Teaching the Teachers: Developing a Teaching Improvement Program for Academic Librarians

"This case study will examine the programs and workshops of the University Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as it attempts to orient approximately 100 librarians to their instructional roles and to meet the continuing education needs of the University Library’s instructional staff, which includes librarians as well as support staff and a contingent of approximately 60 graduate assistants enrolled in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science working in preprofessional public services positions."Ope

Strategies for providing public service with an online catalog

In light of the viewpoint that the online catalog is not simply a card catalog on wheels, but a significantly different tool utilizing alternative approaches to providing the patron with not only the traditional card catalog information but also additional information, what strategies can librarians take to enhance service to their patrons both in answering specific questions and in providing instruction in catalog use?published or submitted for publicatio

The Effectiveness of an Information Desk Staffed by Graduate Students and Nonprofessionals

published or submitted for publicatio

Internet Use in Uzbekistan: Developing a Methodology for Tracking Information Technology Implementation Success

This article reports on an ongoing investigation of Internet development in Central Asia. Begun in 2000, the research currently focuses on recent developments in Uzbekistan, including changes in legislation governing telecommunications. The results of two surveys conducted in November and December 2002 in Tashkent and Bukhara, Uzbekistan, are presented. These surveys of managers at Internet access points and information technology professionals provide a detailed picture of the current state of Internet infrastructure in Uzbekistan, particularly in contrast to official government figures. The article argues that effective survey research must incorporate an understanding of how culture, policy, and infrastructure affect patterns of Internet development. (c) 2004 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7