Illinois Digital Scholarship: Preserving and Accessing the Digital Past, Present, and Future

Since the University's establishment in 1867, its scholarly output has been issued primarily in print, and the University Library and Archives have been readily able to collect, preserve, and to provide access to that output. Today, technological, economic, political and social forces are buffeting all means of scholarly communication. Scholars, academic institutions and publishers are engaged in debate about the impact of digital scholarship and open access publishing on the promotion and tenure process. The upsurge in digital scholarship affects many aspects of the academic enterprise, including how we record, evaluate, preserve, organize and disseminate scholarly work. The result has left the Library with no ready means by which to archive digitally produced publications, reports, presentations, and learning objects, much of which cannot be adequately represented in print form. In this incredibly fluid environment of digital scholarship, the critical question of how we will collect, preserve, and manage access to this important part of the University scholarly record demands a rational and forward-looking plan - one that includes perspectives from diverse scholarly disciplines, incorporates significant research breakthroughs in information science and computer science, and makes effective projections for future integration within the Library and computing services as a part of the campus infrastructure.Prepared jointly by the University of Illinois Library and CITES at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig

The Community College As Entrepreneur: Developing and Sustaining Effective Noncredit Workforce Training Partnerships

In an era of increasingly tight community college budgets, noncredit workforce training partnerships with local business and industry are becoming critical sources of revenue. These partnerships can underwrite otherwise unaffordable projects and build effective bridges from non-credit to credit-bearing coursework for students. However, little research exists on the nature of community college noncredit workforce training partnerships or how those partnerships are built and maintained. The purpose of this study is to identify how and in what ways Illinois single-campus community colleges develop and sustain effective noncredit workforce training partnerships. This qualitative case study of Illinois’ single-campus community colleges and their business and industry counterparts examines the entrepreneurial orientation of noncredit workforce training partnerships, analyzes the methods by which partnerships are built and sustained, and examines the levels to which partnerships are evaluated. A sequential multi-method approach to data collection gathered data and information from five community college administrators and five noncredit workforce training partners. The conceptual framework for this study incorporates Lumpkin and Dess’s (1996) Entrepreneurial Orientation Construct; Amey, Eddy, and Ozaki’s (2007) Partnership Development Model; and Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick’s (1993) Four Levels of Training Evaluation. The findings indicate that community college administrators frequently demonstrate the Entrepreneurial Orientation Construct’s salient dimensions of innovativeness, proactiveness, and autonomy; however, these administrators rarely demonstrate the salient dimensions of risk-taking and competitive aggressiveness. In addition, noncredit workforce training partnerships are normally initiated by a x community college champion who may or may not be the college president; however, this individual must be viewed as a champion by both partners. All study participants found that the key to successful noncredit workforce training partnerships involves the use of a knowledgeable, experienced closer who attends to the relationship’s logistical details and keeps the champion apprised of partnership developments. The findings also indicate that most noncredit workforce training administrators limit their use of training evaluation to measuring learners’ reaction to training, which reaction is used almost exclusively for purposes of marketing and promotion. These administrators do not employ successive levels of evaluation to measure learning, behavioral change, or results, all of which could impact training effectiveness or future training initiatives. Interestingly, study participants also indicated a need for the community college to implement client resource management software, membership on local workforce investment and economic development agency boards, and noncredit advisory councils to assist in partnership development and maintenance. Finally, Condon’s Noncredit Workforce Training Partnership Model is presented to guide community college administrators in developing and sustaining noncredit workforce training partnerships

Representing Information Collections for Visual Cognition

The importance of digital information collections is growing. Collections are typically represented with text-only, in a linear list format, which turns out to be a weak representation for cognition. We learned this from empirical research in cognitive psychology, and by conducting a study to develop an understanding of current practices and resulting breakdowns in human experiences of building and utilizing collections. Because of limited human attention and memory, participants had trouble finding specific elements in their collections, resulting in low levels of collection utilization. To address these issues, this research develops new collection representations for visual cognition. First, we present the image+text surrogate, a concise representation for a document, or portion thereof, which is easy to understand and think about. An information extraction algorithm is developed to automatically transform a document into a small set of image+text surrogates. After refinement, the average accuracy performance of the algorithm was 90%. Then, we introduce the composition space to represent collections, which helps people connect elements visually in a spatial format. To ensure diverse information from multiple sources to be presented evenly in the composition space, we developed a new control structure, the ResultDis- tributor. A user study has demonstrated that the participants were able to browse more diverse information using the ResultDistributor-enhanced composition space. Participants also found it easier and more entertaining to browse information in this representation. This research is applicable to represent the information resources in contexts such as search engines or digital libraries. The better representation will enhance the cognitive efficacy and enjoyment of people’s everyday tasks of information searching, browsing, collecting, and discovering

