Librarians Do It Differently: Comparative Usability Testing with Students and Library Staff

Librarians Do It Differently: Comparative Usability Testing with Students and Library Staff

Sex Chromosomes Do It Differently

Organisms are finely tuned systems that are resilient to perturbations but that must maintain some constants. For example, within the genome, the ratio between different gene products must be tightly constrained to ensure stoichiometric assembly of protein complexes and the like. Evolution has honed expression levels so that as long as there is the same number of chromosomes per cell, the relat...

Birds Do It, Bees Do It, but Candida albicans Does It Differently

The yeast Candida albicans lives an unnoticed and mostly harmless life as a member of our gut flora. However, mainly in an immunocompromised host, it can proliferate and cause severe, life-threatening infections. Within this normally mild-mannered, single-celled fungus beats the heart of a reproductive adventurer. For while it appears to be incapable of meiosis and therefore true sex, it engage...

Clarifying Jurisdiction in the Library Workforce: Tasks, Support Staff, and Professional Librarians

Jurisdiction refers to those tasks or responsibilities that are seen as central to and exclusively controlled by a profession. When library work is examined, what is the proper jurisdiction for professional, masters-level librarians? This study examines the definition of professional with respect to library workers by using data from a national survey of competencies for library support staff a...

Academic Library Support Staff Competencies: What Should Support Staff Know and Be Able to Do?

Rachel Applegate is Assistant Professor at Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, Indianapolis; e-mail: [email protected] Over half of all non-student employees of academic libraries are support staff. What competencies should these workers possess? To what extent are these competencies similar across library departments and across library types—in what ways do they diff...