March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach – gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products – to run a simulated tournament in which 64 animals compete to become the tournament champion. While the encounters between the animals are hypothetical, the outcomes rely on empirical evidence from the scientific literature. Players select their favored combatants beforehand, and during the tournament scientists translate the academic literature into gripping “play-by-play” narration on social media. To date ~1100 scholarly works, covering almost 400 taxa, have been transformed into science stories. March Mammal Madness is most typically used by high-school educators teaching life sciences, and we estimate that our materials reached ~1% of high-school students in the United States in 2019. Here we document the intentional design, public engagement, and magnitude of reach of the project. We further explain how human psychological and cognitive adaptations for shared experiences, social learning, narrative, and imagery contribute to the widespread use of March Mammal Madness.

Take a journey to discover how you can provide quality information to your patrons for free! Explore the world of Open Access Resources! Open Access refers to scholarly information that is free, online, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. This makes it easier for people to find and use reliable information on a myriad of subjects, such as health information, educational materials, or business resources. Knowledge of Open Access is important for all librarians to help us best serve our communities and stretch our dwindling budgets. Your tour guides will give an overview of Open Access, discuss legislative issues, demonstrate how to find open access resources, and explain how librarians can get involved.

Presented at the SDLA/NDLA/MPLA Tri-conference 2013

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.

Readability formulas are used widely in education, and increasingly in business and government. Over 30 years of research on more than 200 readability formulas has demonstrated moderate to strong predictive correlations with reading comprehension. In this study, five well-known readability formulas correlated highly with each other when applied to selected recent historical articles (N = 22) from two music education research journals. The mean level of difficulty (readability) for all 22 articles was grade 14.04, near the beginning of the second year of college. Since research shows that most people read below their highest completed school grade and also prefer easier materials, this is probably an appropriate level of difficulty for the presumptive readers of these two journals (i.e., holders of undergraduate and graduate degrees). Professors, librarians, and others responsible for guiding students toward reading material at appropriate levels of readability could benefit from these results.

Poster about meeting the academic and cultural needs of international students at the Arizona State University Libraries and the University of Arizona Libraries. The poster presentation focuses on:

1. Strategies to promote information literacy skills of international students in the two university libraries.
2. What the libraries are doing to improve services to meet the needs and encourage library use among international students.
3. Partnerships that have been established with other academic departments or institutions.