Kicking & Streaming! Lessons Learned Building Oral History Collections in Bepress

Presentation given by Georgia Southern faculty member Autumn M. Johnson at Digital Commons Southeastern Users Group Meeting

Managing Sustainability and Scalability with Successful Archival Projects: Two Lone Arranger, Dual-Role Archivist Case Studies

Two lone arranger, dual-role archivists are faced with highly successful, yet outsized, collaborative projects that have placed unexpected demands on time and resources. The archivists describe their successful projects which similarly engage students with primary source archival materials in innovative ways, from expanding the use of the institutional content management system (CMS) for student creators to providing career-relevant training to German language students. While these projects provide opportunities for institutional and community recognition and engagement with the archives, they require the archivist to consider ways to manage sustainability, scalability, and assessment of their collections along with their overwhelming workload. Lone arranger, dual-role archivists must develop specific and practical solutions to successfully maintain outsized, collaborative projects. This is particularly important in the post-pandemic era when the impacts of reduced budgets and staffing are widespread

For Good Measure: Assessing the Impact of Game-Based Instruction in the Archives

Presented at Society of Georgia Archivists annual meeting Abstract Game-based instructional programs can provide creative, hands-on learning opportunities while protecting valuable collections. This presentation will reflect on the experience of using game-based instructional techniques to successfully develop an Escape Game that engaged a campus community with archival sources and authentic learning. Sensory game immersion provided authentic engagement with the materiality of collections, their historical context, and the deeper critical narratives within the collection. Tasks were designed to engage learning objectives that explored archival conceptualization, discovery, and interpretation. The successful program increased awareness of the archival collections throughout the University community and became a catalyst for collaboration between subject librarians and teaching faculty

Archives and STEM: The Perfect Formula for Immersive Cross-Disciplinary Instruction

Presented at Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy Reaching out to STEM Students beyond the one-shot requested instruction sessions is challenging. Creating faculty buy-in for non-traditional STEM instruction is doubly challenging. This poster will highlight a recent activity designed to draw STEM participation in utilizing a unique set of resources from the institution’s Archival Collections. Normally viewed as primarily relevant to history and humanities students, this collection provides the backbone for a fully immersive Escape Room Activity and exposure to primary sources normally not considered part of the normal STEM course work. The hands-on activity provides an opportunity for critical thinking, reflection, and teamwork. The poster will highlight the archival collection, the challenges of designing instruction for cross-disciplinary work, building faculty buy-in and support, and assessment options addressing the ACRL Framework; specifically Scholarship as Conversation, and Information has Value. A handout with URL links will provide participants the opportunity to evaluate their collections and best practices tips for designing a similar activity

Qualitative Exploration of Geospatially Identified Bright Spots and Priority Areas to Improve Diabetes Management.

BACKGROUND: Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) results in significant morbidity and mortality and is associated with disparities in prevalence, treatment, and outcomes. GIS can identify geographically based disparities. In the focused Rapid Assessment Process (fRAP)-a novel mixed-method study design-GIS is combined with qualitative inquiry to inform practice interventions and policy changes. METHODS: Using fRAP, areas with poor T2DM outcomes (priority areas) as well as areas with positive T2DM outcomes (bright spots) were identified, focus groups were conducted, and responses analyzed for intervention opportunities. Focus group participants were English- and Spanish-speaking patients with T2DM living in one of the identified areas. Qualitative analysis consisted of initial coding with a priori themes from the focus group question guide, followed by identification of emergent themes within each defined category. RESULTS: The a priori categories included Facilitators, Barriers, Strategies, and Impact of Diabetes Diagnosis. Emerging recurrent themes were Interactions with Medical Professionals, Medications, Lifestyle Management, Family Motivators and Support, Self-Efficacy, and Social Needs and Community Resources. CONCLUSIONS: Thematic results from focus groups can be used by practices to improve T2DM care through educating patients about chronic disease and nutrition, connecting them to diabetes-specific services, learning how diabetes fits in the context of patient lives, and eliciting patient values and motivations to improve diabetes self-management. Findings also may be used by health care professionals to inform community-based advocacy efforts, interventions, and future research

