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  • A taste of cell-cultured meat: a scoping review
    To, K. V.; Comer, C. Cozette; O'Keefe, Sean F.; Lahne, Jacob (Frontiers, 2024-01-23)
    Cell-cultured meat (CM) is a novel meat product grown in vitro from animal cells, widely framed as equivalent to conventional meat but presented as produced in a more sustainable way. Despite its limited availability for human consumption, consumer acceptance of CM (e.g., willingness to purchase and consume) has been extensively investigated. A key but under-investigated assumption of these studies is that CM’s sensory qualities are comparable to conventional, equivalent meat products. Therefore, the current review aims to clarify what is actually known about the sensory characteristics of CM and their potential impact on consumer acceptance. To this end, a structured scoping review of existing, peer-reviewed literature on the sensory evaluation of CM was conducted according to the PRISMA-ScR and Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines. Among the included studies (N = 26), only 5 conducted research activities that could be termed “sensory evaluation,” with only 4 of those 5 studies evaluating actual CM products in some form. The remaining 21 studies based their conclusions on the sensory characteristics of CM and consequent consumer acceptance to a set of hypothetical CM products and consumption experiences, often with explicitly positive information framing. In addition, many consumer acceptance studies in the literature have the explicit goal to increase the acceptance of CM, with some authors (researchers) acting as direct CM industry affiliates; this may be a source of bias on the level of consumer acceptance toward these products. By separating what is known about CM sensory characteristics and consumer acceptance from what is merely speculated, the current review reported realistic expectations of CM’s sensory characteristics within the promissory narratives of CM proponents.
  • Prisoners After War : Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration
    Higgins, Jason A. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024-03)
    The United States has both the largest, most expensive, and most powerful military and the largest, most expensive, and most punitive carceral system in the history of the world. Since the American War in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of veterans have been incarcerated after their military service. Identifying the previously unrecognized connections between American wars and mass incarceration, Prisoners after War reaches across lines of race, class, and gender to record the untold history of incarcerated veterans over the past six decades. Having conducted dozens of oral history interviews, Jason A. Higgins traces the lifelong effects of war, inequality, disability, and mental illness, and explores why hundreds of thousands of veterans, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, were caught up in the carceral system. This original study tells an intergenerational history of state-sanctioned violence, punishment, and inequality, but its pages also resonate with stories of survival and redemption, revealing future possibilities for reform and reparative justice.
  • Automatic Metadata Extraction Incorporating Visual Features from Scanned Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    Choudhury, Muntabir; Jayanetti, Himarsha R.; Wu, Jian; Ingram, William A.; Fox, Edward (IEEE, 2021-09-27)
    Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain domain knowledge that can be used for many digital library tasks, such as analyzing citation networks and predicting research trends. Automatic metadata extraction is important to build scalable digital library search engines. Most existing methods are designed for born-digital documents such as GROBID, CERMINE, and ParsCit, so they often fail to extract metadata from scanned documents such as for ETDs. Traditional sequence tagging methods mainly rely on text-based features. In this paper, we propose a conditional random field (CRF) model that combines text-based and visual features. To verify the robustness of our model, we extended an existing corpus and created a new ground truth corpus consisting of 500 ETD cover pages with human validated metadata. Our experiments show that CRF with visual features outperformed both a heuristic baseline and a CRF model with only text-based features. The proposed model achieved 81.3%-96% F1 measure on seven metadata fields. The data and source code are publicly available on Google Drive1 and a GitHub repository2.
  • Building A Large Collection of Multi-domain Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    Uddin, Sami; Banerjee, Bipasha; Wu, Jian; Ingram, William A.; Fox, Edward A. (IEEE, 2021-12-15)
    In this work, we report our progress on building a collection containing over 450k Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), including full-text and metadata. Our goal is to close the gap of accessibility between long text and short text documents, and to create a new research opportunity for the scholarly community. For that, we developed an ETD Ingestion Framework (EIF) that automatically harvests metadata and PDFs of ETDs from university libraries. We faced multiple challenges and learned many lessons during the process, that led to proposed solutions to overcome/mitigate the limitations of the current data. We also described the data that we have collected. We hope our methods will be useful for building similar collections from university libraries and that the data can be used for research and education.
  • Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) 2022
    Klein, Martin; Kelly, Mat; Xie, Zhiwu; Fox, Edward A. (IEEE, 2022-06-20)
    The 2022 edition of the Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) will explore the integration of web archiving and digital libraries. The workshop aims at addressing aspects covering the entire life cycle of digital resources, including creation/ authoring, uploading/publishing, crawling, indexing, exploration, and archiving. It will also explore areas such as archiving processes and tools for "non-Traditional" resources such as social media, scholarly and government datasets, 3D objects, and digital online art.
  • Cyberbiosecurity Workforce Preparation: Education at the Convergence of Cybersecurity and Biosecurity
    Adeoye, Samson; Lindberg, Heather; Bagby, B.; Brown, Anne M.; Batarseh, Feras; Kaufman, Eric K. (2024-01)
    Cyberbiosecurity is an emerging field at the convergence of life sciences and the digital world. As technological advances improve operational processes and expose them to vulnerabilities in agriculture and life sciences, cyberbiosecurity has become increasingly important for addressing contemporary concerns. Unfortunately, at this time, educational opportunities for cyberbiosecurity workforce preparation are limited. Stakeholders’ perceptions may help guide cyberbiosecurity workforce preparation efforts and bridge the gap from the classroom to the field. Toward this end, we identified stakeholders in education, private industry, and state agencies in [State] and sought their input through both an online survey and focus groups. Findings suggest limited awareness and understanding of cyberbiosecurity. Results indicate that both formal and non-formal learning components—including short modules and comprehensive standalone courses—are important for cyberbiosecurity education programming. Stakeholders tied potential success of education programming to systems thinking and collaborative designs. Moreover, results reveal insights into concerns at the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT), which is central to effective workforce preparation for today’s agriculture and life sciences professionals. Continuous interdisciplinary collaboration and academia-industry partnerships will be critical for developing robust cyberbiosecurity education and securing the future of agriculture.
  • Comparative Study and Expansion of Metadata Standards for Historic Fashion Collections
    Ng, Wen Nie (2023-09-27)
    The goal of the paper is to enhance the metadata standard of fashion collections by expanding the controlled vocabulary and metadata elements for Costume Core, a metadata schema designed specifically for fashion artifacts. Various techniques are employed to achieve this goal, including identifying new descriptors using word embedding similarity measurements and adding new descriptive terms for precise artifact descriptions to use when re-cataloging a university fashion collection in Costume Core. The paper also provides a sneak peek of the Model Output Confirmative Helper Application, which simplifies the vocabulary review process. Additionally, a survey was conducted to collect insights into how other fashion professionals use metadata when describing dress artifacts. The survey results reveal 1) commonly used metadata standards in the historic fashion domain; 2) sample metadata respondents use; and 3) partial potential metadata that can be appended to Costume Core, which is relevant to Virginia Tech’s Oris Glisson Historic Costume and Textile Collection. The expanded Costume Core resulting from the project offers a more comprehensive way of describing fashion collection holdings/artifacts. It has the potential to be adopted by the fashion collections to produce metadata that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
  • From OER to Open Press and Open Impact: Taking open education initiatives to the next level
    Buck, Stefanie; Brown, Allison; Elder, Abbey; Walz, Anita R.; McGuire, Hugh (2023-11-08)
    When educational institutions invest in open education, their initiatives begin in “start-up” mode grappling with awareness-building, tools, and finding early adopters willing to jump in and get things moving. As projects gain momentum, they evolve as they work to operationalize, scale, and demonstrate the impacts of open education in ways that align with institutional strategic priorities. Join this session for a thoughtful discussion with campus champions who have directed open education initiatives through stages of maturity including the “Open Press” model, a central hub for creating, managing, and sharing open learning materials and scholarship. How has the Open Press model helped them move open education to the next level? How do they define and demonstrate impact in step with broader institutional priorities? What guidance can they offer colleagues seeking to build sustainable, impactful open education projects?
  • Immersive Cross-platform X3D Training: Elevating Construction Safety Education
    Roofigari-Esfahan, Nazila; Polys, Nicholas F.; Johnson, Ashley; Ogle, J. Todd; Sandbrook, Ben (ACM, 2023-10-09)
    A multi-platform Virtual Reality (VR) approach is proposed to complement the traditional approaches for construction safety training. Visual simulations of a highway construction project were developed and presented through the developed platforms, aiming at giving students immersive experience of actual construction environments. The simulated worksite scenarios included active traffic, multiple worker roles and heavy equipment, and was rendered at different times of day and weather conditions. We used this material in an undergraduate class activity with 50 students. During a session in our visualization lab, students experienced the scenarios presenting day shift, afternoon shift with adverse weather and night shift and were asked to develop daily report of their job site observation. The scenrios were presented via the following platforms: TV projection, Mobile Phone, Head-Mounted Display (HMD), and CAVE projection room. The results demonstrates that the multi-platform immersive experience has the potential to significantly improve hazard recognition skill of construction students.
