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Urban and peri-urban agriculture in the global food security conundrum
No full textFirst paragraph:
Rural exodus and increased urbanization have led to the development of urban slums in major cities across the world, resulting in food insecurity. Food deserts and food pantries are cropping up in the developed world as famine and malnutrition ravage parts of the developing world, exacerbated by endless conflicts. Therefore, food systems and value chains are facing pressures and are increasingly vulnerable due to strains on natural ecosystems and the impact of climate change. These strains have impacted not only land use, but also soil quality, leading to reduced quantity and quality of food available at reasonable costs to the urban poor. Thus, there is an urgent need for creative methods of food production in the urban centers to improve the sustainable food supply value chain. Food gardens as part of urban agriculture have the potential to mitigate the rise in hunger and food insecurity as it has inherent health, socio-cultural, environmental, and economic benefits as documented by Lawson (2005) and in Soleri, Cleveland, and Smith’s Food Gardens for a Changing World. Urban food gardens provide fresh, nutritious food that alleviates hunger and improves the health and wellbeing of the local community—plus any excess produce can be sold for additional income. Food gardens improve urban environmental quality and carbon footprint, and add value as places of community connection, networking, and empowerment
Research methods for STEM librarians: Perspectives from a narrative inquiry angle
Get PDFAs Librarians, we are expected and required to conduct research so as to contribute to the advancement of the profession and the global knowledge base in Library, Archival, Museum and Information Science. A review of the research methodology used in the top ranking journals in Library and Information Science (LIS) research, shows a predominance of traditional descriptive qualitative research with surveys as the main data collection method. However, the ensuing results from this type of research and data usage merely tell just part of the whole story while a lot more useful information could be gleaned using other elements in a narrative inquiry methodology – ways in which humans experience the world, in this case, the Library and Information Sciences (LIS) world. Qualitative observational research describes and classifies various cultural, racial, and / or sociological groups by employing interpretive and naturalistic approaches. It is both observational and narrative in nature and relies less on the experimental elements normally associated with scientific research. Results from this study shows that a more holistic picture emerges when we utilize more ways of data collection (triangulation) and this certainly has far reaching implications on the quality of research carried out in the LIS profession. The beauty of narrative inquiry lies not only in the social construction of knowledge but also in our ability to present results in different genres such as fiction, poetry, performance art and art, providing more points for connection in order to reach a wider audience
Hispanics and Lifelong Learning: Libraries at Crossroads?
Get PDFThis was presented at the Hispanics in the Southwest: Immigration, Education, Health, and Public Policy Conference held at Texas Tech University.Libraries have traditionally been and remain the place where people of all ages seek and find information, develop the love of reading, advance the pursuit of knowledge while enhancing their quality of life
Promoting information literacy skills within the Bindura University community. An all-inclusive approach
No full textTeaching information/media/digital literacy to our students, faculty, staff and community users is core to the mission of the Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE). Though homogenous by race, we are a diverse academic community that strives to support inclusive excellence in our teaching, research and outreach endeavors.
One on one instructions to students, one shot classes in the libraries, is offered by faculty librarians or a la carte as needed, at the behest of faculty members for specific classes or research groups. We also have the semester long Communication module where we teach a section on Information Literacy.
Additionally, we offer specific training to primary/secondary school librarians and teacher librarians who run media literacy centers in their schools. They come in as a cohort for a specific period of time and return to their schools where we continue offering virtual support to enable them keep up to date and provide much needed services to their communities.
The challenges of “Information infrastructure” including cost of access to Internet, low bandwidth, low ICT skills, technophobia and technological determinism continue to mar our efforts. Despite these challenges, we forge ahead with quality services to our library users and patrons through inculcating critical information literacy skills to our diverse audience
Science Librarian and Faculty Collaboration to enhance Information Literacy and critical thinking skills in Undergraduate and Graduate students in the STEM fields
No full textResearch is an art and a science that can be taught and learned and how students develop into budding scientists is a function of so many variables working together alongside their desire to work hard with or without supervision and dream big. Students new to the scientific research process find reading scholarly papers challenging and many professors do not have the time to explain the process, concentrating on training them with the skills necessary to conduct experiments in the lab. The embedded librarian model involves placing subject specialist librarians in partnership with individual faculty or research groups or class cohorts as in honors colleges, which will utilize their knowledge and expertise. Science Librarians would be involved in supporting curriculum development, library tours and database demonstrations during class sessions or one shot sessions; workshops and seminars on topics of common interest such as scholarly communications or issues related to information ethics; consultation with students on research assignments, information literacy instructions for or without credit; collaborating on flipped learning sessions etc. Unfortunately this type of faculty-librarian collaboration is not the norm across board in tertiary institutions. This paper reflects on the strategy that has been used for the last three years with biology faculty at Texas Tech University and evaluates the results of the pre and post survey administered to students plus their personal testimonies via email to the librarian. The results show an improvement in student’s ability to identify resources, a better understanding of information ethics and more importantly knowing where to go for help. Therefore collaboration between Science Librarian and STEM Faculty is very encouraged as it would facilitate enhancing not only Information Literacy and critical thinking skills but also inculcating lifelong learning skills in the students. The potential cost benefit analysis for the librarian, faculty, students and the university in scholarly productivity is highly positive
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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