Most academic libraries offer some form of digital reference service through e-mail or Web forms. Now many libraries are moving toward an almost-immediate form of digital reference: instant messaging. During the 2000—2001 academic year, the General Libraries of the University at Buffalo conducted a pilot project to assess the feasibility of providing reference through instant messaging. The libraries used the popular “chat room” format and America Online s Instant Messenger software. This article describes the project, its implementation, the software used, staffing issues, and publicity efforts. It also discusses the results of the project in terms of user demographics, satisfaction levels, usage statistics, patron comments, and librarian feedback. Finally, the article offers conclusions about offering instant messaging reference in a large academic library.
In order to determine the effect of family support on the psychological well-being of heterosexual couples with at least one HIV-seropositive, family support data were obtained from couples, who were separately interviewed. Two hundred heterosexuals were interviewed (97 males, 103 females). 182 were partners in HIV serodiscordant couples (18 members were in 10 couples concordant for HIV-seropositivity). Overall, there were 76 HIV+ males and 30 HIV+ females. The Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) was used to measure psychological distress. Sixty-five per cent of the subjects had family members aware of partners' HIV infection, but only 50% of aware families were reported as supportive. Family support was not a significant predictor of distress. Gender was the most significant predictor of psychological distress as measured by the BSI subscales. Both HIV positive and HIV negative females had more distress than their male counterparts on several dimensions (somatization, obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, phobic anxiety and paranoia), and on the General Severity Index (GSI) of the BSI (HIV-positives: p = 0.003; HIV-negatives: p = 0.01). Despite the general lack of association of family support with psychological distress, women in couples affected by HIV had more distress than men. The mental health needs of women clearly differ from men, and continued gender comparisons should be done to develop appropriate and effective interventions for these groups.
Olson (1993, Annals of Human Genetics 57, 291-295) proposed a large-sample test of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium when genotype data are sampled from several populations with different allele frequencies. The test assumes that a ratio measure of disequilibrium is constant across the populations. In this paper, we consider the problem of testing the assumption of homogeneity of that ratio and propose both a large-sample test and an exact test. The large-sample test is appropriate if sample sizes in all strata are sufficiently large, but is strongly anticonservative if some strata are small. In the latter case, the exact test is preferred and we approximate the P-value of this test using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach.
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