Search results

This paper discusses how University of Maryland University College (UMUC) librarians customized EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to allow for searching across librarian-selected sets of discipline-specific databases. Discipline-specific searching results in a smaller and more relevant set of search results, which can make research more efficient and effective.

This paper describes the collaboration between systems and reference and instruction librarians to develop, test, launch, promote, and assess discipline-specific searching in EDS in support of effective teaching and learning.

Customization of a discovery tool to allow researchers to run searches across pre-selected sets of discipline-specific databases is beneficial to the researchers since it enables them to find a smaller and more relevant set of search results than they would otherwise receive if they searched across all databases available in the discovery tool.

This paper provides detailed instructions regarding customization of EDS to allow for discipline-specific searching and discusses ways in which this enhancement can be brought to researchers' attention during reference and instruction interactions. This paper should be of interest to technical librarians as well as to reference and instruction librarians.

The problems of One‐Man‐Bands (OMBs) began to be taken seriously in the early 1980s when the Aslib OMB group was formed. The group received considerable attention in the professional press, and became the object of a study by Judith Collins and Janet Shuter who identified them as “information professionals working in isolation”. Many of the problems identified in the Collins/Shuter study remain — not least of these being the further education and training needs of OMBs. These needs are studied in this report. The author has firstly done an extensive survey of the literature to find what has been written about this branch of the profession. Then by means of a questionnaire sent to the Aslib OMB group and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (INVOG), training and education needs have been pinpointed. Some of these needs have then been explored in greater detail by means of case studies. The author found that the most common deterrents to continuing education and training were time, cost, location, finding suitable courses to cover the large variety of skills needed and lastly, lack of encouragement from employers. The author has concluded by recommending areas where further research is needed, and suggesting some solutions to the problems discussed.

Over the last two decades, women's issues such as education, employment, pay equity, sexuality, lifestyle, housing, economics, environmental safety, health, child‐rearing practices, reproductive rights, military service, and criminal justice have become a major focus of public policy at every level. There has been equal interest about women of various ethnic backgrounds, women in other countries, and women's writing. There have been burgeoning social and political demands for research, scholarship, and activism on women‐related topics. To meet these demands, universities and colleges started interdisciplinary women's studies programs. Sheila Tobias, a leading scholar in the field of women's studies, defines it this way:

Legal information work has expanded with the growth in knowledge management and emergence of a new type of knowledge/information manager, the professional support lawyer. This study aims to investigate competency requirements for library‐based information work in UK law firms, including the specialist subject knowledge required, methods of development and the impact on information professionals of professional support lawyers.

The investigation used a pragmatic mixed‐methods approach, including a mainly quantitative questionnaire, administered online to 64 legal information professionals, followed by eight semi‐structured interviews and a focus group with four participants. A literature review informed the questionnaire design and contextualised the findings.

The survey confirmed a broad range of competency requirements and clarified the specific subject knowledge needed. Participants favoured a varied combination of formal, and informal learning. Most participants also wanted specialised professional education for the sector.

The nature of the sample and use of categorised questions were limiting factors, partly compensated by inviting open‐ended comments and follow‐up interviews. A larger study using qualitative methods with professional support lawyers and fee‐earners would provide a fuller more rounded picture.

The findings indicate that the subject knowledge needed for legal information work in law firms is more extensive than for other sectors and suggest that information science departments should strengthen and extend curriculum content to reflect this need.

The study has advanced the understanding of the competency, education and training needs of UK legal information professionals, challenging assumptions about academic/professional qualifications and illuminating the blend of competencies needed.

Comparative performance profiles were determined, by two independent scientific information centres, for on‐line retrieval by means of (a) tree text words and (b) subject indexing codes, from a data base of 4,600 descriptions of on‐going research projects in four broad subject areas. Altogether, thirty‐nine questions that users had previously asked of the Science Information Exchange (SIE) of the Smithsonian Institution, and that were in the four subject areas, were employed by SIE staffscientists, and twelve of these were independently used by staff members of the Biological Sciences Communication Project (BSCP) of the George Washington University. Results for the two studies showed average recall values 30–40% higher, and relevance values 15–20% higher, for subject index code use as compared with text word use. Advantages and disadvantages of both approaches are discussed.

This paper aims to examine the global pattern of growth and development of eHealth research based on publication headcount, and analysis of the characteristics, of the keywords used by authors and indexers to represent their research content during 1945–2019.

