Automated Classification to Improve the Efficiency of Weeding Library Collections

Previous studies have shown that weeding a library collection benefits patrons and increases circulation rates. However, the time required to review the collection and make weeding decisions presents a formidable obstacle. This study empirically evaluated methods for automatically classifying weeding candidates. A data set containing 80,346 items from a large-scale weeding project running from 2011 to 2014 at Wesleyan University was used to train six machine learning classifiers to predict a weeding decision of either ‘Keep’ or ‘Weed’ for each candidate. The study found statistically significant agreement (p?=?0.001) between classifier predictions and librarian judgments for all classifier types. The naive Bayes and linear support vector machine classifiers had the highest recall (fraction of items weeded by librarians that were identified by the algorithm), while the k-nearest-neighbor classifier had the highest precision (fraction of recommended candidates that librarians had chosen to weed). The variables found to be most relevant were: librarian and faculty votes for retention, item age, and the presence of copies in other libraries.     

The influence of pictures on the derivation of meaning from children's reading materials

This discussion is a review of experimental work designed to determine whether pictures have an effect upon the derivation of meaning from the text printed in children's reading materials. Many reading schemes emphasize the use of illustration, but for a number of different purposes ranging from the provision of a referent for a specific word, to the provision of' contextual support, and the generation of motivation for reading. Experimental studies of the interactions between pictures arid words in the cognitive system go some way to supporting three uses of illustration in (a) the provision of meanings against which the print may be compared, (b) in the development of an organized understanding of the meaning of the text, and (c) in the enhancement of subsequent recall. The danger of distraction arising from the pictures has also been investigated, and been found to lead to decoding errors in young children presented with one word at a time. An analysis of mutual interference effects between pairs of pictures and words leads to the conclusion that the cognitive representations of meanings arc organized in a semantic system common to pictures and words. Thus, any decoding errors due to interference effects are of more than local importance—they can affect comprehension and influence the stored representation.     

The role of education in Jewish continuity: a response to Jonathan Sacks

Contrasting explanations of Jewish survival form the backdrop to this article. For Jonathan Sacks (1994 Sacks, J. 1994. Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?, Ilford: Vallentine Mitchell.  [Google Scholar]) the crucial factor has been the role played by Jewish education; indeed, he claims that the demographic threat currently facing Anglo‐Jewry is largely the result of the community having neglected the Jewish education of its children over the past 200 years. He advocates reinstating this communal responsibility as the sovereign Jewish value in order to deal with the threat. In my view, the influence that Sacks attributes to education and particularly to Jewish schools is overstated. It stems from a misreading of modern Anglo‐Jewish history and from a failure to take fully into account the ways in which Jewish schools impact on their pupils’ ethnic and religious identity. These considerations apart, I contend that prioritising education will not necessarily strengthen the commitment to Jewish continuity that is the sine qua non of survival.     

The ‘White Man’s Game’? West Indian Cricket Tours of the 1900s

The 1900s saw two tours of the United Kingdom (UK) by a mixed race cricket team representing the West Indies. This paper argues that the tours were part of a concerted cultural campaign largely organized by the West India Committee to raise the profile of the British West Indian colonies in the Mother Country in the light of competition for favour among the settler colonies. It analyzes the selection of the team and its reception in the UK to argue that the existing literature has been mistaken in portraying the team to have been subject to consistent hostility due to the inclusion of black players in the touring party. Rather it is argued that the team of 1900 was largely welcomed as a truly representative West Indian team but that by 1906 a tightening of the definition of who could represent the empire on the sports field, influenced by the settlement of the South Africa War, meant that mixed race cricket would be rejected and the West Indians unjustly excluded from the Imperial Cricket Conference, which became an all whites club.