ALISE Conference 2010 WIP Submission Sessions 1
Suellen S. Adams
52. Information Needs/ Behaviors of Specific Groups
Information Behavior of Serious Recreational Athletes
This poster will outline preliminary findings of a primarily ethnographic research project conducted with serious recreational athletes in Central Texas and Southern New England. Serious recreational athletes for this study included both road and trail runners, duathletes, triathletes, and cyclists who had trained for and competed in at least one event. Focus was on how athletes determined what information they needed, how they found it and how they used it. Of secondary importance was the attempt to determine if there was some established base of canonical literature (books, magazines, websites) that these people had in common. At this time, I have considerable suggestive data in Texas and by the time of the conference should have data from New England as well as preliminary findings overall. It now seems clear that further study will be warranted, and a glimpse at the next steps will also be included.
Nicole D. Alemanne
Besiki Stvilia
Corinne Jörgensen
59. Metadata and Semantic Web
Creating Context for User-Generated Tags: An Exploratory Study
Researchers have proposed employing user-generated tags to enhance the metadata and descriptions of cultural heritage resources. However, questions remain about the efficacy of tags as subject terms for discovery, because freely developed tags lack some characteristics shared by terms developed through the use of controlled vocabularies and thesauri. Specifically, tags do not have context: We do not know the exact meaning that a creator attaches to a tag, and therefore it cannot be disambiguated. Because tags do appear to hold some promise for bringing the user perspective to description and discovery, research to determine methods for creating context is an essential component of tag-related projects.
This exploratory study will investigate methods for enhancing Flickr tags as image metadata through the creation of context. Community generated tags will be harvested from a sample of images in the Library of Congress’ (LoC) Flickr photostream and will be compared to metadata from related Wikipedia articles to determine the incidence of similarity and difference. This will inform an exploration of methods of combining user-generated tags with other resources to create richer, contextual metadata for images. In addition, a content analysis of comments in the LoC Flickr photostream will be employed to explore the idea of comments as a process of collective disambiguation. Finally, the LoC and Wikipedia subject terms will be compared to subject headings from the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials to determine whether socially created metadata can be used to enhance a current knowledge organization tool by suggesting new concepts, terms and relationships.
Simon Aristeguieta-Trillos
INFORMATION SEEKING BEHAVIOR OF SCIENTISTS IN VENEZUELA
The study will identify information seeking behaviors and dissemination of scientific information by the Venezuelan scientific community. The purpose is to discover the strategies and behaviors designed and implemented by scientists in Venezuela to be current with scientific information; as well as to describe how scientific information is disseminated in Venezuela and abroad. The study approaches the problem from a phenomenological perspective. Participants in the study tell the researcher how information seeking activities are accomplished and how research is disseminated nationally and internationally. The long interview was used to collect data. Data analysis involves analytic induction. Participants in the study were Venezuelan scientists registered in the Incentive Research Program sponsored by the Venezuelan National Government. Seventeen researchers were interviewed in July 2009. Thirteen were recorded following the University of Tennessee IRB guidelines. Transcription, data analysis and organization of information will be carried out from September 2009 to February 2010.
Christopher Sean Burns
Collection Development and Social Computing: Measuring the Relevancy of Scholarly Papers
CiteULike.org is a web site that allows users to manage, store, and tag scholarly citations and papers. My research project hypothesis states there will be a correlation between the frequencies of article postings on CiteULike.org with the amount of instances an article has been cited, as reported by Google Scholar. This hypothesis is built upon the following argument: The process of adding citations and papers to CiteULike.org, tagging those citations and papers, and managing one's citation library involves a degree of manual effort. Since the process involves some level of effort, which includes an investment of time and thought, users of CiteULike.org will primarily add citations and papers to their accounts they have already deemed to have a high level of value and relevancy. Consequently, I propose that the selection process involved, perhaps comparable to the collection development process conducted by librarians, increases the identification and exchange of highly relevant articles per field of study. To measure article relevancy, I will begin by identifying article frequency on CiteULike.org and comparing this to a citation analysis of these articles on Google Scholar (additional studies may include subscription databases such as Scopus). This research will begin to form the basis of future inquiry in how scholars determine for themselves article value and relevancy as well as inquiry in information retrieval on social computing web sites.
