Italian Occupational Nomenclature

This paper examines the social and linguistic significance of gendered occupational nouns in Italian. The history of feminism in Italy is important in understanding the effort it took for women to have the rights, in particular the workplace rights, that they have today. Examining nouns used to refer to women in certain occupations reflects this movement and the rate of its evolution. Some occupational nouns have variant forms, one or two that mark the female gender and one that marks the masculine but is used for males and females in the occupation. This is true particularly for nouns referring to high-ranking positions traditionally held by men and only more recently held by women. This variation is significant because it means that these nouns are currently undergoing a change. In order to examine this change in progress, I conducted a study wherein participants completed a questionnaire of sentence completions which required a gendered occupational noun. The results demonstrated that in every noun displaying variation, women always chose a feminine form whereas men almost always chose the masculine form to refer to females in the profession. This suggests that women are not content with the application of masculine nomenclature to their occupations, and possibly reflects their continued discomfort with gender inequality as well as the association of masculinity with positions of power. This study shows that language is not the only thing changing; Italian society is adapting to a modern world where women can and should occupy high-ranking positions in all labor sectors. Language change, like social change for women in Italy, is slow and it appears that women may be spear-heading this linguistic change in order to claim their feminine identity both in society and in the workplace.No embargoAcademic Major: Romance Studie

Measuring our Impact: the Open.Michigan Initiative

The Open.Michigan initiative has been producing and promoting high quality Open Educational Resources (OER) from the University of Michigan (U-M) and its partner institutions since early 2008. As the initiative refines its global education mission, it is imperative that we understand the value the initiative adds to U-M and to the global learning community. In order to ensure sustainability and effective growth, Open.Michigan is currently developing a strategic plan and assembling a set of metrics to evaluate its efforts associated with this plan. These efforts will ensure Open.Michigan continues to adapt to an evolving educational landscape and continues to anticipate the needs of our community members. Over the last three years of Open.Michigan’s operation, it has gathered and analyzed a limited set of data for specific activities and goals. The current evaluation project aims to comprehensively examine the activities of Open.Michigan and determine its overall impact at U-M and in open education. It marks the start of a continual evaluation of Open.Michigan’s activities into the future.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91308/1/Measuring_our_Impact_OpenMichigan_Rodgers.dochttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91308/2/Measuring_our_Impact_OpenMichigan_Rodgers.pd

Diffusing Organizational Change through Service Design and Iterative Assessment

This presentation was presented by Emily Puckett Rodgers and Rachel Vacek on December 6, 2018 at the Library Assessment Conference in Houston, TX.At the University of Michigan Library, dozens of librarians and staff are engaged in a series of activities to reimagine the ways our organization designs and implements our services. Between 2016 and 2017, we collaborated with brightspot strategy to develop a service philosophy, framework, and principles to help us begin the process to transform our physical and digital spaces to better represent our expertise, collections, and tools, and to meet the evolving needs of our academic community today and tomorrow. As we look to transform our spaces to serve the needs of our research community, we are taking care to ensure that whatever form our buildings and web presence take, will follow the function and intent of our services. Our efforts in this work are collaborative and distributed in nature, diffusing the shift in design and evaluation across the organization. With it, we aim to facilitate organizational change that puts our users at the center of service design and delivery. It also fundamentally recognizes that our departments play a role in supporting the academic needs of our faculty, students, and staff at the University of Michigan. This work is structured by established approaches in design thinking and user-centered design. Multiple teams of librarians and staff are applying this approach to redesign services. Topics include consultation, digital scholarship, staff innovation, citation management, and developing a persona-based toolkit that any staff across our organization may use in efforts to design new or make improvements to existing services. While each team is using the same overall approach to its service design work, the application and outcomes are unique to each domain. Within four design cycles, each team engages in a retrospective to review the process, the impact of the work, and consider its potential effects on our organizational structures. Additionally, the service design efforts support our organization’s adoption of an assessment-driven mindset through embedding evaluation into our processes. Once the service design phase is complete, each team will generate a series of pilots or prototypes to test aspects of their designs in the context of our organization. In the Summer and Fall of 2018, teams will implement those pilots and prototypes, testing their ability to scale effectively or meet our programmatic and mission-based goals yielding a series of small-scale, but impactful activities or processes that will further diffuse the design-thinking approach throughout our organization. Each of these sets of activities will be assessed before moving onto future stages of the work. We will also evaluate how they help us enact our service philosophy, framework, and principles in the practice of our everyday work. Ultimately this work will yield a culture shift within our organization enabling us to embrace a user-centered, service-based approach to how we develop services, and how we expect to collaborate and connect with colleagues within our library and academic community. It will also enable us to embed assessment practices into various facets of our work, from the beginning stages of design through its testing and into implementation at scale.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146754/1/Diffusing Organizational Change through Service Design and Iterative Assessment.pdfDescription of Diffusing Organizational Change through Service Design and Iterative Assessment.pdf : PDF of Presentatio

