Consolidation of journal publishers and declining library budgets has resulted in conflicts between academic libraries over price and access. Several conflict theories, including conflict spiral, power dependence, and game theory can be used to explain how this relationship developed and possible approaches to improving a libraries position.

This paper presents the results of a preliminary study designed to examine the feasibility of conducting research into the learning outcomes associated with research consultation between reference librarians and university students. The researcher studied the teaching taking place at an academic library reference desk and assessed the student’s ability to apply what was taught to a new information need. The results indicate that participant awareness of library resources increased and their skill in searching online databases improved. Although participants demonstrated greater skill in identifying and obtaining useful information, they were unable to demonstrate an increased ability to assess the quality of the information acquired. The paper demonstrated that it is both possible and useful to assess the learning taking place at academic library reference desks.

The pursuit of accurate methods for generalizing attributes of a population from a sampled subset is a problem predating the discipline of statistics. Rather than attempting to characterize a population and so assume that the population perfectly represents its own generative process, a superpopulation approach considers the observed population as a sigma algebra of all possible data generated by a process and is focused upon estimating the parameters of the process rather than producing summary statistics.

This study briefly surveys the essentials of survey sampling and evaluates a new superpopulation-based approach put forth by Chaudhuri, Handcock and Rendall (2013), based upon the empirical likelihood of Owen (1989). Using the form of the Hajek estimator and informing it with conditional estimation on empirical likelihood, the approach is shown by simulation study to improve in both accuracy and variance against Hajek's estimator in cases where the values of interest and sampled auxiliary information have little or no correlation, and no improvement over existing methods otherwise.

Large multiwavelength surveys are now driving the frontiers of astronomical research. I describe results from my work using data from two large astronomical surveys: the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), which has obtained deep photometric and spectroscopic data on two square degrees of the sky using many of the most powerful telescopes in the world, and the WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallels (WISP) Survey, which uses the highly sensitive slitless spectroscopic capability of the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 to detect star-forming galaxies over most of the universe's history. First I describe my work on the evolution of the high-redshift quasar luminosity function, an important observational quantity constraining the growth of the supermassive black holes in the early universe. I show that the number density of faint quasars declines rapidly above z~3. This result is discussed in the context of cosmic reionization and the coevolution of galaxies and their central black holes.

Next I present results of a multi-year campaign of near-infrared spectroscopy with FIRE, a world-class near-infrared spectrometer on the Magellan Baade 6.5 meter telescope in Chile, targeting emission-line galaxies at z~2 discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope. Our results showed that the typical emission-line galaxy at this redshift has low-metallicity, low dust obscuration, high ionization parameter, and little evidence for significant active galactic nucleus (AGN) contribution to the emission lines. We also find evidence that high redshift star-forming galaxies have enhanced nitrogen abundances. This result has interesting implications for the nature of the star formation in such galaxies -- in particular, it could mean that a large fraction of such galaxies harbor substantial populations of Wolf-Rayet stars, which are massive, evolved stars ejecting large amounts of enriched matter into the interstellar medium.

Finally, I will discuss the discovery of three distant, ultracool brown dwarfs in the WISP survey. These objects, larger than massive planets but smaller than dwarf stars, are very difficult to detect, but their numbers and distribution in our galaxy have profound implications for our understanding of the formation of low-mass stars and planets. The brown dwarfs were found in the WFC3 grism spectroscopy, where they were identified through their strong atmospheric absorption features of water and methane. A systematic search for such objects in all WISP fields yielded three in total, allowing statistical inferences to be made regarding their distribution and number density in the Milky Way.