Faculty and Staff

Illicit psychostimulant addiction remains a significant problem worldwide, despite decades of research into the neural underpinnings and various treatment approaches. The purpose of this review is to provide a succinct overview of the neurocircuitry involved in drug addiction, as well as the acute and chronic effects of cocaine and amphetamines within this circuitry in humans. Investigational pharmacological treatments for illicit psychostimulant addiction are also reviewed. Our current knowledge base clearly demonstrates that illicit psychostimulants produce lasting adaptive neural and behavioral changes that contribute to the progression and maintenance of addiction. However, attempts at generating pharmacological treatments for psychostimulant addiction have historically focused on intervening at the level of the acute effects of these drugs. The lack of approved pharmacological treatments for psychostimulant addiction highlights the need for new treatment strategies, especially those that prevent or ameliorate the adaptive neural, cognitive, and behavioral changes caused by chronic use of this class of illicit drugs.

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.

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a risk factor for tobacco use and dependence. This study examines the responsiveness to nicotine of an adolescent model of ADHD, the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR). The conditioned place preference (CPP) procedure was used to assess nicotine-induced locomotion and conditioned reward in SHR and the Wistar Kyoto (WKY) control strain over a range of nicotine doses (0.0, 0.1, 0.3 and 0.6 mg/kg). Prior to conditioning, SHRs were more active and less biased toward one side of the CPP chamber than WKY rats. Following conditioning, SHRs developed CPP to the highest dose of nicotine (0.6 mg/kg), whereas WKYs did not develop CPP to any nicotine dose tested. During conditioning, SHRs displayed greater locomotor activity in the nicotine-paired compartment than in the saline-paired compartment across conditioning trials. SHRs that received nicotine (0.1, 0.3, 0.6 mg/kg) in the nicotine-paired compartment showed an increase in locomotor activity between conditioning trials. Nicotine did not significantly affect WKY locomotor activity. These findings suggest that the SHR strain is a suitable model for studying ADHD-related nicotine use and dependence, but highlights potential limitations of the WKY control strain and the CPP procedure for modeling ADHD-related nicotine reward.

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.