Ann W. Hallyburton, Heidi E. Buchanan and Timothy V. Carstens
This paper seeks to provide support and direction for academic libraries collecting popular materials.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to provide support and direction for academic libraries collecting popular materials.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper offers a case study format supplemented by statistical and descriptive analyses.
Findings
The paper presents literature and case history‐based information on the debate surrounding popular materials collection in academic libraries. The case study provides concrete, cost‐effective steps for academic libraries to use in building popular materials collections.
Practical implications
The authors make the case for support of popular materials collections through detailed evaluation of circulation records.
Originality/value
This paper offers a level of statistical analysis of circulation records unique to the library literature on popular materials collection. It also provides a distinctive case history of the evolution of a successful collection and includes easily adaptable steps.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to examine healthcare professionals’ own health literacy through the lenses of information behavior and evidence-based practice. These practitioners’…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine healthcare professionals’ own health literacy through the lenses of information behavior and evidence-based practice. These practitioners’ health information literacy is critical to client care.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper applies general and professional-specific models of information behavior and issues of bias to methods in which healthcare practitioners seek, evaluate and use research information within professional practice.
Findings
Case examples from library, medical and the broader healthcare literature are used to explore ways in which care professionals’ information behaviors align with or deviate from information behavior models and the role of different types of bias in their information behavior. Adaption of evidence-based practice precepts, already familiar to healthcare professionals, is proposed as a method to improve practitioners’ health information literacy.
Originality/value
Explorations of “health literacy” have primarily focused on healthcare consumers’ interactions with basic health information and services. The health literacy (and health information literacy) of care practitioners has received much less attention. By gaining a greater understanding of how information behaviors intersect with healthcare practitioners’ own health literacy, the librarians and educators who serve future and current care professionals can offer more informed information literacy instruction, enabling practitioners to provide improved patient care.
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Keywords
Ann Hallyburton and Paromita Biswas
The idiom “sacred cow” is problematic due to its inaccuracy and cultural insensitivity. The purpose of this paper is to examine the term’s meaning within the nursing literature…
Abstract
Purpose
The idiom “sacred cow” is problematic due to its inaccuracy and cultural insensitivity. The purpose of this paper is to examine the term’s meaning within the nursing literature, describe connotations in religious contexts, explore subject headings applied to research using the phrase, and discuss alternative terminology.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper employs Rodgers’ evolutionary concept analysis methodology to identify the concept “sacred cow” and surrogate terms, collect and analyze sample articles and headings, explore an exemplary case, and look for concept implications.
Findings
The term “sacred cow” appears frequently in the healthcare literature, particularly within the nursing literature. Its meaning within this literature pertains primarily to practices not supported by empirical evidence and performed to maintain a status quo. Headings applied to the relevant literature do not describe this concept, and more accurate headings could not be found within widely used controlled vocabularies.
Research limitations/implications
“Sacred cow” is an inaccurate descriptor for practices not supported by evidence as these practices do not usually apply to holiness or cattle. The term’s implied meaning comes only when viewed within a context satirizing beliefs considered as “other.”
Originality/value
This paper appears to be the first to methodically explore the concept of “sacred cow” within the nursing literature. The paper breaks ground in proposing solutions for the lack of applicable controlled vocabulary. By exploring these topics, it is hoped future authors use more accurate, culturally neutral terminology when discussing non-evidence-based practices and indexers increase discoverability by using more descriptive headings.