The Academic Librarian and Techno-Communication: Facilitating Social Networking with Generation Y Students

This paper will address the ways in which academic librarians can work to bridge the communication gap with Generation Y students using social networking and techno-communication. Utilizing cyber-communication opens many doors previously shut to educators. Academic librarians, specifically, have much to gain by embracing the trend toward online communication and social networking. Facebook, and other social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace, have helped to dissolve barriers between librarians and students. An online profile can allow, even moderately techno-savvy librarians, a new brand of accessibility to the university community. Academic librarians can gain acceptance and direct access to students, and anyone else in the university network with a Facebook account. Cyber-connected librarians are also able to directly advertise—and even personally invite—online university members to events, inform network users of new library collections, new online databases, upcoming library workshops, and any number of other outreach activities. In addition, a librarian’s online profile page can include links to sites designed to help students with citing sources for a paper, RSS feeds to library and university news and events, current national and world news items, book reviews, and personal and reference desk contact information. Other forms of technological communication, such as IM (instant messaging or chatting) can also be a useful tool for the academic librarian.International Federation of Library AssociationsUniversity of Toronto, LibraryUniversity of Toronto, Faculty of InformationUniversity of Illinois, LibraryTitle VI National Resource Center Grant (P015A060066)unpublishednot peer reviewe

The Digital Difference of Online Social Networking in the Carribean

Users of online social networking sites have made significant advances in the development of global virtual communities. With their origins in listservs, egroups, blogs, chat rooms and instant messaging, social networking sites provide opportunities for users with required skills, to construct public or semi-public profiles, to interact with ???friends??? and colleagues across the globe and to collaboratively create social capital. The presentation will focus on the impact of social networking on the Caribbean. It will examine participation of Caribbean people, including candidates in recent general elections held in 2007 and 2008, in popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. The assessment will cover factors influencing membership and participation, conditions under which content is created and information shared, as well as issues of privacy and protection. In recognition of the successes of these sites in facilitating interaction among large geographically dispersed groups of users, sharing content, collaborating with peers, and linking communities, the presentation will also examine and assess the role of information literacy the activities of library social networking sites, and their contribution to the development of interactive information resources in the social sciences.International Federation of Library AssociationsUniversity of Toronto, LibraryUniversity of Toronto, Faculty of InformationUniversity of Illinois, LibraryTitle VI National Resource Center Grant (P015A060066)unpublishednot peer reviewe

The disappearing women: North West ICT project final report

Project Context The Disappearing Women: Northwest ICT project was embarked upon to further understand why more women leave the sector than are being recruited, 36% of new ICT recruits in the UK (in the first quarter of 2002) were women, yet in the same period, women accounted for 46% of all leavers or ‘disappearing’ women (The DTI Women in IT Champions report 2003, Grey and Healy 2004). This continuing trend shows a decline from 27% of women making up the ICT workforce in 1997 with a drop to 21% in 2004 (The DTI Women in IT Industry report 2005b). The number of women in the ICT sector remains disappointingly small considering that women make up around 50% of the total UK workforce and significantly this figure has gradually continued to fall despite numerous initiatives to attract more women into the sector (see Griffiths and Moore 2006 for a list of high profile ‘women in ICT’ initiatives). The research team’s first gender research project - Women in IT (WINIT) - ran for two years from January 2004 until March 2006 at the Information Systems Institute at The University of Salford and dealt solely with women who worked in the ICT sector in England. The WINIT Project via an online questionnaire and in-depth interviews gathered the stories and experiences of up to 500 participants and 19 interviewees respectively. The project enabled these women’s voices to be heard but the research team were constantly aware that a certain part of the female ICT workforce - the ‘disappearing’ women who had left ICT vowing never to return - had been overlooked and effectively silenced. It was these women who once found, may be able to facilitate a more in-depth understanding of why women were leaving the ICT sector. Having amassed skills and expertise, qualifications in ICT and crossed ICT recruitment barriers (DTI 2005a) the ‘disappearing’ women for whatever reasons decided to change their career trajectories and leave the sector. What ‘chilly’ (Falkner 2004) workplaces, disinterested organisational cultures and indifferent working conditions had these women encountered that became determining factors in leaving the ICT sector? There has been little (if any) research conducted involving this specific cohort of women and The Disappearing Women: North West ICT (DW: NW ICT) project seeks to make a research contribution to what is a continuing statistical and symbolic under-representation of women in the ICT labour market. The DW: NW ICT project was partly funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) from April 2006 until December 2006 under ESF Objective 3, Policy Field 5.1: Improving the Participation of Women. The DW: NW ICT project contributes research to priority 5 and its strategic objective to reduce the level of disadvantage faced by women in the labour market. The project was run in the Information Systems Group, Salford Business School of The University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK. The report is structured as follows. The first section presents the backdrop for the research, looking in general at women in the ICT labour market in England and then women leaving the ICT sector focussing on the North West of England and more explicitly women leaving ICT employment in the North West of England. The research aims of the project form the following section; they have been loosely classified in to two groupings, the push and pull factors that are contributing to the high attrition rate of women leaving ICT. The methodology follows with the route taken in how this ‘hard to reach’ target sample were finally located, once contacted the life history interview process and procedures adopted is explained in full. The vignettes of the ‘disappearing’ women are included to allow the reader an opportunity to ‘get to know’ these women a little more closely. Key themes that have naturally emerged throughout the interview data analysis process are presented, including hostilities in the ICT workplace, significant events and the process of leaving ICT workplaces and finally stories of the ‘appearing’ women and their current situations are heard. A discussion regarding the findings of the DW: NW ICT project concludes this report