Debi Carruth
52. Information Needs/Behaviors of Specific Groups
Information Behavior of Gifted Youth Related to Hobby Pursuit: An Exploratory Study
Through intensive exploratory research, this study seeks to explicate the information behavior of gifted youth related to their hobby pursuits and the evolution of their information behavior processes during the pursuit of hobbies. The investigation draws upon the theoretical frameworks of Everyday Life Information Seeking (ELIS), Flow, and Serious Leisure to examine the information behavior of gifted young people related to their hobbies. The methodology is loosely modeled on a study conducted by Fisher et al. with preadolescent youth (2007).
It is known that gifted youth do not, as a general rule, get their intellectual needs met in the classroom. We do not know, however, if gifted youth find ways outside school to challenge themselves and if they do, the form these challenges take or the information processes through which gifted youth pursue them. The absence of concrete knowledge about these issues leaves parents and caregivers of gifted children and the children themselves without information that might significantly change how they take advantage of their talents in everyday life.
Serious leisure, which includes hobby pursuit, amateur pursuits, and volunteerism, might provide the motivation and challenge that gifted children do not find at school. Of particular interest to the current study are hobbies, because hobby pursuit is an information-rich endeavor (Hartel, 2007). The current research focuses on information behaviors of gifted youth related to their hobby pursuits in order to fill identified research gaps and provide useful information for gifted youth and the adults who care about their well-being.
Hsia-Ching Chang
Hemalata Iyer
Minjie Chen
The origin of Chinese American children's literature: A historical study
This project plans to delineate the history of early Chinese American children's literature published from the 1920s until the eve of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s. Since the first arrival of Chinese laborers in California from the Gold Rush of 1848, Chinese immigrants had been subjected to racial hatred and discriminatory legislations in the United States. Books by ethnic Chinese writers or about Chinese characters generally had no market in the mainstream society. My preliminary research found that it was between two World Wars and with the then popular notion of "internationalism" that folktales translated from Chinese and fairy tales featuring Chinese characters began to be introduced to American young readers. During the 1930s, a group of Caucasian authors who were familiar with Chinese culture succeeded in works of contemporary realistic fiction about China and ethnic Chinese people. Following the outbreak of the Pacific War, the allied relationship between China and the United States increased America's interest in China/Chinese and gave ethnic Chinese writers a louder voice in the literary world. After World War II, however, the ensuing Cold War rendered modern China a dangerous topic, either silencing writers or forcing them to choose such "safe" topics as folktales and folk customs, topics devoid of the chaotic political reality of Chinese (American) society. Lacking an understanding of the little studied early Chinese American children’s literature has prevented us from putting contemporary works into a proper historical context. Constructing that history will help us see the legacy of pre-1960s Chinese American children's literature, and to gain insight into how contemporary works have negotiated the tradition and burden from the embryonic stage of that literature.
Pok W. Chin
Users' concepts of an image and image categorization
A concept in a human’s mind is a mental representation of a category of entities. In order to become a member of a category, an entity must meet certain categorical rules. However, cognitive scientists still cannot agree on what kind of rules can comprehensively and exhaustively constitutes categorical rules. According to Medin (1989), “Categorization involves treating two or more distinct entities as in some way equivalent in the service of accessing knowledge and making predictions”. Categorizing and indexing groups of images has “the potential to reduce the search space and, thus, search time, because there are fewer categories than the total number of individual members” (O’Connor, O’Connor, and Abbas, 1999). The fundamental notion underlying this research study is that the potential concepts drawn from an image are subject to individual interpretation. The researcher of this study proposes a three way classification for concepts drawn from an image: (1) concept of high material embodiment (HME), (2) concept of moderate material embodiment (MME), and (3) concept of low material embodiment (LME). HME concept refers to an image meaning that has unambiguous membership in certain class of objects. LME concept refers to an image meaning that has great ambiguity and cannot be confined to finite membership in certain class of objects. MME concept is a mix of HME and LME concepts. This study aspires to explore and investigate how two groups of subjects browse and select images that they deem matching these concepts.
Medin, D. (1989). Concepts and conceptual structures. American Psychologist, 45, 1469-1481.
