The Graduate Assistant in Technical Services: Reflecting on a Real-World Work Experience

This session will feature two perspectives reflecting on a Graduate Assistant Technical Services position at The University of Southern Mississippi. In 2021 the Technical Services department began a new initiative to hire a LIS graduate student to work part-time in the department. This was not a practicum but regular employment. The department envisioned that the GA\u27s experience would serve as an introduction to technical services work as close to a real-world work experience as possible while exposing them to different areas of technical services such as acquisitions and cataloging. The presenters, a Graduate Assistant and supervising Catalog Librarian, will each reflect on the past year and share what worked well, challenges faced, and recommendations for best practices

Meeting the Challenge: Preparing for a Graduate Assistant

The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries Technical Services Department added a Graduate Assistant to the department in Fall 2021. In this session, we will discuss the processes the department undertook to prepare for a successful assistantship opportunity. Through thorough planning the department established a hiring process, training components, and work rotations throughout the department to provide both an extensive emersion into Technical Services work and meet departmental needs for assistance with project completion

Supervision and culture: Meetings at thresholds

Counsellors are required to engage in supervision in order to reflect on, reflexively review, and extend their practice. Supervision, then, might be understood as a partnership in which the focus of practitioners and supervisors is on ethical and effective practice with all clients. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, there has recently been interest in the implications for supervision of cultural difference, particularly in terms of the Treaty of Waitangi as a practice metaphor, and when non-Māori practitioners counsel Māori clients. This article offers an account of a qualitative investigation by a group of counsellors/supervisors into their experiences of supervision as cultural partnership. Based on interviews and then using writing-as-research, the article explores the playing out of supervision’s contribution to practitioners’ effective and ethical practice in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, showing a range of possible accounts and strategies and discussing their effects. Employing the metaphor of threshold, the article includes a series of reflections and considerations for supervision practice when attention is drawn to difference

The Holes in the cheese : improving engineering students' generic communicative competencies

Engineers spend considerable time communicating technical details to various audiences. This requires communicative competence which is linked to the underlying knowledge and skills in the engineering disciplines. The metaphor 'holes in the cheese‘ is used to describe a particular group of reading and writing competencies which are not yet adequately developed in students, but which are expected to be in place at their educational level, and which are further characterised as follows: (a) while it is reasonable to include limited revision of prior topics or competencies in a mainstream programme, substantive interventions to address them must be extra-curricular; (b) a significant proportion of students require development in this regard; (c) they are seldom explicitly taught; (d) most engineering academics are not explicitly trained to identify or address them; (e) identifying and addressing them through traditional assessment of written work ('red ink‘) is time-consuming for academics; (f) moreover, addressing them through traditional assessment is seldom successful: while the document may have been corrected, an improvement in competence is seldom established by this method. By way of evidence, this paper attempts to name, explain and illustrate these 'holes in the cheese‘ in terms that are sufficiently explicit and concrete so that fellow engineering academics can readily understand and relate to them. This evidence is illustrative and anecdotal, serving as a point of discussion rather than a conclusion of fact. With regard to reading fluency and comprehension, the reading speeds of students on intake to supplementary interventions, over a three year period, have typically been below the reading speeds regarded as a lower threshold for university students when reading fiction and non-technical materials. With regard to writing, typical challenges include grammatical errors as well as structure, organisation, logic, and integration / synthesis of information from multiple sources

Associations Between Temperamental Negative Affectivity and Parental Anxiety Across Childhood

Extant research suggests a link between child temperamental negativity and parental anxiety and depression. However, most studies focus on temperamental negativity generally, and over fairly short longitudinal time spans. The present study extended the time span well beyond immediate postnatal infancy and explored associations between specific child temperament dimensions, both positive and negative, and parental psychopathology. We expected positive relationships between temperamental negative affectivity and parental mental health problems, but an inverse relation involving temperamental effortful control. Data were collected on child temperament, and parental anxiety and depression, using a cross-sectional design and anonymous survey methodology across five child age groups: infancy (INF; 3 - 13 months, N ≅ 83), toddler (TOD; 14 - 36 months, N ≅ 94), early childhood (EC; 3 - 7 years, N ≅ 81), middle/late childhood (MLC; 8 - 10 years, N ≅ 31), and early adolescence (EA; 10 - 15 years, N ≅ 38). REDCap survey links were published on several dozen social media outlets and relevant listservs. Across all datasets, parental respondents primarily identified as white and female. Child gender distribution was approximately equal between girls and boys. We used the Rothbart family of instruments to assess temperamental negative affectivity and effortful control in each sample (i.e., IBQ-R Short Form, ECBQ Short Form, CBQ Short Form, TMCQ Standard Form, and EATQ-R Short Form, respectively). Parental anxiety was measured by the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7), and parental depression was measured by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Associations involving child negative affectivity were generally consistent with expectations. Results indicated positive correlations between parental anxiety and child negative affectivity in 4 out of 5 groups (INF: r(83) = .25, p = .02; TOD: r(94) = .27, p = .01; EC: r(81) = .37, p \u3c .001; EA: r(39) = .57, p \u3c .001), and between parental depression and child negative affectivity in all age groups (INF: r(81) = .26, p = .02; TOD: r(91) = .22, p = .03; EAC: r(80) = .26, p = .02; MLC: r(30) = .42, p = .02; EAA: r(37) = .42, p = .01). Effortful control was negatively, but less robustly, correlated with parental anxiety (TOD: r(94) = -.22, p = .03; EAA: r(39) = -.44, p = .02) and depression (TOD: r(91) = -.29, p = .01; MLC: r(30) = .45, p = .01). Although we make no assumptions regarding directions of effect between child temperament and parental mental health, bidirectional influences seem likely. For example, parental mental health problems probably exacerbate temperamental negative affectivity, and temperamental negative affectivity probably exacerbates parental mental health problems. This study provides an important expansion of the timeframes of associations between parental mental health and child temperament

