Religious Accommodations for Sabbatarian Observance among Library Staff

Over the last twenty-five years, litigation related to religious discrimination in the workplace has been on the rise. One of the tension points has been the religious practice of Sabbath keeping, leading to employment scheduling conflicts. Title VII and its subsequent amendments require that employers seek “reasonable accommodations” for Sabbatarian observance. Such adjustments should not cause “undue hardship” to the employer, who is required to make a “good faith effort” at accommodation. This article discusses creative alternatives that managers of public libraries and nonsectarian academic libraries may implement when accommodating Seventh-Day Adventist and similar Sabbatarian staff members

Online Library Tutorials: A Literature Review

In 2009, the Journal of Web Librarianship published a literature review covering best practices for creating library online tutorials. These principles included (1) knowing the tutorial’s purpose, (2) using standards, (3) collaborating with others, (4) engaging students, and (5) conducting evaluations. The purpose of this current essay is to serve as an updated literature review, culling and synthesizing seven other pedagogical facets from newer literature: (1) technology updates, (2) tutorial maintenance and revision, (3) multimedia learning by gaming, (4) cognitive load theory and chunking, (5) adult education theory, (6) blended and flipped learning, and (7) the importance of ongoing engagement

Marital Exits and Marital Expectations in Nineteenth Century America

On April 10, 1991, Professor of Law, Hendrik A. Hartog of the University of Wisconsin Law School, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s eleventh Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: Meanings of Marriage: The Structure of Marital Expectations in Nineteenth Century America. Hendrik Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University. He holds a PhD. in the History of American Civilization from Brandeis University (1982), a J.D. from the New York University School of Law (1973), and an A.B. from Carleton College (1970). Before coming to Princeton, he taught at the University of Wisconsin Law School (1982-92) and at the Indiana University (Bloomington) School of Law (1977-82). Hartog has spent his scholarly life working in the social history of American law, obsessed with the difficulties and opportunities that come with studying how broad political and cultural themes have been expressed in ordinary legal conflicts. He has worked in a variety of areas of American legal history: on the history of city life, on the history of constitutional rights claims, on the history of marriage, and on the historiography of legal change. He is the author of Public Property and Private Power: the Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (1983) and Man and Wife in America: a History (2000). He is the editor of Law in the American Revolution and the Revolution in the Law (1981) and the co-editor of Law in Culture and Culture in Law (2000) and American Public Life and the Historical Imagination (2003). Representative articles include “Pigs and Positivism” (Wisconsin Law Review, 1985); “The Constitution of Aspiration and ‘The Rights that Belong to us All’” (Journal of American History, 1987); “Mrs. Packard on Dependency” (Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 1988); “Abigail Bailey’s Coverture: Law in a Married Woman’s Consciousness” (in Law in Everyday Life, 1993); “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and ‘The Unwritten Law,’ in Nineteenth-Century America” (Journal of American History, 1997); and “Llewellyn, Divorce, and Description” (in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, 2003). He has been awarded a variety of national fellowships and lectureships, and for a decade he co-edited Studies in Legal History, the book series of the American Society for Legal History

Two-point motional Stark effect diagnostic for Madison Symmetric Torus

A high-precision spectral motional Stark effect (MSE) diagnostic provides internal magnetic field measurements for Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) plasmas. Currently, MST uses two spatial views-on the magnetic axis and on the midminor (off-axis) radius, the latter added recently. A new analysis scheme has been developed to infer both the pitch angle and the magnitude of the magnetic field from MSE spectra. Systematic errors are reduced by using atomic data from atomic data and analysis structure in the fit. Reconstructed current density and safety factor profiles are more strongly and globally constrained with the addition of the off-axis radius measurement than with the on-axis one only

Investigation of inelastic light scattering in heavily electron-irradiated alkali halides

The properties of several unusual Raman scattering peaks observed in heavily irradiated NaCl with vast amounts of colloidal sodium are investigated. A new peak (at 3580 cm-1) has been observed far beyond the cut-off limit of the one-phonon spectrum. This scattering phenomenon has been explained with an electron quantum confinement model where the electronic excitations are quantized as expected for wire-like structures of nano-particles of metallic sodium.

Decision support for crew rostering at NS

This paper describes a method for solving the cyclic crewrostering problem (CCRP). This is the problem of cyclicallyordering a set of duties for a number of crew members, such thatseveral complex constraints are satisfied and such that thequality of the obtained roster is as high as possible. Thedescribed method was tested on a number of instances of NS, thelargest operator of passenger trains in the Netherlands. Theseinstances involve the generation of rosters for groups of traindrivers or conductors of NS. The tests show that high qualitysolutions for practical instances of the CCRP can be generated inan acceptable amount of computing time. Finally, we describe anexperiment where we constructed rosters in an automatic way for agroup of conductors. They preferred our - generated - rosters overtheir own manually constructed rosters.

Global Ethics, Religious Liberty, and Freedom of Information Access

Devout Christians work in a spectrum of library settings (including public libraries), networked by globalized information access. By nature of their employment, these librarians assist patrons in accessing and retrieving information that challenges or conflicts with a biblical worldview. How can one defend taking such an active role in this seeming contradiction? This article maintains that Christian commitment may not only co-exist with the freedom of information access but may also support it as a universal human right in our globalized, pluralistic context. To make the case, the essay contrasts two varying accounts of Global Ethics (differing in their view of the suitable role of religion in society). Then the article analyzes the historical roots of “religious liberty” within early Christian thought. Finally, the essay contends that a robust approach to religious liberty entails considerations of reciprocity and the right to access contrary perspectives, in order that religious adherents may properly understand and accurately portray opposing worldviews and may avoid the mere parroting of unchallenged beliefs. In this manner, an allegiance to the particularity of Christian faith can coalesce with support for the freedom of information access, including library patron access to antithetical belief systems and ideologies