Impact evaluation of museums, archives and libraries: available evidence project.

This report provides a critical overview of impact evaluation in the museums, archives and libraries sector. The study, funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, consisted largely of a review of the literature published during a five year retrospective period, with a particular emphasis on impact evaluations conducted within the UK. An advisory group, representing all three domains, was also established. The methodologies used in, and the evidence obtained from, these evaluation studies are discussed critically within the broad context of social, learning and economic impact. While there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence and descriptions of best practice in the sector, extensive hard evidence of impact, gathered systematically, is often lacking. The most compelling evidence from the review indicates that the sector has an impact on personal development. There is also a current emphasis on the impact evaluation of special projects and initiatives; a shift in emphasis towards the evaluation of core services will require a corresponding shift in professional thinking. Issues relating to physical, emotional and intellectual access to the sector by individuals or groups deemed to be in danger of exclusion are also discussed. While the profession is beginning to recognise access as a priority, there is a need to increase access throughout the sector in order to enable impact. The report concludes with a series of detailed recommendations for follow-on work, including: further consultation on impact evaluation, both within and outwith the sector; further research into economic impact, long-term impact, the impact of the archives domain, and the establishment of causal relationships between sector use and social, learning and economic impact; further development of, and access to, appropriate evaluation techniques and tools; increased support for evidence-based practice; and the development and adoption of a strategic plan for the sector

Engaging policy in science writing: Patterns and strategies

Many scientific researchers aspire to engage policy in their writing, but translating scientific research and findings into policy discussion often requires an understanding of the institutional complexities of legal and policy processes and actors. To examine how researchers have undertaken that challenge, we developed a set of metrics and applied them to articles published in one of the principal academic publication venues for science and policy—Science magazine’s Policy Forum. We reviewed each Policy Forum article published over a five-year period (2011–15), 220 in all. For each article, we assessed the level of policy content based on presence of a stated policy proposal or position and identification of the relevant policy actors and actions, and recorded attributes such as field of science, field of policy, number of references to legal and policy sources, number of authors from law and policy institutions, and number of citations. We find that a handful of science fields dominate publication frequency, but that all fields have produced publications with high policy engagement. Of the attributes, number of references to law and policy sources is correlated positively with level of engagement, whereas number of law and policy authors was fairly constant across all depths of engagement. Surprisingly, level of policy engagement was negatively correlated with the number of citations an article subsequently received. We offer possible explanations for these results and thoughts for authors, editors, and research institutions interested in facilitating robust engagement of policy in scientific writing

Developing a Māori theory of value: Report prepared for Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga

This report sets out the findings and outcomes of the Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga (NPM) funded platform research project entitled ‘Developing a Māori theory of value,’ which was completed between 1 October 2018 and 31 March 2021. The original end date of 30 September 2020 was extended by way of variation due to the impact of Covid-19. The purpose of the project was to develop a Māori theory of value for the Māori economy.falsePalmerston North, New ZealandNgā Pae o te Māramatang

The Privilege to Select : Global Research System, European Academic Library Collections, and Decolonisation

A large part of the literature published in the ‘Global South’ is barely covered by bibliographic databases. Institutional policies increasingly require researchers globally to publish in ‘international’ journals, draining local infrastructures. The standard-setting power of ‘Global South’ scholars is minimised further. My main aim is to render visible the ways in which European academic libraries contribute to this situation. It is explained as a consequence of specific features of current world society, referred to as coloniality, social injustice, and quantified communication. The thesis analyses peripherality conceptually and scientometrically: based on a sample, how is Southeast African basic social sciences and humanities (SSH) research integrated in global scholarly communication, and how do local dissemination infrastructures develop under these conditions? Finally, how are professional values, specifically neutrality, and workflows of European academic libraries, interrelated with these developments? The methodological approach of the thesis is multi-faceted, including conceptual analyses, scientometrics, and a short survey of collection managers and an analysis of the corresponding libraries' collection policies. The off-mainstream decolonial scientometric approach required the construction of a database from multiple sources. Southeast Africa was selected as a field for some of the empirical studies included, because out of all rarely studied local communities to which a peripheral status is commonly attributed, the large majority of Southeast African authors use English as their primary academic language. This excludes linguistic reasons for the peripheral attribution.The theoretical and conceptual point of departure is to analyse scholarly communication as a self-referential social system with global reach (Luhmann). In this thesis, an unorthodox understanding of social systems theory is developed, providing it with cultural humility, inspired by decolonial thinking. The value of the approach lies in its in-built capacity for social change: peripheries are constructed communicatively, and culturally humble communication avoids adding to the accumulation of peripheral references attributed to the ‘Global South’, for instance by suspending the incarceration of area studies which tends to subsume any research from and about Africa as African studies, remote from the core of SSH. While centrality serves the necessary purpose of reducing the overwhelming complexity of global research, communicative centres can just as well be constructed as topical, and do not require a spatial attachment to be functional. Another advantage of this approach is its awareness of different levels of observation, differentiating, for instance, between whether the academic librarian's neutrality is imagined as playing out in interaction with the user (passive neutrality), as representing the diversity of the research system (active neutrality), or as balancing social bias running through society at large, and hence furthering social justice (culturally humble neutrality)