  • Discovering Poe as a Compositionist: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” and Process Theory
    McNabb, Kayla B. (2013-03-01)
    Though Poe has commonly been remembered for his contributions to the detective, horror, and science-fiction genres, we should consider how his innovation extended into other areas. This includes his critical works, such as his essay “The Philosophy of Composition.” Despite Poe’s classical training and the trends in composition instruction before and during his educational career, the theory of composition argued for in his critical essays is more analogous to the Process Theory established by compositionsts over 100 years later than the teaching methods of his time, suggesting that Poe’s concept of composition was very progressive. To truly understand Poe’s environment, we must examine the tradition that informed early nineteenth-century educational systems as well as Poe’s own academic experience. In order to discover the connections between Poe’s critical methodologies and those of later composition theorists, we must compare the preexisting notions in the field to the developments seen in composition theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.
  • Doing the Work: Developing a DEI Toolkit to Center Equity in Textbook Creation
    Blicher, Heather; Vold, Veronica (2023-10-16)
    Open Oregon Educational Resources received federal and Governor’s Emergency Education Relief funding to develop openly licensed, targeted pathway materials with an equity lens for Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS), Sociology, and Criminal Justice. This project redesigns high-enrollment courses in disciplines that lead to in-demand occupations where high-quality openly licensed course materials with an equity lens are not currently available. To support author teams, we push beyond the traditional concept of OER as an affordability tool to include a throughline that focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We developed a DEI toolkit in Pressbooks to engage participants in OER development strategies that center equity in the labor-intensive process of textbook creation and design. Recognizing the challenges of coordinating training sessions for a large project team and the need to accommodate learner variability, we created an interactive, accessible toolkit that provides participants with synchronous and asynchronous options for engagement. It is designed to be flexible, allowing team members to participate and learn at their own pace, with regular and sustained interaction with equity consultants, instructional designers, and other specialists for questions and feedback.
  • From Potential to Possibility: Virginia Tech's Journey in Developing Inclusive OER
    Grey, Kindred; Blicher, Heather (2023-10-13)
    Accessibility is an essential component in developing open educational resources (OER). It amplifies the reach and impact of OER by extending usability to a broader audience. It ensures that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can fully participate in and benefit from course materials, to perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the content effectively. This expanded audience enriches the learning experience for all and encourages collaboration, diversity, and innovation. Accompany us as we take you through Virginia Tech’s journey making open materials increasingly accessible over the years. Hear about our beginning accessibility efforts, how we are currently approaching accessibility, and features we would like to incorporate in the future. We’ll highlight standard features that make learning resources more accessible and also share a few new features that Virginia Tech’s program has incorporated, such as QR codes, podcasts, Aria tagging, and PDF remediation. We also invite diverse perspectives into the process, including individuals with disabilities and educators specializing in accessibility who provide insights on making resources more inclusive from the outset. Lastly, we’ll talk about some features that we have in the pipeline, such as offering multiple languages and audiobooks. We recognize that new user needs arise every day. Let’s use our time together to stay curious about accessibility features and build a community to support each other.
  • Human Elements in OER Work: Developing an Ethic of Hospitality and Care
    Walz, Anita R. (2023-10-13)
    For project managers and subject matter experts alike, OER projects can be labor-intensive. It can be easy to view such projects as merely functional, driven by project-management methods and production techniques. In the same way that teaching combines disciplinary facts and perspectives with social engagement, motivation, and design -- and because OER work is also with and for people -- these human aspects are an integral part of creating course materials. This brief presentation highlights several perspectives, challenges, and examples related to hospitality and care within OER creation projects related to an OER. These touch on communication strategies, roles of project managers and subject matter experts, human limitations including boundaries, burnout, and conflict, and understanding and leveraging stakeholder motivations -- including student savings, but also learning, curiosity, creativity, and the value of worthwhile work.
