scholarly journals Patron-Driven Acquisition of E-Books Satisfies Users’ Needs While Also Building the Library’s Collection

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Badia
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Research University ◽  
Standardized Test ◽  
The United States ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
Complete Collection ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
Library Catalogue ◽  
The University

Objective – To present the initial results of an academic library’s one-year pilot with patron-driven acquisition of e-books, which was undertaken “to observe how user preferences and the availability of e-books interacted with [the library’s] traditional selection program” (p. 469). Design – Case study. Setting – The University of Iowa, a major urban research university in the United States. Subjects – Original selection of 19,000 e-book titles from ebrary at the beginning of the pilot in October 2009. To curb spending during the pilot, the number of e-book titles available for purchase was reduced to 12,000 titles at the end of December 2009, and increased to nearly 13,000 titles in April 2010. Methods – These e-book titles were loaded into the library’s catalogue. The goal was for the University of Iowa’s faculty, staff, and students to search the library catalogue, discover these e-book titles, and purchase these books unknowingly by accessing them. The tenth click by a user on any of the pages of an e-book caused the title to be automatically purchased for the library (i.e., ebrary charged the library for the e-book). Main Results – From October 2009 to September 2010, the library acquired 850 e-books for almost $90,000 through patron-driven acquisition. The average amount spent per week was $1,848 and the average cost per book was $106. Researchers found that 80% of the e-books purchased by library patrons were used between 2 to 10 times in a 1-year period. E-books were purchased in all subject areas, but titles in medicine (133 titles purchased, 16%), sociology (72 titles purchased, 8%), economics (58 titles purchased, 7%), and education (54 titles purchased, 6%) were the most popular. Two of the top three most heavily used titles were standardized test preparation workbooks. In addition, 166 of the e-books purchased had print duplicates in the library, and the total number of times the print copies circulated dropped 70% after the e-versions of these books were obtained. The authors also examined usage data for their subscription to ebrary’s Academic Complete collection from September 2009 to July 2010, which consisted of 47,367 e-books. Together with the 12,947 book titles loaded into the catalogue for the patron-acquisition pilot, there were a grand total of 60,314 ebrary e-book titles in the library catalogue that were accessible to the Iowa University community. The study revealed that 15% of these titles were used during this 11-month period, and the used titles were consulted 3 or more times. The authors sorted the user sessions by publisher and found that patrons used e-books from a wide variety of publishing houses, of which numerous university presses together constituted the majority of uses. The five most heavily used e-books were in the fields of medicine, followed by economics, sociology, English-American literature, and education. Conclusion – The authors’ experience has shown that patron-driven acquisition “can be a useful and effective tool for meeting user needs and building the local collection” (p. 490). Incomplete coverage of academic publications makes patron-driven acquisition only one tool among others, such as selection by liaison librarians, which may be employed for collection development. According to the authors, patron-driven acquisition “does a good job of satisfying the sometimes unrecognized demand for interdisciplinary materials often overlooked through traditional selection methods,” (p. 491) and alerts librarians to new research areas.

Between Europe and America

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-285
Author(s):  
Arvind Rajagopal
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
University Of Berlin ◽  
Guggenheim Fellowship ◽  
The University ◽  
Intellectual Formation

Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American literature before it was thought to constitute a canon in the academy. Unlike many other scholars who shared his focus, he completed his education in postwar Germany. The title of his doctoral dissertation on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), completed at the Free University of Berlin in 1975, has a still-contemporary ring: “The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism.’” He taught at Columbia University, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and spent the bulk of his career in the United States. In this interview he discusses his intellectual formation and offers reflections on the development of his field, the evolving institutional culture of the university, and 1970s-era multiculturalism.

