Developing a model of library user education for freshman science students

Discusses the cooperative effort between librarians and science faculty at Bucknell University in developing an effective library use education course for incoming undergraduate science and engineering students. Describes course structure and activities, and includes a library instruction bibliography. (five references) (EA)

Library support for science research and education at Bucknell University: pulling it all together

Based on the Ricker/Witmer survey on Library Support for Science Research and Education, a brief statistical analysis of the Bucknell University community and library support for science and engineering research and education is provided. The position and responsibilities of Reference Librarian/Coordinator of Science and Engineering Resources in the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library are detailed. Throughout the article, I describe the motivation and justification for an integrated university library collection, which serves not only the Science and Engineering faculty and students, but the entire Bucknell University community. The issues of finance and budget, public service, and information access and delivery in relation to a central university library are discussed.

Engineering Design: the Information Component

The curriculum of the Bucknell University Chemical Engineering Department includes a required senior year capstone course titled Process Engineering, with an emphasis on process design. For the past ten years library research has been a significant component of the coursework, and students working in teams meet with the librarian throughout the semester to explore a wide variety of information resources required for their project. The assignment has been the same from 1989 to 1999. Teams of students are responsible for designing a safe, efficient, and profitable process for the dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene monomer. A series of written reports on their chosen process design is a significant course outcome. While the assignment and the specific chemical technology have not changed radically in the past decade, the process of research and discovery has evolved considerably. This paper describes the solutions offered in 1989 to meet the information needs of the chemical engineering students at Bucknell University, and the evolution in research brought about by online databases, electronic journals, and the Internet, making the process of discovery a completely different experience in 1999.

Introduction to E-Science

An introduction to computationally-enabled science, challenges, and opportunities.

Data Management Policies and Issues with Life Science Data

Data management and sharing are relatively new concepts in the health and life sciences fields. This presentation will cover some basic policies as well as the impediments to data sharing unique to health and life sciences data.

Compliance: E-Science Mandates and Policies

Data collected under federally funded research is subject to compliance rules and regulations. Policies affecting what you can and cannot do with your data, who is responsible, and what role your institution plays can vary with funding agencies and the type of data collected. This talk will address many of the compliance issues associated with research data, as well as funder mandates that you need to be aware of to ensure compliance.

Information Management and Mediation in a Digital Reference Service Focused in Social Sciences

This paper investigates the current relationship between information management and information mediation along with the digital reference service through a case study which took place in an academic library. The concept of information mediation is herein analyzed, since a conceptual examination provides elements that will help people to comprehend and evaluate the concerned service. The information professional plays a very important role in the mediation aforementioned, which may be directly or indirectly; consciously or unconsciously; by himself/herself or plurally; individually or inserted into a group ? in all such manners that mediator facilitates the acquisition of information, fully or partially satisfying a user?s need of all sorts of knowledge. Meanwhile, we here approach information management from a scope that points out a description over performed activities concerned to policies and procedures put into effect until the service evaluation by proposing a criterion for such point. Finally, we outline a few actions to be implemented in long-term perspective, which goal is to continually ameliorate such assistance, taking in account the human factor

Information Management and Mediation in a Digital Reference Service Focused in Social Sciences

This paper investigates the current relationship between information management and information mediation along with the digital reference service through a case study which took place in an academic library. The concept of information mediation is herein analyzed, since a conceptual examination provides elements that will help people to comprehend and evaluate the concerned service. The information professional plays a very important role in the mediation aforementioned, which may be directly or indirectly; consciously or unconsciously; by himself/herself or plurally; individually or inserted into a group ? in all such manners that mediator facilitates the acquisition of information, fully or partially satisfying a user?s need of all sorts of knowledge. Meanwhile, we here approach information management from a scope that points out a description over performed activities concerned to policies and procedures put into effect until the service evaluation by proposing a criterion for such point. Finally, we outline a few actions to be implemented in long-term perspective, which goal is to continually ameliorate such assistance, taking in account the human factor

Information Management and Mediation in a Digital Reference Service Focused in Social Sciences

This paper investigates the current relationship between information management and information mediation along with the digital reference service through a case study which took place in an academic library. The concept of information mediation is herein analyzed, since a conceptual examination provides elements that will help people to comprehend and evaluate the concerned service. The information professional plays a very important role in the mediation aforementioned, which may be directly or indirectly; consciously or unconsciously; by himself/herself or plurally; individually or inserted into a group ? in all such manners that mediator facilitates the acquisition of information, fully or partially satisfying a user?s need of all sorts of knowledge. Meanwhile, we here approach information management from a scope that points out a description over performed activities concerned to policies and procedures put into effect until the service evaluation by proposing a criterion for such point. Finally, we outline a few actions to be implemented in long-term perspective, which goal is to continually ameliorate such assistance, taking in account the human factor

Mutual Information and Perplexity based Clustering of Dialogue Information for Dynamic Adaptation of Language Models

We present two approaches to cluster dialogue-based information obtained by the speech understanding module and the dialogue manager of a spoken dialogue system. The purpose is to estimate a language model related to each cluster, and use them to dynamically modify the model of the speech recognizer at each dialogue turn. In the first approach we build the cluster tree using local decisions based on a Maximum Normalized Mutual Information criterion. In the second one we take global decisions, based on the optimization of the global perplexity of the combination of the cluster-related LMs. Our experiments show a relative reduction of the word error rate of 15.17%, which helps to improve the performance of the understanding and the dialogue manager modules.

What We Are Learning About the Diverse Backgrounds of Academic Library Users: An Overview of Research Designs and Methods in Information Behaviour Studies

Academic libraries increasingly serve a more diverse population of users not only in regard to race and ethnicity, but also to age, gender, language, sexual orientation, and national and cultural backgrounds. This papers reports the findings of the study that explored information behaviour research as a potential source of information about diversity of academic library users and examined the relationship between the use of different research designs and data collection methods and the information gathered about users’ diverse backgrounds. The study found that information behaviour research offers limited insight into the diversity of academic library users. The choice of a research design was not critical but the use of multiple data collection played a role in gathering information about culturally diverse users.