Faculty and Staff

In spring 2013, the presenters developed a survey on academic library streaming video and distributed it broadly through various discussion and mailing lists.

This is the first large-scale and most comprehensive effort to date to collect data on streaming video funding, licensing, acquisition, and hosting in academic libraries. Its results will provide benchmark data for future explorations of this rapidly expanding approach to video in academic libraries.

Streaming video is becoming a common occurrence on many campuses today. Its fast growth is due in part to the steady growth of online classes and programs. Technology has also played a role in this growth as alternatives for ingesting and accessing content have expanded. Multiple options are now available including in-house approaches, cloud storage, and third party vendors.

This survey collected data on how academic institutions address the day-to-day operations related to streaming video as well as perceived directions for future action.

Survey questions addressed selection and acquisition of video in both hard copy and streaming formats, funding for acquisitions, current and planned hosting interfaces, cataloging and access, and current practice and policy on digitization of hard copy titles for streaming. This session reviews the instrument used, and provides a preliminary look at some of the key data collected.

Studies on urban heat island (UHI) have been more than a century after the phenomenon was first discovered in the early 1800s. UHI emerges as the source of many urban environmental problems and exacerbates the living environment in cities. Under the challenges of increasing urbanization and future climate changes, there is a pressing need for sustainable adaptation/mitigation strategies for UHI effects, one popular option being the use of reflective materials. While it is introduced as an effective method to reduce temperature and energy consumption in cities, its impacts on environmental sustainability and large-scale non-local effect are inadequately explored. This paper provides a synthetic overview of potential environmental impacts of reflective materials at a variety of scales, ranging from energy load on a single building to regional hydroclimate. The review shows that mitigation potential of reflective materials depends on a set of factors, including building characteristics, urban environment, meteorological and geographical conditions, to name a few. Precaution needs to be exercised by city planners and policy makers for large-scale deployment of reflective materials before their environmental impacts, especially on regional hydroclimates, are better understood. In general, it is recommended that optimal strategy for UHI needs to be determined on a city-by-city basis, rather than adopting a “one-solution-fits-all” strategy.