Leveraging Vendor Assessments of Usage Data

ABSTRACT

This article summarizes a presentation given at the 2017 North Carolina Serials Conference by Judith Nagata. The speaker discussed how her library used vendor-supplied usage data and graphic representations of that data to make decisions about journals and journal packages.     

The Read Feed—Reviews

ABSTRACT

Beth Ashmore reviews More Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data; Michelle DeMars reviews Library Consortia: Models for Collaboration and Sustainability; Sarah Tusa reviews Library Management in Disruptive Times: Skills and Knowledge for an Uncertain Future.     

Reviews

Abstract

Beth Ashmore reviews The Purpose-Based Library: Finding Your Path to Survival, Success and Growth; Scott Johnson reviews Metaliteracy in Practice; Catherine Johnson reviews Teaching Information Literacy Reframed: 50+ Framework-Based Exercises for Creating Information-Literate Learners; Adolfo G. Prieto reviews Dynamic Research Support for Academic Libraries.     

A fundamental rethink of practice learning in social work education

A common response to the need to place increasing numbers of social work students in field education or practice learning placements has been to broaden the range of organisations in which placements are sought. While this strategy has provided many beneficial learning opportunities for students, it has not been sufficient in tackling ongoing difficulties in locating work-integrated learning opportunities for social work students. We argue that new approaches to finding placement opportunities will require a fundamental rethink as to how student placements are understood. This paper introduces an innovative project which started with a consideration of learning opportunities and built a structure to facilitate these, rather than rely on organisational availability to host students on placements.     

In Their Own Voice: Mothers in Drug Treatment and Their Views on Parenting,Behavioral Parent Training,and Barriers to Engagement

Behavioral parent training offers mothers in drug treatment a valuable opportunity to improve their parenting skills through real-time, individualized coaching, but these mothers might be reluctant to participate with their child. Participants were 23 mothers or female guardians from 4 drug treatment programs with children 1 to 10 years old. Focus group discussions and questionnaires asked about their perspectives on parenting and their interest in and obstacles to participating in behavioral parent training. Detailed narrative responses and quantitative analyses identified some unique issues in parenting for this population as well as logistical, attitudinal, and emotional barriers to participating in behavioral parent training with their children.     

A multivariate analysis of adverse childhood experiences and health behaviors and outcomes among college students

Objective: This study investigated associations between adverse childhood experiences (ACE) prior to age 18 years and multiple health behaviors (eg, cigarette and other substance use) and outcomes (eg, obesity, depression) for a large college sample. Participants: 2,969 college students from seven universities in the state of Georgia were included in the analysis. Methods: Web-based surveys were completed by students (45–60 minutes) during the spring semester, 2015. Results: Findings indicate that more ACEs are associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms, ADHD symptoms, cigarette use, alcohol use, marijuana use, and BMI, in addition to lower levels of fruit and vegetable intake, and sleep. Conclusion: ACEs may carry forward in the lifespan to influence a range of unhealthy outcomes among college students. College intervention programs may benefit by recognizing the pervasiveness of ACEs and their associations with health behaviors and outcomes, and include interventions across more than one health behavior.     

Examining the efficacy of an mHealth media literacy education program for sexual health promotion in older adolescents attending community college

Objective: To determine the feasibility of a mobile health (mHealth), media literacy education program, Media Aware, for improving sexual health outcomes in older adolescent community college students. Participants: 184 community college students (ages 18–19) participated in the study from April–December 2015. Methods: Eight community college campuses were randomly assigned to either the intervention or a wait-list control group. Student participants from each campus completed web-based pretest and posttest questionnaires. Intervention group students received Media Aware in between questionnaires. Results: Several intervention effects of the Media Aware program were significant, including reducing older adolescents' self-reported risky sexual behaviors; positively affecting knowledge, attitudes, normative beliefs, and intentions related to sexual health; and increasing media skepticism. Some gender differences in the findings were revealed. Conclusions: The results from this study suggest that Media Aware is a promising means of delivering comprehensive sexual health education to older adolescents attending community college.     

Conditionality in the context of housing-led homelessness policy: Comparing Australia’s Housing First agenda to Scotland’s “rights-based” approach

Homelessness services and policy have historically tended to be organised by an explicitly conditional logic, wherein people experiencing homelessness must prove their “housing readiness” before accessing settled housing. This model has been robustly challenged in recent decades by “housing-led” approaches that ostensibly eschew conditionality and prioritise the rapid rehousing of people experiencing homelessness. Various countries now include housing-led approaches in the national policy frameworks, including Australia, which overhauled its approach to homelessness in 2008, and Scotland, where a housing-led approach is supported by a legal right to housing for homeless households. Notwithstanding this policy shift, conditionality remains an enduring feature of responses to homelessness in both jurisdictions. This paper sheds light on this phenomenon by comparing the Australian experience with that of Scotland. We demonstrate how conditionality remains a feature of both jurisdictions; however, there is greater effort in Scotland to identify and minimise conditionality, whereas in Australia it is able to persist relatively unchallenged. We conclude with some reflections on what Australia can learn from Scotland’s relative success, highlighting the importance of a national-level policy framework and an adequate affordable housing supply.     

Black Adolescents’ Critical Reflection Development: Parents’ Racial Socialization and Attributions About Race Achievement Gaps

This research explored the development of Black adolescents’ (N = 454) critical reflection, conceived as individual (i.e., blaming Black people) and structural (i.e., blaming systemic racism) attributions for race achievement gaps. In this longitudinal study, adolescents and their parents reported their individual and structural attributions for race achievement gaps and parents’ racial socialization. Adolescents’ structural attributions increased from Grade 10 to Grade 12. Average levels of individual attributions did not change. Adolescents’ reports of parental racial socialization and parents’ structural attributions when youth were in Grade 10 predicted increases in adolescents’ structural attributions. Findings are applied to future research and efforts to increase adolescent critical reflection.     

Automated Discovery in Managerial Problem Formulation: Formation of Causal Hypotheses for Cognitive Mapping

Development of knowledge acquisition techniques known as automated discovery systems has occurred in deep and narrow domains of knowledge. Automated discovery is the generation of new knowledge by a computer system on its own, without the help of another knowledge source. This paper describes research and validation of an automated discovery system for a wide and shallow domain—business management. The system continues recent advances in expert systems research which have enhanced cognitive mapping, a problem formulation tool. The system perceives the behavior of distal variables in the environment through probabilistic cues-to-causality, and generates previously unknown hypotheses by aggregating the probabilities into a single criterion of causal relatedness. The system is validated against the source code of a simulated managerial environment, and causal relationships posited by decision makers experienced in the play of the gaming simulator.