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This paper aims to provide details of a collaborative campus effort that created a Media Commons at an undergraduate library at a major research university to provide students and faculty opportunities to experiment with emerging technologies, with expanded opportunities to learn of best practices in educational technology.

This is a case study that used a web survey, focus groups, usage statistics, and interviews to determine the needs and best practices for creating and maintaining the Media Commons.

Preliminary results indicate that this program provides value to students and faculty seeking to learn about and use multimedia for coursework and projects. It confirms the gap on campus for places students can go for loanable technology and consultation services in the production and editing of multimedia.

Because the Media Commons just launched there has not had a programmatic evaluation yet to assess the impact of this program. However, based on initial feedback, suggestions for improvements in the program are included.

The rationale, process and efforts described in this paper can be replicated by other institutions that are interested in creating a Media Commons.

Although there are many articles written about Learning Commons and Information Commons, there is not much available that documents the efforts of creating a Media Commons at a library and the rationale for centralizing and freely making available campus multimedia expertise and equipment.

This paper aims to explore the changing role of the reference collection in learning commons at Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries.

A 15-question survey was sent to managers at academic research libraries with membership in the ARL. Respondents were asked about their learning commons and reference collections. To increase the sample size, the researchers conducted phone interviews with a random sample of individuals from the same target population, utilizing the same questions and generated additional results.

Most respondents had or were planning learning commons for their libraries. The role of reference collections varied. Of those who had retained a print reference collection, the majority believed them to be little-used. The researchers believe this may signal an end to a formerly cherished idea: the primacy of the reference collection within a library learning space.

This study involved a random sample of public service managers at North American ARL academic libraries. While the sample is believed to be representative of the broader population, findings may not be generalizable to all ARL libraries or to other academic libraries.

Many papers have been written about information or learning commons spaces and their distinctive elements. Others have discussed the changing role of reference collections. This paper is unique in examining the changing role of the reference collection within learning commons spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the idea and implementation of information commons' is becoming more prevalent in the academic library community. Many of these have been implemented in what were once General Reference areas of libraries. This paper discusses the process and experience of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, including concept development, acceptance and implementation. In addition, the first 18 months of operation and our visions for the future of our implementation are contained herein. One of the major themes of the paper is that change in an information commons is inevitable.

The paper is a case study of the information commons implementation done at Brigham Young University.

The paper shows the implementation of the information commons at Brigham Young University has been very successful and it will continue to adapt as higher education practice at the University continues to change.

This paper shows that the jury is still out as concerns “best practices” in information commons' design, Brigham Young University's experience constitutes a case study, which may very well emerge as an example of “best practice.”

Shows that the experience at Brigham Young University will help other academic institutions as they contemplate implementing an information commons or changing a current implementation.

Libraries are exploring the meaning of the “information commons” and have responded to the technological needs of the diversity of digital access trends. The purpose of this conceptual article is to explore the possibilities of the next step of developing dynamic “learning commons” using examples of projects and ideas presented by librarians in the field.

The “learning commons” model has the potential to be a laboratory for students, librarians and faculty. It is a collaboration space and requires partnerships and cooperation across disciplines. Ideas about user behavior and types of projects to be explored are included.

Funding for learning commons is linked to measured outcomes. The role of the librarian changes to include advocacy and project planning.

This paper demonstrates that the change in library service via the learning commons concept requires planning, interdisciplinary collaboration and a certain amount of risk taking.

This paper is useful for librarians who are designing and/or implementing “learning commons” spaces and concepts into their libraries and library services.

Although heritage sites are numerous, facility management (FM) is maybe the most important process in heritage site management systems. The similarities and differences of the sites should be considered before implementing common FM information systems that support more heritage sites with various area types. The presented classifications are collected and made primarily to support this process. Specialties of heritage sites were also observed from FM point of view. The paper attempts to identify a few groups that can be used well for FM system installations.

The paper observes the sites from several points of view. The sites are classified by heritage types, by facility planning point of view, by fragmentation and the rate of built‐in area, by human influence, by application. It offers three methods for area classification, later the computerized supporting systems are observed.

On most heritage sites FM is probably the most important management process. These cultural and natural sites are handled usually by governmental authorities and/or such organizations that can serve more sites permanently.

Since, the heritage sites are various, there might be several exceptional cases that are not collected in this paper.

The paper offers guidelines and ideas to enhance the FM system implementation on different types of heritage sites. Using these groupings, several problems can be identified early in the planning phase of such information systems.

This paper attempts to present the diversity of the objects on the heritage sites, trying to categorize them for FM purposes from more viewpoints. Most of these sites are currently not applied with efficient FM support.

This impact assessment provides empirical evidence from household producer surveys to test the assumptions surrounding the contribution of participatory varietal selection (PVS) activities on seed sector development. The purpose of this paper is to focus on household access and adoption of common bean varieties from seed provision services and local markets to determine if, and under what social conditions, PVS activities stimulated seed uptake and market participation.

The propensity score matching technique and simple regression analysis were used to estimate the impact and compare household performance across three farmer groups located in Hoima, Uganda.

PVS increased access to and adoption of improved varieties and supported additional intermediate development outcomes when farmer group characteristics were aligned with PVS efforts. Specifically, PVS was more likely to stimulate market purchases of newly introduced varieties in the farmer group located closest to markets. The project did not however, improve all the development objectives that were evaluated. PVS most critically, did not increase the probability that households received the specific varieties they desired.

This study found that PVS can support the key pillars of seed sector development. In addition to increasing household access to new varieties, free seed dissemination promoted market participation and stimulated local seed market development.