The Academic Vocation

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R. Schwehn
Keyword(s):  
Research University ◽  
The United States ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
University Education ◽  
Knowledge And Skills ◽  
College And University ◽  
Teaching History ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Number Of Classes

In this chapter, I shall try to advance our thinking about college and university education in the United States through a critical study of contemporary conceptions of the academic vocation. Current reflection upon the state of higher learning in America makes this task at once more urgent and more difficult than it has ever been since the rise of the modern research university. Consider, for example, former Harvard President Derek Bok’s 1986–87 report to the Harvard Board of Overseers. On the one hand, Bok repeatedly insists that universities are obliged to help students learn how to lead ethical, fulfilling lives. On the other hand, he admits that faculty are ill-equipped to help the university discharge this obligation. “Professors,” Bok writes, “. . . are trained to transmit knowledge and skills within their chosen discipline, not to help students become more mature, morally perceptive human beings.” Notice Bok’s assumptions. Teaching history or chemistry or mathematics or literature has little or nothing to do with forming students’ characters. Faculty members must therefore be exhorted, cajoled, or otherwise maneuvered to undertake this latter endeavor in addition to teaching their chosen disciplines. The pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue are, for Bok at least, utterly discrete activities. To complicate matters still further, the Harvard faculty, together with most faculty members at other modern research universities, would very probably resist the notion that their principal vocational obligation is, as Bok suggested, to transmit the knowledge and skills of their disciplines. They believe that their calling primarily involves making or advancing knowledge, not transmitting it. How else could we explain the familiar academic lament “Because this is a terribly busy semester for me, I do not have any time to do my own work”? Among all occupational groups other than the professoriate, such a complaint, voiced under conditions of intensive labor, is inconceivable. Among university faculty members, it is expected. Never mind the number of classes taught, courses prepared, papers graded, and committees convened.

scholarly journals Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature

eLife ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S Himmelstein ◽  
Ariel Rodriguez Romero ◽  
Jacob G Levernier ◽  
Thomas Anthony Munro ◽  
Stephen Reid McLaughlin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Research University ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Internet Connection ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

The website Sci-Hub enables users to download PDF versions of scholarly articles, including many articles that are paywalled at their journal’s site. Sci-Hub has grown rapidly since its creation in 2011, but the extent of its coverage has been unclear. Here we report that, as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals. We find that coverage varies by discipline and publisher, and that Sci-Hub preferentially covers popular, paywalled content. For toll access articles, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States. Green open access to toll access articles via licit services, on the other hand, remains quite limited. Our interactive browser at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub allows users to explore these findings in more detail. For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection, suggesting the toll access business model may become unsustainable.

scholarly journals The Model of Professional Development School (PDS) as a Practice of Partnership University-Schools in Teacher Education: A Multi-year Evaluation Study in Israel

1970 ◽  
pp. 453-469
Author(s):  
Nava Bar
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Teacher Education ◽  
Teacher Training ◽  
Learning Communities ◽  
Research University ◽  
Professional Development School ◽  
Evaluation Study ◽  
The United States ◽  
Partnership Model ◽  
The University

The article presents in its first part the partnership model – PDS (Professional Development School) for teacher education that developed in the 1970s in the United States following criticism and re- search findings that indicated lack of satisfaction with the traditional teacher education programs. In its second part the article presents findings and discussion of a multi-year study conducted over seven years, from 2010 to 2016, in the first and up till now the only PDS partnership incorporated into teacher training program in research university in Israel. The multi-year study focused on stu- dent teachers’ evaluation of the contribution of the teacher training components of the university- school partnership model (PDS) to their learning of teaching: the practice teaching in the school and the school mentors; the groups of student colleagues as learning communities and their weekly meetings and the university coordinators. From the perception of the PDS partnership as a dynamic and developing process and from the approach of evidence-based practice, the importance of this multi year study lies in the identification of the essential strengths in the process of the practical experience expressed in the partnerships for their empowerment. In addition the importance of this research is in the identification of the essential weaknesses and challenges, for the purpose of en- quiry and learning in the learning communities who take part in the PDS partnerships, and the rais- ing of the necessary courses of action and changes. The importance of the research study in the in-ternational aspect lies in the presentation of an additional profile of partnership for the extension of the shared discussion about dilemmas and challenges that arise from the implementation of different partnerships in the training of teachers.

