Material Availability: A Study of Academic Library Performance

This article reports the findings of a study modeled after Saracevic, Shaw, and Kantor\u27s efforts to identify and quantify the causes of users\u27 failures to identify and locate library materials. The researchers analyzed patron-reported and librarian-observed subject and known-item searches and found an overall success rate of only 54 percent. The problems that led to the 46 percent failure rate were analyzed by source and type of failure, and subjective observations concerning problems encountered by patrons were recorded. Recommendations are made for reducing library malfunctions and circulation, patron, and acquisition errors

Book Availability: Academic Library Assessment

published or submitted for publicatio

Material availability: a study of academic library performance

published or submitted for publicatio

Emissions of trace gases and aerosols during the open combustion of biomass in the laboratory

We characterized the gas- and speciated aerosol-phase emissions from the open combustion of 33 different plant species during a series of 255 controlled laboratory burns during the Fire Laboratory at Missoula Experiments (FLAME). The plant species we tested were chosen to improve the existing database for U.S. domestic fuels: laboratory-based emission factors have not previously been reported for many commonly-burned species that are frequently consumed by fires near populated regions and protected scenic areas. The plants we tested included the chaparral species chamise, manzanita, and ceanothus, and species common to the southeastern US (common reed, hickory, kudzu, needlegrass rush, rhododendron, cord grass, sawgrass, titi, and wax myrtle). Fire-integrated emission factors for gas-phase CO{sub 2}, CO, CH{sub 4}, C{sub 2-4} hydrocarbons, NH{sub 3}, SO{sub 2}, NO, NO{sub 2}, HNO{sub 3} and particle-phase organic carbon (OC), elemental carbon (EC), SO{sub 4}{sup 2-}, NO{sub 3}{sup -}, Cl{sup -}, Na{sup +}, K{sup +}, and NH{sub 4}{sup +} generally varied with both fuel type and with the fire-integrated modified combustion efficiency (MCE), a measure of the relative importance of flaming- and smoldering-phase combustion to the total emissions during the burn. Chaparral fuels tended to emit less particulate OC per unit mass of dry fuel than did other fuel types, whereas southeastern species had some of the largest observed EF for total fine particulate matter. Our measurements often spanned a larger range of MCE than prior studies, and thus help to improve estimates for individual fuels of the variation of emissions with combustion conditions