This study adopted a bibliometric research design and a quantitative approach. The source of the data was Elsevier’s Scopus database. The search query involved multiple search terms because researchers’ choice of keywords varies very significantly. The search for eHealth research publications was limited to conference papers and research articles published before 2020.

eHealth originated in the late 1990s, but it has become an envelope term for describing much older terms such as telemedicine, and its variants that originated much earlier. The keywords were spread through the 27 Scopus Subject Areas, with medicine (44.04%), engineering (12.84%) and computer science (11.47%) leading, while by Scopus All Science Journal Classification Health Sciences accounted for 55.83% of the keywords. Physical sciences followed with 30.62%. The classifications social sciences and life sciences made only single-digit contributions. eHealth is about meeting health needs, but the work of engineers and computer scientists is very outstanding in achieving this goal.

This study demonstrates that eHealth is an unexplored aspect of health literature and highlights the nature of the accumulated literature in the area. It further demonstrates that eHealth is a multidisciplinary area that is attractive to researchers from all disciplines because of its sensitive focus on health, and therefore requires pooling and integration of human resources and expertise, methods and approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on customer relationship management (CRM) to obtain a comprehensive framework of mutually exclusive CRM research areas and sub‐areas free of all potentially disruptive factors (plethora of CRM definitions, personal judgments, etc.).

The keywords reported in 396 CRM articles published during the period 2000‐2006 are used to uncover first a great number of detailed keyword sub‐groups and, by subject summation, the CRM‐related research areas. This classification scheme is considered unbiased, in contrast with any direct classification of articles alone among CRM research areas fixed in advance.

An up‐to‐date conceptual and functional CRM framework emerges, consisting of a total of nine distinct research areas having their own weights, importance and popularity among the research community. Newly emerging CRM research areas are self‐identified as attracting the interest of the researchers and managers.

Keywords are activated, for a first time, as an added value characteristic reflecting genuinely the authors' beliefs about the subject content fields of their articles, important enough to reveal a self‐supported and self‐weighted unbiased and exhaustive CRM framework, useful to researchers and marketing practitioners. The paper offers strong evidence that e‐CRM is too complex to be comprehensively classified by mere procedures and simple criteria alone.

This chapter outlines the importance of enhancement courses, particularly in mathematics, to the preservice landscape in England. These programs occur after an individual has completed a degree but before admittance to preservice teacher education. The pedagogies used in these programs are characterized as both pedagogies of teacher preparation and of selection for preservice. The learning that takes place in these programs is an under-researched area. The chapter addresses that issue by specifying, analyzing, and justifying the pedagogies of teacher preparation deployed in the context of one mathematics enhancement course (MEC). We draw on international research to argue that there is a specific body of knowledge for teaching their subject area, which all teachers need to generate. In terms of empirical work and personal scholarship, the chapter is based primarily on the scholarship and practice of the first author, Clarke, between 2008 and 2014. We present an exemplar of teaching, following the principles of the pedagogies of preparation in place for the MEC. These pedagogies aim to develop for student teachers a profound or “relational understanding” of fundamental mathematics, aiming for the re-experiencing and re-construction of an aspect of mathematics, which they first learned as young grade school students. We argue that a distinctive form of mathematical knowledge is thus produced in and through the teaching processes. In the final part of the chapter, we outline the conditions in which these pedagogies might be adopted in other contexts, arguing that they represent good practice in teaching subject knowledge in all teacher education programs.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

There is a huge amount of information and data stored in publicly available online databases that consist of large text files accessed by Boolean search techniques. It is widely held that less use is made of these databases than could or should be the case, and that one reason for this is that potential users find it difficult to identify which databases to search, to use the various command languages of the hosts and to construct the Boolean search statements required. This reasoning has stimulated a considerable amount of exploration and development work on the construction of search interfaces, to aid the inexperienced user to gain effective access to these databases. The aim of our paper is to review aspects of the design of such interfaces: to indicate the requirements that must be met if maximum aid is to be offered to the inexperienced searcher; to spell out the knowledge that must be incorporated in an interface if such aid is to be given; to describe some of the solutions that have been implemented in experimental and operational interfaces; and to discuss some of the problems encountered. The paper closes with an extensive bibliography of references relevant to online search aids, going well beyond the items explicitly mentioned in the text. An index to software appears after the bibliography at the end of the paper.