How weight change is modelled in population studies can affect research findings: empirical results from a large-scale cohort study

Objectives: To investigate how results of the association between education and weight change vary when weight change is defined and modelled in different ways. Design: Longitudinal cohort study. Participants: 60 404 men and women participating in the Social, Environmental and Economic Factors (SEEF) subcomponent of the 45 and Up Study—a population-based cohort study of people aged 45 years or older, residing in New South Wales, Australia. Outcome measures: The main exposure was selfreported education, categorised into four groups. The outcome was annual weight change, based on change in self-reported weight between the 45 and Up Study baseline questionnaire and SEEF questionnaire (completed an average of 3.3 years later). Weight change was modelled in four different ways: absolute change (kg) modelled as (1) a continuous variable and (2) a categorical variable (loss, maintenance and gain), and relative (%) change modelled as (3) a continuous variable and (4) a categorical variable. Different cutpoints for defining weight-change categories were also tested. Results: When weight change was measured categorically, people with higher levels of education (compared with no school certificate) were less likely to lose or to gain weight. When weight change was measured as the average of a continuous measure, a null relationship between education and annual weight change was observed. No material differences in the education and weight-change relationship were found when comparing weight change defined as an absolute (kg) versus a relative (%) measure. Results of the logistic regression were sensitive to different cut-points for defining weight-change categories. Conclusions: Using average weight change can obscure important directional relationship information and, where possible, categorical outcome measurements should be included in analyses

"Taking away the chaos": a health needs assessment for people who inject drugs in public places in Glasgow, Scotland

Background: Public injecting of recreational drugs has been documented in a number of cities worldwide and was a key risk factor in a HIV outbreak in Glasgow, Scotland during 2015. We investigated the characteristics and health needs of people involved in this practice and explored stakeholder attitudes to new harm reduction interventions. Methods: We used a tripartite health needs assessment framework, comprising epidemiological, comparative, and corporate approaches. We undertook an analysis of local and national secondary data sources on drug use; a series of rapid literature reviews; and an engagement exercise with people currently injecting in public places, people in recovery from injecting drug use, and staff from relevant health and social services. Results: Between 400 and 500 individuals are estimated to regularly inject in public places in Glasgow city centre: most experience a combination of profound social vulnerabilities. Priority health needs comprise addictions care; prevention and treatment of blood-borne viruses; other injecting-related infections and injuries; and overdose and drug-related death. Among people with lived experience and staff from relevant health and social care services, there was widespread – though not unanimous – support for the introduction of safer injecting facilities and heroin-assisted treatment services. Conclusions: The environment and context in which drug consumption occurs is a key determinant of harm, and is inextricably linked to upstream social factors. Public injecting therefore requires a multifaceted response. Though evidence-based interventions exist, their implementation internationally is variable: understanding the attitudes of key stakeholders provides important insights into local facilitators and barriers. Following this study, Glasgow plans to establish the world’s first co-located safer injecting facility and heroin-assisted treatment service

Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery is an early, short-term intervention literacy program. It helps the lowest achieving first grade children develop effective and efficient problem solving processes and strategies used by successful children in the classroom. The goal of the program is to bring those children who are having most difficulty developing literacy skills to a level of achievement at or beyond their peers. This way, they can participate in and benefit from regular classroom literacy instruction

Characteristics of antidepressant medication users in a cohort of mid-age and older Australians

