Reaping the Digital Dividend: Is it Time to Take the Great Leap?
Five years ago I wrote about some of the key issues and problems that confronted academic law libraries, and speculated about what the future might hold. I discussed trends in legal education and developments in legal research instruction; the changing physical environment of the library, including an idea that was once anathema, the growing move to allow patrons to eat and drink in the library. Time has passed all too quickly and there have been many momentous changes in the world, including the trauma of September 11, 2001, and the protracted war in Iraq.
The Virtual Law School Library
What do the next twenty years hold for law school libraries? How will they look in 2021? What will be in them? Who will use them? Will we still use books, or will everything be accessed through an electronic medium? These questions are canvassed in the context of a law school library that is, in 2001, uneasily poised at a junction where signposts point to alternative futures for the delivery of legal education itself. I. Introduction We seem, yet again, to be at one of those moments in time, so common in the last quarter of the 20th century, and likely to be continuous in the 21st, when the future appears as a melting pot of possibilities for law libraries, particularly university law libraries. This time the uncertainty is largely driven by the potential advent of Web-based learning, and the as yet largely undeveloped nature of the law school response to the possibilities of education outside of the traditional classroom model. Uncertainty is also due to the growing awareness that IT literacy is increasing rapidly among our user community, and that students in particular now prefer electronic sources of information over print – sources which, increasingly, they can access from places other than the physical law library.
The Prevalence of Dietary Supplement Use among College Students: A Nationwide Survey in Japan
To clarify the prevalence of dietary supplement use among college students, we conducted Internet-based nationwide questionnaire surveys with 157,595 Japanese college students aged between 18 to 24 years old who were registrants of Macromill Inc. (Tokyo, Japan). Among the 9066 respondents (response rate 5.8%), 16.8% were currently using dietary supplements. The prevalence of dietary supplement use did not differ significantly between males (17.1%) and females (16.7%). However, it increased according to their grade (13.1% to 20.5%), and it was higher in medical and pharmaceutical college students (22.0%) compared to others (16.7%). The main purpose of dietary supplement use was for the health benefits in both males and females. Other reasons were to build muscle in males, and as a beauty supplement and for weight loss in females. According to the purpose of dietary supplement use, the most commonly-used dietary supplements were vitamin/mineral supplements in both males and females, then protein and weight loss supplements in males and females, respectively. Although most students obtained information about dietary supplements via the Internet, they typically purchased the supplements from drug stores. Of the students surveyed, 7.5% who were currently using or used to use dietary supplements experienced adverse effects, with no significant difference between genders (8.8% in male, 7.0% in female). In conclusion, the prevalence of dietary supplement use increased with grade among college students in Japan. Some of them experienced adverse effects. Education may be important to prevent adverse effects resulting from supplement use in college.