Developing a Collection (Team): Adapting, Innovating, and Thriving in Organizational Change at Kennesaw State University

In 2013, the Kennesaw State University (KSU) Library System hired its first Collection Development Librarian. Since then, the Library System has experienced remarkable changes and growth in many areas, including institutional consolidation, facility renovations, new staffing, and organizational restructuring. Of note is the establishment and extraordinary growth of the Collection Development Unit since 2015. With a good dose of creativity, these changes enabled us to grow into a flourishing team. By pulling together talent from other library units and creating positions from the ground up, we were able to generate something new. Within four years of focused and dedicated effort by this highly motivated team, we developed and implemented a broad spectrum of innovative programs and services, including a robust training calendar, comprehensive collection maintenance and assessment plans, a very active undergraduate faculty liaison group, and effective outreach and marketing initiatives with other library units and with the KSU community at large. Great success never comes easy, and disruptive change is not unfamiliar to libraries. How did we make our case to Library Administration to gain their support, especially when funding and other resources were scarce? What positions were needed the most and what are strategic ways to recruit new team members? How were we going to prioritize the daunting tasks awaiting us? To tackle these inevitable challenges, we employed many innovative strategies and accrued valuable experiences along the way. In this panel presentation, we will share our best practices in team-building, the unorthodox solutions we came up with, as well as the lessons we learned in the process. We hope that our story will inspire and help you to build an outstanding team that is able to thrive on change

Are Older Workers Worthy of Their Pay? An Empirical Investigation of Age-Productivity and Age-Wage Nexuses

Using longitudinal employer-employee data spanning over a 22-year period, we compare age-wage and age-productivity profiles and find that productivity increases until the age range of 50-54, whereas wages peak around the age 40-44. At younger ages, wages increase in line with productivity gains but as prime-age approaches, wage increases lag behind productivity gains. As a result, older workers are, in fact, worthy of their pay, in the sense that their contribution to firm-level productivity exceeds their contribution to the wage bill. On the methodological side, we note that failure to account for the endogenous nature of the regressors in the estimation of the wage and productivity equations biases the results towards a pattern consistent with underpayment followed by overpayment type of policies.aging, productivity, wages

Managing social-ecological systems under uncertainty : implications for conservation

Natural resource managers and conservationists are often confronted with the challenges of uncertainty. Limits to knowledge and predictability challenge conservation success and socio-economic, institutional and political context affect implementation of conservation interventions. Using a management strategy evaluation (MSE) conceptual framework, I use a multidisciplinary approach to gain a better understanding of the role and implications of different sources and types of uncertainty for the management of social-ecological systems, giving special attention to the issues of observation and implementation uncertainty. The conservation of harvested ungulate species in the Serengeti, Tanzania, is used as a case study. I investigated which factors should be prioritized in order to increase survey accuracy and precision, and explored the potential effects of budgetary scenarios on the robustness of the population estimates obtained for different savannah ungulate species. The relative importance of each process affecting precision and accuracy varied according to the survey technique and biological characteristics of the species. I applied specialized questioning techniques developed for studying non-compliant and sensitive behaviour, using the unmatched-count technique (UCT) to assess prevalence of illegal hunting in the Serengeti. I found that poaching remains widespread in the Serengeti and current alternative sources of income may not be sufficiently attractive to compete with the opportunities provided by hunting. I explored trade-offs between different types of error when monitoring changes in population abundance and how these are affected by budgetary, observational and ecological conditions. Higher observation error and conducting surveys less frequently increased the likelihood of not detecting trends and misclassifying the shape of the trend but the differences between multiple levels of observation error decreased for higher monitoring length and frequency. Using key informant interviews with the main actors in the monitoring and management system, I provided recommendations for the development and implementation of interventions within long-term integrated and adaptive frameworks. The research presented in this thesis highlights the need to consider the role of people as influential components within social-ecological systems in order to promote effective conservation interventions. Monitoring and implementation must be understood as dynamic features of the system, instead of merely acting upon it, and the multiple sources of uncertainty must be fully considered in conservation planning, requiring the development and application of tools to aid management decision-making under uncertainty.Open Acces

Comparing the Early Research Performance of PhD Graduates in Labor Economics in Europe and the USA

This paper analyzes the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics, addressing the following questions: Are there major productivity differences between graduates from American and European institutions? If so, how relevant is the quality of the training received (i.e. ranking of institution and supervisor) and the research environment in the subsequent job placement institution? The population under study consists of labor economics PhD graduates who received their degree in the years 2000 to 2005 in Europe or the USA. Research productivity is evaluated alternatively as the number of publications or the quality-adjusted number of publications of an individual. When restricting the analysis to the number of publications, results suggest a higher productivity by graduates from European universities than from USA universities, but this difference vanishes when accounting for the quality of the publication. The results also indicate that graduates placed at American institutions, in particular top ones, are likely to publish more quality-adjusted articles than their European counterparts. This may be because, when hired, they already have several good acceptances or because of more focused research efforts and clearer career incentives.graduate programs, research productivity

Trends in Economic Research: An International Perspective

Given the recent efforts in several countries to reorganize the research institutional setting to improve research productivity, our analysis addresses the following questions: To which extent has the recent awareness over international quality standards in economics around the world been reflected in research performance? How have individual countries fared? Do research quantity and quality indicators tell us the same story? We concentrate on trends taking place since the beginning of the 1990s and rely on a very comprehensive database of scientific journals, to provide a cross-country comparison of the evolution of research in economics. Our findings indicate that Europe is catching up with the US but, in terms of influential research, the US maintains a dominant position. The main continental European countries, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, experienced some of the largest growth rates in economic scientific output. Other European countries, namely the UK, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, have shown remarkable progress in per capita output. Collaborative research seems to be a key factor explaining the relative success of some European countries, in particular when it comes to publishing in top journals, attained predominantly through international collaborations.US, North-America, research performance, publications, rankings, Europe

