347 research outputs found
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Tilling the garden of joy/sorrow: A poetic inquiry into the rhizomatic complexities of growing into and through collective spaces
No full textA pilot research project turned ongoing program sought to explore the experience of participating in an inclusive Campus Community Garden. In the confines of institutional research the project undertook a specific focus on uncovering the perceived benefits and barriers to participating preschoolers, older adults, individuals with mixed abilities and their caregivers from residential and intermediate care facilities. This paper describes a parallel exploration as an occurrent act of art making; an evolving rhizomatic process of poetic reflection on images and privileged notes from the field. In this work, the authors uncover the shape, movement, and colour of the joy/sorrow of tilling the garden through creative expression
An Exploration into the Recruitment and Retention Strategies of Female Officers at the Calgary Police Service: Are Female Officers Overlooked Within the Promotional Process?
No full textSince the beginning, policing has been a male-dominated para-military profession. Through the increasing participation of women in the workforce, policing has and continues to grow as a diverse organization. This research is focused on the position of women in the police hierarchy in relation to their positive and negative experiences. Using only secondary data, this study builds onto existing information concerning female officers within the Calgary Police Service. Additionally, this thesis demonstrates the theoretical context of the glass ceiling and functionalist theories in the examination of female participation in the police promotional process
LIS Practitioner-focused Research Trends Toward Open Access Journals, Academic-focused Research Toward Traditional Journals [Evidence Summary]
No full textA Review of:
Chang, Y-W. (2017). Comparative study of characteristics of authors between open access and non-open access journals in library and information science. Library & Information Science Research, 39(1), 8-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2017.01.002
Objective – To examine the occupational characteristics and publication habits of library and information science (LIS) authors regarding traditional journals and open access journals.
Design – Content analysis.
Setting – English language research articles published in open access (OA) journals and non-open access (non-OA) journals from 2008 to 2013 that are indexed in LIS databases.
Subjects – The authorship characteristics for 3,472 peer-reviewed articles.
Methods – This researcher identified 33 total journals meeting the inclusion criteria by using the LIS categories within 2012 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to find 13 appropriate non-OA journals, and within the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to identify 20 appropriate OA journals. They found 1,665 articles by 3,186 authors published in the non-OA journals, and another 1,807 articles by 3,446 authors within the OA journals.
The researcher used author affiliation to determine article authors’ occupations using information included in the articles themselves or by looking for information on the Internet, and excluded articles when occupational information could not be located. Authors were categorized into four occupational categories: Librarians (practitioners), Academics (faculty and researchers), Students (graduate or undergraduate), and Others. Using these categories, the author identified 10 different types of collaborations for co-authored articles.
Main Results – This research involves three primary research questions. The first examined the occupational differences between authors publishing in OA journals versus non-OA journals. Academics (faculty and researchers) more commonly published in non-OA journals (58.1%) compared to OA journals (35.6%). The inverse was true for librarian practitioners, who were more likely to publish in OA journals (53.9%) compared to non-OA journals (25.5%). Student authors, a combined category that included both graduate and undergraduate students, published more in non-OA journals (10.1%) versus in OA journals (5.0%). The final category of “other” saw only a slight difference between non-OA (6.3%) and OA (5.5%) publication venues.
This second research question explored the difference in the proportion of LIS authors who published in OA and non-OA journals. Overall, authors were more likely to publish in OA journals (72.4%) vs. non-OA (64.3%). Librarians tended to be primary authors in OA journals, while LIS academics tend to be primary authors for articles in non-OA publications. Academics from outside the LIS discipline but contributing to the disciplinary literature were more likely to publish in non-OA journals. Regarding trends over time, this research showed a decrease in the percentage of librarian practitioners and “other” authors publishing in OA journals, while academics and students increased their OA contributions rates during the same period.
Finally, the research explored whether authors formed different types of collaborations when publishing in OA journals as compared to non-OA journals. When examining co-authorship of articles, just over half of all articles published in OA journals (54.4%) and non-OA journals (53.2%) were co-authored. Overall the researcher identified 10 types of collaborative relationships and examined the rates for publishing in OA versus non-OA journals for these relationships. OA journals saw three main relationships, with high levels of collaborations between practitioner librarians (38.6% of collaborations), between librarians and academics (20.5%), and between academics only (18.0%). Non-OA journals saw four main relationships, with collaborations between academics appearing most often (34.1%), along with academic-student collaborations (21.5%), practitioner librarian collaborations (15.5%), and librarian-academic collaborations (13.2%).
