproductive women—nuns, widows, and spinsters—what Furth did for our understanding of the history of women, gender, and reproduction in late imperial Chinese medicine. Before Furth turned her attention to comparable subjects in the cultural history of Chinese medicine, however, she started her career in the 1960s in intellectual history at Stanford, where in 1966 she finished a dissertation on the geologist and public intellectual Ding Wenjiang. The resulting book, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture (Harvard, 1970), approached the British-educated scientist as a modern-day scientific positivist and elite technocrat who also had a Confucian ethic of social responsibility. She argued that his approach to western science as a type of epistemology helped shape the "new culture" of the May 4 movement. After this book, she developed an interest in the nexus of science, politics, and reform among Chinese conservatives of Ding's generation. This led to the edited volume Limits of Change: Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Harvard, 1976). Her chapter on "Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920" in the Republican Era volume 12 of the Cambridge History of China (1983) also developed from her initial research questions. While she was a Fulbright fellow in China from 1981 to 1982, however, her interests shifted to both the deeper past of late imperial China and the literate medical tradition. Her shift from intellectual and political to social and cultural history, engagement with feminism, and work on kinship, gender, [End Page 49] and sexuality during the Ming-Qing periods resulted from engagement with the broader transformations in history from the 1970s to the 1980s. This analytic reorientation also dovetailed with her role as co-editor with James Lee of Late Imperial China for eight years from 1985-93. Her prodigious scholarship on gender and medicine culminated in A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History 960-1665 (Stanford, 1999). The rich Chinese tradition of medical case histories she mined for this monograph became the subject of an even broader synthesis of "case reasoning" in the co-edited volume on Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (Hawai'i, 2007). After eighteen years of teaching in the Department of History at the University of Southern California in 2008 she became Professor Emerita of Chinese history. This transition in her position, however, has not decreased her intellectual contributions to the field through editing the work of others or publishing her own. Co-edited with Angela Leung, Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Public in the Long Twentieth Century (Duke, 2010), once again expands our collective vision, provides a new synthesis, and opens yet further paths of productive inquiry. [End Page 50] Marta Hanson Department of History of Medicine Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 2011 Society for Qing Studies and The Johns Hopkins University Press

This article is based on services to library users in the area of chemistry at the Science and Engineering (S&E) Library of the University of Southern California (USC), to which I applied various new technologies as outreach approaches. Various Web 2.0 technologies such as a blog, tags, YouTube, RSS feeds, Instant Messaging, online presentation and e-surveys have been selected to overcome challenges in the current library framework and to enhance the effectiveness of the approaches. These Web 2.0 technologies function as catalysts which help lower human barriers between my users and me, enable me to reach my users virtually, and attract users to resources from the library as well as various services I provided [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze student satisfaction with multimedia services at the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS) Library using the LibQUAL+TM indicator. LibQUAL+TM is a tool developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to assess user perceptions of library service quality. The research method used is quantitative with a survey approach. The research instrument was an online questionnaire developed based on three dimensions of LibQUAL+TM: the effect of service, information control, and Library as place. Data were collected from a sample of ITS students who used the Library's multimedia services in 2023. The analysis showed that overall, students were "Satisfied" with the effect of service but "Dissatisfied" with the dimensions of information control and the Library. Gap analysis shows that student perceptions have mostly exceeded minimum expectations but are still below ideal expectations. Some aspects that need to be improved are the completeness of the multimedia collection, ease of access, and facility updates and maintenance. This research provides valuable input for ITS library managers to improve the quality of multimedia services to meet student needs and expectations.

Measuring Worth

SUMMARY Libraries are engaged in the development of customized portals or information gateways designed to reduce information overload and provide enhanced access to distributed information resources. Among the concerns that are being addressed in the next generation of library portals are: (1) providing enhanced navigation and linking through the rapidly growing number of electronic resources, in particular full-text resources; and (2) providing the capability of searching multiple information resources-such as periodical index databases, the library online catalog, and Web search engines-from a single user interface form. The technologies that will provide linking between discrete full-text resources and from periodical index databases and online catalogs to full-text will become increasingly important. These linking technologies are being built around information standards such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and the CrossRef publishers' initiative. Libraries are also building e-resource registry databases that identify and provide links to available licensed electronic full-text resources. This paper will describe the role of portal services and examine the technologies involved in full-text linking. The paper will also describe a portal application that was developed at the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-paign (UIUC), which features simultaneous search and dynamic linking capabilities over multiple information resources. This simultaneous search service provides a model for synchronous searching of information resources and offers full-text linking capabilities built around a custom UIUC e-resource database, the CrossRef metadata database, and the article DOI.

This special section includes a selection of original research papers focused on the mechanics of nanocomposites and nanostructures. The September issue includes the first set of papers on the subject. Most of the papers were also presented at the Nanomechanics and Nanocomposites Symposium at the 2012 Conference of the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers held at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. The Nanomechanics and Nanocomposites Symposium provided a unique venue for researchers exploring the intersections of applied and computational mechanics within the field of materials science at the nanoscale. In this area, there are both tremendous challenges and opportunities. It is humbling to consider the limitations of our current knowledge about the structures and properties of materials at the smaller scales. On the other hand, it is bewildering to consider all of the possibilities for breakthroughs in the engineering disciplines that might be achieved by understanding our world and employing that knowledge to make advances in the materials we use. Although this symposium featured papers on a wide variety of topics, mechanics of materials at the nanoscale was a dominant theme discussed. Indeed, four of the five papers in this first series were devoted entirely to nanomechanical behavior of materials, and a majority of the remaining papers also focused, at least in part, on aspects of nanomechanics. Accordingly, we are pleased to publish this collection of papers in the similarly themed Journal of Nanomechanics and Micromechanics. We believe these papers represent some of the wide scope seen in the field.