Speed is Relative (Human and Animal Running Speeds): Are You a Cheetah, a Chicken, or a Snail?

To put matters in perspective, running speeds for humans and other land animals are compared over various distances. Humans compare quite favorably over longer distances with many species. Both fast and slow human runners can benefit from comparing their individual times in races with other species

Golden Rule Reference: Face-to-Face and Virtual

Reference service in all types of libraries could be improved if librarians actively adopted the mindset of the Golden Rule. The Rule is expressed in some form in many world religions and instructs us to treat others how we would like to be treated. Such an approach has applicability not only in face-to-face reference transactions, but also in virtual reference settings. The empathetic reference librarian should be alert to both verbal and non-verbal clues which can indicate how a patron would like to be treated

Core Conservation Biology Monographs: A Citation Analysis

Conservation biology is a multidisciplinary subject of recent origins. Analysis of cited monographs from the journal Conservation Biology resulted in a list of 47 monographs which were heavily cited for this discipline. Over half of these were from related disciplines such as ecology, genetics, evolution, population biology, statistics, and natural resource management

Document Delivery as a Supplement or Replacement for Serial Subscriptions

Increasing serials costs and shrinking budgets present challenges for academic libraries to continue providing sufficient access to scholarly articles. Rapid document delivery services can serve as an effective means to fill the gap caused by serials cancellations. This column examines several of the existing document delivery service providers and addresses issues involved in their implementation

Exploring faculty perspectives on open access at a medium-sized, American doctoral university

Faculty hold widely varying perspectives on the benefits and challenges afforded by open access (OA) publishing. In the United States, conversations on OA models and strategy have been dominated by scholars affiliated with Carnegie R1 institutions. This article reports findings from interviews conducted with faculty at a Carnegie R2 institution, highlighting disciplinary and individual perspectives on the high costs and rich rewards afforded by OA. The results reiterate the persistence of a high degree of skepticism regarding the quality of peer review and business models associated with OA publishing. By exploring scholars’ perceptions of and experiences with OA publishing and their comfort using or sharing unpublished, publicly available content, the authors highlight the degree to which OA approaches must remain flexible, iterative and multifaceted – no single solution can begin to accommodate the rich and varying needs of individual stakeholders

Champagne Wishes and a Domestic Beer Budget: Assessing and Supporting Serials Access at a Carnegie R2

As library budgets are cut or remain flat, librarians asked to do more with less are considering diverse data to investigate how best to invest limited funds. The data available to librarians are extensive but they may also be contradictory. In this presentation, we contextualize findings from interviews conducted with Illinois State University faculty with institutional and collections data. Using the words of faculty members across disciplines, we highlight some of the tensions around discovery and access to scholarly literature, perceptions of urgency, and engagement with open access. The interview results--triangulated with institutional usage and cost data—suggest a variety of ways by which to support serials access and align our practices with the strategic plan of our University and Library

Disciplinary Differences and Scholarly Literature: Discovery, Browsing, and Formats

This study reports faculty experiences regarding the discovery of scholarly content, highlighting similarities and differences across a range of academic disciplines. The authors interviewed twenty-five faculty members at a public, high-research university in the Midwest to explore the intersections of discovery, browsing, and format from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Although most participants rely on similar discovery tools such as library catalogs and databases and Google Scholar, their discovery techniques varied according to the discipline and type of research being done. Browsing is not a standard method for discovery, but it is still done selectively and strategically by some scholars. Journal articles are the most important format across disciplines, but books, chapters, and conference proceedings are core for some scholars and should be considered when facilitating discovery. The findings detail several ways in which disciplinary and personal experiences shape scholars’ practices. The authors discuss the perceived disconnect between browsability, discovery, and access of scholarly literature and explore solutions that make the library central to discovery and browsing

I’ll Wait Zero Seconds : Faculty Perspectives on Serials Access, Sharing, and Immediacy

This study explores how faculty across disciplines access and share scholarly serial content and what expectations they have for immediacy. The authors conducted twenty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews with faculty of various ranks representing all Illinois State University (ISU) colleges. The findings, presented in the words of participants and triangulated with data from local sources, suggest that faculty use a variety of context-specific mechanisms to access and share serial literature. Participants discuss how they use library services such as databases, subscriptions, interlibrary loan, and document delivery, coupled with academic social networks, disciplinary repositories, author websites, and other publicly available sources to obtain the full text of articles along with their manifold considerations for sharing and requesting content. The urgency with which faculty need to gain access to scholarly literature is dependent on intersecting elements of discipline, current projects, how the resource will be used, the perceived competitiveness of the field, career stage, and personal practices. The findings reiterate that scholarly literature remains integral to the research and teaching of faculty even as needs and practices for accessing and sharing it grow more individualized and distributed

Ten years of major equestrian injury: are we addressing functional outcomes?

YesFunding provided by the Open Access Authors Fund

Sexual Priming, Gender Stereotyping, and Likelihood to Sexually Harass: Examining the Cognitive Effects of Playing a Sexually-Explicit Video Game

The present study examines the short-term cognitive effects of playing a sexually explicit video game with female “objectification” content on male players. Seventy-four male students from a university in California, U.S. participated in a laboratory experiment. They were randomly assigned to play either a sexually-explicit game or one of two control games. Participants’ cognitive accessibility to sexual and sexually objectifying thoughts was measured in a lexical decision task. A likelihood-to-sexually-harass scale was also administered. Results show that playing a video game with the theme of female “objectification” may prime thoughts related to sex, encourage men to view women as sex objects, and lead to self-reported tendencies to behave inappropriately towards women in social situations