Songphan Choemprayong
The Strength of Outsiders’ Doctrine: Collective Information Behavior during Thailand’s 2006 Coup D’état
This study explores the way in which people seek and share information during a socio-political crisis, using the September 19, 2006 coup d’état in Thailand as a case study, where the insiders’ world is highly restricted. Using Chatman’s theory of life in a round and Merton’s Insiders and Outsiders doctrine as major theoretical frameworks, this study particularly focuses on the roles of insiders and outsiders in this phenomenon. Qualitative methods are applied, including document analysis and semi-structure interviews. The document analysis covers public online documents (i.e., blogs, photos, videos, discussion forums, and Wikipedia entries) and private documents (e.g., transaction logs, diaries/journals) obtained during the interviews. Sense-making methodology, including the Micro-Moment Time-line interview approach and the question roster, frames the telephone and online interviews. The informants are selected using two methods. The first twenty informants are recruited as a result of the document analysis, controlling for document type, small world membership, and the degree of political discussion in the document. Another group of informants, up to 20 informants, are recruited using a snowball sampling technique. Based on grounded theory, the analytical schemes are adapted from Clarke’s situational map and social arenas/worldview map. In addition to augment the understanding of collective information behavior during socio-political crises, this study is expected to expand the discourse of information poverty/poor outside the context of everyday life and routine activities. Additionally, it extends understanding of conditions/factors influencing the interactions between insiders and outsiders, especially when the insiders step outside of their own word to obtain information.
Clayton A. Copeland
Creating a Culture of Collaboration: Working Together to Make Libraries Accessible for
The 1980’s “Decade of the Disabled,” and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 stimulated increased awareness regarding rights of differently-able people for improved access to education, employment, and information (United Nations, 1982). As “great equalizers of knowledge,” (Epp, 2006) libraries were among organizations striving to become accessible, enabling environments for differently-able patrons. While “diversity” remains critical for libraries, many remain inaccessible (Murray, 2000, 2001; Wojahn, 2006). In recent years, few studies have investigated how library accessibility - physical and virtual - might be improved. Various factors - including financial limitations, lack of awareness regarding the existence and impact of inaccessibility, and even complacency - are arguable contributors to this reality. Perhaps one of the most significant contributors, however, is the lack of collaboration that has existed in the process of determining when libraries are in fact accessible / inaccessible. Pervasive reliance on one dimensional studies that singly investigate library accessibility / inaccessibility from the perspectives of architects, typically-able library professionals, typically-able library patrons, or even from the perspectives of differently-able library patrons themselves, significantly handicap the studies’ impact. This study seeks to conduct a collaborative, multi-dimensional investigation of library accessibility and services from multiple perspectives and to bring people with various professional and lived experiences together to define and overcome barriers to accessibility. Study methods offer meta-analysis for fit to the problem of equity of access to information – an issue that presents with differently-able populations through distinct, observable, and measurable manifestations.
Jeanette de Richemond
My current research focuses on the assessment of “enough” information to make a decision. Preliminary findings of a survey of 90 health sciences librarians revealed that finding, interpreting, and providing information that answers a question or contributes to making a decision is the goal of the health science librarians’ work task. Based on the findings, health science librarians assess “enough” as information leading to a decision or providing an answer. The assessment of “enough” is influenced by the context in which the work task is performed; this may include the patient’s problem, the available information resources, as well as the larger context in which the search is performed. The determination of “enough” is affected by the amount of time available to conduct the search in the information retrieval systems or library books. Health science librarians also tend to use their own heuristics as in determining that “enough” information has been provided when N search strategies result in the same retrieval results N times.
The poster will report on the state of my current research; provide theoretical background for propositions about “enough,” (such as “Enough” includes the development of knowledge that evidence exists to support a particular theory. In medical work, the concept of “enough” represents a state of knowledge required to take action.), and present a new model for assessing enough.
Theoretical background is based on Schutz and Luckmann Belkin, Li and Belkin, and Dervin, among others.