  • Using Altmetric Data Responsibly: A Guide to Interpretation and Good Practice
    Miles, Rachel A.; Price, Robyn (2023-10-12)
    This guide focuses specifically on data from the data provider and company, Altmetric, but other types of altmetrics are mentioned and occasionally used as a comparison in this guide, such as the Open Syllabus database to find the educational engagement with scholarly outputs. This guide opens with an introduction followed by an overview of Altmetric and the Altmetric Attention Score, Altmetrics and Responsible Research Assessment, Output Types Tracked by Altmetric, and the Altmetric Sources of Attention, which include: News and Mainstream Media, Social Media (X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Reddit, and historical data from Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Sina Weibo); Patents, Peer Review, Syllabi (historical data only), Multimedia, Public Policy Documents, Wikipedia, Research Highlights, Reference Managers, and Blogs; finally, there is a conclusion, a list of related resources and readings, two appendices, and references. This guide is intended for use by librarians, practitioners, funders, and other users of Altmetric data or those who are interested in incorporating altmetrics into their bibliometric practice and/or research analytics. It can also help researchers who are going up for annual evaluations and promotion and tenure reviews, who can use the data in informed and practical applications. It can also be a useful reference guide for research managers and university administrators who want to understand the broader online engagement with research publications beyond traditional scholarly citations, also known as bibliometrics, but who also want to avoid misusing, misinterpreting, or abusing Altmetric data when making decisions, creating policies, and evaluating faculty members and researchers at their institutions.
  • But what do you REALLY think? An OER collaborator perception survey
    Walz, Anita R.; Blicher, Heather; Grey, Kindred (2023-10-17)
    Since 2013 the Open Education Initiative (OEI) at Virginia Tech https://guides.lib.vt.edu/oer has supported faculty in exploring, adopting, adapting, creating, and freely-distributing open educational resources of various formats. In an effort to identify how to document, strengthen, streamline, and advocate for program permanence, the OEI conducted a formal, anonymous survey. The survey population included faculty and staff open education collaborators who have or are partnering with the OEI since an initial series of grants in 2016. While we keep in close contact with collaborators throughout the entire development process, we believe that anonymous feedback will help us to gain additional insights after projects are completed. We seek to uncover additional aspects of faculty/staff motivations to participate in the OEI, areas for program improvement, and observations about the program from a faculty/staff viewpoint rather than our own perceptions. Our program, institutional context, core values, and earlier, informal findings informed the openly-licensed survey instrument. We will discuss expected findings vs. actual findings from the survey, and our plans for responding, including possible asynchronous online learning modules designed to streamline labor-intensive steps. We hope that these will expand the reach and impact of the OEI while keeping workloads within reason for members of the OEI.
  • Learning Together: Linked Data Experimentation at an Academic Library
    Munshower, Alan (2023-07-27)
    Wikidata is a global, collaboratively edited, multilingual knowledge base that any project, organization or person can freely use. Wikidata expands access and connections for archival materials while also raising questions for archivists. This session will offer a brief introduction to the Wikidata model of "linked open data", followed by archivists describing their organizations' Wikidata project goals and processes, with time for Q&A and open discussion of the platform's promise and pitfalls.
  • Subjective Differences in Preparation Between TEEM and MDiv Pastors in the ELCA
    Porter, Nathaniel D. (2016-01-14)
    This report summarizes findings from a 2005 survey of 52 graduates of the Theological Education for Emerging Ministries (TEEM) program of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America regarding their ministry preparation and call experiences. It is part of a larger study of non-residential seminary outcomes including the published articles "Preparation in Context" (Porter 2016, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-016-0246-5).
  • Collaborations Beyond the Library: Bibliometric Analyses to Support Engineering Research, Innovation and Diversity
    Over, Sarah; Stovall, Connie (2023-06-28)
    A new library department was formed to focus on growing university research impact and delivering data-driven research intelligence. The department collaborates with multiple units across campus, including with the College of Engineering via the department’s Engineering Collections and Research Analyst. All collaborations stem from the need for data-driven decisions for determining inter- and intra-institutional strengths and for discovering potential and existing research partnerships. This paper focuses on key collaborations with campus partners relevant to engineering research, innovation, and diversity efforts at Virginia Tech, providing processes and examples in each area. Examples include: an analysis of institutional degree data to determine competency related to the CHIPS and Science Act; prospective aerospace company collaborations; and research alignment analysis with HBCUs and other minority serving institutions. Each example covers tools, alternatives, and processes used to generate these analyses with end products presented to collaborators. Overall the collaborations have been successful and are growing, which prompted the need for a new department, with wide support within the library and across campus.