Healing the Hurt: Trauma-Informed Approaches to the Health of Boys and Young Men of Color

From discrimination and poverty to alcoholism and assault, trauma in its varied forms plays a major part in the lives of Latino and African-American boys and young men. This paper outlines the ways in which violence prevention, family support, health care, foster care, and juvenile justice can incorporate a trauma-informed approach to improve the physical and mental health of young men and boys

Usability Testing for E-Resource Discovery: How Students Find & Choose E-Resources Using Library Websites

In early 2010, library staff at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Ohio designed and conducted a usability study of key parts of the library website, focusing on the web pages generated by the library’s electronic resources management system (ERM) that list and describe the library’s databases. The goal was to discover how users find and choose e-resources and identify ways the library could improve access to e-resources through its web site. This article outlines the usability study conducted at BGSU, presents its conclusions about how students at BGSU find and choose databases, contextualizes these findings with other current research about user behavior, and makes recommendations for increasing student use of library e-resources

The Changing Access to Electronic Journals: A Survey of Academic Library Web Sites Revisited

This article analyzes the content, organization, and features of academic library electronic journal Web pages and examines major trends that we found. In a replication of a 1997-1998 study, the authors revisited 114 academic library e-journal Web sites from North American universities to see how they have evolved in the past few years. The authors discovered that the Web sites are much more elaborate and sophisticated than just three years ago, and they discuss the four basic organizational models that they see emerging in this field: high maintenance HTML model, new “low maintenance” HTML model, catalog-driven model and database-driven model

Student Desk Assistants vs. Professional Librarians: How Do Their Chat Transcripts Compare?

How effective are student assistants at answering chat reference questions? Can they provide the quality of service that we expect from our professional staff? When preparing for an in-service professional development activity for a group of reference librarians who staffed our chat reference service, I was surprised to find that a few of the exemplar examples of chat reference transactions were performed by student reference assistants rather than professional librarians. Was this a fluke? Was there a pattern to this? Is there something about students that make them more adept at answering questions in this format? I will share my findings from analyzing hundreds of chat reference transactions, using generally accepted standards for quality chat reference transactions. What can professional librarians learn from student employees and what do students still need to learn from us? Come and learn how student employees can be a valuable component of your chat reference staff

Reaching Additional Users with Proactive Chat

Despite a general decline in recent years in academic libraries’ reference desk statistics, research indicates that library users continue to have complex research questions but are largely unaware that librarians are waiting and ready to assist them. The challenge for librarians is to connect with users at their point of need. At Bowling Green State University, we are making a move in this direction with proactive (pop-up) chat widgets embedded within our library Web pages, catalog, and databases. Since implementation, the number of chat reference questions received has more than doubled, helping us reach additional users from on-and off-campus

Can Student Assistants Effectively Provide Chat Reference Services? Student Transcripts vs. Librarian Transcripts

To determine if undergraduate student information desk assistants were effectively staffing the library\u27s chat reference service, librarians at Bowling Green State University embarked on a chat transcript analysis project, comparing the performance of librarians to student assistants. Although student desk assistants generally did not perform as well as librarians, it was concluded that with a renewed emphasis on continual oversight and training, students were a very viable option for staffing a chat reference service

Seasonal succession of free-living bacterial communities in coastal waters of the Western Antarctic Peninsula

© The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Frontiers in Microbiology 7 (2016): 1731, doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2016.01731.The marine ecosystem along the Western Antarctic Peninsula undergoes a dramatic seasonal transition every spring, from almost total darkness to almost continuous sunlight, resulting in a cascade of environmental changes, including phytoplankton blooms that support a highly productive food web. Despite having important implications for the movement of energy and materials through this ecosystem, little is known about how these changes impact bacterial succession in this region. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, we measured changes in free-living bacterial community composition and richness during a 9-month period that spanned winter to the end of summer. Chlorophyll a concentrations were relatively low until summer when a major phytoplankton bloom occurred, followed 3 weeks later by a high peak in bacterial production. Richness in bacterial communities varied between ~1,200 and 1,800 observed operational taxonomic units (OTUs) before the major phytoplankton bloom (out of ~43,000 sequences per sample). During peak bacterial production, OTU richness decreased to ~700 OTUs. The significant decrease in OTU richness only lasted a few weeks, after which time OTU richness increased again as bacterial production declined toward pre-bloom levels. OTU richness was negatively correlated with bacterial production and chlorophyll a concentrations. Unlike the temporal pattern in OTU richness, community composition changed from winter to spring, prior to onset of the summer phytoplankton bloom. Community composition continued to change during the phytoplankton bloom, with increased relative abundance of several taxa associated with phytoplankton blooms, particularly Polaribacter. Bacterial community composition began to revert toward pre-bloom conditions as bacterial production declined. Overall, our findings clearly demonstrate the temporal relationship between phytoplankton blooms and seasonal succession in bacterial growth and community composition. Our study highlights the importance of high-resolution time series sampling, especially during the relatively under-sampled Antarctic winter and spring, which enabled us to discover seasonal changes in bacterial community composition that preceded the summertime phytoplankton bloom.CL was partially funded by the Graduate School and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University and the Brown University-Marine Biological Laboratory Joint Graduate Program. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. ANT-1142114 to LA-Z, OPP-0823101 and PLR-1440435 to HD, and ANT-1141993 to JR

Changing Practices of Undergraduate Business Teaching at BGSU

This report will discuss the findings and recommendations of a study of the changing teaching needs of undergraduate business faculty at Bowling Green State University (BGSU). This local project was conducted by BGSU librarians in the 2018-19 academic year as part of a national study coordinated by Ithaka S+R in conjunction with other institutional-level studies throughout the country. Ithaka S+R, a not-for-profit research and consulting organization that works with academic communities, will produce an overarching report on supporting the changing practices of undergraduate teaching in the field of business