André de Souza Pena
The State of the Art of studies of scientific collaboration in Brazil
It is intended to investigate the state of the art of scientific collaboration in Brazil. It is done a survey of a major journal in information science from Brazil, called Perspectives on Information Science, from 1996 to 2006. Bibliometric characteristics are analyzed some of the articles that address this issue in order to characterize the authors who are more productive in this line of research in Brazil, what are its key employees, the papers most cited, and so on. It is hoped this work with a direction to stimulate production in this area, and spread the importance of collaboration in academia.
Dr. Betsy Diamant-Cohen
Collaborative Partnerships in Children’s Services: Best Practices
Carolyn Hank
Scholars and Their Blogs: A Methodological Approach Examining Blogs as an Informal Channel of Scholarly Communication and Implications for Digital Preservation
This poster presents a methodological approach for research on scholars’ blogs. The intent is three-fold. First, it allows for investigation into a framework for studying this diverse and expanding group of content creators. This builds from earlier survey research on bloggers’ digital preservation perceptions and preferences, regardless of domain.1,2 Second, it will inform current and future blog curation and preservation initiatives. This will be achieved through identification of blog attributes and blogger behaviors and preferences impacting the acquisition, identification, storage, use and viability for long-term stewardship. Third, it will contribute to on-going dialogue and investigation on the contemporary system of scholarly communication. In particular, it will consider the role of blogs as an evolving informal channel of scholarly communication. The proposed approach includes: 1) a document analysis of scholars’ blogs, examining particular blog elements, including posts, comments, use statements, and “about” information, quantifying publishing behaviors (e.g., frequency of updates), and publication impact (e.g., blog rolls, linkages, and commentary); and 2) a web-based survey to assess perceptions on preservation and reflections on how bloggers’ perceive their blogging activities in relation to scholarly communication. Considering the pace in which technologies and communication channels evolve, deliberate approaches to the selection, acquisition and long-term stewardship of scholarly blogs is a contemporary research challenge. Without such approaches, the scholar blogs of today may be unavailable into the future. The methodology proposed in this poster is intended to contribute to discussions on what constitutes scholarly communication and inform emerging programmatic approaches for preservation.
Dana Hanson-Baldauf
Everyday Life Information Needs, Practices, and Challenges of Young Adults with Intellectual Disabilities
Access to meaningful information can have a life changing impact in the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities, providing a sense of security and fostering empowerment and self-control in lives that are often afforded few opportunities for such. Although the Developmental Disabilities Act and Bill of Rights (2000) emphasizes the need and importance of information as a means to independence and increased quality of life for individuals with developmental disabilities, very little has been studied and written in the field of information and library science regarding the information needs, practices, and challenges of these individuals. Furthermore, their voices, perspectives, and opinions have largely been excluded from consideration.
The proposed poster will provide details of a study in progress exploring the everyday life information needs, practices, and challenges of four young adults with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities, bringing forth their voices, perspectives, and opinions through narrative interviews. This study employs a case study approach and utilizes a grounded theory framework for data collection decision making and analysis. It is hoped the outcome will serve as a springboard for increased research in this area, resulting in improved library and information service to these individuals, and ultimately, increased quality of life for individuals with intellectual disabilities.
Mary Ann Harlan
Information Literacy Practices of Adolescent Content Creators.
As members of the Web 2.0 digital community over half of American adolescents have participated in creating content and sharing that content online. However many indications suggest that content creation is occurring primarily in informal environments, and that adolescents are learning the skills, developing the ethics, and acquiring habits through interaction with others in this informal community rather than through direct, formal instruction. Participation in content sharing communities suggests that teens are information literate, although the information literacy practices in Web 2.0 may differ from academic information literacy, and the skills, and practices may differ from those learned in a formal setting.
Heiko Haubitz
Rebecca D. Hunt, Ph.D.
A Literary Examination of Celebrity-Authored Children’s Books
The past two decades have brought to the book publishing industry a steady increase in the number of celebrities writing books for children. Book publishers have recognized this “phenomena” to be a lucrative market worldwide and have capitalized on it. Celebrities of all kinds and in different parts of the world – actors in film and television, news anchors, politicians, government officials, athletes, musicians, pop stars, and authors of adult novels have written children’s books. Two theoretical frameworks will be used to examine the literary quality and merit of the celebrity authored books. Children’s books written by sports celebrities will be the focus of this study. Other categories or celebrity-authored books will be examined at a later date.
