Grantseeking, Technology Renovation, and Creative Solutions to Support Library Access and Online Teaching and Learning During the Global COVID-19 Outbreak

The sudden global epidemiological outbreak in early spring 2020 challenged the academic libraries’ Access and Resource Sharing (ARS) department and prevented staff from providing the types of essential services that its users expect and require. With the full closure of campus and all courses moving online within a week, ARS staff were put on the front lines of finding ways to continue providing patrons with access to the library’s physical collections while library buildings were closed. This paper details how the ARS community and a large research university library’s ARS department responded and adapted to these rapid changes, acted creatively, and reinvented services through collaboration, creative solutions, grantseeking, and technology renovation. ARS staff continued to test a scan-beside-the-stacks methodology through a grant-funded project to create an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) mobile cart. This mobile cart allowed for a single employee to handle all items to complete the digital conversion of print materials and reduced the risk of coronavirus transfer between library staff members during the COVID-19 pandemic. An on-demand book digitization program in collaboration with multiple departments opened up access to resources to effectively fulfill patrons’ needs. Through these and other adaptations, ARS staff retained their professional commitment to provide materials and a high level of services to their users

Controlled Digital Lending, Equitable Access to Knowledge and Future Library Services

Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) became a popular term in the United States of America (USA) libraries as a result of a white paper authored by Kyle K. Courtney (Harvard University) and David Hansen (Duke University). (Citation?) The white paper gave the legal groundwork to explore the copyright aspect of CDL: Fair Use, First Sale Doctrine and Supreme Court rulings. The white paper also provided guidelines for Library professionals implementing this new technology to fulfill their users’ needs. Inspired by the recent CDL guidelines developed by Courtney and Hansen (2018) two librarians from the University of Florida (UF), and Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) started a conversation about how to develop strategies to make CDL work possible at each institution. The authors share their stories of piloting and initiating a CDL program to ensure students have reliable, affordable access to course materials they need to be successful. Additionally, the authors discuss the emerging trends of CDL in the USA, and the development of the CDL platforms, policies and implementation plans. Most importantly, the implementation of these programs presents challenges, lessons learned, and plans to sustain the program in the future

Company’s Performance and Its Determinants: A Study on Dutch Lady Milk Industries Berhad

Nowadays, the business environment has undergone some changes, bringing more and more complexity and occurrence of unpredictable events. In today's ever-changing global economy, companies face enormous competitive pressures that require them to become better, faster and cheaper. They need to cope with the increasingly serious challenges of the environment and need to improve their adaptability. Today, continuous performance is the goal of any company. This is because only through performance, companies can experience development and progress. Therefore, this study is to know the influences of internal variables and external variables toward company’s performance for effective and efficient results

MGE: A Training-Free and Efficient Model Generation and Enhancement Scheme

To provide a foundation for the research of deep learning models, the construction of model pool is an essential step. This paper proposes a Training-Free and Efficient Model Generation and Enhancement Scheme (MGE). This scheme primarily considers two aspects during the model generation process: the distribution of model parameters and model performance. Experiments result shows that generated models are comparable to models obtained through normal training, and even superior in some cases. Moreover, the time consumed in generating models accounts for only 1\% of the time required for normal model training. More importantly, with the enhancement of Evolution-MGE, generated models exhibits competitive generalization ability in few-shot tasks. And the behavioral dissimilarity of generated models has the potential of adversarial defense

Company’s Performance and Its Determinants: A Study on Dutch Lady Milk Industries Berhad

Nowadays, the business environment has undergone some changes, bringing more and more complexity and occurrence of unpredictable events. In today's ever-changing global economy, companies face enormous competitive pressures that require them to become better, faster and cheaper. They need to cope with the increasingly serious challenges of the environment and need to improve their adaptability. Today, continuous performance is the goal of any company. This is because only through performance, companies can experience development and progress. Therefore, this study is to know the influences of internal variables and external variables toward company’s performance for effective and efficient results

Concurrent Session 1: Resources for Open Education – UMass Boston Libraries and OER: What Can You and Your Students Access for Free?

Librarians at UMass Boston discuss different models of using “fully open” and “modified open” educational resources in your classroom and in your scholarship and how UMass Boston librarians can support those efforts

Improved Corrosion Behavior of Biodegradable Mg-4Zn-1Mn Alloy Modified by Sr/F co-doped CaP Micro-arc Oxidation Coatings

The Sr/F co-doped CaP (Sr/F-CaP) coatings were prepared by micro-arc oxidation (MAO) under different voltages to modify the microstructure and corrosion behavior of Mg-4Zn-1Mn alloy. The surface and interface characteristics investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDS) showed that the MAO coatings displayed uneven crater-like holes and tiny cracks under lower voltage, while they exhibited relatively homogeneous crater-like holes without cracks under higher voltage. The thickness of MAO coatings increased with increasing voltage. The corrosion behavior of Mg-4Zn-1Mn alloy was improved by the MAO coatings. The MAO coatings prepared under 450 V and 500 V voltages possessed the best corrosion resistance with regard to the electrochemical corrosion tests and immersion corrosion tests, respectively. The MAO coatings fabricated under 450-500 V could provide a better corrosion protection effect for the substrate

WmXML: A System for Watermarking XML Data

As increasing amount of data is published in the form of XML, copyright protection of XML data is becoming an important requirement for many applications. While digital watermarking is a widely used measure to protect digital data from copyright offences, the complex and flexible construction of XML data poses a number of challenges to digital watermarking, such as re-organization and alteration attacks. To overcome these challenges, the watermarking scheme has to be based on the usability of data and the underlying semantics like key attributes and functional dependencies. In this paper, we describe WmXML, a system for watermarking XML documents. It generates queries from essential semantics to identify the available watermarking bandwidth in XML documents, and integrates query rewriting technique to overcome the threats from data re-organization and alteration. In the demonstration, we will showcase the use of WmXML and its effectiveness in countering various attacks.

StegFS: A Steganographic File System

While user access control and encryption can protect valuable data from passive observers, those techniques leave visible ciphertexts that are likely to alert an active adversary to the existence of the data, who can then compel an authorized user to disclose it. This paper introduces StegFS, a steganographic file system that aims to overcome that weakness by offering plausible deniability to owners of protected files. StegFS securely hides user-selected files in a file system so that, without the corresponding access keys, an attacker would not be able to deduce their existence, even if the attacker is thoroughly familiar with the implementation of the file system and has gained full access to it. Unlike previous steganographic schemes, our construction satisfies the prerequisites of a practical file system in ensuring integrity of the files and maintaining efficient space utilization. We have completed an implementation on Linux, and experiment results confirm that StegFS achieves an order of magnitude improvements in performance and/or space utilization over the existing schemes. 1