Volume 22 Issue 1 Introduction (Access Services in the New Century)

Libraries are continuing to change at a rapid pace, transforming from quiet repositories into vibrant locations for knowledge and information gathering and exchange. Books are being moved to storage facilities to make room for more collaborative learning spaces. Technology demands are rising. Makerspaces are becoming essential library services. While these changes are both scary and exciting, they are also necessary for libraries to remain true to their core mission: serving our communities and their information needs while respecting their rights to privacy and intellectual freedom. While everything in our industry feels like it is changing rapidly, it also remains the same. The spring issue of OLA Quarterly focuses on access services in the new century. How are core activities like circulation, interlibrary loan, space and stacks management changing? Staying the same? How can we better meet our patron’s needs, especially as our communities change around us? How can we ensure we are meeting the needs of all community members, especially those who are traditionally underserved? What have been our major success and victories in this new century? I have had the immense pleasure of working with Access Services colleagues from across the state to answer some of these questions

Volume 22 Issue 1 Introduction (Access Services in the New Century)

Libraries are continuing to change at a rapid pace, transforming from quiet repositories into vibrant locations for knowledge and information gathering and exchange. Books are being moved to storage facilities to make room for more collaborative learning spaces. Technology demands are rising. Makerspaces are becoming essential library services. While these changes are both scary and exciting, they are also necessary for libraries to remain true to their core mission: serving our communities and their information needs while respecting their rights to privacy and intellectual freedom. While everything in our industry feels like it is changing rapidly, it also remains the same. The spring issue of OLA Quarterly focuses on access services in the new century. How are core activities like circulation, interlibrary loan, space and stacks management changing? Staying the same? How can we better meet our patron’s needs, especially as our communities change around us? How can we ensure we are meeting the needs of all community members, especially those who are traditionally underserved? What have been our major success and victories in this new century? I have had the immense pleasure of working with Access Services colleagues from across the state to answer some of these questions

Chapter 1- Resilient Pedagogy and Self-Determination: Unlocking Student Engagement in Uncertain Times

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in spring of 2020, like many educators, I experienced a definite disruption in the structure and plans I had designed for my courses. I was teaching a mix of graduate and undergraduate classes—some with as few as seven students, others with as many as 98, some upper-level skills-based courses, others in the broad general education arena, but all of them designed exclusively for face-to-face delivery. In fact, due to some long-standing institutional prejudices against online instruction, the opportunity to teach in a mode other than face-to-face had never materialized over the 10 years I had taught in higher education. Even a one-time request to teach a summer class in the fully online space was denied, so I should have been wholly unprepared to make the “emergency pivot” to virtual, remote instruction. However, despite no real practice in non-face-to-face modalities, I didn’t find the pivot to be particularly stressful. I hesitate to make this claim in print, and I understand the immense privilege I have in so doing (e.g., highly functional Wi-Fi, a corner of my bedroom where I could add a desk, a partner with a flexible work schedule and the capacity to share in childcare duties, job security via tenure), but it’s true—it only took about a day of strategizing for each of the four different courses I was teaching to figure out how to make the transition

Forces Producing the Present World Situation

My central theme is this: Certainly the Soviet threat is the central factor that Americans must keep in mind at all times in planning their national and international affairs; yet apart from this threat, there are other basic factors that have been with us over a longer period, that will remain with us into the future, and that are even more fundamental in their impact upon the American posi­tion in world affairs

The Revolution Will Not Be Stereotyped: Changing Perceptions through Diversity

Chapter 12. In this chapter, we examine the connection between increasing diversity in the library workplace and dispelling stereotypes. We explore how diversity in the academic library workforce can have positive effects in dispelling stereotypes through visibility, outreach, and education. We also want to rethink what we mean when we discuss diversity and what it entails. This is important to the process of examining library diversity initiatives and how they can fall short of complete inclusion. We also explore how activist librarians have defied the librarian stereotype and what we can learn from them. In order to create desired changes, we also need to see what the field is currently doing in terms of recruiting for diversity and what we can do to create a culture of inclusion at our institutions. Academic libraries are in the position to reimagine their place on campus to be more than just a warehouse for books, and many are well along in this process. Librarians with different and diverse backgrounds, who are able to effectively communicate with a wide variety of individuals, will dispel antiquated library stereotypes. Students’ perceptions will change once dynamic, diverse, and future-thinking librarians start working directly with them. The answer to dispelling stereotypes and increasing diversity in library staff is not simple, but by better understanding our past endeavors, we can create better steps for the future

UA51/1/3 WKU Turns 25-Year-Old Gym Into Complete, Modern, Well-Carpeted Library

Press release by contractor Masland Carpets regarding the renovation of the Health & Physical Education Building into a library

Image Processing: How the Retina Detects the Direction of Image Motion

In the retina, the beautifully symmetrical ‘starburst’ amacrine cells interact with each other in a way that creates asymmetrical responses to moving images at their dendritic tips. This computation, occurring in a retinal interneuron, is a foundation of the directional signals transmitted by the retina to the brain

Ethnic Differences in Children’s Entry into Public Mental Health Care via Emergency Mental Health Services

For children and youth making a mental health crisis visit, we investigated ethnic disparities in whether the children and youth were currently in treatment or whether this crisis visit was an entry or reentry point into mental health treatment. We gathered Medicaid claims for mental health services provided to 20,110 public-sector clients ages 17 and younger and divided them into foster care and non-foster care subsamples. We then employed logistic regression to analyze our data with sociodemographic and clinical controls. Among children and youth who were not placed in foster care, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans were significantly less likely than Caucasians to have received mental health care during the three months preceding a crisis visit. Disparities among children and youth in foster care were not statistically significant. Ethnic minority children and youth were more likely than Caucasians to use emergency care as an entry or reentry point into the mental health treatment, thereby exhibiting a crisis-oriented pattern of care

Automated computation of arbor densities: a step toward identifying neuronal cell types

The shape and position of a neuron convey information regarding its molecular and functional identity. The identification of cell types from structure, a classic method, relies on the time-consuming step of arbor tracing. However, as genetic tools and imaging methods make data-driven approaches to neuronal circuit analysis feasible, the need for automated processing increases. Here, we first establish that mouse retinal ganglion cell types can be as precise about distributing their arbor volumes across the inner plexiform layer as they are about distributing the skeletons of the arbors. Then, we describe an automated approach to computing the spatial distribution of the dendritic arbors, or arbor density, with respect to a global depth coordinate based on this observation. Our method involves three-dimensional reconstruction of neuronal arbors by a supervised machine learning algorithm, post-processing of the enhanced stacks to remove somata and isolate the neuron of interest, and registration of neurons to each other using automatically detected arbors of the starburst amacrine interneurons as fiducial markers. In principle, this method could be generalizable to other structures of the CNS, provided that they allow sparse labeling of the cells and contain a reliable axis of spatial reference