Conclusion – LIS practitioner-focused research tends to appear more often in open access journals, while academic-focused researcher tends to appear more often in non-OA journals. These trends also appear in research collaborations, with co-authored works involving librarians appearing more often in OA journals, and collaborations that include academics more likely to appear in non-OA journals
Creating Information Literacy Competencies for Psychology Undergraduates
No full textThis webinar presentation was delivered to the Psychology Librarians Canada group. The presentation outlines a SoTL project which aims to discover students' information literacy competencies in the Psychology undergraduate program at Mount Royal, and discusses how these competencies could be used to develop a scaffolded information literacy program
Dog-bites, rabies and One Health: Towards a coordinated agenda for research, policy and practice
No full textDog-bites and rabies are neglected problems worldwide, notwithstanding recent efforts to raise awareness and to consolidate preventive action. As problems, dog-bites and rabies are entangled with one another, and both align with the concept of One Health. This concept emphasizes interdependence between humans and non-human species in complex socio-ecological systems. Despite intuitive appeal, One Health applications and critiques remain under-developed with respect to social science and social justice. In this article, we report on an ethnographic case-study of policies on dog bites and rabies, with a focus on Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which is widely recognized as a leader in animal-control policies. The fieldwork took place between 2013 and 2016. Our analysis suggests that current policies on rabies prevention may come at the expense of a ‘bigger picture’ for One Health. In that ‘bigger picture,’ support is needed to enhance coordination between animal-control and public-health policies. Such coordination has direct relevance for the well-being of children, not least Indigenous children
Survival Analysis of Canadian Oil and Gas Firms
No full textIn the context of oil price fluctuations inducing boom and bust cycles, this empirical study is a survival analysis of the Canadian oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) industry. The population includes 540 public Canadian E&P firms that have their headquarters and production activity in Canada, and the data covers the periods of Q1-2002 to Q1-2016 representing over 15,850 firm-quarter observations. The method is an extended Cox model with repeating events, allowing for the use of time-varying predictor variables and the analysis is executed in R, a free statistical software. The study introduces a new definition of financial distress as two consecutive quarters of negative operating cash flow to total assets ratio, develops a baseline model with financial ratios and industry-specific covariates and tests three hypotheses. The first two hypotheses examine the extent to which hedging and company size respectively correlate to the state of financial distress, and the third hypothesis explores how being financially distressed contributes to being a target in a merger and acquisitions (M&A) transaction. The findings show that a hedging firm is 18.5 times less exposed to the hazard of financial distress than a non-hedging firm; and with each unit size increase, a firm is 1.18 times less likely to experience financial distress, but financial distress is not a valid predictor of the hazard of being an M&A target. This study provides a new perspective supporting the use of hedging and size increase for increasing corporate resilience in Canadian oil and gas firms
The Representation of Library Value in Extra-Institutional Evaluations of University Quality
No full textThe ways in which university quality assessments are developed reveal a great deal about value constructs surrounding higher education. Measures developed and consumed by external stakeholders, in particular, indicate which elements of academia are broadly perceived to be most reflective of quality. This paper examines the historical context of library quality assessment and reviews the literature related to how library value is framed in three forms of external evaluation: accreditation, university rankings, and student surveys. The review finds that the library’s contribution to university quality, when it is considered at all, continues to be measured in terms of collections, spaces, and expenditures, despite significant expansion of library services into non-traditional arenas, including teaching and research, scholarly communications, and data management and visualization. These findings are contrasted with the frequently invoked notion of the library as the heart of the university
Conscious Connections: Phenomenology and Decoding the Disciplines
No full textThis chapter describes how seven disciplinary bottlenecks from four diverse disciplines were analyzed using a phenomenological perspective and includes a discussion of embodied knowing and implications for educators
Intuitions and Instincts: Considerations for Decoding Disciplinary Identities
No full textDeciphering teachers’ paths to their disciplinary professional identities can make important elements of their tacit knowledge explicit and available to their students
Impact of Decoding Work within a Professional Program
No full textThis chapter demonstrates how Decoding work can be productively utilized within a curriculum change process to help make design decisions based on a more nuanced understanding of student learning, and the relationship of a professional program to the field