Faculty and Staff

Contemporary human populations conform to ecogeographic predictions that animals will become more compact in cooler climates and less compact in warmer ones. However, it remains unclear to what extent this pattern reflects plastic responses to current environments or genetic differences among populations. Analyzing anthropometric surveys of 232,684 children and adults from across 80 ethnolinguistic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Americas, we confirm that body surface-to-volume correlates with contemporary temperature at magnitudes found in more latitudinally diverse samples (Adj. R² = 0.14-0.28). However, far more variation in body surface-to-volume is attributable to genetic population structure (Adj. R² = 0.50-0.74). Moreover, genetic population structure accounts for nearly all of the observed relationship between contemporary temperature and body surface-to-volume among children and adults. Indeed, after controlling for population structure, contemporary temperature accounts for no more than 4% of the variance in body form in these groups. This effect of genetic affinity on body form is also independent of other ecological variables, such as dominant mode of subsistence and household wealth per capita. These findings suggest that the observed fit of human body surface-to-volume with current climate in this sample reflects relatively large effects of existing genetic population structure of contemporary humans compared to plastic response to current environments.

Background: The transition from the home to college is a phase in which emerging adults shift toward more unhealthy eating and physical activity patterns, higher body mass indices, thus increasing risk of overweight/obesity. Currently, little is understood about how changing friendship networks shape weight gain behaviors. This paper describes the recruitment, data collection, and data analytic protocols for the SPARC (Social impact of Physical Activity and nutRition in College) study, a longitudinal examination of the mechanisms by which friends and friendship networks influence nutrition and physical activity behaviors and weight gain in the transition to college life.

Methods: The SPARC study aims to follow 1450 university freshmen from a large university over an academic year, collecting data on multiple aspects of friends and friendship networks. Integrating multiple types of data related to student lives, ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) are administered via a cell phone application, devilSPARC. EMAs collected in four 1-week periods (a total of 4 EMA waves) are integrated with linked data from web-based surveys and anthropometric measurements conducted at four times points (for a total of eight data collection periods including EMAs, separated by ~1 month). University databases will provide student card data, allowing integration of both time-dated data on food purchasing, use of physical activity venues, and geographical information system (GIS) locations of these activities relative to other students in their social networks.

Discussion: Findings are intended to guide the development of more effective interventions to enhance behaviors among college students that protect against weight gain during college.

Objectives: While PhD dissertations are typically accessible as part of a university library’s general collection, or as content within a proprietary database, many other terminal degree projects remain invisible and inaccessible to a greater audience. This poster will describe the development and creation of a digital repository collection containing doctor of nursing practice (DNP) student’s final projects.

Methods: The “Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Final Projects Collection” was created over the course of one semester and included initial discussions with program faculty and administrators, the creation of a student consent form, the development of a process for adding student work to the repository collection, and a presentation to graduating students. This poster will describe the process in more detail, discuss benefits and challenges, as well as highlight the considerations to keep in mind when developing and creating a digital collection of student work. Additionally, best practices and lessons learned will also be described to provide valuable information to others considering creating this type of collection at their own institution.

Results: At the end of the first semester of implementation, twenty student projects existed in our public collection. On the whole, both faculty and students were pleased to have a collection highlighting the work being done in their program. Valuable lessons were learned that can be applied in the next semester of implementation. Specifically, metadata consistency was an issue during the initial uploading process. Gaining select faculty and student buy-in by allaying concerns related to some student’s wanting to publish in a peer-reviewed journal on the topic of their final project remains vital.

Conclusion: Creating open access collections of student applied final projects or capstone projects allows for greater visibility of this type of often overlooked student scholarship. Specifically, the final projects showcased can now be found and accessed by potential employers, researchers, other schools, and other DNP students. In many cases these final projects have applied real-world impact related to answering clinical questions or patient care that should be shared with the world.

While PhD dissertations are typically accessible many other terminal degree projects remain invisible and inaccessible to a greater audience. Over the past year and a half, librarians at Arizona State University collaborated with faculty and departmental administrators across a variety of fields to develop and create institutional repository collections that highlight and authoritatively share this type of student scholarship with schools, researchers, and future employers. This poster will present the benefits, challenges, and considerations required to successfully implement and manage these collections of applied final projects or capstone projects. Specifically, issues/challenges related to metadata consistency, faculty buy-in, and developing an ingest process, as well as benefits related to increased visibility and improved educational and employment opportunities will be discussed. This interactive presentation will also discuss lessons learned from the presenter’s experiences in context of how they can easily apply to benefit their respective institutions.

Objectives: With more and more of our students enrolling in online degree programs and attending class virtually we as librarians must ensure that we are providing the same level of education, content, and service to these online students as we do to our in-person students. This poster will describe the development and implementation of multiple library modules across a 100% online RN-BSN nursing program at a large public institution.

Methods: The librarian met with and worked with instructors across three courses in the online RN-BSN program to discuss and examine current library content and instruction that already existed in these classes, as well as the need for new content and modules. An instructional scaffolding approach was settled on, where new content would be introduced progressively to students over the course of three semesters in three separate consecutive courses. In previous semesters, many faculty simply chose their own library content, linked only to the general tutorials page, or lacked any library content at all, making a new structured approach even more necessary. This poster will describe the development of these library modules in more detail, including software used and best practices, and will also focus on the implementation and lessons learned.

Results: A total of five new modules were implemented in the first two classes, while current library tutorials were kept in the third class in the sequence. The modules focused on teaching the students information literacy and database searching skills.

Conclusion: Sequencing library modules over the course of multiple semesters allowed students to build upon core knowledge that is necessary to successfully complete increasingly advanced assignments and gain research skills that can be applied in their future careers as nurses.

Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) is a growing method of collection development in academic libraries that follows a Just-In-Time model versus the more traditional Just-In-Case model. Arizona State University (ASU) implemented our current PDA plan and profiles in 2009 with minimal changes occurring since this initial implementation date. Our PDA model of collection development involves purchasing print and e-books when users select them in the online catalog, rather than receiving items on an approval plan or by librarian selection. After an initial investigation concluded that several major health sciences publications had not been loaded into the catalog for potential patron selection, we began a more thorough examination of our PDA profile.

ASU serves over 6,500 students, faculty, and staff in Nursing and Allied Health fields in a range of programs requiring a robust collection. This poster details the process we used to determine whether the profiles created by previous librarians in 2009 have succeeded in uploading records for publications that appear on the 2014 nursing texts from Doody’s Core Titles into our catalog. Specifically, our poster will present on the number of Doody’s titles that were excluded from the PDA plan due to our profile settings and analyze why these titles were excluded. Our findings will allow us to order titles that are currently missing from our collection as well as tailor our PDA profiles to include key texts in nursing and allied health subjects in the future. We will also provide recommendations and considerations for other libraries considering or using a PDA model for purchasing texts in the health sciences.