The Uses of the University: After Fifty Years

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-479
Author(s):  
Michael A. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Research University ◽  
The United States ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Clark Kerr ◽  
To Come ◽  
The University

It is now almost a half century since Clark Kerr (1911–2003) delivered the 1963 Edwin L. Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, presenting what was ultimately recognized as one of the most significant and influential ruminations on the nature of higher education in the United States. This sustained reflection on the modern evolution of the research university, ultimately published by Harvard University Press as The Uses of the University (1963), framed discussion and debate regarding the role of what Kerr called “the multiversity” for decades to come. In this endeavor, there was no one at the time better suited to the task. An economist who had served for several years on the faculty at the University of Washington, Seattle, Kerr joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1945. Appointed Berkeley's first chancellor in 1952, he was the mastermind behind the enormous expansion (in both capacity and excellence) that marked the campus's immediate postwar history. By 1958, as the then legendary Robert Gordon Sproul concluded his 28-year duty as University of California (UC) president, Kerr seemed the obvious and best choice as successor.

scholarly journals Hate Speech In Canada

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
CASIS
Keyword(s):  
Hate Speech ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of British Columbia ◽  
Canadian Association ◽  
Intelligence Studies ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Affairs ◽  
The University

On May 16th 2019, the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS) Vancouver hosted Dr. Heidi Tworek at its roundtable meeting titled “Hate Speech in Canada: A New Democratic Threat Requiring Policy Incentives.” Dr. Tworek is an Assistant Professor of International History at the University of British Columbia. She is also a non-resident Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and the Joint Centre for History and Economics at Harvard University. She works on the history of news and of international organizations. Alongside academic publications, she also writes about German and transatlantic politics and media for a wide variety of venues including Foreign Affairs and Wired magazine.

Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Egyptian Woman ◽  
University Of Massachusetts ◽  
The University ◽  
Modern Arabic

In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography,Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel,Siraaj: An Arab Tale,which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

scholarly journals Engagement: bibliometric analysis

Nova Scientia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (21) ◽  
pp. 524-551
Author(s):  
Claudia Leticia Preciado Ortiz ◽  
Juan Antonio Vargas Barraza ◽  
Ainhize Gilsanz López
Keyword(s):  
Bibliometric Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Brand Engagement ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Communication Environments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Online Environments ◽  
Number Of Publications ◽  
The University

Introduction: The objective of this paper was to carry out a bibliometric analysis by using the different names that engagement has had in marketing to know growth trends, current research areas and to discover potential future lines of research on this subject.Method: The Scopus database was the provider of the information, analyzing a sample of 1791 documents for the period from 1996 to March 10, 2018, the date on which the data was downloaded.                     Results: The results show that the development of research on the subject is growing. The country that leads in number of publications is the United States, however, the most productive institution is the University of Auckland, New Zealand; and the leading journal was Computers in Human Behavior. Similarly, the most productive authors are Hollebeek, Graffigna and Malthouse; but the author who had the greatest impact on citations per year and not per number of publications was Brodie. The main areas in which a particular interest has been given are customer / consumer engagement, social media engagement, user engagement and brand engagement. It is possible to emphasize the concentration in studies that are focused on online environments (social networks and brand communities) and recent studies related to mobile environments (apps).             Discussion or Conclusion: It can be concluded that engagement is a frontier issue in the area of marketing, especially focused on online environments and recently on mobile applications. It is an area of research in which there is much to do, since brands are betting every day on using more interactive channels to keep their customers and attract new ones, by generating new communication environments, involvement and engagement between brands and customers.   

scholarly journals A Cybersecurity Executive DBA?

