Nonacademic Departments Research Articles

Careers Library: Unconventional collaboration to boost learning

The pressure on higher education institutions to produce employment-ready graduates is high, and academic libraries can contribute to this goal by collaborating with non-academic departments. The Georgetown University in Qatar library partnered with the Career Services Centre and the Alumni office in launching Careers Library programme that expanded on the idea of the Human Library by creating an online week-long event aimed at empowering senior students with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in professional life after graduation. This practice paper illustrates how the library can engage in broader activities beyond information literacy instruction and leverage alumni relationships to develop students’ competencies. The collaboration proved to be beneficial and it fits well within the framework of library outreach activities. The value to the academic community is that this event can be easily replicated and it offers an easy way to draw on the expertise of alumni willing to give back to their school.

An indoor environmental quality assessment of office spaces at an urban Australian university

ABSTRACT This paper reports the results of a comprehensive indoor environmental quality (IEQ) evaluation conducted in seven office buildings at an Australian university. A mix of objective and subjective assessments was carried out and a total of 519 staff participated in the survey from various non-academic departments. Three types of buildings were included in this study: ‘Heritage listed’ (c.1880–1890s), ‘Conventional’ (c.1960–1980s) and ‘Modern’ (post 2000) office buildings. Although the measured IEQ conditions were relatively good with no significant fluctuation across the selected buildings, the discrepancy between objective IEQ data and subjective occupant evaluations was noted. The Modern building type designed with fully double-glazed façades showed the highest levels of overall comfort and satisfaction and perceived productivity, whereas the Conventional building type constructed during the late 20th-century period, notable for deep floor plates, had the lowest. The heritage listed type buildings had lower window to wall ratios, yet displayed improved occupant satisfaction across all IEQ areas over the conventional type buildings. The results support that building renovation and regular maintenance can improve occupant comfort and satisfaction within offices. The findings could be useful for property managers looking for strategies to improve the performance of their building stock.

Impact of Service Quality on Malaysian Polytechnic Sustainability Using Modified HEdPERF Model: An Empirical Study

Current literature in higher education service quality and organisational performance depicts that adequate application of modified HEdPERF (Higher Education PERFormance) in the organisation daily operation will generate high performance activities that subsequently will increase organisation performance. Although many previous investigations have studied the association between service quality and organisation performance in higher education, the role of modified HEdPERF education specific model as a critical factor for improving organisation performance among managers has been poorly discussed. The goal of this work is to assess the effect of modified HEdPERF service quality model and organisation performance relationship among heads of department of Malaysian polytechnics. This study employed random sampling method through self-administered questionnaires collected from 192 Heads of Department covering academic and non-academic departments within Malaysian polytechnics. The results have shown that programme issues, academic aspects and access are significant antecedents for organisational performance at Malaysian polytechnics. Conversely, non-academic and physical facilities were not able to improve organisational performance. The study outcomes confirm the ability of organisation to correctly execute modified HEdPERF which covers programme issue, academic aspects and access in daily operations as important measure to improve the performance of the organisation.

THE EFFECT OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES ON EMPLOYEES’ WORK PERFORMANCE AMONG NON-ACADEMIC STAFF

Technological changes are important in improving performance as well as increasing productivity of the employees. The state-of-the-art technologies help placing organization a better position to face competitor and stay relevant through this technological advancement era. In this rapid changing of technologies, employees should fully utilize this opportunity to improve work performance and be able to adapt with these changes to raise their standard work performance. However, not all employees can cope with the changes of new technology in their organization and it is feared that such behaviour can influence job performance, since majority of the employees (non-academic staff) comprises of older generation workers who are against or resistant to this change. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between technological changes and employees’ work performance. Quantitative data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire that consisted of items with five-point Likert scale. A total number of 250 non-academic staff was identified from the Administrative Department of Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Kelantan Branch. A stratified random sampling technique was applied as to ensure that the strata (or layers) in the population are fairly represented in the sample and 100 respondents were later determined. The questionnaires were then distributed randomly to 100 respondents from 10 different non-academic departments in UiTM Kelantan Branch. Result of the findings showed that training of new technology is the most affecting dimension of technological change that affect non-academic staff of UiTM Kelantan Branch. It was also found that New Working Method and Training of New Technology have strong relationship with employees’ work performance. However, Acceptance has no relationship with employees’ work performance. It is therefore recommended that a new model for the independent variable should be developed by future researcher.

An analysis of Changes in Human Resource Management within Non-Academic Departments of Japanese National Universities after Their Incorporation

An analysis of Changes in Human Resource Management within Non-Academic Departments of Japanese National Universities after Their Incorporation

CASONTO

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an efficient and scalable Arabic semantic search engine based on a domain-specific ontological graph for Colleges of Applied Science, Sultanate of Oman (CASOnto). It also supports the factorial question answering and uses two types of searching: the keyword-based search and the semantics-based search in both languages Arabic and English. This engine is built on variety of technologies such as resource description framework data and ontological graph. Furthermore, two experimental results are conducted; the first is a comparison among entity-search and the classical-search in the system itself. The second compares the CASOnto with well-known semantic search engines such as Kngine, Wolfram Alpha and Google to measure their performance and efficiency. Design/methodology/approach The design and implementation of the system comprises the following phases, namely, designing inference, storing, indexing, searching, query processing and the user’s friendly interface, where it is designed based on a specific domain of the IBRI CAS (College of Applied Science) to highlight the academic and nonacademic departments. Furthermore, it is ontological inferred data stored in the tuple data base (TDB) and MySQL to handle the keyword-based search as well as entity-based search. The indexing and searching processes are built based on the Lucene for the keyword search, while TDB is used for the entity search. Query processing is a very important component in the search engines that helps to improve the user’s search results and make the system efficient and scalable. CASOnto handles the Arabic issues such as spelling correction, query completion, stop words’ removal and diacritics removal. It also supports the analysis of the factorial question answering. Findings In this paper, an efficient and scalable Arabic semantic search engine is proposed. The results show that the semantic search that built on the SPARQL is better than the classical search in both simple and complex queries. Clearly, the accuracy of semantic search equals to 100 per cent in both types of queries. On the other hand, the comparison of CASOnto with the Wolfram Alpha, Kngine and Google refers to better results by CASOnto. Consequently, it seems that our proposed engine retrieved better and efficient results than other engines. Thus, it is built according to the ontological domain-specific, highly scalable performance and handles the complex queries well by understanding the context behind the query. Research limitations/implications The proposed engine is built on a specific domain (CAS Ibri – Oman), and in the future vision, it will highlight the nonfactorial question answering and expand the domain of CASOnto to involve more integrated different domains. Originality/value The main contribution of this paper is to build an efficient and scalable Arabic semantic search engine. Because of the widespread use of search engines, a new dimension of challenge is created to keep up with the evolution of the semantic Web. Whereas, catering to the needs of users has become a matter of paramount importance in the light of artificial intelligence and technological development to access the accurate and the efficient information in less possible time. However, the research challenges still in its infancy due to lack of research engine that supports the Arabic language. It could be traced back to the complexity of the Arabic language morphological and grammar rules.

Use of Early Goal-Directed Therapy in the Emergency Department before and after the Sepsis Trilogy

The management of sepsis evolved recently with the publication of three large trials (referred to as the sepsis trilogy) investigating the efficacy of early goal-directed therapy (EGDT). Our goal was to determine if the publication of these trials has influenced the use of EGDT when caring for patients with severe sepsis and septic shock in the emergency department (ED). In February 2014, we surveyed a sample of board-certified emergency medicine physicians regarding their use of EGDT in the ED. A follow-up survey was sent after the publication of the sepsis trilogy. Data was analyzed using 95% confidence intervals to determine if there was a change in the use of EGDT following the publication of the above trials. Subgroup analyses were also performed with regard to academic affiliation and emergency department volume. Surveys were sent to 308 and 350 physicians in the pre-and post-publication periods, respectively. Overall, ED use of EGDT did not change with publication of the sepsis trilogy, 48.7% (CI 39.3% - 58.2%) before and 50.5% (CI 40.6% - 60.3%) after. Subgroup analysis revealed that academic-affiliated EDs significantly decreased EGDT use following the sepsis trilogy while nonacademic departments significantly increased EGDT use. Use of EGDT was significantly greater in community departments versus academic departments following the publication of the sepsis trilogy. There was no change overall in the use of EGDT protocols when caring for patients with severe sepsis and septic shock, but subgroup analyses revealed that academic departments decreased their use of EGDT while community departments increased use of EGDT. This may be due to varying rates of uptake of the medical literature between academic and community healthcare systems.

