Beyond 'Show & Tell': Working with Faculty to Design Meaningful Archives-based Assignments for Undergraduates

Poster session given at Association of College & Research Libraries Conference in Portland, Oregon, March 25-28, 2015UT Librarie

Intellectualizing the everyday : the genre paintings of Adriaen Brouwer

textFlemish painter Adriaen Brouwer (1605/06-1638) spent the most productive years (1626-1627) of his short career working in Haarlem as a member of the city's most popular "Rederijkerskamer" (chamber of rhetoric), "De Wijngaartrancken" (the vine tendrils). Brouwer dwells in his genre scenes on the peculiarities of Dutch culture - its character, institutions, ideas and customs. It is in Brouwer's genre scenes, prized by both Rubens and Rembrandt, that we may note remarkable influences of Holland's new artistic self-awareness. These ideas were propelled by the activities of the Rederijkers. This paper focuses on the intellectual environment of Holland from the year ca.1600 to ca.1630 covering the period surrounding the publication of Karel van Mander's treatise on painting to the explosion of genre painting occurring in the first half of the seventeenth-century. It is my contention that Brouwer's artistic choices are symptomatic of his participation in intellectual milieus. A focused discussion of the writings, traditions and activities of the Rederijkers (and other intellectual sources) reveals consistencies with the prevalent trends in genre painting produced contemporaneously.Art Histor

Creation of a Curatorial Plan for the RIT Archives: A Case Study of the Frans Wildenhain Ceramic Collection

Professionals in museums, archives, and libraries have a responsibility to maintain the quality of their collections so that the general public and scholars can enjoy and benefit from them. As such, any institution that holds, or displays objects for any period of time should have a curatorial plan in place that describes the necessary care, conservation, and preservation of those items. Without such a plan, museum professionals and their collections suffer. This thesis recognizes the importance of such documentation. In the absence of a curatorial care plan for the Wildenhain Ceramic Collection, I have created one. This collection is housed in the Wallace Center Archives at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Along with the curatorial care plan, a formalized method of condition reporting was created and implemented for the use in the collection. The Wildenhain Ceramic Collection consists of 330 pieces of contemporary ceramic work, from which a sample of forty pieces were used to assess the overall condition of the collection. After condition reporting and assessing the collection, I created a plan that provides an overview of the types of damage seen, ascribes possible causes, as well as makes recommendations on how to care for the collection. In addition, recommendations on storage and condition reporting are included

Cut! How assessing student learning helped us focus our video production

Library Instruction Services at UT Austin is faced with the challenge of making sure 8,000 new students achieve a set of basic information literacy learning outcomes each year. In order to maximize the time we spend in the classroom as well as to meet students at their points of need, we began creating videos aimed at teaching students concepts and skills ranging from understanding the importance of background information to finding the full-text of articles. We planned and recorded the videos following best practices, and began including them in pre-session assignments for students and stand-alone research guides. Our web analytics told us that the videos were being used, but the question remained: did students achieve the desired learning outcomes after watching the videos? Approach: In order to answer this question, we recruited 10 first-year students at the beginning of the fall semester to participate in a video assessment project to measure their learning after watching one of the two most widely used videos we created. In individual sessions, student volunteers were asked to think aloud as they completed a pre-test composed of a series of tasks that mirrored the process of finding materials for a typical first-year assignment, and then watched a video walking them through the steps of either finding an article or finding a book on a topic. After watching the video, students were asked to walk through the same series of tasks as before, again thinking aloud and explaining their decisions as they did so. Findings: In the pre-test, only two of five students fulfilled the learning outcomes tied to the video on finding an article for a paper, and four of five students fulfilled the learning outcomes tied to the video on finding a book. In the posttest, four of five students successfully found a relevant article, and four of five students found and explained how to retrieve a relevant book. By analyzing students' comments and performance, we learned that our videos were more successful in teaching conceptual ideas (such as where different kinds of information would be published, or how to brainstorm keywords) than in demonstrating navigation or click-by-click instruction. Practical Implications: Even though our assessment project had a very small sample size, we learned valuable information that has helped us make decisions about the videos we create. In the future, we will focus on creating videos that explain and reinforce complex ideas and difficult concepts (such as evaluating information) or provide real-life visuals (such as finding a call number in the stacks) rather than screencasts that demonstrate tools. This will allow us to spend more time designing instructional tools that aim to help students understand threshold concepts and less time recording screencasts of changing database interfaces. As instruction increasingly moves online, it is essential to know which formats work best for different kinds of learning, and how to focus our energy on providing the most value. After assessing the learning outcomes in our videos, we know how to better facilitate deeper learning.UT Librarie

