Dependency on Regional Libraries for Grey Literature: Perceptions of Researchers in Engineering Sciences and Technology

While highlighting the strength of Grey Literature collection in the engineering institutions recognized for research in the state of Karnataka, the study focuses on the extent of dependency of researchers and librarians on the regional libraries for grey resources. In the present study, response have been sought as to the frequency of access, discipline-wise use of grey collection, gender-wise awareness of Grey Literature available in the holdings of the regional libraries. Further, the research study focuses on the perceptions of the faculty and research scholars as to the cooperation and assistance rendered by the library staff in getting Grey Literature. The study also covers the feed back of the researchers on notifying new arrivals of Grey Literature on the institution website, and the need for conducting orientation programmes for better access and use of Grey Literature available in the holdings of the regional libraries. The summary of findings depicts that an overwhelming majority of the researches opine that the libraries either individually or jointly have to notify new arrivals on the website and further there is felt-need for the conduct of orientation progammes.Includes: Conference preprint, Abstract and Biographical notesXAInternationa

Katrina and the Waves: Bad Organization, Natural Evil or The State

REJECTED - publisher's policy states that PDF cannot be archivedThis paper considers Deleuze and Guattari's notions of the smooth and the striated as a basis for rethinking the events of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans in September 2005. It is argued here that popular narratives of Katrina, and perspectives on disaster from the field of organization studies, have tended to be conditioned by a long-standing and restrictive dualism between 'man' (organization) and 'nature' (disorganization), and an associated, anthropocentric moral framework. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari are seen to offer a set of concepts relating to spatial and material patterns of organization which allow us to move beyond such a conceptual dualism towards other ways of thinking the events of Katrina. Furthermore, they are also understood to have provided the basis for some radical reflections on the role of the State in the reproduction of a particular material and conceptual logic of disaster management and planning. According to an application of their concepts of the smooth and the striated, Katrina is described here, not according to notions of natural disorder, but as a Deleuzo-Guattarian 'war machine', operating according to an alien mode of organization to that of the State. It is this encounter, between two irreducibly different modes of organization, which is seen to account for both its extreme 'catastrophic' effects, and for some of the unusual organizational phenomena occurring in its aftermath. In contrast to some recent papers in the field of organization studies that have tended to treat Deleuze and Guattari's work in abstract and theoretical terms, this paper proposes to make a distinctive contribution to this Deleuzo-Guattarian 'turn' by situating, or putting to work, their thought in the context of Katrina as an empirical event

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press