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to investigate antidepressant use, including the class of antidepressant, in mid-age and older Australians according to sociodemographic, lifestyle and physical and mental health-related factors. METHODS: Baseline questionnaire data on 111,705 concession card holders aged ⩾45 years from the 45 and Up Study—a population-based cohort study from New South Wales, Australia—were linked to administrative pharmaceutical data. Current- and any-antidepressant users were those dispensed medications with Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical classification codes beginning N06A, within ⩽6 months and ⩽19 months before baseline, respectively; non-users had no antidepressants dispensed ⩽19 months before baseline. Multinomial logistic regression was used to calculate adjusted relative risk ratios (aRRRs) for predominantly self-reported factors in relation to antidepressant use. RESULTS: Some 19% of the study population (15% of males and 23% of females) were dispensed at least one antidepressant during the study period; 40% of participants used selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) only and 32% used tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) only. Current antidepressant use was markedly higher in those reporting: severe versus no physical impairment (aRRR 3.86(95%CI 3.67–4.06)); fair/poor versus excellent/very good self-rated health (4.04(3.83–4.25)); high/very high versus low psychological distress (7.22(6.81–7.66)); ever- versus never-diagnosis of depression by a doctor (18.85(17.95–19.79)); low-dose antipsychotic use versus no antipsychotic use (12.26(9.85–15.27)); and dispensing of ⩾10 versus <5 other medications (5.97(5.62–6.34)). Sociodemographic and lifestyle factors were also associated with use, although to a lesser extent. Females, older people, those with lower education and those with poorer health were more likely to be current antidepressant users than non-users and were also more likely to use TCAs-only versus SSRIs-only. CONCLUSIONS: Use of antidepressants is substantially higher in those with physical ill-health and in those reporting a range of adverse mental health measures. In addition, sociodemographic factors, including sex, age and education were also associated with antidepressant use and the class of antidepressant used.Emily Banks and Bryan Rodgers are supported by the NHMRC (Fellowship No. 1042717 and 471429, respectively). This project was supported by the Study of Economic and Environmental Factors in health project, funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) (grant reference: 402810) and NHMRC project grant 1024450

Academic Libraries 2014: Understanding the Diverse Grant-seeking Needs of Our Faculty

With Federal and State governments divestment from higher education research expanding over the last decade and sequestration impacts hitting the funding streams of major Federal funding agencies this year, many faculty across all disciplines are scrambling to find alternative sources of funding. Who are the major stakeholders within our campus landscapes, and how can the Library collaborate with stakeholders to insure faculty have access to the necessary tools and resources to find funding for their research, programmatic efforts and creative endeavors? How can academic libraries facilitate effective access to and use of information around grant funding for faculty use across disciplines? During the summer and fall of 2013, two University of Michigan librarians conducted interviews with faculty from the health sciences, the arts and humanities, social sciences, sciences and engineering to better understand the changing grants landscape, its intersection with research at our university, and how faculty undertake their grant-seeking activities. Wanting to know more about how grant-seeking fits into the overall research life-cycle, what resources and tools faculty utilize, and who they talk with about their grant needs, the librarians found some interesting trends and some disturbing truths.This poster compares traditional and emerging trends in grant-seeking across the disciplines at the University of Michigan. We also present a model containing the funding stakeholders, and potential ways for librarians to more closely collaborate with faculty grant-seekers.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107043/1/MLA2014PosterHandout.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107043/2/MLA14_GrantsAssess_Poster v3.pd

A Look at Altmetrics and Its Growing Significance to Research Libraries

This document serves as an informational review of the emerging field and practices of alternative metrics or altmetrics. It is intended to be used by librarians and faculty members in research libraries and universities to better understand the trends and challenges associated with altmetrics in higher education. It is also intended to be used by research libraries to offer guidance on how to participate in shaping this emerging field.Many people involved in the scholarly communications process – from academics, students, and researchers, to publishers, librarians, and learners – are participating in a dynamic digital context now more than ever; moreover, digital acts of communication and dissemination of scholarship leave traces of impact that can now be culled and quantified. Altmetrics, metrics based on the social web, provide an opportunity both to more acutely measure the propagation of this communication and to reconsider how we measure research impact in general. While the use of social media and analytics and the structure of tenure and promotion practices are not consistent across or even within disciplines, the practices and experimentation of early adopters, from researchers and institutions to industry, yield stories, lessons learned, and practices worth investigating. Researchers and academic librarians both face new opportunities to engage and support the use of altmetrics tools and methods and to re-examine how scholarship is defined, collected, preserved, used, and discussed. This report summarizes the major trends, opportunities and challenges of altmetrics to both researchers and academic research libraries and outlines ways in which research libraries can participate in shaping this emergent field. Also featured in this article is a micro-case study featuring a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh and Plum Analytics that illustrates how libraries can begin to map out their role on campus in this arena.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99709/1/UMLibraryAltmetrics_090513.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99709/5/Rodgers_Barbrow_Feb314_Altmetrics.pdf-