The first theoretical concept, are the traditional literary elements identified by numerous researchers in the field of children’s literature (e.g., plot, setting, characters). The second theoretical concept of evaluation is “Radical Change,” a theory developed by Eliza Dresang. Radical Change means “fundamental change, departing from the usual or traditional in literature for youth, although still related to it” (1999, 4). The Radical Change framework when used helps to identify, understand, and evaluate books with specific characteristics. This construct allows reviewers to move beyond “description type” evaluations to a more holistic method of evaluation of books published before and during the “digital age.” The use of both theoretical models provides a way to holistically evaluate children’s and young adult literature. It gives “choice” in how we can effectively evaluate and not just review literature.
Yusuke Ishimura Dr. Joan C. Bartlett [email protected]
43. Serving Multicultural Populations
Integrating information behaviour and information literacy: A comparative study of Japanese and Canadian undergraduate students in a Canadian university
This poster session reports preliminary results from doctoral research that investigates the information behavior and information literacy skills of Japanese students, as a sample of international students, and Canadian undergraduates during their research tasks in a Canadian university.
Tingting Jiang
Xiaoguang Wang
53. Scholarly and Scientific Communication
Informal scientific communication in the blogging community: An exploratory study based on blogroll links
The blog is a popular computer-mediated communication system that not only appeals to general Web users, but also scientists and scholars who deem it a convenient informal scientific communication channel. The latter are supported to communicate on a one-to-many basis by publishing their profession-related opinions and ideas in blog posts, or on a one-to-one basis through various links. Blogroll link is an important type of link that clearly states the long-term communication relationship between two bloggers. By sharing similar interests, bloggers form all kinds of topical blogging communities, and their blogroll links gather into social networks which reflect the community structures. This research study conducts a social network analysis with the data from CSDN blogging community, the largest Chinese language blogging community of information technology experts and scientists in China. The processed dataset includes 11,106 blogroll links associated with 6,587 bloggers. According to our findings, the social network of CSDN blogging community is rather sparse and the small-world phenomenon is obvious. It further divides into a number of clusters with star-like topology, each of which can be described as having one central blogger surrounded by many ordinary bloggers. The communication between central and ordinary bloggers within the same cluster is usually one-way and frequent, and different clusters just depend on the central bloggers to communicate with each other. The results indicate that in the communication and diffusion of information, central actors in blogging communities are as influential as core scientists in “invisible colleges”.
Weimao Ke
Scholarly Impact in the Presence of Preferential Attachment
Scholarly communication weaves networks of small worlds that define how knowledge and influence are propagated. It is now well known that preferential attachment supervises evolving dynamics of many collaboration and citation networks, in which, according to de Solla Price (1976), success tends to breed success. The poster reports on an investigation of the effect of preferential attachment on scholarly impact in the emerging field of Information Visualization.
Weimao Ke
Cassidy R. Sugimoto
Javed Mostafa
67. Information Visualization
The Impact of Familiarity and Specificity on Scatter/Gather Browsing and User Relevance Judgment
Abstract: Efficient generation of quality clusters is critical for highly interactive information retrieval (IR) systems. We developed a new clustering algorithm for on-line Scatter/Gather browsing, which was shown to be more scalable than and at least as effective as traditional methods (Ke et al., 2009). This paper reports on additional findings from a user study comparing Scatter/Gather effectiveness. Qualitative analysis of open-ended comments suggests that topic specificity and topic familiarity dictated to a large degree the user's perception of Scatter/Gather effectiveness. Most respondents agreed that it was easier to search broad topics within the Scatter/Gather system, while specific topics were more difficult.
Ji-Hyun Kim
Why Students Blog:
Introduction
Soojung Kim
Does Everyone Want to be a Librarian?: Answerers’ Information Providing Behaviors in Yahoo! Answers
A social Q&A site is a community-based website where people ask and answer questions. Although it is a desirable development that fosters information exchange among the general public, the quality of information provided by lay people in a social Q&A site raises great concerns among information seekers.
