Teaching Patrons to Fish: The Educational Value of Cancelling Requests for Locally Available Materials

Expansive document delivery service for locally available materials is becoming increasingly popular, but is a learning component lost with the implementation of this service? In this study, the authors compare data from two institutions, one that provides an unadvertised document delivery service without instruction, and another that cancels requests for locally available materials with an instructional component. The behavior of each institution\u27s patrons over a 4-year period is analyzed and found to differ at statistically significant levels. These findings will be useful for interlibrary loan policy makers who are considering whether to implement document delivery for locally available items

Survey of Web Developers in Academic Libraries

A survey was sent to library web designers from randomly selected institutions to determine the background, tools, and methods used by those designers. Results, grouped by Carnegie Classification type, indicated that larger schools were not necessarily working with more resources or more advanced levels of technology than other institutions

Turnaround Time Between ILLiad’s Odyssey and Ariel Delivery Methods: A Comparison

Interlibrary loan departments are frequently looking for ways to reduce turnaround time. The advent of electronic delivery in the past decade has greatly reduced turnaround time for articles, but recent developments in this arena have the potential to decrease that time even further. The ILLiad ILL management system has an electronic delivery component, Odyssey, with a Trusted Sender setting that allows articles to be sent to patrons without borrowing staff intervention, provided the lending library is designated as a Trusted Sender, or this feature is enabled for all lenders. Using the tracking data created by the ILLiad management system, the turnaround time for two delivery methods, Ariel and Odyssey, was captured for two different academic institutions. With the Trusted Sender setting turned on, Odyssey delivery was faster than Ariel for the institutions studied

Stability Implications of Bendixson’s Criterion

This note presents a proof that the omega limit set of a solution to a planar system satisfying the Bendixson criterion is either empty or is a single equilibrium. The proof involves elementary techniques which should be accessible to senior undergraduates and graduate students

Assembly and maintenance of subtidal habitat heterogeneity: synergistic effects of light penetration and sedimentation

Copyright © 2005 Inter-Research.I experimentally separated the positive and negative effects of light penetration and sedimentation on the assembly and maintenance of 3 subtidal habitats whose heterogeneity characterizes much of the world’s temperate coastline; encrusting (non-geniculate) coralline algae, articulated (geniculate) coralline algae and filamentous, turf-forming algae. The ability of encrusting corallines to monopolize and retain space without overgrowth depended on the presence of shade (positive effect) if sediment deposition was below that observed on coast characterized by high rates of sedimentation (negative effect). In contrast, the growth and persistence of articulated corallines depended on the absence of shade (negative effect) and high levels of sediment accumulation observed on human-dominated coast (positive effect). The recruitment of filamentous-turfs was facilitated by full light, but was not strongly affected by sedimentation. Instead, filamentous-turfs tolerated heavy sediment accumulation, a factor thought to explain the concomitant increase in spatial dominance of algal-turfs and loss of canopy-forming algae on reefs with heavy sedimentation. Importantly, different habitats will assemble or be maintained to match the environmental conditions in which they are most extensive, demonstrating the key role of physical factors associated with habitat- formers (kelp forests) and human-dominated coast (heavy sedimentation). These results also demonstrate that an appreciation of the integrated roles of physical processes may assist the development of predictive models about the assembly and maintenance of heterogeneity of natural communities, and their potential disruption by humans.Sean D. Connel

The search for the Dark Vector Boson via the Higgs Portal

Abstract: The Standard Model (SM) is known to be incomplete. The introduction of a Dark Sector via an additional U(1)D gauge symmetry added to the SM Lagrangian provides a mechanism to introduce much needed new physics without perturbing the already excellent agreement between the SM theoretical description and the Electroweak Precision Observables (EWPO) experimental constraints. The model has a dark vector boson Zd which can mix with the hypercharge gauge boson with the coupling . This opens the Hypercharge Portal which can mediate the fluctuation of a Z to a Zd, or the decay of the Zd to SM leptons. If a dark Higgs singlet s also exists, this then breaks the U(1)D, opening the Higgs portal and also allowing for Higgs mass mixing between the SM and dark sectors, described by the Higgs mass mixing parameter, k. Including dark fermionic fields in the Lagrangian allows for long-lived cold Dark Matter candidates. The various connections between the Dark and SM sectors allow descriptions of many key astro-physical phenomena. The Model is therefore a fascinating candidate for new physics beyond the SM. It becomes crucial to search for experimental signatures of this model. This contribution discusses a search for the dark force boson Zd using its production via the Higgs Portal and its decay back to SM leptons: H hd ZdZd 4l. The results from ATLAS Run 1 and the further development of the search for Run 2 are presented

The search for crystal undulator radiation

Abstract: The channelling phenomenon applies to the correlated motion of charged particles within a crystal lattice in a direction closely aligned with atomic rows (strings) or crystal planes. When the incident charge particle is highly relativistic, the emitted channeling radiation is boosted by a factor of γ2, where γ is the Lorentz factor. Bremsstrahlung may also be coherent for these conditions, and coherent enhancement leads to both quasi monoenergetic peaks and also significant increases in intensity as compared to the normal process. In the special condition that the crystal is periodically bent, such as in a periodic superlattice, one may also have undulator radiation. All of these phenomena are potential sources of MeV and GeV range intense gamma radiation. The latter phenomenon is proposed as potentially the most important source of monochromatic high energy photons. In principle it can also lead to coherent radiation based on the Free Electron Laser (FEL) principle with intensities similar to an extrapolation of what may be obtained at modern light sources. In this contribution we describe a search for crystal undulator radiation using 2.5 – 6.0 GeV positrons incident on a diamond crystal undulator. The experiments were performed at the T9 Beam-line of the Proton Synchrotron at CERN. The experiment was the result of a winning proposal for the 2015 CERN Beam-line for Schools Competition

Survey of Web Developers in Academic Libraries

A survey was sent to library web designers from randomly selected institutions to determine the background, tools, and methods used by those designers. Results, grouped by Carnegie Classification type, indicated that larger schools were not necessarily working with more resources or more advanced levels of technology than other institutions