This study addressed the need to consider intermediate development outcomes in impact assessments of development interventions. The findings clarified the contribution of PVS in the context of broader development goals and identified farmer group dynamics associated with enhanced impacts among rural producers in Uganda.

This paper aims to investigate capitalization support, an alternative perspective for theorizing social support in-service settings. In the service setting of the student-athlete experience, the relationships between capitalization support service dimensions (i.e. the academic, athletic, self-development and place dimensions), well-being and sports performance are examined through a transformative sport service research (TSSR) lens, a newly introduced form of transformative service research (TSR).

Data from an online survey of Australian student-athletes (n = 867) is examined using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results support the theorized service dimensions of capitalization support, indicating their validity and relevance to the student-athlete experience. Further, the results demonstrate that all capitalization support dimensions except athletic support (i.e. academic support, place support and self-development support), have a direct effect on well-being and an indirect effect on sports performance.

This research is unique for several reasons. First, it introduces a new perspective, capitalization support, to theorizing about social support in services. Second, it is one of the first studies in both TSR and TSSR to empirically test and demonstrate a relationship between support services, well-being and performance in a single study. Insight into how to design services to optimize well-being in relation to other service objectives like performance thus emerges.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the possible reasons behind gender pay disparities, focussing on the unique features of male and female human capital and their wage returns. Despite increasing convergence of male and female human capital attainments, substantial differences remain. Extraction of human capital components non-overlapping across genders provides more profound explanation of the unexplained wage gap of men and women.

Starting with the non-parametric matching-based decomposition technique, the authors extend the pay gap estimation framework and focus on males and females having no counterpart in a set of characteristics within the opposite gender. The authors identify gender-unique human capital in terms of differences in distribution of individual characteristics across men and women and gender-specific combination of human capital characteristics. Wage returns to gender-specific profiles are evaluated applying wage regression on both full distribution of earnings and wage quantiles. The research relies on the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) database for Estonia, which incorporates both formal education and cognitive skill records.

The study identifies sets of characteristics and competencies exclusive for both genders, proving that male and female profiles cannot be directly compared. The results suggest that men possess high individual and combined abilities in numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environment, not always reached by females. This potentiates men’s higher earnings in spite of their generally lower formal educational attainments. Wage gap analysis over the full distribution of earnings shows even larger “glass ceiling” effect for females, possessing woman-specific human capital.

The authors raise a research from a novel perspective towards a role of human capital in gender wage inequality. Instead of usual reference to observable gaps in male and female characteristics, the authors identify the gender-specific human capital profiles, to a large extent non-reached by the opposite gender. Analysed associations between gender-specific characteristics and earnings provide an insight to possible effects of gender-unique human capital on a male-female wage disparity.

Supporting the mental health of university students is a key priority for higher education. Students living with long-term health conditions are at increased risk of poor mental health; yet little work has focused on their particular mental health needs or indeed, the implications for health education in the university setting. This study sought to identify the mental health support needs of students with long-term conditions, including best ways for universities to support these students.

A UK national online survey of 200 university students living with long-term physical health conditions (e.g. asthma, endometriosis, epilepsy) was conducted in 2019.

95% of respondents reported that their long-term condition/s had at least a moderate impact on their mental wellbeing, with 81% reporting that they felt depressed and anxious at least once a month because of their health. The most common suggestion for how universities can better support their mental wellbeing was to raise awareness about long-term conditions on campuses, with many reporting a lack of understanding about long-term conditions from academic and support services staff members – with negative impacts on their mental health. Because of this, some respondents reported a reluctance to come forward and seek help from university services, with 25% not formally disclosing their conditions.

These reported concerns underscore the need to develop health education amongst university staff about long-term conditions and to ensure these students are supported with their health at university.

This paper aims to describe how approaches such as semantic based query rewritings and FRBR work entities composition could solve existing problems and improve the overall behavior of a mediated based meta‐search environment. Moreover, it aims to present meta‐Composer, which is a meta‐search engine without query failures that composes work level entities for display, as well as an autonomous open service for discovering substitutions of unsupported access points, in the context of the Z39.50 environment.

Semantic Access Point Network (SAPN) engine, which is a system for substitution of unsupported access points by exploiting semantic access point information from an RDFS description, was extended as a query rewriting system taking into account user preferences for recall and precision. Additionally, the Library of Congress FRBR display tool was extended to create, in the first place, MARC21, UNIMARC and MODS wrappers for the production of work‐expression‐manifestation identifiers, and, secondly, the composition of work clusters. Finally, pazpar2, the open source meta‐search engine was used as both the middleware and the client platform for the integration of all the above components and the development of meta‐Composer.

Consistent extension of the meta‐search search functionality is possible from the lowest common denominator of the supported access points through semantic based query rewritings. Furthermore, enabling query specificity, which restricts the resulting records, could really improve the overall performance of the system and allow for more space for other extensions. Work centric result presentation gives a more compact and coherent view to the user compared to the typical record‐based de‐duplicated display.

The technical limitation for retrieving all the results from all sources, especially for large result sets, indicates the need for further research for the development of heuristics in order to find the best sources for enriching the results by unique work clusters. The absence of tools, such as authority files, limits the accuracy of the FRBRization process and the discovery of correlations between related works.

Consistent meta‐search services require widespread use of international metadata standards and communication protocols.

The SAPN technology enforces implicitly the semantic interoperability in the context of the Z39.50 protocol. meta‐Composer is an open service which offers meta‐search within valuable sources world wide and it also provides the potential to evaluate new services. The SAPN open service gives the ability to any other mediator or client, to extend and improve consistently its search functionality, in the same context and by using web services technology.