Marketing and Outreach in Law Libraries: A White Paper

In recent years, libraries have turned to marketing and outreach to better educate library users about services and resources while gaining an understanding of their needs. Marketing and outreach are relatively new concepts in academic law libraries, and librarians tasked with these functions have found resources and examples of this type of work to be lacking. Though focused on academic law libraries, the article identifies the challenges facing all law libraries, explains why libraries need marketing and outreach plans, and provides examples of marketing and outreach successes

Fibronectin enhances early shear stress resistance of seeded adult human venous endothelial cells.

An in vitro parallel plate perfusion chamber was used to study the shear stress resistance of seeded adult human saphenous vein endothelial cells (AHSVECs) on glass surfaces coated with different substrates. Endothelial cells were seeded onto glass slides precoated with these substrates and then exposed to pulsatile flow with an average shear stress of 8 dyn/cm2 for 1 hr. After AHSVEC attachment periods of 15 min, 1 hr, and 2 hr, flow dislodged all but 1.4, 30.4, and 72.2%, respectively, of cells that had been seeded onto 1% gelatin. Control slides that were not exposed to flow retained 12.9% (P less than 0.03), 49.8% (NS), and 95.2% (NS) of seeded cells. Precoating the slides with 10 micrograms/ml fibronectin resulted in 69.4, 89.5, and 97.7% of cells remaining after flow, compared with 6.4% (P less than 0.03), 53.7% (NS), and 93.3% (NS), respectively, when using matched slides coated with 1% gelatin. Results with 20% fetal bovine serum as the substrate were not statistically different from those obtained with 1% gelatin. We conclude that fibronectin enhances the early attachment of AHSVECs to artificial surfaces and is, therefore, potentially useful for increasing attached cell yields on arterial prostheses prepared with immediate cell seeding techniques

Correlation of continuous-wave Doppler spectral flow analysis with gross pathology in carotid stenosis.

Preoperative continuous-wave Doppler spectral analysis was used to generate two parameters, peak frequency in the internal carotid artery (fmax) and the ratio of peak frequencies in the internal and common carotid arteries (carotid index). These were compared with direct measurement of residual lumen diameter in pathologic specimens obtained from carotid endarterectomy in 37 patients. Doppler shift frequency parameters were well correlated with residual lumen diameter when the latter was at least 1 mm. Residual lumens of less than or equal to 2 mm were found to have an fmax of greater than 7.5 kHz and a carotid index of greater than 3.8. If fmax was greater than 14 kHz or the carotid index was greater than 7, the residual lumen diameter was nearly always less than or equal to 1 mm. Thus, the severity of the stenosis correlated directly with Doppler shift frequencies. The length of stenoses did not affect the correlations