The Australian science curriculum

The Australian Science Curriculum has appeared at a time when there is widespread concern for the quality of science teaching and learning in Australia and the engagement of students in learning science, leading to calls for significant reform. The new curriculum thus carries the hopes of reform-minded scientists and educators for a change in the way science in schools can support teaching practices that engage students in quality learning. This analysis will examine whether it is an adequate vehicle for doing this. Will it live up to our expectations?<br /

Evaluation of an Internet Document Delivery Service

An Internet-based Document Delivery Service (DDS) has been developed within the framework of the CNR ( the Italian Research National Council) Project BiblioMIME, in order to take advantage of new Internet technologies and promote cooperation among CNR and Italian university libraries. Adopting such technologies changes the traditional organisation of DDS and may drastically reduce costs and delivery times. An information system managing DDS requests and monitoring the temporal evolution of the service has been implemented, running on the local-area network of a test-site library. It aims to track number and types of documents requested and received, user distribution, delivery times and types (surface mail, fax, Internet), to automate repetitive manual procedures and to deal with the various accounting methods used by other libraries. Transmission of documents is carried out by means of an e-mail/Web gateway system supporting document exchange via Internet, which assists receiving libraries in retrieving requested documents. This paper describes the architecture and main design features of the e-mail/Web gateway server (the BiblioMime server). This approach permits librarians to continue using e-mail service to send large documents, while resolving problems that users may encounter when downloading large size files with e-mail agents. The library operator sends the document as an attachment to the destination address; on fly the e-mail server extracts and saves the attachments in a web-server disk file and substitutes them with a new message part that includes an URL pointing to the saved document. The receiver can download these large objects by means of a user-friendly browser. We further discuss the data gathered during the triennium 1998-2000; this consists of about 5,000 DDS transactions per annum with 300 other Italian scientific and bio-medical libraries and commercial document suppliers. Use of the instruments described above allowed us to evaluate the performance of service “before” and “after” the use of Internet Document Delivery and to extract some critical data regarding DDS. Those include: a) libraries with which we have greater numbers of exchanges and their turnaround times; b) extraordinary reduction in costs and delivery times; c) the most frequently requested serial titles (allowing cost-effective decisions on new subscriptions); d) impact on DDS of library participation in consortia which allow user access to greater numbers of online serials

GAELS Project Final Report: Information environment for engineering

The GAELS project was a collaboration commenced in 1999 between Glasgow University Library and Strathclyde University Library with two main aims:· to develop collaborative information services in support of engineering research at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde· to develop a CAL (computer-aided learning package) package in advanced information skills for engineering research students and staff The project was funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) from their Strategic Change Initiative funding stream, and funding was awarded initially for one year, with an extension of the grant for a further year. The project ended in June 2001.The funding from SHEFC paid for two research assistants, one based at Glasgow University Library working on collaborative information services and one based at Strathclyde University Library developing courseware. Latterly, after these two research assistants left to take up other posts, there has been a single researcher based at Glasgow University Library.The project was funded to investigate the feasibility of new services to the Engineering Faculties at both Universities, with a view to making recommendations for service provision that can be developed for other subject areas

Electronic Resources and Academic Libraries, 1980-2000: A Historical Perspective

published or submitted for publicatio

Issues Regarding the Peruvian Maternal and Child Healthcare System

This paper highlights the deficiencies of the Peruvian Healthcare system. Despite the treaties and covenants the Peruvian government has signed, it has done little to mitigate the ills of its broken healthcare system. Peru’s current healthcare system is characterized by inequality between women, children, the poor and the wealthy. Furthermore, there is a lack of accessibility to maternal and child healthcare services that violates every individual’s right to health. The Peruvian government has been unresponsive towards the needs of women, children, and rural culture. Ineffective non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been incapable of alleviating Peru’s broken system. Additionally, Peru has not received adequate economic funds from globalization efforts despite the proven success of new programs, particularly the new cultural adaptations to healthcare services that have been implemented. The research performed in this study discovered a statistically significant negative relationship between the amount of Peruvian gross domestic product (GDP) invested in health and the nation’s infant mortality rate, proving the importance of government expenditure investment in the healthcare system. This finding proved that as the amount invested in health increased, the rate of infant mortality decreased. In order to increase the quality of healthcare received by Peruvians, especially women and children, it is necessary that more finances be invested into Peru’s healthcare system