Search results

Today’s librarians are faced with the need to constantly reevaluate database purchases in order to find the most cost‐effective means of supplying these resources to users. When a database is available from more than one provider, it may be necessary to make a detailed comparison of features and search engines to determine the best version for a particular library. This article compares 48 features of four versions of the ERIC database (SilverPlatter, FirstSearch, AskERIC, and SearchERIC.org), and discusses the relative merits of some of the more important features. Also included is an overview of the results of a survey given to Education majors which provides information on user preferences for versions of the ERIC database.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how and why accountants who moved from accounting firms to public service adapted their identities to reduce insecurity. The literature on accountant identity highlights insecurity caused by promotion criterion to partnership, which requires accountants to win new work for their employers and leads to overtime, as a serious problem which has permeated the accounting profession. However, there have been few studies that explore whether accountants who moved to the public service, where they have stronger job security and can enjoy work-life balance, have resolved the insecurity problem, although a neoliberalism turn accompanied by New Public Management-style reforms has increased the number of accountants in public service. Therefore, the authors of the current study aim to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the identity transitions of South Korean (hereafter Korean) accountants who joined the public service.

The authors theorise the nature of the process of identity adaptation with conceptual tools from Pierre Bourdieu, such as habitus and capital, and examine whether the accountants took a “vision-of-division” or a “di-vision” strategy in the public service to secure their identity. For this purpose, the authors interviewed accountants and their non-accountant colleagues, and investigated other written sources, such as newspaper articles and business cards.

The authors found that Korean accountants in Big-4 firms dealt with the same insecurity issues as accountants in western countries and perceived public service as an attractive alternative to remove this insecurity. However, accountants who joined the public service found themselves confronted with different types of problems, such as accounting/costing work being regarded as demeaning, which made their identity insecure. Therefore, some accountants took a di-vision strategy that makes the difference between themselves and typical public servants less visible by avoiding accounting/costing work, using bureaucratic designations and de-emphasising their accounting credentials. Accountants took this strategy because the symbolic value of their accountancy qualifications grew weaker over time, due to the increase in the number of qualified accountants, and because the public service field valued bureaucratic habitus and capital more highly than those of the accountants.

From a methodological aspect, the authors collected participants’ business cards and analysed which designations/credentials they chose in order to create a certain perception. This analysis helped the authors understand how accountants work on their identity by de-emphasising accounting credentials to secure their identity in an organisational field. In a theoretical dimension, the current study argues that the symbolic capital of accounting credentials is dependent on the organisational and social context in line with Bourdieu, and, contrary to Bourdieu, on the supply and demand in the professional labour market.

This paper is an exploratory study of one approach to incorporating situational information into information retrieval systems, drawing on principles and methods of discourse linguistics. A tenet of discourse linguistics is that texts of a specific type possess a structure above the syntactic level, which follows conventions known to the people using such texts to communicate. In some cases, such as literature describing work done, the structure is closely related to situations, and may therefore be a useful representational vehicle for the present purpose. Abstracts of empirical research papers exhibit a well‐defined discourse‐level structure, which is revealed by lexical clues. Two methods of detecting the structure automatically are presented: (i) a Bayesian probabilistic analysis; and (ii) a neural network model. Both methods show promise in preliminary implementations. A study of users' oral problem statements indicates that they are not amenable to the same kind of processing. However, from in‐depth interviews with users and search intermediaries, the following conclusions are drawn: (i) the notion of a generic research script is meaningful to both users and intermediaries as a high‐level description of situation; (ii) a researcher's position in the script is a predictor of the relevance of documents; and (iii) currently, intermediaries can make very little use of situational information. The implications of these findings for system design are discussed, and a system structure presented to serve as a framework for future experimental work on the factors identified in this paper. The design calls for a dialogue with the user on his or her position in a research script and incorporates features permitting discourse‐level components of abstracts to be specified in search strategies.

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.

Investigates the anti‐liquor store campaign in Los Angeles, California, USA, against Korean immigrants led by African Americans and Latino Americans. Shows that inner city areas in Los Angeles are not as deeply segregated as portrayed. Demonstrates how a coalition of immigrants/minorities were able to disrupt and change the way the liquour industry had impacted on their communities.

Post office chiefs, facing the possible collapse of the complicated and controversial postal code, are considering a range of ‘penalties’ to try to force firms and customers to catch on to the system. The success of the £80 million project is entirely dependent on public support. And before mechanized sorting becomes efficient and economic to run, at least 70% of all letters must be correctly coded.

The Queen's Speech opening the new Parliament, fulfilling its traditional function of foreshadowing the Government's programme of legislative and administrative action, included a paragraph which declared that “further steps will be taken to increase the supply of teachers” and “higher and further education will be expanded to meet increasing demand”.

More than five years have passed since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983 by then‐Secretary of Education Terrance Bell's National Commission on Excellence in Education. Those years have seen the publication of an enormous body of both primary material, composed of research reports, essays, and federal and state reform proposals and reports; and secondary material, composed of summaries and reviews of the original reform reports and reports about effective programs that are based on reform recommendations. This annotated bibliography seeks to identify, briefly describe, and organize in a useful manner those publications dealing with K‐12 education reform and improvement. The overall purposes of this article are to bring organization to that list, and also to trace relationships and influences from the federal initiatives to the states and professional associations, and from there to the school districts and individual schools.

Five groups of searchers each performed two of four pre‐selected searches on the DIALOG system using ONTAP, the 1975 subset of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database. The groups were novices, moderately experienced searchers without ERIC experience, moderately experienced searchers with ERIC experience, very experienced searchers without ERIC experience, and very experienced searchers with ERIC experience. Data were collected on the education, online training, online experience, institutional setting, and personal characteristics of the rearchers. Variables that describe the search process (e.g. number of commands used) and variables that describe the outcome of searches (e.g. recall) were measured by examination of the search transcripts. The results showed that, compared to the experienced subjects, the novices performed surprisingly well. Although, as a group, they searched more slowly than the experienced subjects and scored lower on most (but not all) outcome measures, the differences were not as great as might be expected. Three meaningful patterns were identified among the experienced subjects' searches: (1) the group with the greatest overall experience and the greatest ERIC database experience achieved the highest recall and had the highest values of a subset of search process variables designated ‘search effort’ variables (e.g. number of commands and descriptors, connect time); (2) in general, the moderately experienced searchers with ERIC experience performed the briefest, most cost effective searches (when cost effectiveness is measured in terms of time per relevant reference retrieved). This pattern is attributed to the fact that 75 percent of this group work in academic libraries that charge individual users for online connect time. In this situation pressure to keep costs low appears to be great; (3) the subjects with ERIC experience used more thesaurus terms than the subjects without ERIC experience. The subjects without ERIC experience tended to prefer free text to thesaurus terms. In regard to outcome, only slight evidence was found to support the hypothesis that ERIC database experience leads to greater success in searching.