Goodbye to all that: Disintermediation, disruption and the diminishing library

The librarian’s role in collection development is being eroded through disintermediation. A number of factors are contributing to this: • With the Big Deals for e-journals power has shifted considerably in the publishers’ favour, and libraries’ freedom to make collection development decisions has been curtailed. If the trend towards national deals and block payments, seen for instance in the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL), continues, this freedom will be eroded even more; acquisitions decisions are increasingly made at the level of publisher rather than title. • A notable response to the power of the publishers’ monopoly is the open access movement, which aims to make scholarly literature freely available to all. One route is through open access publishing, where typically the author, or their institution or research funder, pays the cost of peer review and publishing. The other route is the deposit of pre- or post-prints of traditionally published materials in the author’s institutional repository or in a subject repository such as Arxiv. The librarian again is making no decisions on availability in collections. • E-book technology has enabled the introduction of so-called ‘patron selection’ or ‘patron driven acquisition’ (PDA). Suppliers of e-books are now offering libraries the opportunity to make available a fund to be spent on new e-book titles as they become popular with library users. PDA is becoming increasingly popular: a recent survey of 250 libraries in the USA showed that ‘32 have PDA programs deployed; 42 planned to have a program deployed within the next year; and an additional 90 plan to deploy a program within the next three years’ (http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/?p=932). Librarians are able to impose some restrictions – for instance specifying subjects or ranges of titles; otherwise selection is taken out of the hands of librarians and entrusted to users . Initial statistics show the usage of many titles selected by users to be as high as the usage of titles selected by librarians or academics. • Google’s massive digitisation programme, although currently under legal threat, is another example. In the disintermediated world the librarian’s role is changing. It will in my view become increasingly focused not on externally produced resources, but on creating, developing and maintaining repositories of materials, whether learning objects, research data-sets or research outputs, produced in house in their own institution. Traditionally librarians have sought through the art of collection development to obtain the outputs of the world’s scholars and make them available to the scholars of their own institution – an impossible task. However our role is now being reversed: it will be to collect the outputs of our own institution’s scholars and make them freely available to the world. This task is capable of achievement and attains the aim of universal availability of scholarship to scholars. However it is not collection development as it has been practised down the years in the print world; that art, it can be argued, will no longer be needed in the era of disintermediation

Identifying the underlying dimensions of teachers\u27 emotional intelligence

Within the area of educational research that has its focus on individual differences, the concept of emotional intelligence and its study in relation to the professional lives of teachers has raised considerable interest over the past decade. This article reports on data from a new measure of emotional intelligence specifically related to situations in the teaching environment. The four underlying dimensions that are identified in this study appear to be a more relevant way of characterising emotional intelligence for those in the teaching profession than other conceptualisations of emotional intelligence. The article concludes with an examination of the contention that emotional intelligence is strongly connected to effective teaching practice<br /

An exploration of individual differences in teachers’ temperaments and multiple intelligence

For this study on individual differences, predictions were made from the literature on the four temperaments in order to examine how teachers with particular temperaments might use their multiple intelligence strengths in their approaches to teaching and learning. From a cohort of 336 beginning teachers it was found that temperaments and multiple intelligences are two separate constructs. The differences in patterns of intelligence strengths confirm that each of the four temperaments is distinct from the other. Teachers adopting a Catalyst Temperament have above average strengths in Linguistic, Musical, Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Intelligences. Those with a Stabilizer Temperament display above average strengths in Logical-Mathematical and Interpersonal Intelligences. Teachers adopting a Theorist Temperament demonstrate strengths in Logical-Mathematical, Linguistic, Spatial and Intrapersonal Intelligences. Those with an Improviser Temperament show below average strengths in all except Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence.<br /

Differences in student engagement : investigating the role of the dominant cognitive processes preferred by engineering and education students

This paper reports on a study of the differences in the dominant cognitive processes preferred by groups of engineering and education students and examines the implications of these differences for the assessment of student engagement with university courses. Concern is expressed that the items commonly used to capture student engagement data do not adequately cover the full range of the dominant cognitive processes preferred by tertiary students. The paper sets out a brief overview of student engagement along with the theory of dominant and auxiliary cognitive processes, as developed by Jung and later by Myers. Evidence is presented of the differing frequencies of the eight cognitive processes, as assessed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, that are preferred by cohorts of students undertaking courses in engineering and education. The implications of these differences are discussed in the context of subject disciplines in university environments.<br /

Identifying a taxonomy for the emergence of metacognition in young learners

This paper details a study of upper primary (elementary) students&rsquo; thinking as they go about solving a problem, presented in an innovative computer program. Student responses to a metacognitive probe question reveal levels of responses that can be classified because of their shared quality. A thematic analysis was conducted with the initial classifications being based on theoretically derived categories from the metacognitive literature. These classifications were subsequently ordered into a taxonomy of hierarchical progression towards metacognition. Results in this instance indicated that less than 20% of these upper primary students showed they were capable of operating at a metacognitive level

Use of colloid chemistry principles to improve efficiency in biodiesel production

The principles of colloid chemistry have been employed to improve the efficiency of biodiesel production. Potential sources of material loss caused by colloid chemistry were linked to specific steps in the sequence of unit operations, and literature reviewed for possible solutions. Liquid-liquid equilibrium and trans-esterification experiments with high oleic sunflower and rapeseed oils were conducted using apolar and polar solvents. The kinetics of trans-esterification were improved by both through the modification of interfacial resistance but the shift to final chemical equilibrium was only possible with apolar solvents. The use of an apolar solvent is beneficial in synthesis and product refining alike, though the removal of interfacial resistance between reaction partners, by shifting the reversible trans-esterification to close to complete conversion in a single step, and by reducing losses in material and profit. The results can be used to design and operate leaner, more efficient biodiesel production s ystems