A 2CUL Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment of Humanities Doctoral Students: Design, Implementation and Analysis

This paper examines the processes taken to design and administer a collaborative ethnographic study of humanities doctoral students within an inter-institutional, collaborative framework. Project organization and management, including the creation of instruments and analysis of results across two local research teams and institutional cultures is discussed. Effective communications, among and between project teams, and time management were identified as critical factors for success. Benefits resulting from the project included an improved understanding of the needs of a key user group, a heightened interest in user assessment and data-driven decision-making among staff within the partner organizations, and a deeper engagement with academic administrators on both campuses

A 2CUL Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment of Humanities Doctoral Students

This paper examines the processes taken to design and administer a collaborative ethnographic study of humanities doctoral students within an inter-institutional, collaborative framework. Project organization and management, including the creation of instruments and analysis of results across two local research teams and institutional cultures is discussed. Effective communications, among and between project teams, and time management were identified as critical factors for success. Benefits resulting from the project included an improved understanding of the needs of a key user group, a heightened interest in user assessment and data-driven decision making among staff within the partner organizations, and a deeper engagement with important academic administrators on both campuses

Supporting Humanities Doctoral Student Success: A Collaborative Project between Cornell University Library and Columbia University Libraries

In recent years there have been a number of major, large-scale studies in the United States on the high attrition rates for doctoral students in the humanities. The results of these studies reveal a significant gap between the humanities and other disciplines. None of the studies consulted has specifically considered the role of the library in supporting doctoral program completion, even though it is often characterized as the humanist‘s equivalent to the scientific laboratory. This collaborative study includes focus groups and individual interviews with doctoral students in the humanities at both Cornell and Columbia. The study investigates whether the research library might positively impact doctoral student success in the humanities and discusses specific strategies it might employ to do so

Patterns of Spatial Variation of Assemblages Associated with Intertidal Rocky Shores: A Global Perspective

Assemblages associated with intertidal rocky shores were examined for large scale distribution patterns with specific emphasis on identifying latitudinal trends of species richness and taxonomic distinctiveness. Seventy-two sites distributed around the globe were evaluated following the standardized sampling protocol of the Census of Marine Life NaGISA project (www.nagisa.coml.org). There were no clear patterns of standardized estimators of species richness along latitudinal gradients or among Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs); however, a strong latitudinal gradient in taxonomic composition (i.e., proportion of different taxonomic groups in a given sample) was observed. Environmental variables related to natural influences were strongly related to the distribution patterns of the assemblages on the LME scale, particularly photoperiod, sea surface temperature (SST) and rainfall. In contrast, no environmental variables directly associated with human influences (with the exception of the inorganic pollution index) were related to assemblage patterns among LMEs. Correlations of the natural assemblages with either latitudinal gradients or environmental variables were equally strong suggesting that neither neutral models nor models based solely on environmental variables sufficiently explain spatial variation of these assemblages at a global scale. Despite the data shortcomings in this study (e.g., unbalanced sample distribution), we show the importance of generating biological global databases for the use in large-scale diversity comparisons of rocky intertidal assemblages to stimulate continued sampling and analyses

Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog

Color plates for Chapter V and an announcement about the publication of a new book: Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog.As part of the development of eXtensible Catalog (XC), a project sponsored by the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries, four institutions conducted eighty interviews and numerous workshops to understand how researchers learn about, acquire, and use scholarly resources. Research findings informed the design and development of XC, a set of open-source applications that provides access to resources across a range of databases, metadata schemas, and standards. In this volume, members of the project team report on key findings of the user research that was done at Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University, and discuss the value of including library users and technology specialists from many disciplines in the software design and development process