The telling of stories lies at the heart of human communication. In this important new book Peter Brophy introduces and explains the concept of story-telling or narrative-based practice in teaching, research, professional practice and organizations. He illustrates the deficiencies in evidence-based practice models, which focus on quantitative rather than qualitative evidence, and highlights the importance of narrative by drawing on insights from fields as disparate as pedagogy, anthropolog...

Service design is a holistic, co-creative, and user-centered approach to understanding user behavior for creating or refining services.Use this LITA Guide to help as a toolkit for implementing service design studies and projects at all types of libraries. It begins with directions for how to create a service design team and assembling a user working group for your library and move through the various phases in a service design journey. The authors outline the tools required to gain...

The unconventional computing is a niche for interdisciplinary science, cross-bred of computer science, physics, mathematics, chemistry, electronic engineering, biology, material science and nanotechnology. The aims of this book are to uncover and exploit principles and mechanisms of information processing in and functional properties of physical, chemical and living systems to develop efficient algorithms, design optimal architectures and manufacture working prototypes of future and emerge...

Serials Binding: A Simple and Complete Guidebook to Processes presents all the step-by-step information needed to begin a journal binding project. This essential handbook provides novice faculty and staff beginning bindery programs at any school or library with a useful history of binding, work flow information, and vendor information. Practical and concise, this guide explains the entire process in easy-to-understand terms, including comprehensive strategies for each critical sta...

Today's tech-savvy and digitally connected students present a new challenge for today's school librarians. This book offers the 21st-century tools and know-how necessary for educators to appeal to and challenge students to learn—and to want to learn.What are the best ways to motivate students to become engaged and develop a passion for learning? Can appealing to their desire for socialization and constant communication—attributes of their lives outside of education...

This volume is unusual in that the theme is quite broad in scope yet focused on a specific topic; innovations and boundary-pushing studies in areas not usually found in library literature. It represents a look at the periphery of the field surveyed in previous volumes and presents chapters grouped into two categories: professional issues and transforming services. First section chapters include the challenges facing librarians in an age of litigiousness and threats to academic freedom, edu...

The safe management of the complex distributed systems and critical infrastructures which constitute the backbone of modern industry and society entails identifying and quantifying their vulnerabilities to design adequate protection, mitigation, and emergency action against failure. In practice, there is no fail-safe solution to such problems and various frameworks are being proposed to effectively integrate different methods of complex systems analysis in a problem-driven approach to thei...

Public libraries have strangely never been the subject of an extensive design history. Consequently, this important and comprehensive book represents a ground-breaking socio-architectural study of pre-1939 public library buildings. A surprisingly high proportion of these urban civic buildings remain intact and present an increasingly difficult architectural problem for many communities. The book thus includes a study of what is happening to these historic libraries now and proposes that kn...

This book systematically presents a comprehensive framework and effective techniques for in-depth analysis, clear design procedure, and efficient implementation of diagnosis and prognosis algorithms for hybrid systems. It offers an overview of the fundamentals of diagnosis\prognosis and hybrid bond graph modeling. This book also describes hybrid bond graph-based quantitative fault detection, isolation and estimation. Moreover, it also presents strategies to track the system mode and predic...

International authority control will soon be a reality. Examine the projects that are moving the information science professions in that direction today!In Authority Control in Organizing and Accessing Information: Definition and International Experience, international experts examine the state of the art and explore new theoretical perspectives. This essential resource, which has its origins in the International Conference on Authority Control (Italy, 2003), addresses standards, e...

Academic Crowdsourcing in the Humanities lays the foundations for a theoretical framework to understand the value of crowdsourcing, an avenue that is increasingly becoming important to academia as the web transforms collaboration and communication and blurs institutional and professional boundaries. Crowdsourcing projects in the humanities have, for the most part, focused on the generation or enhancement of content in a variety of ways, leveraging the rich resources of knowledge, creativit...

The purpose of this primer is to provide the basics of the Finite Element Method, primarily illustrated through a classical model problem, linearized elasticity. The topics covered are:• Weighted residual methods and Galerkin approximations,• A model problem for one-dimensional linear elastostatics,• Weak formulations in one dimension,• Minimum principles in one dimension,• Error estimation in one dimension,• Construction of Finite Element ba...