The evolution of interdisciplinarity in physics research

Science, being a social enterprise, is subject to fragmentation into groups that focus on specialized areas or topics. Often new advances occur through cross-fertilization of ideas between sub-fields that otherwise have little overlap as they study dissimilar phenomena using different techniques. Thus to explore the nature and dynamics of scientific progress one needs to consider the large-scale organization and interactions between different subject areas. Here, we study the relationships between the sub-fields of Physics using the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) codes employed for self-categorization of articles published over the past 25 years (1985-2009). We observe a clear trend towards increasing interactions between the different sub-fields. The network of sub-fields also exhibits core-periphery organization, the nucleus being dominated by Condensed Matter and General Physics. However, over time Interdisciplinary Physics is steadily increasing its share in the network core, reflecting a shift in the overall trend of Physics research.Comment: Published version, 10 pages, 8 figures + Supplementary Informatio

Analyzing the Persistence of Referenced Web Resources with Memento

In this paper we present the results of a study into the persistence and availability of web resources referenced from papers in scholarly repositories. Two repositories with different characteristics, arXiv and the UNT digital library, are studied to determine if the nature of the repository, or of its content, has a bearing on the availability of the web resources cited by that content. Memento makes it possible to automate discovery of archived resources and to consider the time between the publication of the research and the archiving of the referenced URLs. This automation allows us to process more than 160000 URLs, the largest known such study, and the repository metadata allows consideration of the results by discipline. The results are startling: 45% (66096) of the URLs referenced from arXiv still exist, but are not preserved for future generations, and 28% of resources referenced by UNT papers have been lost. Moving forwards, we provide some initial recommendations, including that repositories should publish URL lists extracted from papers that could be used as seeds for web archiving systems.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to Open Repositories 2011 Conferenc

Employment Data for Buffalo

The types of jobs available in Buffalo have changed post-recession, with midlevel skilled jobs disappearing and high and low skill jobs growing. The loss of jobs in fields such as teaching, office administration, factory work and construction work during the recession is exacerbated by the fact that many midlevel jobs, such as manufacturing, are being automated or sent to cheaper markets. Growth has occurred on the high and low skill ends of the spectrum, however, with increases in fields that require high-level business skill, healthcare expertise, computer training, engineering, etc. At the low end, there has been growth in food preparation, personal care, and jobs such as store clerks and child care providers. These changes are reflected in the fact that 31.2% of employed persons in Buffalo work in management, professional, and related occupations, and 20.8% work in service occupations, as of 2012. The data suggests the need for workers in Buffalo to acquire more education, training, and skills to ameliorate growing inequality and polarization in the job market, and for expansion of policies like living wages to ensure that the high number of low-skill jobs does not result in higher poverty

Consistency of Hedonic Price Indexes with Unobserved Characteristics

Hedonic regressions are prone to omitted variable bias. The estimation of price relatives for new and disappearing goods using hedonic imputation methods involves taking ratios of hedonic models. This may lead to a situation where the omitted variable bias in each of the hedonic regressions offset each other. This study finds that the single imputation hedonic method estimates inconsistent price relatives, while the double imputation method may produce consistent price relatives depending on the behavior of unobserved characteristics in the comparison periods. The study outlines a methodology to test whether double imputation price relatives are consistent. The results of this study have implications with regard to the construction of quality adjusted indexes.Hedonic imputation method; omitted variable bias; model selection; quality adjusted price indexes; new and disappearing goods

The eye gaze direction of an observed person can bias perception, memory, and attention in adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder

The reported experiments aimed to investigate whether a person and his or her gaze direction presented in the context of a naturalistic scene cause perception, memory, and attention to be biased in typically developing adolescents and high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A novel computerized image manipulation program presented a series of photographic scenes, each containing a person. The program enabled participants to laterally maneuver the scenes behind a static window, the borders of which partially occluded the scenes. The gaze direction of the person in the scenes spontaneously cued attention of both groups in the direction of gaze, affecting judgments of preference (Experiment 1a) and causing memory biases (Experiment 1b). Experiment 2 showed that the gaze direction of a person cues visual search accurately to the exact location of gaze in both groups. These findings suggest that biases in preference, memory, and attention are caused by another person's gaze direction when viewed in a complex scene in adolescents with and without ASD (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

The eye gaze direction of an observed person can bias perception, memory, and attention in adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder

The reported experiments aimed to investigate whether a person and his or her gaze direction presented in the context of a naturalistic scene cause perception, memory, and attention to be biased in typically developing adolescents and high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A novel computerized image manipulation program presented a series of photographic scenes, each containing a person. The program enabled participants to laterally maneuver the scenes behind a static window, the borders of which partially occluded the scenes. The gaze direction of the person in the scenes spontaneously cued attention of both groups in the direction of gaze, affecting judgments of preference (Experiment 1a) and causing memory biases (Experiment 1b). Experiment 2 showed that the gaze direction of a person cues visual search accurately to the exact location of gaze in both groups. These findings suggest that biases in preference, memory, and attention are caused by another person's gaze direction when viewed in a complex scene in adolescents with and without ASD (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved