Finding Aids Research Articles

A Tale of Two Levels: Analyzing the Discoverability and Impact of Item-Level Description in EAD Finding Aids

Utah State University Libraries Cataloging and Metadata Services unit investigated the discoverability of local EAD finding aids. Two versions of the same finding aid were described at the file level and item level, respectively. Analytics for each guide were assessed to discover which descriptive level was most frequently accessed. Patron search terms and finding aid tags was also assessed. Data shows that personal names are the most common type of search term, search terms are most commonly found in the Collection Inventory, and that the availability of item-level description improves discovery by an average of 6100% over file-level descriptions.

How We Gather Now: A Finding Aid

This article documents the ongoing development of the virtual exhibition currently titled How We Gather Now: A Finding Aid. This exhibition, created in collaboration with the Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance research project ( http://www.gatheringspartnership.com ) aims to generate a virtual space to facilitate ongoing access to a curated selection of recorded online conversations about performance in Canada generated since March 2020. These recorded conversations between people who were not usually, easily, in a room together, represent a new archival object emerging from the simultaneous and intersecting truths of a global pandemic and protest against anti-Black racism. The article applies the structure of the Zoom conversation—which the exhibition aims to document and interpret—to offer readers a view, through isolated windows, into a research-creation process in progress. Through this contribution, the project’s curatorial team and research collaborators identify the key questions that motivated the exhibition’s development, outline the shifts in curatorial approach, and present the methodological approaches currently taken to historicize new and urgent forms of performance-related gatherings.

Archival Play

AbstractThis article offers a critical and personal reflection on the role of curiosity, fragments, and play in creating meaningful encounters with archives in the college classroom. Drawing on play theory, poetics, media studies, and pedagogical theory, the essay reimagines archival collections as formal and material playgrounds open to spontaneous experimentation. Through reflections on the finding aid, logistical media, Curious George, and other subjects, the essay finds in the archive an elemental play that can be harnessed to create a radically spontaneous pedagogy organized around student curiosity. By cultivating the curiosity inherent to archival play, teachers can actively shape the playful dividend that arrives when students enter the archive and begin to search, find, and discover meaningful patterns in the fragments of history.

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

Connecticut State Library Spotlight

Connecticut State Library Spotlight

Cartographic Ephemera and American Travel Mapping

The ephemeral maps that are discussed in this article include those found in promotional brochures and handbills, on postcards, souvenirs, placemats, and hotel stationery. They include the maps of local streets and roads handed out at car rental and real estate agencies, maps on timetables and transportation tickets, and in airline magazines. The types and formats of these objects are almost unlimited, and their numbers are prodigious. Ephemeral maps, like ephemera in general struggle for a place among the established classes of formats—books, prints, manuscripts, archives, broadsheets, pamphlets, and yes, maps among them—that professional librarians use in catalog descriptions and finding aids. It is hard in practice to delineate the boundary between a map and a brochure as formats; perhaps we shouldn’t try. In an effort to support informed choices, this paper offers a classification of ephemeral travel mapping before concluding with a case for its retention (wherever practical).

The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information

The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

Senses of Place: An Architectural Historian Before and During COVID-19

Senses of Place: An Architectural Historian Before and During COVID-19

Serum extracellular vesicles containing MIAT induces atrial fibrosis, inflammation and oxidative stress to promote atrial remodeling and atrial fibrillation via blockade of miR-485-5p-mediated CXCL10 inhibition.

BackgroundAtrial fibrillation (AF), a supraventricular arrhythmia that impairs cardiac function, is a main source of morbidity and mortality. Serum‐derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been identified to carry potential biomarker or target for the diagnosis and treatment of AF. We intended to dissect out the role of lncRNA MIAT enriched in serum‐derived EVs in AF.MethodsMIAT expression was quantified in EVs isolated from serum samples of AF patients. Mouse and cell models of AF were developed after angiotensin II (Ang II) induction. Relationship between MIAT, miR‐485‐5p, and CXCL10 was identified. Ectopic expression and depletion assays were implemented in Ang II‐treated mice or HL‐1 cells, or those co‐cultured with serum‐derived EVs to explore the roles of EV‐carried MIAT.ResultsMIAT was upregulated in EVs from serum samples of AF patients. Further analysis indicated that MIAT enriched in serum‐derived EVs promoted atrial fibrosis, inflammation and oxidative stress, and aggravated the atrial remodeling and resultant AF. Mechanistically, MIAT bound to miR‐485‐5p and weakened its inhibitory role on the target CXCL10, which was responsible for the role of serum‐derived EV containing MIAT in cellular fibrosis, oxidative stress and inflammation, and atrial remodeling in vivo.ConclusionsIn conclusion, serum‐derived EV containing MIAT facilitates atrial remodeling and exacerbates the AF by abolishing the miR‐485‐5p‐mediated CXCL10 inhibition. This finding aids in the deeper understanding about the pathophysiology of AF.