Robin Fogle Kurz
Something Worth Reading: A Critical Analysis of Cultural Representation in State-Level Picture Book Award Nominees
Sook Lim
Credibility judgment in the context of Wikipedia
User-generated information sources have been rapidly growing in web 2.0 environments. As a result, Internet users have a variety of choices of web information sources, which requires more mental efforts in evaluating as to whether the information they view is credible, compared to traditionally authoritative sources. Previous research shows that Internet users are concerned about the credibility of web information. Interestingly, however, Internet users do not diligently evaluate web information (Metzger, 2007) and tend not to verify information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007). Furthermore, there exists discrepancy between what Internet users say and what they actually do regarding verifying information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007; Iding, Crosby, Auernheimer, & Klemn, 2009). It seems that the principle of least effort in performing tasks (Case, 2005) is applicable to user information behavior in web environments. Acknowledging these phenomena, this study examines credibility judgment in relation to mental efforts concerning Wikipedia.
The major research questions include as follows: The significance of the study lies in the applicability of the new knowledge of credibility judgment in Wikipedia to improving information literacy in web environments. Data will be collected employing both an experiment and a web survey. This poster session will present previous credibility studies, and the conceptual framework and methodology of the study.
References Case, D. O. (2005). Principle of least effort. K. Fisher, S. Erdelez, & L. Mckechnie (editors), Theories of information behavior (pp. 289-292). Medford, NJ, Information Today, Inc.
Yeo-Joo Lim
Educational Graphic Novels in Korean Children’s Lives
Educational Graphic Novels (EGN) are recognized as an independent genre in Korea. Hwang defines EGNs “are comic books that are made in a popular format to support learning useful information, to cultivate learning motivation in diverse topics, and thus guide readers to more effective education (p.5)1.” Although teachers and librarians disapprove of comics in general, they tend to be more generous when it comes to EGNs, because they believe the educational aspect of them. However, still many teachers and librarians are concerned about the quality and authenticity of the content of EGNs. Also, many librarians hesitate to include them in their collections. In spite of all these worries, children “just love them.”
Hwang, H. Y. (2006). A Study on the Educational Roles of Learning Comics. Master’s Thesis. Kyung Hee University.
Charles Meadows
A comparative study of the diffusion of online classroom platforms within colleges of communication
Due to increasing student populations, restricted physical space, and a technologically driven society, institutions of higher education are quickly accepting alternative instructional platforms.
Lorri Mon Lauren H. Mandel
38. Electronic Reference Services
Temporal Cycles in Virtual Questioning
Multiple temporal patterns can be seen in how questioners approach and ask questions of chat and e-mail digital reference services, such as incoming question patterns in a typical day or week, but little research has as yet investigated how questioning varies throughout an entire year, or temporal patterns influencing types of questions asked throughout a year. While awareness of daily and weekly questioning flows helps arrange daily staffing levels, knowledge of seasonal questioning patterns would assist in staffing for subject expertise, arranging referrals, and preparing answers for known types of cyclical questioning.
Barbara J. Montgomery
One to Many: An Exploration of the Roots of Illiteracy in the Southeastern United States
Jamie Campbell Naidoo
Why Are They Kissing?: A Critical Analysis of International Picture Books Depicting Same-Sex Households and Gay Themes.
Cultural pluralism encompasses many facets including ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and family composition. Research indicates that it is important for children to see representations of themselves and “the other” in their literature in order to function successfully within a culturally pluralistic society and to make intercultural connections. Within the realm of U.S. children’s publishing, families are almost always depicted as nuclear despite the increasing number of households with same-sex parents. The majority of children’s picture books that do feature same-sex parents or gay themes are published in countries outside the U.S. Accordingly, the social themes inscribed within these international books greatly impact young children’s understanding of same-sex families as well as their ability to socially interact with children from these households.