10.28945/3925 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 09
Author(s):  
Utkarsh Shrivastava ◽  
Taufeeq Mohammed
Keyword(s):  
Research University ◽  
Doctoral Program ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cyber Attacks ◽  
Department Of Labor ◽  
Successful Launch ◽  
College Of Business ◽  
Human Side ◽  
The University

After the successful launch of a DBA program for working executives, the program’s academic director ponders whether or not there might be an opportunity to create a cybersecurity doctoral program based on the existing program’s research core. Grandon Gill, Academic Director of the Doctorate of Business Administration Program (DBA) at the University of South Florida’s (USF) Muma College of Business pondered the email he had just sent to Moez Limayem, the dean of the college (see Exhibit 1). In that email, he had raised the possibility of developing a version of the college’s highly successful DBA program specifically targeting cybersecurity professionals. He also noted the possibility of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help cover the costs of launching the program. The idea of starting the program sparked when Gill had attended an NSF principal investigator’s meeting earlier in the year. A key area of discussion in the meeting involved the serious shortage of terminally qualified faculty candidates to teach cybersecurity-related graduate courses at universities across the United States. These discussions were confirmed by subsequent research. Recent surveys by the U.S. Department of Labor found that the demand for cybersecurity graduates had increased by 27% in 2016 to reach a record high, and increasing number of data breaches and cyber-attacks highlighted the need for trained security professionals. Although there was a lot of practical experience out there in the cybersecurity arena, when a research university like USF wanted to hire faculty, candidates needed to have a terminal degree such as a PhD or DBA. These were much less common among the security experts that would be a good fit with business schools or MIS departments. Indeed, there were few doctoral programs in cybersecurity that focused on researching the human side of cybersecurity—increasingly important in the worlds of business and government. The Muma College of Business has experienced many challenges in its own efforts to hire cybersecurity faculty. What Gill also recognized was that much of the research content of the DBA program that he led could be quite applicable to nontechnical cybersecurity research. The possibility of initiating the new program was not a decision to be taken lightly. Indeed, it raised a series of related questions and decisions: 1) Would such a program be viable in the first place? 2) Should the launch of such a program be contingent on the acquisition of external funding to cover startup expenses? 3) Could the DBA program faculty and staff, already stretched thin by the DBA program’s larger than expected cohorts, support such an additional program? 4) At a university where responsibility for cybersecurity was spread across three colleges, what type of support or opposition could be anticipated for such a program?

scholarly journals A Cybersecurity Executive DBA?

10.28945/3913 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 001-035
Keyword(s):  
Research University ◽  
Doctoral Programs ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cyber Attacks ◽  
Graduate Courses ◽  
Department Of Labor ◽  
College Of Business ◽  
Human Side ◽  
The University

Grandon Gill, Academic Director of the Doctorate of Business Administration Program (DBA) at the University of South Florida’s (USF) Muma College of Business pondered the email he had just sent to Moez Limayem, the dean of the college (see Exhibit 1). In that email, he had raised the possibility of developing a version of the college’s highly successful DBA program specifically targeting cybersecurity professionals. He also noted the possibility of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help cover the costs of launching the program. The idea of starting the program sparked when Gill had attended an NSF principal investigator’s meeting earlier in the year. A key area of discussion in the meeting involved the serious shortage of terminally qualified faculty candidates to teach cybersecurity-related graduate courses at universities across the United States. These discussions were confirmed by subsequent research. Recent surveys by the U.S. Department of Labor found that the demand for cybersecurity graduates had increased by 27% in 2016 to reach a record high, and increasing number of data breaches and cyber-attacks highlighted the need for trained security professionals. Although there was a lot of practical experience out there in the cybersecurity arena, when a research university like USF wanted to hire faculty, candidates needed to have a terminal degree such as a PhD or DBA. These were much less common among the security experts that would be a good fit with business schools or MIS departments. Indeed, there were few doctoral programs in cybersecurity that focused on researching the human side of cybersecurity—increasingly important in the worlds of business and government. The Muma College of Business has experienced many challenges in its own efforts to hire cybersecurity faculty. What Gill also recognized was that much of the research content of the DBA program that he led could be quite applicable to nontechnical cybersecurity research. The possibility of initiating the new program was not a decision to be taken lightly. Indeed, it raised a series of related questions and decisions: 1) Would such a program be viable in the first place? 2) Should the launch of such a program be contingent on the acquisition of external funding to cover startup expenses? 3) Could the DBA program faculty and staff, already stretched thin by the DBA program’s larger than expected cohorts, support such an additional program? 4) At a university where responsibility for cybersecurity was spread across three colleges, what type of support or opposition could be anticipated for such a program?

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