Are human rights archives accessible? Challenges and possible solutions to improve access for Dealing with the Past initiatives

Records and archives containing information relating to grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law represent a fundamental source for, and can become trustworthy documentary evidence within, Dealing with the Past (DWP) processes including truth commissions, criminal tribunals, reparation programs, vetting processes and outreach projects. Those intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) working in the fields of human rights and peace and security are themselves important observers and actors in DWP processes and hence their records and archives are highly relevant to DWP initiatives. Such organizations should therefore be transparent and be able to facilitate DWP processes by granting access to their records. Given the International Council on Archives’ definition of “access” as relating to “… the availability of records for consultation as a result both of legal authorization and the existence of finding aids”, and the experience of swisspeace in advising DWP initiatives on collecting evidence and improving records management capacity, swisspeace together with the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs developed a roadmap which centres on the development of an “archives accessibility maturity model”. This tool will not only improve hands-on access in practice, but will ultimately improve knowledge about the multi-layered complexity of archives’ accessibility, strengthening the capacity of IGOs, INGOs and DWP initiatives to design and implement their access regulations, and thereby improving DWP initiatives’ ability to make successful access requests.

Effect of material and care system combination on subclinical inflammation of the ocular surface in soft contact lens wear

PurposeTo investigate the ocular subclinical inflammatory response in two soft contact lens materials when used in combination with two different care systems (‘solutions’). MethodsFifteen established soft contact lens wearers wore each of two lenses: Acuvue® 2 (CH) and Acuvue® Oasys® (SiH) or no lenses in random sequence for one week. Two care systems were used: a peroxide system: Oxysept 1 Step® (P) for the right lens and Opti-Free® Replenish® (MPS) for the left lens. After one week of lens/no lens wear, in vivo confocal microscopy (IVCM) of corneal and conjunctival regions was carried out. Density of presumed dendritic cells (DC) and ‘white spots’ (WS) were quantified. Impression cytology of the bulbar and upper eyelid margin conjunctivae was carried out and samples were analysed for CD45+, CD3+ and CD11c+ cells. ResultsThe SiH + MPS combination showed a greater inflammatory response compared to SiH + P in seven out of 12 parameters investigated (p < 0.05). The remaining five were not statistically different between the two solutions. The converse was found for the CH lens, with four of the 12 parameters showing a greater response with the P solution compared to the MPS (p < 0.05). ConclusionThis study suggests that the SiH lens investigated demonstrated an upregulated response when used with a MPS compared to a P solution whereas the converse is true for the CH lens which showed a reduced response when used with a MPS compared to a P solution. This finding aids in the understanding of the biological underpinnings of manifest corneal inflammatory events during contact lens wear.

Processing Mad Men: Media Studies, Legitimation, and Archival Description

Media scholars and historians are well aware of major gaps within the archival record, gaps that have fundamentally shaped the theories and methodologies of media studies as a discipline. However, much of the valuable media studies research that has been done to interrogate ideological work within “the archive” is actually research into the politics of one specific archival process: acquisition. This article focuses instead on the process of archival description. Comparing the rhetorical strategies present in the press surrounding the Harry Ransom Center’s (HRC) acquisition of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men materials with the HRC finding aid’s description of the collection itself, this article demonstrates a historiographical imperative for media scholars to cultivate basic archival literacies drawn from the archival disciplines themselves. I argue that by better valuing the intellectual labor of archivists, media scholars will be wellpositioned to make use of the considerable archival record that does remain.

Adjusting Our Sails to COVID-19’s Gale

Adjusting Our Sails to COVID-19’s Gale

Reward Space Noise for Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning

A fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) is how to achieve efficient exploration in initially unknown environments. Most state-of-the-art RL algorithms leverage action space noise to drive exploration. The classical strategies are computationally efficient and straightforward to implement. However, these methods may fail to perform effectively in complex environments. To address this issue, we propose a novel strategy named reward space noise (RSN) for farsighted and consistent exploration in RL. By introducing the stochasticity from reward space, we are able to change agent’s understanding about environment and perturb its behaviors. We find that the simple RSN can achieve consistent exploration and scale to complex domains without intensive computational cost. To demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed method, we implement a deep Q-learning agent with reward noise and evaluate its exploratory performance on a set of Atari games which are challenging for the naive [Formula: see text]-greedy strategy. The results show that reward noise outperforms action noise in most games and performs comparably in others. Concretely, we found that in the early training, the best exploratory performance of reward noise is obviously better than action noise, which demonstrates that the reward noise can quickly explore the valuable states and aid in finding the optimal policy. Moreover, the average scores and learning efficiency of reward noise are also higher than action noise through the whole training, which indicates that the reward noise can generate more stable and consistent performance.

Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum?

<i>Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum?</i>

Early prediction of heart disease using the most significant features of diabetes by machine learning techniques

Medical science is witnessing high levels of specialization with doctors specializing in specific areas, say, heart disease (HD), diabetes, nephrology, and the like. In the process, patients have to make multiple visits for treatment of simultaneous ailments. Studies show that there is overlap in causes of different diseases. One such co-existence is observed in patients with diabetes suffering from HD too. In many cases, one precedes the other. Hence, it is worth diagnosing that a patient having a particular ailment is likely to develop another. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning methods are widely used in healthcare.&nbsp; There are few references to such work using data mining approaches. HD is a primary cause of death worldwide. Studies show that diabetes patients also have HD. This paper aims to identify the association and common risk factors between diabetes and HD - this finding aid in anticipating the HD of a diabetic patient. The authors use proven data mining approaches - logistics regression, decision tree, and random forest to arrive at the most accurate results. The validation is done using unsupervised method: K-means Clustering. The initial investigation demonstrates that body-mass-index (BMI) and age are among the key risk factors for diabetes; and smoking habit, age, gender-male and diabetes (glucose level) lead to HD. 31% of diabetic patients had HD.

A Hypothesized Mechanistic Model of Longitudinal Wall Motion at the Common Carotid Artery

Abstract By adopting a physics-physiology integrative approach, this work hypothesizes a mechanistic model of longitudinal wall motion ux(t) at the common carotid artery (CCA) and explores its antegrade amplitude ux0-ante and retrograde amplitude ux0-retro in systole for their clear implications. By examining the findings on ux(t) and other relevant findings on the cardiovascular (CV) physiology in the context of the physical essence of ux(t) and the CV system, a mechanistic model of ux(t) is hypothesized and formulated as a boundary-value problem of nonhomogeneous wave propagation in a semi-infinite domain. With the aid of findings on ux(t) and other related findings in the CV system, a scaling analysis of the boundary-value problem gives rise to two longitudinal arterial indices based on the two amplitudes: longitudinal elasticity Exx at the CCA being estimated from ux0-ante, and ux0-retro as an inverse indicator of the maximum base rotation of the left ventricle (LV) and a positive indicator of longitudinal elasticity at the ascending aorta (AA). The two arterial indices are qualitatively validated by their consistency with the effect of subclinical atherosclerosis and aging on the related parameters in the CV system. The implications of longitudinal elasticity to the LV function and energy transmission in the arterial tree are also discussed.

A multiple site community outbreak of COVID‐19 in Sydney, Australia

ObjectiveTo investigate an outbreak of COVID‐19 in Sydney, Australia. MethodsEpidemiological linking and analysis of cases of COVID‐19 across multiple outbreak sites. ResultsFifteen cases of COVID‐19 and 41 contacts were identified and linked in a cluster that included one workplace and five households. The mean incubation period in the cases ranged from 4.6 to 6.4 days, while the median incubation period was shorter, ranging from 3 to 5 days. The overall range of incubation periods was 2 to 12 days. Differential attack rates were found within households (86% adults vs. 9% children) and workplace (32%) settings. Conclusions and implications for public healthOur investigation links cases between multiple households and a workplace. When exploring these links using a rapid workplace assessment, real‐time cluster data along with objective measurements of exposure, such as with the Australian Government COVIDSafe app, may have allowed these links to be identified more readily and potentially reduced further spread of COVID‐19. We found age as a factor for infection, with children being less likely to both acquire SARS‐CoV‐2 infection and to develop symptoms. This finding aids in our understanding of how the virus affects children and cautiously supports face‐to‐face classroom teaching.

Delayed Modeling Approach to Forecast the Periodic Behavior of SARS-2.

The ongoing threat of Coronavirus is alarming. The key players of this virus are modeled mathematically during this research. The transmission rates are hypothesized, with the aid of epidemiological concepts and recent findings. The model reported is extended, by taking into account the delayed dynamics. Time delay reflects the fact that the dynamic behavior of transmission of the disease, at time t depends not only on the state at time t but also on the state in some period τ before time t. The research presented in this manuscript will not only help in understanding the current threat of pandemic (SARS-2), but will also contribute in making precautionary measures and developing control strategies.