Reconsidering Literacy

Literacy, until recently, was defined as the ability to read printed text and to understand the nuances of both the form and content of that printed text. More recently there has been a focus on subsets of literacy – data literacy, numeracy, visual literacy, media literacy, etc. – that recognizes the means of communicating ideas and facts are not limited to the printed text and that there are multiple means which may be more powerful ways of communicating in our world. In recent years, higher education has been redefining what it means to be educated – from a focus on specific bodies of knowledge, or disciplines, to a focus on developing and mastering skills for varying modes of inquiry. Simultaneously, there has been a growing focus on expanding how students and faculty communicate knowledge – what was once strictly the term paper approach is being replaced by the oral presentation, the poster session, or the artistic response. In a world where ideas are more readily communicated via social media such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, the ability to accurately assess additional modes of communication is critical. This paper will explore different subsets of literacy, describe a method for developing mastery of those literacies in higher education, and advocate for academic library professionals to become specialists focused on literacies as much, if not more, than on content

Spring Forward: Collaborating to Build and Assess a Collection of Learning Objects

Delivering innovative information literacy instruction to an ever-growing student population requires some resetting of previous practices and ideas. Collaboratively developed interactive learning activities that address library skills and the research process presented in a flipped-classroom style may represent a useful innovation in this area. This paper addresses the ongoing project at the University of South Florida (USF) Tampa Library in which interactive digital learning objects are developed, embedded into all sections of a university course via the online learning management system, assessed, and reworked

Wasted Words?: Current Trends in Collection Development Policies

The transition to electronic resources and the changing role of the collection development librarian are having a tremendous impact on the manner by which libraries select and acquire new materials. The goal of this research project was to further elucidate the current trends of collection development policies in members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) as well as gauge current use and future efficacy. The survey was designed and sent to librarians responsible for collection development at university-affiliated ARL libraries in order to obtain a current picture of academic collection development policies, and how they are changing due to the abundance of electronic resources and new methods of data-driven acquisitions. The goals of the survey are to Measure the continued use of CD policies as major collection-building tools; Assess the frequency of updates to collection development policies; Determine the availability of collection development policies; Measure and compare the amount of time available to librarians to review and select new materials; Determine if print materials are being reviewed in new and innovative ways or if they receive the same assessment as electronically formatted materials; Measure the employment of data or patron-driven acquisition methods. The findings will require additional assessment, but the data does seem to indicate a time of change in the way academic libraries complete and assess their primary collection development activities. This survey was created, at least in part, with the hope of setting a starting point for continued evaluation and longitudinal measurement. If our survey participants are as actively helpful in future years, these dreams of cyclical assessment may well come to fruition

Fitting Age-Period-Cohort Models Using the Intrinsic Estimator: Assumptions and Misapplications

We thank Demography’s editorial office for the opportunity to respond to te Grotenhuis et al.’s commentary regarding the methods used and the results presented in our earlier paper (Masters et al. 2014). In this response, we briefly reply to three general themes raised in the commentary: (1) the presentation and discussion of APC results, (2) the fitting of full APC models to data for which a simpler model holds, and (3) the variation in the estimated age, period, and cohort coefficients produced by the intrinsic estimator (IE) (i.e., the “non-uniqueness property” of the IE, as referred to by Pelzer et al. (2015))

Fertility Intentions and Clinical Care Attendance Among Women Living with HIV in South Africa

Poor HIV care retention impedes optimal treatment outcomes in persons living with HIV. Women trying to become pregnant may be motivated by periconception horizontal and vertical transmission concerns and thus more likely to attend HIV care visits than women not trying to conceive. We estimated the effect of fertility intentions on HIV care attendance over 12 months among non-pregnant, HIV-positive women aged 18–35 years who were on or initiating antiretroviral therapy in Johannesburg, South Africa. The percentage of women attending an HIV care visit decreased from 93.4% in the first quarter to 82.8% in the fourth quarter. Fertility intentions were not strongly associated with care attendance in this cohort of reproductive-aged women; however, attendance declined over time irrespective of childbearing plans. These findings suggest a need for reinforced efforts to support care engagement and risk reduction, including safer conception practices for women wishing to conceive

Rethinking the heterosexual infectivity of HIV-1: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Studies of cumulative HIV incidence suggest that co-factors such as genital ulcer disease (GUD), HIV disease stage, and circumcision influence HIV transmission; however, the heterosexual infectivity of HIV-1 is commonly cited as a fixed value (∼0·001, or 1 transmission per thousand contacts). We sought to estimate transmission co-factor effects on the heterosexual infectivity of HIV-1 and to quantify the extent to which study methods have affected infectivity estimates