Quality of websites of obstetrics and gynecology departments: a cross-sectional study.

BackgroundThe internet has become an easily accessible and widely used source of healthcare information. There are, however, no standardized or commonly accepted criteria for the quality of Obstetrics and Gynecology websites. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the quality of websites of Obstetrics and Gynecology departments in German-speaking countries and to compare websites nationally and internationally.MethodsWe scored 672 websites from Germany (n = 566), Austria (n = 57), and Switzerland (n = 49) using the objective criteria: Google search rank (2 items), technical aspects (11 items), navigation (8 items), and content (6 items) for a 26 point score. Scores were compared nationally and internationally. Multivariable regression models assessed good quality scores (≥50% of maximum) as the dependent variables and country, academic affiliation, being member of a healthcare consortium, confessional affiliation, and content management system (CMS) use as independent variables.ResultsThe mean score of websites was 13.8 ± 3.3. 4.2% were rated as good (≥75% of maximum), 61.8% as fair (≥50% of maximum). German (14.0 ± 3.2) and Swiss (13.8 ± 4.0) websites scored significantly higher compared to Austrian websites (11.6 ± 2.5) (P < 0.001 and P = 0.005, respectively). Within Germany, academic had higher scores than non-academic departments (14.9 ± 3.2 vs. 13.7 ± 3.1, P < 0.001). Single institutions had higher scores compared to healthcare consortium institutions (14.1 ± 3.2 vs. 13.2 ± 2.6, P = 0.003). Departments in Northern and Southern states had higher scores compared to Eastern states (14.4 ± 3.2 and 14.2 ± 3.2 vs. 13.0 ± 3.0, P < 0.001). In multivariate regression models, all subscores (all: P < 0.001) independently predicted a website’s reaching a good quality score, with navigation subscore as strongest predictor. Affiliations were predictors for some good individual subscores, but not for others. High content subscore was associated with good Google search rank, technical aspects, and navigation subscores.ConclusionsThe quality of websites of Obstetrics and Gynecology departments varies widely. We found marked differences depending on country, affiliation, and region.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12884-015-0537-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Succession Planning Gives Women a Shot at Leadership

Succession Planning Gives Women a Shot at Leadership

The Virtual Library Liaison: A Case Study at an Online University

ABSTRACT Capella University, an online university, started its library liaison program in 2007. The goals of the program were to increase the use of library resources and services and promote integration of information literacy competencies into coursework. A review of the literature of liaison programs shows a focus on liaison activities in traditional colleges and universities. While some activities are adaptable to the online environment, this setting provides unique opportunities for enhancing the impact of the liaison relationship. This article will describe key initiatives in three areas: the online course room, reference transactions, and collaboration with both academic and nonacademic departments. Strategies, activities, and tools used to implement the initiatives will be discussed.

Fundoplication in Paediatric Surgery: A Survey in 40 German Institutions

There is no generally accepted standard surgical approach to gastrooesophageal reflux disease (GERD) at present. However, laparoscopic fundoplication has been advocated to be the procedure of choice for gastrooesophageal reflux disease in children. We aimed to assess the standards of the diagnostic workup and operative techniques in paediatric surgical institutions in Germany. A questionnaire including 14 items was sent to all 71 departments of paediatric surgery in Germany. Forty (56 %) took part in the survey. Concepts of routine diagnostic workup, operative techniques, number of procedures, and conversions were assessed. The average annual frequency of fundoplications was less than 20 in 36 units (90 %). Experience with laparoscopic fundoplication was present in 24 institutions (60 %). In 19 out of these (79 %) fewer than 50 laparoscopic fundoplications had been performed altogether up to the time of the survey. Out of 584 fundoplications performed in the year 2002, 184 (32 %) had been done laparoscopically. The ratio of conventional versus laparoscopic fundoplication was 170/130 (57/43 %) in academic, and 226/54 (81/19 %) in non-academic departments. The preferred technique of fundoplication, irrespective of the approach, was the Nissen wrap in 28 (70 %) of the departments. The number of paediatric surgeons performing laparoscopic fundoplication was 1 - 2 in 16 institutions (67 %), 3 or 4 in 6 (25 %), and 5 in 2 (8 %) departments. The conversion rate was reported to be less than 5 % in 15 departments (63 %), and 5 - 10 % in 3 (13 %). The laparoscopic approach for surgical repair of GERD in children is not yet generally accepted in Germany. In most departments, training remains problematic due to low numbers of procedures. However, the feasibility of laparoscopic fundoplication in Germany is excellent, with a low rate of conversions.