Mathematical Fuzzy Logic in the Emerging Fields of Engineering, Finance, and Computer Sciences

Mathematical fuzzy logic (MFL) specifically targets many-valued logic and has significantly contributed to the logical foundations of fuzzy set theory (FST). It explores the computational and philosophical rationale behind the uncertainty due to imprecision in the backdrop of traditional mathematical logic. Since uncertainty is present in almost every real-world application, it is essential to develop novel approaches and tools for efficient processing. This book is the collection of the publications in the Special Issue “Mathematical Fuzzy Logic in the Emerging Fields of Engineering, Finance, and Computer Sciences”, which aims to cover theoretical and practical aspects of MFL and FST. Specifically, this book addresses several problems, such as:- Industrial optimization problems- Multi-criteria decision-making- Financial forecasting problems- Image processing- Educational data mining- Explainable artificial intelligence, etc

Use Case Oriented Medical Visual Information Retrieval & System Evaluation

Large amounts of medical visual data are produced daily in hospitals, while new imaging techniques continue to emerge. In addition, many images are made available continuously via publications in the scientific literature and can also be valuable for clinical routine, research and education. Information retrieval systems are useful tools to provide access to the biomedical literature and fulfil the information needs of medical professionals. The tools developed in this thesis can potentially help clinicians make decisions about difficult diagnoses via a case-based retrieval system based on a use case associated with a specific evaluation task. This system retrieves articles from the biomedical literature when querying with a case description and attached images. This thesis proposes a multimodal approach for medical case-based retrieval with focus on the integration of visual information connected to text. Furthermore, the ImageCLEFmed evaluation campaign was organised during this thesis promoting medical retrieval system evaluation

Education for Environmental Citizenship

This Special Issue includes 14 empirical, theoretical, methodological research articles and reviews in various fields considering EEC. It provided a platform for researchers to share their research work on the field of education for environmental citizenship, including aspects of civic engagement and civic participation, democratic action, social and environmental change, individual and collective actions, environmental actions, socio-political actions, environmental justice, inter- and intra-generational justice, and connectedness to nature

The collection, analysis and exploitation of footballer attributes: A systematic review

© 2022 – The authors. Published by IOS Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License (CC BY-NC 4.0)There is growing on-going research into how footballer attributes, collected prior to, during and post-match, may address the demands of clubs, media pundits and gaming developers. Focusing upon individual player performance analysis and prediction, we examined the body of research which considers different player attributes. This resulted in the selection of 132 relevant papers published between 1999 and 2020. From these we have compiled a comprehensive list of player attributes, categorising them as static, such as age and height, or dynamic, such as pass completions and shots on target. To indicate their accuracy, we classified each attribute as objectively or subjectively derived, and finally by their implied accessibility and their likely personal and club sensitivity. We assigned these attributes to 25 logical groups such as passing, tackling and player demographics. We analysed the relative research focus on each group and noted the analytical methods deployed, identifying which statistical or machine learning techniques were used. We reviewed and considered the use of character trait attributes in the selected papers and discuss more formal approaches to their use. Based upon this we have made recommendations on how this work may be developed to support elite clubs in the consideration of transfer targets.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio