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Portions of this letter come from the content published in the paper by Ware et al. [1].

As the international student population continues to grow, librarians must adjust their instruction to meet the needs of students who are adapting to a new country, culture, and language. This study assesses first-year international students as they engage in the research process through the completion of concept maps that precede database searches. Librarians assessed concept maps of international students completed prior to information literacy instruction to better understand the difficulties they experienced defining research topics and identifying keywords and alternatives. The results of this assessment provide a deeper understanding of the challenges first-year international students face with creating search strategies. Ultimately, this study resulted in more meaningful relationships between librarians and English as a second language (ESL) instructors, and effective adaptations to ESL library instruction.

Academic libraries are one of the most important sources of "on the job" training for future library instructors. Librarians who supervise and assess these future library instructors (often in graduate assistant positions) often choose to provide observations and feedback each semester to these instructors in training. Scholarly literature, however, provides little information on whether this system helps graduate assistants to develop as teachers. The authors of this article assessed graduate assistants' performance as teachers over three semesters using a system of observation and self-assessment. They analyzed both patterns and areas of growth and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this system.

This article explores student, instructor, and librarian perceptions of chat reference in the context of an introductory composition course. Participants in a mixed-method study responded to an anonymized chat transcript. While student respondents valued speed and efficiency, they were willing to receive instruction and open to questions that demonstrated interest or moved the research forward. Librarian and instructor comments focused on how these chats supported or could better support student learning, as well as on the interplay between classroom teaching, library instruction, and reference. The authors also identify implications that these findings have for the development of best practices in chat reference.

Real-time national global positioning system (GPS) networks are being established in a number of countries for atmospheric sensing. The authors, in collaboration with participating universities, are developing one of these networks in the United States. The proposed network, named "SuomiNet" to honor meteorological satellite pioneer Verner Suomi, is funded by the US National Science Foundation to exploit the recently shown ability of ground-based GPS receivers to make thousands of accurate upper and lower atmospheric measurements per day. Phase delays induced in GPS signals by the ionosphere and neutral atmosphere can be measured with high precision simultaneously along a dozen or so GPS ray paths in the field of view. These delays can be converted into integrated water-vapor (if surface pressure data or estimates are available) and total electron content (TEC), along each GPS ray path. The resulting continuous, accurate, all-weather, real-time GPS moisture data will help advance university research in mesoscale modeling and data assimilation, severe weather, precipitation, cloud dynamics, regional climate and hydrology. Similarly, continuous, accurate, all-weather, real-time TEC data have applications in modeling and prediction of severe terrestrial and space weather, detection and forecasting of low-latitude ionospheric scintillation activity and geomagnetic storm effects at ionospheric mid-latitudes, and detection of ionospheric effects induced by a variety of geophysical events. SuomiNet data also have potential applications in coastal meteorology, providing ground truth for satellite radiometry, correction of synthetic aperture radar data for crustal deformation and topography studies, and detection of scintillation associated with atmospheric turbulence in the lower troposphere. In this paper we describe SuomiNet, its applications, and the larger opportunity to coordinate national real-time GPS networks to maximize their scientific and operational impact. © 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Real-time national Global Positioning System (GPS) networks are being established in a number of countries for atmospheric sensing. UCAR, in collaboration with participating universities, is developing one of these networks in the United States. The network, named "SuomiNet" to honor meteorological satellite pioneer Verner Suomi, is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. SuomiNet will exploit the recently-shown ability of ground-based GPS receivers to make thousands of accurate upper and lower atmospheric measurements per day. Phase delays induced in GPS signals by the ionosphere and neutral atmosphere can be measured with high precision simultaneously along up to a dozen GPS ray paths in the field of view. These delays can be converted into total electron content (TEC), and integrated water vapor (if surface pressure data or estimates are available), along each GPS ray path. The resulting continuous, accurate, all-weather, real-time upper and lower atmospheric data create a variety of opportunities for atmospheric research. In this letter we describe SuomiNet, its applications, and the opportunity to coordinate national real-time GPS networks to create, a global network with larger scientific and operational potential. Copy right© The Society of Geomagnetism and Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences (SGEPSS); The Seismological Society of Japan; The Volcanological Society of Japan; The Geodetic Society of Japan; The Japanese Society for Planetary Sciences.

Given the many changes in our students and their study and research practices, libraries are finding it necessary to seek new ways to reach these students. The Undergraduate Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created a new model to do so. Librarian's Office Hours are a hybrid of reference and instructional services that fulfill the dual purposes of meeting the needs of term paper research counseling and library workshops. This article discusses the strategies involved in the creation and implementation of this service and examines suggestions for the future of such a service. (Contains 1 note.)

Community involvement in music making is a time-honored tradition that is experiencing a joyful resurgence. The word "community" can mean both an area of geography as well as a group of people coming together with a sense of purpose. In creating a community chorus, a key to its success is to place more emphasis on the second aspect. Go beyond physical boundaries of living areas and form a new subset of the population that comes together to make music. This article gives the detailed steps involved in starting a community chorus. It includes a discussion of what positions will need to be assigned, how to decide on a rehearsal site, and what music texts to choose. Included is a list of MENC resources and 3 notes.

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2008.02.019 Byline: Santiago de la PeA[+ or -]a (a), Susan K. Avery (a), James P. Avery (b) Keywords: Meteors Abstract: Every year the Earth crosses or passes near one of the dust trails left by Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle in its pass through the Solar System every 33.2 years. This produces a meteor shower Commonly called the Leonid. The 2001 Leonid meteor shower is one of the strongest in recent years. We present observations made by the 50 MHz all-sky meteor radar located at the Platteville Atmospheric Observatory in Colorado (40[degrees] N, 105[degrees] W). The spatial and temporal distributions of the meteor activity detected by the radar during the 2001 Leonid shower differs from the observed sporadic activity detected by VHF radars. Estimation of the radiant flux of the meteor shower of the shower by a well-known methodology is presented, and the intensity of the phenomena is discussed. Author Affiliation: (a) Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder, 216 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-216, USA (b) Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, 426 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-425, USA Article History: Received 28 May 2007; Revised 15 February 2008

This paper presents the self-surveying technique for calibrating the antenna spacing, orientation, and phase errors in multiple receiver radar antenna arrays. Utilizing a set of source transmitters placed at known locations in the far-field of the array and measurements of the phase present at each antenna, the array's relative antenna locations and phase errors can be determined. The advantage of this technique is that the radar is used in its normal operating mode, providing an end-to-end calibration under true operational conditions. A self-survey calibration was performed with a meteor radar located at Sondre Stromfjord, Greenland, successfully mapping the array. The antenna positions were relatively close the expected locations, although the baselines were rotated approximately 5 [degrees] from the true cardinal directions. The majority of the phase error was introduced by the receivers.

This paper discusses the implementation of the University of Colorado's third generation meteor echo detection and collection (MEDAC) system. MEDAC is a PC-based instrument package designed to obtain upper atmosphere wind profiles in conjunction with a host doppler radar. MEDAC/SC is a single card version of the system, which improves reliability, simplifies useability, and increases configuration flexibility. The meteor detection algorithm used by the card has been improved to dynamically adjust to the prevailing noise level and is less likely to respond to nonmeteor targets. To support the hardware, a preemptive multitasking control program with a graphical user interface has been developed. This interface incorporates the experiences gained over the last five years operating MEDAC in remote locations by personnel of widely varying technical backgrounds. Postprocessing of the data involves the estimation of each echo's signal-to-noise ratio, doppler velocity, and direction of arrival.