Évaluation du nombre de terrains de stage en gynécologie-obstétrique : résultats d’une enquête nationale auprès des internes

To evaluate of the actual and optimal number of training positions in obstetrics and gynaecology in France. Between February and April 2004, we performed a survey of French trainees in obstetrics and gynecology on the available and optimal number of positions for training in their department according to the activity. We also performed a count of the trainees in obstetrics and gynaecology in France. There are 817 trainees in obstetrics and gynaecology in 26 towns in France. They are trained in 177 departments, of which 55 are academic and 122 non-academics. There are 571 positions for training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology: 334 in academic departments and 237 in general non-academic departments. There is therefore 0.7 position per trainee in obstetrics and gynaecology. Trainees estimate that there is a need and a possibility for at least 50 more positions. There is an uneven distribution in trainees between academic departments in Paris and elsewhere in France. Trainees consider possible the opening of at least 50 more training positions in obstetrics and gynaecology.

Cost containment in anesthesiology: A survey of department activities

To survey cost containment activities in anesthesiology and to determine to what extent departments use cost policies and guidelines. Mail survey. Academic and large nonacademic anesthesiology departments. 147 responding departments answered 20 questions. 38% of surveys were returned. 90 responders identified themselves as academic departments and 57 responders as nonacademic. 73% of departments reported pressure from hospital administrators to reduce anesthesia costs. The most common cost-saving activity, used by 90% of departments, is improving operating room (OR) utilization. 53% of all departments have policies or guidelines to contain drug costs, while 48% of departments have these to contain other product costs. Departments reporting themselves as academic generally reported greater use of cost policies. Anesthesiology departments are experiencing pressure to reduce costs and the majority have cost policies and guidelines concerning utilization of ORs and anesthetic drugs. Academic anesthesiology departments may be experiencing more cost-containment pressure than nonacademic departments.

AAA Pilot Survey of Nonacademic Departments: Where the MAs Are

Anthropology NewsVolume 31, Issue 5 p. 1-22 AAA Pilot Survey of Nonacademic Departments: Where the MAs Are David Givens, David Givens Editor Information ServiceSearch for more papers by this authorRandolph Fillmore, Randolph Fillmore Information ServiceSearch for more papers by this author David Givens, David Givens Editor Information ServiceSearch for more papers by this authorRandolph Fillmore, Randolph Fillmore Information ServiceSearch for more papers by this author First published: May 1990 https://doi.org/10.1111/an.1990.31.5.1.2AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume31, Issue5May 1990Pages 1-22 RelatedInformation

Undergraduate teaching of geriatric medicine in the United Kingdom: changes in the years 1981-1986.

A follow-up survey of undergraduate teaching of geriatric medicine was carried out in 1986. All 27 clinical medical schools responded. Geriatric medicine is taught to all medical students in 25 and to only a proportion of students in two. Fifty-nine per cent of schools have academic departments teaching for a mean of 89 hours compared with 33 hours in non-academic departments--an overall mean of 68 hours. The subject is taught by various methods with 70% of teaching time spent on bedside clinical instruction. Other aspects of institutional and community care are often covered. The subject is examined in 18 schools. New academic departments are planned at four schools, and an increase in teaching time planned in five. To meet the needs of the population of the next century, reconsideration of curricula in some of the medical schools is recommended.