Your Recommended Daily Allowance of RDA

Presentation from the MARAC conference in Boston, MA on March 18-21, 2015. S13 - Using RDA for Archives and Manuscripts

Mechanism of pH-dependent activation of the sodium-proton antiporter NhaA

Data files to accompany the article in Nature Communications, in press.

A Worldwide History Spanning Genocide for the Sake of Corporate Profit

A Worldwide History Spanning Genocide for the Sake of Corporate Profit is the title of a thesis consisting of four stories. Crosky’s Knife is presented first for the sake of allowing potential readers to embrace a sense of amiable audience engagement and is based on a true story of a veteran of one of the many global conflicts currently raged on behalf of freedom. The three pieces following this feint are reworked versions of stories written from the heart and delivered to machines. As it presents numerous aspects of reality that the average person may not wish to consider, doing so with shockingly casual acceptance of such horror and/or banality, the conscious reception of the duty of engagement and possible appreciation of the text is not advised. Knives, rabid dogs, severed tongues, and a downpour of malnourished Iraqi babies are components intrinsic to the direction of this thesis.

Archival Collections and TMS at Reynolda House Museum of American Art

Presentation from the MARAC conference in Roanoke, VA on October 7–10, 2015. S8 - Minimal Processing and Preservation: Friends or Foes?

Planting a Melodious Vegetable Garden: Where the History of Food & Drink Meets a Musical Composition

Presentation from the MARAC conference in Philadelphia, PA on November 7-9, 2013. S6 - Art from Archives

Opening Up Our Finding Aids: A Forum Discussion of © and CC Licenses

Presentation from the MARAC conference in Roanoke, VA on October 8–10, 2015. S13. “Un session” I: A MARAC Mini-Unconference.

Tending The Front Porch: Athletics & The University Archive

Presentation from the MARAC conference in Baltimore, MD on October 16–18, 2014. S18 - Varsity Lessons: College Sports Archives and the Human Experience

Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting: Management and Production of Digital Collections

The Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting plan was written in 2012 and revised 2013-2014, as a five-year plan for the newly established department at the University of Maryland Libraries under the Digital Systems and Stewardship Division. The plan focuses on increasing digitization production, both in-house and through vendors, and creates a model for the management of this production.

Pittsburgh and Philadelphia Can Work Together: Processing the Arlen Specter Collection at the University of Pittsburgh

Presentation from the MARAC conference in Pittsburgh, PA on April 14–16, 2016. S2 - Making Friends: The Highs, Lows, and Challenges of Inter-Repository Archival Relationships

The Careers of Two Ritas: Latinas, Hollywood, and the Dilemmas of Anglicization

Senior capstone project for AMST 450.

Crop Insurance For Maryland Field Crops And Livestock

Multi-peril crop insurance is a valuable risk management tool which allows you to insure against losses on your farm due to adverse weather conditions, price fluctuations, and unavoidable pests and diseases. It shifts unavoidable production risks to an insurance company for the payment of a fixed amount of premium per acre. This publication assists readers in understanding the basics of the federal crop insurance program.

The conformational landscape of RNA translational regulators and their potential as drug discovery targets

RNA is an underutilized target for drug discovery. Once thought to be a passive carrier of genetic information, RNA is now known to play a critical role in essentially all aspects of biology including signaling, gene regulation, catalysis, and retroviral infection. It is now well-established that RNA does not exist as a single static structure, but instead populates an ensemble of energetic minima along a free-energy landscape. Knowledge of this structural landscape has become an important goal for understanding its diverse biological functions. In this case, NMR spectroscopy has emerged as an important player in the characterization of RNA structural ensembles, with solution-state techniques accounting for almost half of deposited RNA structures in the PDB, yet the rate of RNA structure publication has been stagnant over the past decade. Several bottlenecks limit the pace of RNA structure determination by NMR: the high cost of isotopic labeling, tedious and ambiguous resonance assignment methods, and a limited database of RNA optimized pulse programs. We have addressed some of these challenges to NMR characterization of RNA structure with applications to various RNA-drug targets. These approaches will increasingly become integral to designing new therapeutics targeting RNA.

The Effect of Architecture and Shear Stress on Endothelialization of 3D Printed Vascular Networks

Despite significant progress in the field of tissue engineering within the last decade, a number of unsolved problems still remain. One of the most relevant issues is the lack of proper vascularization that limits the size of engineered tissues to smaller than clinically relevant dimensions. In particular, the growth of engineered tissue in vitro within bioreactors is plagued with this challenge. Specifically, the tubular perfusion system bioreactor has been used for large scale bone constructs; however these engineered constructs lack inherent vasculature and quickly develop a hypoxic core, where no nutrient exchange can occur, thus leading to cell death. Through the use of 3D printed vascular templates in conjunction with a tubular perfusion system bioreactor, we attempt to create an endothelial cell monolayer on 3D scaffolds that could potentially serve as the foundation of inherent vasculature within these engineered bone grafts.

TESTING THE JOINT ROLES OF CAREER DECISION SELF-EFFICACY AND PERSONALITY TRAITS IN THE PREDICTION OF CAREER INDECISION

Career decision-making self-efficacy and the Big Five traits of neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness were examined as predictors of career indecision in a sample of 181 undergraduates. Participants completed an online survey. I predicted that the Big Five traits and career decision-making self-efficacy would (a) interrelate moderately and (b) each relate significantly and moderately to career indecision. In addition, I predicted that career decision-making self-efficacy would partially mediate the relationships between the Big Five traits and career indecision, while the Big Five traits were predicted to moderate the relationship between career decision-making self-efficacy and career indecision. Finally, I predicted that career decision-making self-efficacy would account for a greater amount of unique variance in career indecision than the Big Five traits. All predicted correlations were significant. Career decision-making self-efficacy fully mediated the relationship of Extraversion to career indecision and partially mediated the relationships of Neuroticism and Conscientiousness to career indecision. Conscientiousness was found to moderate the relationship of career decision-making self-efficacy to career indecision such that the negative relation between self-efficacy and career indecision was stronger in the presence of high conscientiousness. This study builds upon existing research on the prediction of career indecision by examining potential mediating and moderating relationships.