Study protocol for a randomised controlled trial of invasive versus conservative management of primary spontaneous pneumothorax

INTRODUCTION: Current management of primary spontaneous pneumothorax (PSP) is variable, with little evidence from randomised controlled trials to guide treatment. Guidelines emphasise intervention in many patients, which involves chest drain insertion, hospital admission and occasionally surgery. However, there is evidence that conservative management may be effective and safe, and it may also reduce the risk of recurrence. Significant questions remain regarding the optimal initial approach to the management of PSP

A continuous infusion of a minor histocompatibility antigen-immunodominant peptide induces a delay of male skin graft rejection.

We previously reported that an inhibition of antigen-specific Interferon-gamma release and cytotoxicity occurs after a continuous infusion of an HY immunodominant peptide although this treatment is not able to cause a significant delay of male skin grafts rejection. In vivo administration of high doses of an HY peptide, through mini-osmotic pumps, in naïve female mice was used to study the effects on the male skin grafts rejection. A continuous infusion of 1mg of an HY peptide induces a significant delay of male skin graft rejection. In vitro HY-specific Interferon-gamma release was inhibited adding peptide-specific suppressor cells: the ability to inhibit Interferon-gamma release was evident when two HY peptides were present on the same dendritic cells indicating that the suppressor cells exert "linked-suppression". The phenotype of the suppressor cells is CD8(+)CD28(-) and these cells express more CD62 ligand and FOXP3 than controls. Suppressor cells were able to cause a significant delay of rejection of male skin grafts when injected in naive female mice. The inhibitory effects of these suppressor cells seem to be due to the impairment of antigen presentation; down-regulation of B7 molecules on dendritic cells occurred. Taken all together, our data demonstrate that a continuous infusion of an immunodominant HY peptide induces a T CD8 suppressor subset able to inhibit immune responses to male tissues and cells

Data review for 3LN redfish in preparation for an updated management strategy evaluation

Data review for 3LN redfish in preparation for an updated management strategy evaluationVersión del editor

Spinal mobility in radiographic axial spondyloarthritis: criterion concurrent validity of classic and novel measurements

Background Limitations in spinal mobility are a characteristic feature of Axial Spondyloarthritis. Current clinical measurements of spinal mobility have shown low criterion-concurrent validity. This study sought to evaluate criterion-concurrent validity for a clinically feasible measurement method of measuring spine mobility using tri-axial accelerometers. Methods Fifteen radiographic-Spondyloarthritis patients were recruited for this study. Two postural reference radiographs, followed by three trials in forward, left and right lateral bending were taken. For all trials, three measurements were collected: tape (Original Schober’s, Modified Schober’s, Modified-Modified Schober’s, Lateral Spinal Flexion Test and Domjan Test), followed immediately by synchronized radiograph and accelerometer measurements at end range of forward and bilateral lateral flexion. The criterion-concurrent validity of all measurement methods was compared to the radiographic measures using Pearson’s correlation coefficients. A Bland-Altman analysis was conducted to assess agreement. Results In forward bending, the accelerometer method (r = 0.590, p = 0.010) had a stronger correlation to the radiographic measures than all tape measures. In lateral bending, the Lateral Spinal Flexion tape measure (r = 0.743, p = 0.001) correlated stronger than the accelerometer method (r = 0.556, p = 0.016). The Domjan test of bilateral bending (r = 0.708, p = 0.002) had a stronger correlation to the radiographic measure than the accelerometer method. Conclusions Accelerometer measures demonstrated superior criterion-concurrent validity compared to current tape measures of spinal mobility in forward bending. While a moderate correlation exists between accelerometer and radiographs in lateral bending, the Lateral Spinal Flexion Test and Domjan Test were found to have the best criterion-concurrent validity of all tests examined in this study

Volume 43, Number 1, March 2023 OLAC Newsletter

Digitized March 2023 issue of the OLAC Newsletter