Academic literature on the topic 'School yearbooks. [from old catalog]'

This article reports on the evolution of a school-based project about Remembrance and World War Two. The focus of the project is the use of wartime era high school yearbooks. The use of digital technology by students to record and analyze prime source archival material, high school annuals, in concert with oral history, and local community study techniques, provides classroom students the opportunity to learn about World War Two from a far more realistic and personal perspective than can be achieved using standard textbooks. It also aids in the development of a greater understanding of the human toll, and a more critical understanding of source material concerning World War Two and other conflicts.

A 1910Normal School Yearbookfeatured six young women in basketball uniforms. Sixteen-year-old Paz Marquez, the tallest among them and the captain of the team, looks out unsmilingly. In the early years of the century, photographs of women's basketball teams appeared in hundreds of normal-school yearbooks across the American landscape, but this photo came from the normal school in Manila. Two years later, sharing another American ritual, the former team captain graced the cover of the weekly magazineRenacimiento Filipino, this time dressed in a luxurious gown befitting the Queen of the Carnival. That same year, 1912, Paz Marquez graduated with a B.A. in the first class from the College of Liberal Arts at the newly formed, secular University of the Philippines. Participating in commonplace American events, Paz Marquez (later Benitez) acted as a bridge, a link, between two cultures. Over the next decades, Paz continued in this role. In addition, however, she also became a cultural broker, as she confronted the conundrum that the use of English as the official language had imposed on Filipino culture. In these ways, Paz illustrates the complicated and intriguing story of U.S. nation-building from an intimate and distinctly Philippine viewpoint.

Background As the global burden of dementia increases, the absence of treatment underscores the need for identification of factors that may improve cognitive reserve–the ability to stave off cognitive decline in old age. The beneficial association between musical instrument engagement and episodic memory has been identified in children, young adults, and older adults. Yet, previous studies in musical instrument engagement have rarely examined the potential for adolescence and adulthood exposures to independently improve cognition, nor have they been linked with the rate of memory decline over time in older adults. We investigated whether adolescent musical instrument engagement and continued musical instrument engagement over the adult life course were separately associated with higher episodic memory, as well as rate of decline in a large longitudinal cohort. Methods Data were from a prospective cohort of high school graduates from 1957. High school music engagement (HSME) was ascertained through graduate yearbooks and assessed as membership in musical performance groups. A questionnaire was used to assess musical engagement through adulthood (MEA) at ages 35, 55, and 65. The episodic memory score was composed of immediate and delayed recall task scores, and was assessed when participants were aged approximately 65 and 72 years old among 5,718 individuals. Linear mixed models were used to assess the association between music, and memory performance and decline over time. Results Of high school graduates who participated in the study, 38.1% played music in high school, and 21.1% played music in adulthood. While musical engagement was more common in those who played in childhood, 40% of those who played continuously as an adult did not play in high school. High HSME (B = 0.348, p = 0.049) and continuous MEA (B = 0.424, p = 0.012) were associated with higher memory scores at age 65 after covariate adjustment. When examining memory decline, the benefits of high HSME decreased over time (B = -0.435, p = 0.048), while the rate of decline did not differ between MEA groups. Exploratory models revealed differential benefits for HSME and immediate recall, and MEA and delayed recall. Conclusion This study provides further evidence that musical engagement in childhood or adulthood is associated with non-musical cognitive reserve. These two exposures may act differentially in different domains of episodic memory. Further work is needed to determine the relationship between musicianship and the rate of cognitive decline.

