My New Goal: Follow Ben Franklin\u27s Rule to Set Aside 1 Hour a Day to Learn

Benjamin Franklin is famous as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and helping to draft the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Franklin was a Renaissance man. Besides his career as a diplomat, public servant and accomplished printer, he is credited with discoveries about electricity and inventing bifocals, among other things

With a Little Help From My Friends...

Do I have enough friends

Do We Need to Use (and Discard) So Many Plastic Bags Each Year?

Much of the time I hate plastic bags

Reality Check: Instructing Patrons in CD-ROM Use

This is a two-part presentation given by reference librarians Rochelle Ballard and Meg Scharf. Meg first described UCF’s new CD-ROM services. Patron expectations were very high. Although a great deal of assistance was sometimes needed, patrons wanted to be able to search autonomously, which meant they needed instruction. Instruction was delivered to individual patrons at the time of need; through demonstrations held in the area that housed the CD Rooms; in workshops; and in the regular instruction classes delivered by librarians to students at the request of teaching faculty members. Rochelle, who was instrumental in establishing UCF’s end-user services with CD-ROMs, and later with online databases and the Internet, then gave the most important part of the presentation: how UCF librarians learned about searching the 13 CD-ROM databases, and the writing and use of “How to Search” handouts. New CD-ROMs were held back from the Reference floor, so librarians could learn to use them before they fielded questions from students, faculty, and community patrons. She describes workshops held for users in the Bibliographic Instruction classroom. Rochelle, UCF’s expert on the CD-ROMs at the time, describes getting “the shakes at the thought of a new CD-ROM with a different search system.” Some librarians in the audience came from libraries with no CD-ROMs available, and others were at the beginning of offering them to patrons. So while this presentation seems very elementary, at that time it was regarded as a bit “cutting edge”

Genomic Relationships, Novel Loci, and Pleiotropic Mechanisms across Eight Psychiatric Disorders

Genetic influences on psychiatric disorders transcend diagnostic boundaries, suggesting substantial pleiotropy of contributing loci. However, the nature and mechanisms of these pleiotropic effects remain unclear. We performed analyses of 232,964 cases and 494,162 controls from genome-wide studies of anorexia nervosa, attention-deficit/hyper-activity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome. Genetic correlation analyses revealed a meaningful structure within the eight disorders, identifying three groups of inter-related disorders. Meta-analysis across these eight disorders detected 109 loci associated with at least two psychiatric disorders, including 23 loci with pleiotropic effects on four or more disorders and 11 loci with antagonistic effects on multiple disorders. The pleiotropic loci are located within genes that show heightened expression in the brain throughout the lifespan, beginning prenatally in the second trimester, and play prominent roles in neurodevelopmental processes. These findings have important implications for psychiatric nosology, drug development, and risk prediction.Peer reviewe

Summary: We Mean Business: A BI Session for Business Case Analysis Students

A brief summary of an article that appeared in Research Strategies, volume 9, no.2, Spring 1990. The journal ceased publication, and permission to digitize this print-only publication was refused. The summary was created for the repository to recall this article and this highly successful project. 585 UCF College of Business students participated in instruction and online searching over the course of one year

21st Century Library

Work is moving ahead on Phase One of the library project

No, There is No Ghost in the Campus Library Stacks

Toward the end of an old favorite film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a newspaper reporter tells Jimmy Stewart’s character, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

We Mean Business: A BI Session for Business Case Analysis Students

Poster session presented at the American Library Association Annual Conference, showing the results of a program that linked free online searches using the Predicasts databases and specialized instruction classes, targeting upper division business case analysis students

I Hope This Week’s Graduates Acquired What I Did at College: Lifelong Friendships

What will this week’s UCF graduates take with them when then leave campus