“The real library world is dirty and you don't learn that at all in schools”

This poster presents findings of a content analysis based on survey responses collected from 51 librarians who provided vehemently critical feedback on the disconnection between their job realities and their library and information science (LIS) education. The study aims to understand why these librarians are vehemently critical in hopes of seeding an honest conversation about how to improve future LIS education. This is also part of a larger research project based on a survey among 759 currently working librarians and information professionals. Through this study, we found that real-life situations of librarianship, such as challenging social work, security concerns and job prospects, are very important, but they are usually not frequently talked about in LIS programs, which left students unprepared for their real jobs. This poster sheds light on this problem and provides suggestions on how to enhance the effectiveness of education of LIS programs through joint efforts of educators and students

Evaluating a Machine Learning Approach to Identifying Expressive Content at Page Level in HathiTrust

HathiTrust currently provides metadata, scanned images, and full text for all public domain volumes. However, it’s likely there is content that is of interest to scholars and free from restriction within the front matter of most volumes, regardless of rights status. For example, the title page or table of contents may contain information that is likely non-expressive and useful to understanding the content’s structure and subject matter. It’s also likely that some volumes include materials that have expressive/creative content in the first 20 pages, so front matter cannot be made open for all volumes without understanding the most frequent type of content within the first 20 pages. This task is time-prohibitive for entirely manual exploration, so we seek to evaluate a machine learning approach for this task

Listen to Librarians: Highlighted Core Competencies for Librarianship from the Perspectives of Working Librarians

Librarianship is constantly confronted with unexpected and quickly evolving sociotechnical challenges, yet the documents that define the core professional competencies for librarians are infrequently updated. Based upon survey responses collected from 383 working librarians located in the United States, we describe a set of gaps between current competency guidelines and current library realities with regard to practice, management, communication, career development, relations, and personal attributes. We argue that professional library organizations, educators, and policymakers could formulate more relevant and impactful core competency documents by deliberately integrating the on-the-ground insights of librarians&rsquo; lived experience. &nbsp;</p

Book Reviews and the Consolidation of Genre

Some literary scholars have claimed that predictive models can measure the strength of the boundaries that separate different cultural categories—genres, for instance, or market segments. But interpreting textual models as evidence about the strength of a cultural distinction has seemed a questionable move to many readers. We use book reviews to test this inference. Are the similarities between fictional texts purely verbal phenomena, or do they reflect social categories that are also legible (although expressed differently) in readers' responses to those texts? We find that the subject and genre categories most strongly marked in fictional texts are also the categories most strongly marked in reviews of fiction. The correlation is strong; r > .8

Real-time Raman spectroscopic monitoring of solvent-mediated polymorphic transformations

Crystallization processes have been commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry to purify and generate APIs. Although crystallization processes have been widely used, unless the parameters are well defined, various crystallization conditions can produce undesirable solid state forms including polymorphs, solvates, amorphous materials, etc. Raman spectroscopy has greatly improved as a technique over the past twenty years; it has been applied to many different areas of analysis, including monitoring of crystallization processes. Although the use of Raman spectroscopy to monitor crystallization has already been reported in the literature, no study has shown that it can quantitatively determine all the pertinent information from the solute and different polymorphic forms. In the first part of this thesis, it is demonstrated that Raman spectroscopy can be successfully applied to real-time crystallization monitoring, extracting information about both polymorphic transformation processes while simultaneously providing information about the solution concentration. Using the mass balance principle, the amount of the polymorphic form in the solution can also be determined. Although it is well known that particle size can affect Raman signal intensity, the results of published studies and predictions from theoretical principles contradict each other. In addition, there have not been any studies of the influence of particle size on Raman signal intensity for mixtures of polymorphic forms. In this work, the effect of particle size on polymorphic quantitation was probed using Raman spectrometers with different laser beam geometries and it was demonstrated that with a relatively large beam diameter, effects of particle size on the calibration model could be largely eliminated. In the last part of the thesis, it was demonstrated that, through monitoring polymorphic transformations in real-time, quantitative transformation profiles could be generated and correlated to the corresponding temperature. From the aforementioned transformation profiles, thermodynamic and kinetic information about the enantiotropic polymorphic pair could be extracted. For the model compound utilized, flufenamic acid, the thermodynamic transition temperature that was determined from the Raman data was in good agreement with the value reported in the literature

Understanding the lack of student engagement in Chinese library science undergraduate education

This research study aimed to investigate the lack of student engagement in Chinese library science (LS) undergraduate education. Specifically, this study aimed to identify and understand the causes of the lack of student engagement and to articulate effective and pragmatic resolving strategies. This study adopted an inductive approach and a single case study design. The LS program at Wuhan University was employed as the case study, at which 29 full-time LS students were interviewed using a semi-structured question script. A thematic analysis of the interview transcripts pointed to 11 causes of the lack of student engagement. The conceptualisation of the research findings suggested revising the existing LS curricular and maintaining dynamic and interactive relationships among three main determinants of student engagement: curricular design, students’ individual interests, and career prospect. This study provides a perspective on the development and survival of LS education in China and shares important lessons and experiences for LS educators and policy makers across international borders

One-Step Preparation of Phenyl Boron-Modified Magnetic Mesoporous Silica for Selective Enrichment of cis-Diol-Containing Substances

For enrichment and separation of cis-diol-containing compounds from biomatrix, a new type of magnetic nanoparticles named MS-48-PBSC, whichwas facilely prepared in a one-step heterogeneous reaction. The morphology results demonstrated that the MS-48-PBSC was a spherical nanomaterial containing a core of silica-coated magnetic particle with a diameter of about 200 nm, and a cover layer of mesoporous silica with a thickness of approximate 50 nm. The characterization results showed that MS-48-PBSC presented a pore size of 4.2 nm, a surface area of 548 m2·g−1, and a pore volume of 0.30 cm3·g−1. The MS-48-PBSC also exhibited magnetism of 42 emu·g−1 that contributed to the easy separation of magnetic nanomaterial within 30 s from the matrix with the aid of the external magnetic field. In addition, the MS-48-PBSC exhibited high adsorption capacity for adenosine, xanthosine, uridine, sialic acid, and teicoplanin with 0.60, 0.51, 0.42, 0.75, and 1.26 mg/g, respectively, and showed a high selectivity for the cis-diol structure compounds, relative to interferences of bovine serum albumin, guanine, uric acid, and xanthine. The recoveries of adenosine, xanthosine, uridine, sialic acid, and teicoplanin were 71.8–114.1% with relative standard deviation (RSD) ≤ 8.6%, and the enrichment factors of them were 8–11. MS-48-PBSC exhibited quick separation capability from matrix, high adsorption capacity and size exclusion for bovine serum albumin, which could meet the requirements of separation and enrichment for substances with a cis-diol structure

Development of a Process for Separation of Mogroside V from Siraitia grosvenorii by Macroporous Resins

molecule