East Meets West: The Adaptation of Vietnamese International Students to California Community Colleges

This study explores seven adaptation aspects that include language and communication, cultural awareness, loneliness and isolation, new educational settings, financial concerns, gender-based differences, and the political impact of the anti-communist Vietnamese American community. Based on Person/Environment Interactionism theory, case studies of eight students from Vietnam at two Southern California community colleges are considered utilizing data derived from weekly diaries, individual interviews, a final group meeting, and academic records. The students’ prior assumptions and expectations are identified and their coping strategies to various adaptation issues are documented and analyzed. The ethnic diversity of Orange County generally facilitated the students’ adaptation efforts in the aspects of language and communications, cultural awareness, and loneliness and isolation. The students seemed to readily adapt to the new educational settings and excel academically despite some different educational practices. There were no apparent gender-based differences in the students’ adaptation. However, unwelcoming attitudes from the anti-communist members of the Vietnamese American community adversely impacted the international students’ socialization with Vietnamese Americans, but did not impact their academic performance

Academic Library Middle Managers as Leaders: In their Own Words

The experience of academic library middle managers is largely unexamined in the LIS literature, even though middle managers oftentimes function as change agents, succession planners, and project initiators and therefore make significant contributions to organizational success. This qualitative, interview-based study examines how middle managers in collection management or technical services departments experience “leading from the middle” and how they perceive their growth, development, and current roles as leaders. Over the course of ten interviews, significant themes emerged, including: initiating or implementing change; professional relationships with colleagues at all hierarchical levels; organizational culture; and professional development and institutional support for learning

Managing ETDs: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Mandating contribution of theses and dissertations (TDs) to university archives and their electronic equivalents (ETDs) to an institutional repository (IR) is common practice. Optimizing workflows for archival print copies while managing electronic copies in an IR can be challenging given such factors as embargoes and the skill sets required to ensure theses and dissertations are accessible, discoverable, and ultimately safely stashed where they belong. As rational processes were gradually developed at the University of Vermont, pitfalls and breakthroughs presented themselves. This article relates our experience launching an ETD mandate, including campus outreach initiatives and improvements to the various related processes (document submission, harvesting, embargo removal). Our journey encompassed a range of experiences that we designated good, bad, or ugly, depending on workflow impact. We realize these are mere labels and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, especially regarding embargoes

Progress in the microscopic description of nucleon-nucleus elastic scattering at low-energy

In this brief report, we make a short review of progress in developing the microscopic optical potential in recent years. In particular, we present our current studies and plans on building the microscopic optical potential based on the so-called nuclear structure models at low energies.    &nbsp