Faculty Learning Communities are a positive way for libraries to engage academic staff in scholarly communication.

The stakes and politics of research and scholarship are different depending on discipline, department, and institution, and as such, increasing awareness of scholarly communication is fraught with difficulty. Librarians Jennifer Bazeley and Jen Waller share their experience developing a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) in order to address the issues. Cultivating awareness of the entire scholarly communication landscape created stronger faculty advocates for change, but key differences emerged between longer established and newer faculty members

Effect of Tunable Indexing on Term Distribution and Cluster-based Information Retrieval Performance

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of tunable indexing on the structure and information retrieval performance of a clustered document database. The generation of all cluster structures and calculation of term discrimination values is based upon the Cover Coefficient-Based Clustering Methodology. Information retrieval performance is measured in terms of precision, recall, and e-measure. The relationship between term generality and term discrimination value is quantified using the Pearson Rank Correlation Coefficient Test. The effect of tunable indexing on index term distribution and on the number of target clusters is examined

Disability in Ohio : Long-Term Care Providers & Programs

This report describes the range of options used in the long-term care system in Ohio. For each provider or program, we report the eligibility requirements, consumer characteristics, capacity, utilization rate, average monthly cost of care, and major payers for services. The programs and providers include Medicaid waiver programs, nursing facilities, adult day service providers, residential care or assisted living facilities, intermediate care facilities for persons with mental retardation, and home- and community-based providers

Compressed Bit-sliced Signature Files An Index Structure for Large Lexicons

We use the signature file method to search for partially specified terms in large lexicons. To optimize efficiency, we use the concepts of the partially evaluated bit-sliced signature file method and memory resident data structures. Our system employs signature partitioning, compression, and term blocking. We derive equations to obtain system design parameters, and measure indexing efficiency in terms of time and space. The resulting approach provides good response time and is storage-efficient. In the experiments we use four different lexicons, and show that the signature file approach outperforms the inverted file approach in certain efficiency aspects. KEYWORDS: Lexicon search, n-grams, signature files

Is There Value in Value Added Cataloging?

As with most libraries, the Grasselli Library holdings include many items with zero or very few circulations. In particular, we were facing decisions about whether to withdraw numerous items contained in monographic series. In contemplating ways to increase the visibility of these items, we decided to test two methods of enhancing the catalog records of these items with a goal of increasing circulation. The first method was to re-catalog monographic series previously cataloged under the series title, in which individual volumes had unique titles. We added access points for the unique titles, retaining a link to the bibliographic record for the series title as well. As a pilot for this method, we chose to limit the process to the Q’s, as there were a large number of instances of this situation in that area. The second method was to enhance the records by adding table of contents fields. For this method, we chose the P’s as a pilot area, due to the large numbers of items containing individual works for which our patrons might be searching (i.e. plays, stories, etc.). We plan on evaluating the circulation statistics of these items 12 to 18 months after enhancement to determine whether these practices are worth implementing more broadly

Ohio's Aging Network Efforts to Enhance Nursing Home Diversion and Transition

This brief report provides preliminary results from an evaluation of Ohio's diversion and transition demonstration program

Development of the Advanced Bi-Lingual Reading Assistant (ABRA) And Authorizing System (ABRA-AS)

Two programs were created to fulfill a contract with the German, Russian, and East Asian Language Department at Miami University. These programs, Advanced Bilingual Reading Assistant (ABRA) and Advanced Bi-lingual Reading Assistant - Authoring System (ABRA-AS), create a teaching system designed to implement a "reading strategies" approach to teaching German. ABRA is a reading program where a student reads a gven text several times, each time in greater detail. At each level highlighted words or phrases to which the student can obtain translation help. Each level also has comprehension questions. ABRA-AS is the authoring system which creates the levels, the highlights and definitions, and question and answers for the articles read by the ABRA program. Although this program has been written specifically for this project, it may have uses outside the foreign language classroom

To buy or not to buy : considerations in the decision to purchase long-term care insurance

This report presents findings from a survey of a random sample of retired teachers who were given the opportunity to buy long-term care insurance. Characteristics that distinguish purchasers from nonpurchasers are identified