Analisis Penggunaan Keigo Dalam Interaksi Jual Beli Di Jepang

Penelitian ini menganalisis penggunaan keigo dalam interaksi jual beli di Jepang. Keigo adalah ungkapan rasa hormat yang digunakan penutur terhadap mitra tutur berdasarkan status sosial dan tingkat keakraban lawan bicara. Tujuan penelitian adalah untuk mendeskripsikan bentuk tuturan yang digunakan oleh penjual terhadap pembeli dalam interaksi jual beli dan faktor sosial yang melatarbelakangi. Jenis penelitian ini merupakan penelitian deskripstif kualitatif. Data dan sumber data yang digunakan bersifat alami yang diambil dari reality show, dokumenter dan video-video yang nyata menggambarkan kehidupan masyarakat Jepang, berupa percakapan yang mengandung ungkapan futsuukei dan keigo. Teknik pengumpulan data menggunakan teknik simak dan catat. Berdasarkan hasil analisis dari 20 data, terdapat 6 data dengan 6 penanda bentuk futsuukei, 4 data dengan 3 penanda bentuk sonkeigo, 2 data dengan 3 penanda bentuk kenjougo, dan 8 data dengan 6 penanda bentuk teineigo. Faktor sosial yang melatarbelakangi, yaitu 人間関係 ningen kankei (hubungan antara penjual dan pembeli), 年齢 nenrei (usia), dan 場 ba (tempat)

An HPLC-automated Derivatization for Glutathione and Related Thiols Analysis in Brassica rapa L

The high content of glucosinolates and glutathione makes the Brassicaceae an important healthy food. Thiols and especially glutathione and γ-Glu-Cys-Gly tripeptide are involved in many fundamental cellular functions such as oxidative stress protection. Although several methods for sulphur compounds analysis in biological samples are actually used, the determination of glutathione and other sulphur derivatives in plant tissues is rather problematic due to their extreme susceptibility to oxidation, which can lead to their overestimation. The aim of this work was the improvement and validation of an automated method for determination of reduced and oxidised glutathione, cysteine and γ-glutamylcysteine in plant tissues. The method consists of a fully automated pre-column derivatization of thiols based on monobromobimane reagent, a high-performance liquid chromatography derivatives separation, and a fluorimetric detection and quantification. The method was successfully applied for determination of the oxidized and reduced forms of Cys, γ-GC and GSH content in leaves, petioles, inflorescences and roots of Brassica rapa L. subsp. Sylvestris. At harvest, in freshly cut plants, the average contents of GSH/2GSSG were 840/45, 345/70 and 150/70 nmol g−1 FW for the florets, leaf blades and stems, respectively; those of Cys/2Cys were 80/12, 29/12 and 24/6 nmol g-1 FW; while those of γ-GC/γ-GCCG-γ were 8.0/4.0, and 6.0/3.0, 3.0/2.0 nmol g−1 FW, respectively. Such amounts were lower in low-sulphur-grown plants at harvest. The very low coefficient of variation between repeated tests (maximum 1.6%), the high recovery of internal standard (>96%) and the linear correlation coefficient of the calibration (R2 > 0.99) support the efficiency of this method that allowed analysing about 50 samples/die in a totally automated manner with no operator intervention. Our results show that the reported method integrations can significantly improve thiols detection via HPL

Assessing the experience of using synthetic cannabinoids by means of interpretative phenomenological analysis

BACKGROUND: New psychoactive substances (NPS) have been increasingly consumed by people who use drugs in recent years, which pose a new challenge for treatment services. One of the largest groups of NPS is synthetic cannabinoids (SCs), which are intended as a replacement to cannabis. While there is an increasing body of research on the motivation and the effects associated with SC use, little is known about the subjective interpretation of SC use by the people who use drugs themselves. The aim of this study was to examine the experiences and personal interpretations of SC use of users who were heavily dependent on SC and are in treatment. METHODS: A qualitative research method was applied in order to explore unknown and personal aspects of SC use. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six participants who had problematic SC use and entered treatment. The research was conducted in Hungary in 2015. We analyzed data using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). RESULTS: Participants perceived SCs to be unpredictable: their initial positive experiences quickly turned negative. They also reported that SCs took over their lives both interpersonally and intrapersonally: the drug took their old friends away, and while initially it gave them new ones, in the end it not only made them asocial but the drug became their only friend, it hijacked their personalities and made them addicted. CONCLUSIONS: Participants experienced rapid development of effects and they had difficulties interpreting or integrating these experiences. The rapid alteration of effects and experiences may explain the severe psychopathological symptoms, which may be important information for harm reduction and treatment services. Since, these experiences are mostly unknown and unpredictable for people who use SCs, a forum where they could share their experiences could have a harm reducing role. For a harm reduction point of view of SCs, which are underrepresented in literature, it is important to emphasize the impossibility of knowing the quantity, purity, or even the number of different SC compounds in a particular SC product. Our study findings suggest that despite the adverse effects, including a rapid turn of experiences to negative, rapid development of addiction and withdrawal symptoms of SCs, participants continued using the drug because this drug was mostly available and cheap. Therefore, a harm reduction approach would be to make available and legal certain drugs that have less adverse effects and could cause less serious dependence and withdrawal symptoms, with controlled production and distribution (similarly to cannabis legalization in the Netherlands)