One for Nine: The Shared Cataloging Program of the California Digital Library

Abstract

In 1999, the California Digital Library (CDL) began a new cooperative venture, the Shared Cataloging Program, to improve access to its growing collection of electronic resources. Now known within the University of California (UC) as the SCP, the Shared Cataloging Program, based at UC San Diego, distributes ready-to-use cataloging records for all electronic titles licensed by the CDL to each of the other eight (soon to be nine) physical UC campuses. The SCP is the result of an intensive systemwide planning process fostered by a desire for an innovative approach to providing traditional bibliographic access to large numbers of electronic resources. It was launched out of pragmatic necessity along with an institutional commitment to the cooperative ideals of labor-savings, experimentation, and the search for “best practices.” This article will describe its genesis, current operation, one library's use of the records, and issues for future development. Serials Review 2002; 28:4–12.     

THE CASE FOR PARITY AND BIRTH-ORDER STATISTICS

Parity refers to the number of (live) births that a woman (or man) has had. Birth order refers to whether a birth is the first, second, third or higher‐order birth of the parent. In the context of low and shifting fertility, parity and birth‐order statistics are becoming increasingly important for understanding fertility trends and patterns, for policy, and for carrying out projections of future fertility. In Australia, the main sources of demographic data are birth, death and marriage registers, and the five‐yearly national census. Both the birth registers and the census are ideally placed to collect data required to calculate parity and birth‐order statistics. However not all Australian states and territories collect or code the necessary information in the birth registers, and the parity question ‘For each female, how many babies has she ever had?’ is only asked every second census; that is, once every 10 years. In this paper, we outline the importance and uses of parity and birth‐order statistics. We discuss the Australian data available at present and their gaps and shortcomings. We then describe the ‘gold standard’ of parity and birth‐order statistics and how Australia can achieve this standard through some minor changes to the data collection process.     

Development Mobilities: Identity and Authority in an Angolan Development Programme

This ethnographic essay considers how international non-governmental organisations are able to make claims to authoritative knowledge about development work by offering the transnational mobilities of their staff members as evidence. I examine how one professional's biography—his trajectory from Angola to Britain and back again—was differentially presented to external donors and internal staff members as befitting the institutional needs of an international good governance intervention in Angola. These presentations reflect a commoditisation of the cosmopolitanism of professionals' histories in the service of development as a regime of mobility. I argue that, in this development regime, a global hierarchy prevents some individual professionals, particularly those from developing nations, from realising the same benefits of their cosmopolitan mobility as professionals from industrialised nations. While one of mobility studies' many strengths is that it highlights global interconnectedness, social scientists should not read equality in these interconnections but examine how patterns of transnational mobility may produce and reproduce global structures of inequality.     

An adaptive empirical Bayesian thresholding procedure for analysing microarray experiments with replication

Summary.  A typical microarray experiment attempts to ascertain which genes display differential expression in different samples. We model the data by using a two-component mixture model and develop an empirical Bayesian thresholding procedure, which was originally introduced for thresholding wavelet coefficients, as an alternative to the existing methods for determining differential expression across thousands of genes. The method is built on sound theoretical properties and has easy computer implementation in the R statistical package. Furthermore, we consider improvements to the standard empirical Bayesian procedure when replication is present, to increase the robustness and reliability of the method. We provide an introduction to microarrays for those who are unfamilar with the field and the proposed procedure is demonstrated with applications to two-channel complementary DNA microarray experiments.     

Advancing OSCM scientific knowledge by replicating empirical findings: Step-by-step procedure and illustration for transformative replication endeavors

Replication endeavors contribute to the accumulation of scientific evidence about previously reported findings and are crucial for scientific progress. Replication studies are, however, often discouraged and rarely published in the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) discipline. In this article, we offer a framework for replications consisting of two complementary tables. This framework recognizes two types of replications already defined in the literature (i.e., The Exact (EXT) Replication and the Methods-Only (MTD) Replication) and adds to these two new types (i.e., the Bounded-Conceptual-Extension (BCE) Replication and the Transformative (TRF) Replication). The framework clarifies what constitutes replications, forms of replication endeavors, and their purposes. Importantly, we also differentiate replication endeavors from reproducibility tests, robustness checks, and post hoc analyses. Moreover, we describe a seven-step procedure to guide the design, execution, and presentation of replication endeavors, illustrating these steps by conducting a TRF Replication that incorporates, at the same time, a BCE Replication and an MTD Replication of Polyviou et al. (2018). The proposed framework and seven-step procedure hopefully motivate OSCM scholars to embrace replications as valuable scientific endeavors that can yield corroborating evidence to bolster confidence in previously reported findings and, better yet, provide new nuanced findings to advance precise scientific understanding of past and new OSCM phenomena.