Shifts in Scholarly Attention Among World Regions Webinar (Session 1 of OCLC Research Briefing at UNC Chapel Hill)
In this webinar, Dr. Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill presents his research on changing academic attention to world regions over the past 50 years. Tweet: #oclcr #insightseries
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Speaker
Charles Kurzman, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Description
In this webinar, Dr. Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, presents his research on changing academic attention to world regions over the past 50 years, “attention” as measured by analyzing works published about each region of the world and collected in U.S. academic libraries for each year of publication since 1958. The patterns that emerge from this research will help to inform social scientists and educational policymakers about trends and possible gaps in scholarly attention to different regions of the world.
Dr. Kurzman received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how social science maps the world. With this grant, he is examining social-scientific journal articles, books, doctoral dissertations, and disciplinary awards to see how often each world region has been studied over the past half-century. The dataset that this project generates will allow us to track the trends in scholarly attention to various parts of the world, and to test theories in the sociology of social science about how researchers select subjects for study.
This important work by Dr. Kurzman has been presented as a paper, “American Scholarship and the Global Turn,” provided as background material for The Global Dimensions of Scholarship and Research Libraries: A Forum on the Future meeting (held 5-6 December, 2012, at Duke University in Durham, NC, USA; an event supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by Duke and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)).
As part of its public mission and a long-standing program of offering in-kind support for academic research, OCLC provided Dr. Kurzman with a letter of support during the NSF grant application process and later supplied the successfully-funded project with bibliographic data from OCLC WorldCat®, a database of descriptive information – contributed by OCLC member libraries -- representing resources in library collections worldwide. The WorldCat data provided was enhanced by OCLC Research with OCLC algorithmically-assigned Audience Level values, OCLC-assigned Work Keys, FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) headings, and statistical data about U.S. academic library holdings.
OCLC Research was pleased to present this webinar as part of the OCLC Collective Insight Series of presentations and discussions that illuminate the value of collective knowledge, data, and action, value realized daily by libraries, library users, scholars, and the world at large.
This event was part of the OCLC Research Briefing at UNC Chapel Hill that took place on Friday, 7 June. The event was free and open to the public.
OCLC Research is also thankful to UNC Chapel Hill for graciously hosting this event.
Date
07 June 2013
Time
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Eastern Daylight Time, North America [UTC -4]
Venue
UNC Chapel Hill and Online Via WebEx