Grassy–herbaceous land moderates regional climate effects on honey bee colonies in the Northcentral US

The lack of seasonally sustained floral resources (i.e. pollen and nectar) is considered a primary global threat to pollinator health. However, the ability to predict the abundance of flowering resources for pollinators based upon climate, weather, and land cover is difficult due to insufficient monitoring over adequate spatial and temporal scales. Here we use spatiotemporally distributed honey bee hive scales that continuously measure hive weights as a standardized method to assess nectar intake. We analyze late summer colony weight gain as the response variable in a random forest regression model to determine the importance of climate, weather, and land cover on honey bee colony productivity. Our random forest model predicted resource acquisition by honey bee colonies with 71% accuracy, highlighting the detrimental effects of warm, wet regions in the Northcentral United States on nectar intake, as well as the detrimental effect of years with high growing degree day accumulation. Our model also predicted that grassy–herbaceous natural land had a positive effect on the summer nectar flow and that large areas of natural grassy–herbaceous land around apiaries can moderate the detrimental effects of warm, wet climates. These patterns characterize multi-scale ecological processes that constrain the quantity and quality of pollinator nutritional resources. That is, broad climate conditions constrain regional floral communities, while land use and weather act to further modify the quantity and quality of pollinator nutritional resources. Observing such broad-scale trends demonstrates the potential for utilizing hive scales to monitor the effects of climate change on landscape-level floral resources for pollinators. The interaction of climate and land use also present an opportunity to manage for climate-resilient landscapes that support pollinators through abundant floral resources under climate change

Cerebrospinal Fluid Sphingomyelins in Alzheimer's Disease, Neurodegeneration, and Neuroinflammation

BACKGROUND: Sphingomyelin (SM) levels have been associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the association direction has been inconsistent and research on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) SMs has been limited by sample size, breadth of SMs examined, and diversity of biomarkers available. OBJECTIVE: Here, we seek to build on our understanding of the role of SM metabolites in AD by studying a broad range of CSF SMs and biomarkers of AD, neurodegeneration, and neuroinflammation. METHODS: Leveraging two longitudinal AD cohorts with metabolome-wide CSF metabolomics data (n = 502), we analyzed the relationship between the levels of 12 CSF SMs, and AD diagnosis and biomarkers of pathology, neurodegeneration, and neuroinflammation using logistic, linear, and linear mixed effects models. RESULTS: No SMs were significantly associated with AD diagnosis, mild cognitive impairment, or amyloid biomarkers. Phosphorylated tau, neurofilament light, α-synuclein, neurogranin, soluble triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2, and chitinase-3-like-protein 1 were each significantly, positively associated with at least 5 of the SMs. CONCLUSION: The associations between SMs and biomarkers of neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation, but not biomarkers of amyloid or diagnosis of AD, point to SMs as potential biomarkers for neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation that may not be AD-specific

Optimal adhesion control via cooperative hierarchy, grading, geometries and non-linearity of anchorages

Optimization of dry adhesion in biological organisms is achieved using various strategies at different scale levels. In the past, studies have shown how contact splitting is used effectively by animals such as geckos and insects to increase the total peeling line of contacts and therefore the adhesion force. Also, tapering of contacts or grading of their mechanical properties has been shown to be instrumental in the achievement of improved adhesion efficiency. On a more macroscopic scale, structures such as spider web anchorages exploit hierarchical structure or nonlinear constitutive material properties to improve resilience and to achieve tunability in adhesion/detachment characteristics. Here, we analyse some of these properties and propose some mechanisms for the optimization of adhesion that have thus far been neglected in modelling approaches, and could be potentially exploited for the design of bioinspired adhesives. We consider hierarchical structure, contact tapering, grading of mechanical properties, and their interaction. It emerges that these mechanisms contribute on various size scales to the achievement of optimal adhesive properties through structural complexity and hierarchical organization