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.

Biological Soil Crusts (BSCs) are organosedimentary assemblages comprised of microbes and minerals in topsoil of terrestrial environments. BSCs strongly impact soil quality in dryland ecosystems (e.g., soil structure and nutrient yields) due to pioneer species such as Microcoleus vaginatus; phototrophs that produce filaments that bind the soil together, and support an array of heterotrophic microorganisms. These microorganisms in turn contribute to soil stability and biogeochemistry of BSCs. Non-cyanobacterial populations of BSCs are less well known than cyanobacterial populations. Therefore, we attempted to isolate a broad range of numerically significant and phylogenetically representative BSC aerobic heterotrophs. Combining simple pre-treatments (hydration of BSCs under dark and light) and isolation strategies (media with varying nutrient availability and protection from oxidative stress) we recovered 402 bacterial and one fungal isolate in axenic culture, which comprised 116 phylotypes (at 97% 16S rRNA gene sequence homology), 115 bacterial and one fungal. Each medium enriched a mostly distinct subset of phylotypes, and cultivated phylotypes varied due to the BSC pre-treatment. The fraction of the total phylotype diversity isolated, weighted by relative abundance in the community, was determined by the overlap between isolate sequences and OTUs reconstructed from metagenome or metatranscriptome reads. Together, more than 8% of relative abundance of OTUs in the metagenome was represented by our isolates, a cultivation efficiency much larger than typically expected from most soils. We conclude that simple cultivation procedures combined with specific pre-treatment of samples afford a significant reduction in the culturability gap, enabling physiological and metabolic assays that rely on ecologically relevant axenic cultures.