A Review of: Curry, A. (2005). If I ask, will they answer? Evaluating public library reference service to gay and lesbian youth. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 45(1), 65-75. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/journal/refuseserq
 Abstract 
 Objective - To assess the quality of service provided by reference staff in public libraries when presented with a request for LGBTQ information by a young person.
 Design - Unobtrusive observation without informed consent. Setting - Public library branches in the greater Vancouver area, British Columbia, Canada.
 Subjects - Reference librarians.
 Methods - A 19-year-old posing as a high school student approached reference desk staff at 20 public library branches. The student proxy, “Angela”, was instructed to ask for books on forming a gay-straight alliance at her school and, if there was a full reference interview, to also ask for recommendations of novels that the group might read. She recorded the reactions, both verbal and nonverbal, using Reference and User Services Association guidelines as a template. Library administrators were aware of the potential visits and permitted the research, but the reference desk staff were not aware of a potential visit by the student proxy. The researcher claimed that her method, while deceptive, was necessary to obtain authentic reactions from the library staff.
 Main Results - Most reference librarians approached by Angela made adequate attempts to assist her, although a few library staff reacted negatively to her query. Half of the librarians reacted positively to the patron’s request, with most of the others providing neutral responses. Very few of the librarians actually taught the patron how to use the library’s catalog to search for materials, and most of the librarians were unable to find appropriate materials due to not knowing the appropriate search terms. Only three library staff showed overt disapproval of the search topic, such as frowning or rushing to finish the reference interview quickly, with most remaining objective or supportive. Because of the service she received, Angela stated that eight of the 20 libraries were welcoming enough that she thought she would return.
 Conclusion - The wide range of responses received by Angela indicated that there was room for improvement in educating public library staff on gay and lesbian issues and materials, especially for gay and lesbian youth.

We are now over four decades into digitally managing the names of Earth's species. As the number of federating (i.e., software that brings together previously disparate projects under a common infrastructure, for example TaxonWorks) and aggregating (e.g., International Plant Name Index, Catalog of Life (CoL)) efforts increase, there remains an unmet need for both the migration forward of old data, and for the production of new, precise and comprehensive nomenclatural catalogs. Given this context, we provide an overview of how TaxonWorks seeks to contribute to this effort, and where it might evolve in the future. In TaxonWorks, when we talk about governed names and relationships, we mean it in the sense of existing international codes of nomenclature (e.g., the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN)). More technically, nomenclature is defined as a set of objective assertions that describe the relationships between the names given to biological taxa and the rules that determine how those names are governed. It is critical to note that this is not the same thing as the relationship between a name and a biological entity, but rather nomenclature in TaxonWorks represents the details of the (governed) relationships between names. Rather than thinking of nomenclature as changing (a verb commonly used to express frustration with biological nomenclature), it is useful to think of nomenclature as a set of data points, which grows over time. For example, when synonymy happens, we do not erase the past, but rather record a new context for the name(s) in question. The biological concept changes, but the nomenclature (names) simply keeps adding up. Behind the scenes, nomenclature in TaxonWorks is represented by a set of nodes and edges, i.e., a mathematical graph, or network (e.g., Fig. 1). Most names (i.e., nodes in the network) are what TaxonWorks calls "protonyms," monomial epithets that are used to construct, for example, bionomial names (not to be confused with "protonym" sensu the ICZN). Protonyms are linked to other protonyms via relationships defined in NOMEN, an ontology that encodes governed rules of nomenclature. Within the system, all data, nodes and edges, can be cited, i.e., linked to a source and therefore anchored in time and tied to authorship, and annotated with a variety of annotation types (e.g., notes, confidence levels, tags). The actual building of the graphs is greatly simplified by multiple user-interfaces that allow scientists to review (e.g. Fig. 2), create, filter, and add to (again, not "change") the nomenclatural history. As in any complex knowledge-representation model, there are outlying scenarios, or edge cases that emerge, making certain human tasks more complex than others. TaxonWorks is no exception, it has limitations in terms of what and how some things can be represented. While many complex representations are hidden by simplified user-interfaces, some, for example, the handling of the ICZN's Family-group name, batch-loading of invalid relationships, and comparative syncing against external resources need more work to simplify the processes presently required to meet catalogers' needs. The depth at which TaxonWorks can capture nomenclature is only really valuable if it can be used by others. This is facilitated by the application programming interface (API) serving its data (https://api.taxonworks.org), serving text files, and by exports to standards like the emerging Catalog of Life Data Package. With reference to real-world problems, we illustrate different ways in which the API can be used, for example, as integrated into spreadsheets, through the use of command line scripts, and serve in the generation of public-facing websites. Behind all this effort are an increasing number of people recording help videos, developing documentation, and troubleshooting software and technical issues. Major contributions have come from developers at many skill levels, from high school to senior software engineers, illustrating that TaxonWorks leads in enabling both technical and domain-based contributions. The health and growth of this community is a key factor in TaxonWork's potential long-term impact in the effort to unify the names of Earth's species.