Dynamic coordination with timing frictions: theory and applications

We start by presenting the general model of dynamic coordination with timing frictions and some key theoretical results. We prove the model features a unique rationalizable equilibrium, present a method to solve the social planner problem and derive expressions for the equilibrium threshold in limiting cases. With this toolkit in hand, we get analytical results for a case with linear preferences and present several applications, ranging from network externalities to statistical discrimination and to macroeconomics. Besides generating insights for specific questions, the applications illustrate the potential of the model to accommodate a large set of economic problems. Last, we show extensions of the framework that allow for endogenous hazard rates, preemption motives and ex-ante heterogeneous agents

Feasibility Study on the Valuation of Public Goods and Externalities in EU Agriculture

The present report develops and test an up-scaled non-market valuation framework to value changes in the provision level of the Public Goods and Externalities (PGaE) of EU agriculture from the demand-side (i.e. using valuation surveys). The selected PGaE included in the study are the following: cultural landscape, farmland biodiversity, water quality and availability, air quality, soil quality, climate stability, resilience to fire and resilience to flooding. The following achievements have been accomplished along the project development: 1) comprehensive description of the study selected PGaE, 2) quantification of the selected agricultural PGaE using agri-environmental indicators, 3) standardised description of PGaE disentangling the macro-regional agro-ecological infra-structures from its ecological and cultural services, 4) delimitation of wide areas with homogeneous agro-ecological infra-structures across EU (macro-regions), 5) delimitation of the macro-regions, independently from their supply of PGaE, 6) definition of “Macro-Regional Agri-Environmental Problems” (MRAEP), through the association of the macro-regions with the core PGaE supplied by them, delivering non-market demand-side valuation problems relevant to the agricultural and agri-environmental policy decision-makers, 7) design of a Choice Modelling (CM) survey able to gather multi-country value estimates of changes in the provision level of different PGaE supplied by different macro-regions, 8) successful testing of the valuation framework through a pilot survey and 9) delivering of alternative sampling plans for the EU level large-scale survey allowing for different options regarding the number of surveyed countries, the size and composition of respective samples, and the survey administration-mode, balanced with estimates for the corresponding budgetary cost.JRC.J.4-Agriculture and Life Sciences in the Econom

Academic librarian burnout: A survey using the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI)

In the Spring of 2018, the authors administered the highly validated and reliable Copenhagen Burnout Inventory work-related sub-scale to 1,628 academic librarians employed within the United States. Academic librarians reported a total work-related burnout score of 49.6. Overall, female participants who were 35–44 years of age reported the highest levels of work-related burnout with males and older individuals reporting the lowest levels of work-related burnout. This study also revealed some interesting information about non-binary/third-gender librarians that suggests further research is warranted

O professor de Língua Portuguesa em processo de formação continuada: conjugando reflexão e ação

This article aims to discuss the importance of thinking about the professional development of the teacher as an actor of his/her work, in order to ensure innovative practices in the classroom, under the bias of didactization of genre. It is based on the findings of a cooperative project of continuing education (with support of CAPES/Observatory of Education), which had the notion of language as interaction as its foundational concept. The research was undertaken in light of the principles of Sociodiscursive Interacionism. We developed the educational device of genre didactical projects, inspired by the concepts of didactic sequence and literacy projects, in order to put reading production side by side with written production and take them as effective social practices, focusing on a theme generated by students and teacher altogether. The results showed the importance of the training work as a cooperative and gradual process. They also showed that professional development can be understood as a reconfiguration of individual representations on a particular aspect of the teacher’s work. This development adds to the actoriality to allow the change of identity of a traditional teacher for an innovative teacher, a prerequisite for new practices. This route goes from knowledge to action, from a scientifically backed concept of genre to its didactic transposition which will, thus, allow the production of texts marked by genericity and inserted in meaningful social practices for students.Keywords: continuing education, didactization of text genres, actoriality.O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a importância de se pensar no desenvolvimento profissional, no professor como ator de seu trabalho, como forma de garantir práticas inovadoras em sala de aula, sob o viés da didatização de gêneros. Apoiamo-nos em conclusões de projeto sobre processo cooperativo de formação continuada (com apoio CAPES/Observatório da Educação), que teve a noção de linguagem como interação como conceito fundante. Nesse percurso, filiamo-nos teoricamente ao Interacionismo Sociodiscursivo. Desenvolvemos o dispositivo didático dos projetos didáticos de gênero, inspirado nos conceitos de sequência didática e de projetos de letramento, para colocar a produção de leitura lado a lado com a produção textual e tomá-las como práticas sociais efetivas, centradas em tema gerado em conjunto por alunos e professor. Os resultados comprovaram a importância de o trabalho de formação ser cooperativo e gradual. Mostraram também que o desenvolvimento profissional pode ser entendido como uma reconfiguração de representações individuais sobre determinado aspecto do trabalho do professor. Tal desenvolvimento se soma à atorialidade para permitir a mudança de identidade do professor tradicional para o professor inovador, condição essencial para novas práticas. Este percurso passa de um saber para um fazer, de um conceito de gênero respaldado cientificamente, para sua transposição didática, que permitirá, enfim, a produção de textos marcados pela genericidade e inseridos em práticas sociais significativas para os alunos.Palavras-chave: formação continuada, didatização de gênero de texto, atorialidade