Clinical Ladder Mentoring: The Impact on Nursing Professional Development

Clinical ladder mentorship programs engage registered nurses in professional development, improve job satisfaction, and retention. The aim of this quality improvement project was to foster professional growth in early to mid-career nurses and increase clinical ladder participation rates by implementing a clinical ladder mentorship program using the Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle. Following mentorship training sessions for the Clinical Ladder Advisors, nurse mentees pursing clinical ladder advancement completed the Mentorship Effectiveness Scale survey, which evaluated the overall effectiveness of the Clinical Ladder Advisor and nurse mentee relationship and experience. One hundred percent (N=9) of the nurse mentees rated their Clinical Ladder Advisor mentors as effective and supportive while pursuing career advancement. However, clinical ladder participation rates remained flat at 2.2% compared to the previous fiscal year due to competing priorities within the organization. Future implications suggest expanding the clinical ladder mentorship program throughout the health system including the ambulatory setting, tracking and evaluating nursing turnover data system-wide, and transitioning to an electronic clinical ladder portfolio.D.N.P

A Quick Glance at Digital Watermarking in Medical Images Technique Classification, Requirements, Attacks and Application of Tamper Localization

Digital watermarking is seen as a necessary and important field to be developed since the attacks and manipulations of digital documents and media are actively done. This paper surveys and reviews some basic theory about digital watermarking, such as the technique classification, requirements and possible attacks nowadays. Since all data in medical images are significantly important, the demand for the authentication is high. Therefore, this paper also focuses on a specific application of digital image watermarking for medical images which is tamper localization

The accessible learning experience

Academic staff and professional service staff produce vast volumes of information for our students each and every year. More often that not, these are now typically produced in digital format and shared via web sites, blogs or the VLE. The tools that we use to produce these digital documents and media often allow people to create content in a multitude of ways to make our teaching and learning more interesting and engaging. However, in doing this, we are often responsible for making this content inaccessible to about one-fifth of the population who have a permanent or temporary disability. This talk will discuss the key issues around creating accessible content for print and web distribution and show how a few small changes can lead to dramatic gains in making our content more accessible. The legal framework in the UK, EU and US will also be discussed outlining how important this aspect is to ensure we stay within the law. The co-presenter is a former LJMU academic who is now one of only 200 Certified Web Accessibility Professionals in the UK and brings a wealth of professional experience to this field. This outcomes of this talk can make a big contribution to the overall student experience at LJMU across all subject disciplines. The accessible learning experience, PowerPoint. Only LJMU staff and students have access to this resource

Computer-stimulated design: construction of a personal repertoire from scattered fragments

This paper describes some possibilities of creating and structuring a personal digital memory capable of facilitating architectural design and design learning. The raw materials of this memory are different representations that can be found on the Web. Having interpreted these representations, one is able to construct a meaningful memory, educated and personal, which can be called upon subsequently during the design phase, as long as one has a medium that can represent this memory and put it to good use. As a practical, effective application of this process, we will describe part of a configuration geared towards the learning of architectural design. This configuration is composed of various elements, precisely arranged in space and time in a set of interrelations and interactions. The design student is placed at the centre of the arrangement, from where he or she can call on a broad spectrum of possibilities from the Web as provider of image documents. When necessary, students can use specially developed software that allows them a verbal and pictorial interpretation stimulated during particular phases of the learning process. In this way, through pictorial material presented on the network, the students can build up a digital library appropriate to their own understanding of architecture and their own representation of the world. At this point, they can abandon the universe of digital documents and media and return to the world of materials and shapes in intensive design studio sessions, where slowly maturing ideas can at last find concrete form. Thus, we deal with the relationship between the public, shareable aspect of the documents, and the private aspect: the individual interpretation of these documents. In the same way, we show how, within the framework of the teaching programme that has been set up, and without interference, this relationship between public and private can be linked into a dimension of the work of learning which is at times personal, at times collective. The conclusion attempts to outline the issues raised by this sort of configuration, and to show how thoughtful use of computers and networks can stimulate and enrich design rather than just “aid” it, as is generally accepted.