Sarah Park
Information Seeking Behavior, Needs and Resources of Transnationally Adopted Koreans
Indication of special needs: none
Ellen Pozzi
Subaltern Studies: Metatheory and Method for Capturing Experiences of Immigrant Library Users
This poster will explore the use of subaltern studies to uncover the role of the library in the information neighborhood of the immigrant user at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. In Theories of Information Behavior, Marcia Bates defines metatheory as a “fundamental set of ideas about how phenomena of interest in a particular field should be thought about and researched.” Subaltern studies can be a way of thinking about the phenomenon of immigrant use of the library. It can form a framework for using evidence to uncover history from below, avoiding privileging one voice over another and understanding power relations between library and immigrant user. In addition to acting as a framework, subaltern studies can provide the method for analyzing a library’s official records. The archive can be read ‘against the grain’ to find evidence of the experiences of foreign-born users of the American public library. This poster will give a brief history of subaltern studies. It will demonstrate the relevance of subaltern studies to the problem of discovering the role of the library in immigrant’s lives. Finally it will give examples of how subaltern studies methodology will be used in a proposed study of Italian immigrants and their interactions with the Newark Public Library in New Jersey between 1889 and 1919.
Dr. Daniel Roland
The Interpretation of Major Social Events From the Pulpit: An Analysis of Sermons following 9/11 and the ELCA Decision to Ordain Gay Clergy
The research project focuses on clergy members as both consumers and producers of information in the routine task of producing a sermon, a prevalent information product in society. On a weekly basis, the information content of sermons varies greatly from one clergy member to another. However, major events such as 9/11 or a controversial denominational change in policy creates a situation in which many clergy may well be accessing and producing very similar information.
Christianity traditionally holds that the sermon is the Word of God as an interpretation of God’s written word, the Bible. The Holy Spirit guides sermon preparation from the selection of the Bible text and the decisions regarding sermon content. Variations in sermon content are explained as the unique expression of God’s Word for a particular group of people at a particular place and in a particular time. The research project examines the information presented in sermons in the days following major events that touch society or a denomination as a whole.
The research project analyzes the texts of sermons posted to the Internet by clergy of various denominations in the Sundays following 9/11 and the texts of sermons posted by clergy members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) for Sunday, August 23, 2009, which is the Sunday after a denominational change in policy to allow the ordination of practicing homosexuals as ELCA clergy. The analysis looks for contextual patterns in the interpretation of data and the presentation of information regarding such major events.
Abebe Rorissa
Diane Neal
Jonathan Muckell
Alex Chaucer
54. Organization of Information
A comparison of tags assigned to still and moving images on flickr
Digital libraries have become more distributed and more diverse in their collections. It is common for digital libraries, both offline and online, to contain information sources that are multimedia in nature. They provide access to, among others, text and image (still and moving) documents as well as audio files. While digital cameras now capture some metadata automatically, user assigned tags are indispensible when it comes to describing the semantic contents, including location (through geotagging, a process of assigning geographical metadata, usually the latitude and longitude coordinates of locations), of still and moving images. What is more, the numbers of still and moving images that are geotagged are increasing. According to flickr (www.flickr.com), one of the very popular photo sharing services, 3.2 million items were geotagged in September 2009 alone. One of the criticisms directed at user assigned tags, compared to controlled vocabulary terms, is that they are not precise and not well investigated. To address this, we undertook an analysis of tags assigned to a sample of geotagged still and moving images on flickr. The poster will present results of our analysis and implications for indexing and retrieval of still and moving image documents, in light of the fact that user assigned tags will potentially help solve the indexing problem associated with semantic contents of multimedia documents. They also have the potential to bridge the semantic gap. A systematic analysis of geotagged images is both timely and necessary because the phenomenon of social tagging and its true potential are new and not fully understood.
Catherine L. Smith
Nina Wacholder
71. Human-Computer Interaction
Sarah W. Sutton
Identifying core competencies for electronic resources librarians in the twenty-first century academic library
Richard J. Urban Dr. Michael Twidale
71. Human-Computer Interaction
Patchwork Prototyping a Collections Dashboard
As aggregations of digitized cultural heritage materials grow larger, it becomes difficult to understand the size, scope and significant features of purpose-built collections. The dimensionless nature of digital libraries can make the already challenging task of "collections understanding" even more difficult. Emerging approaches to dynamic information visualization offer a way to provide users with a sense of the shape and contours of obscured features of digital collections.
In this poster, we will demonstrate a novel design method called patchwork prototyping that we have used to elicit useful visualizations for cultural heritage collections. Traditional approaches to user-centered design have relied on opposite ends of an interaction spectrum. Lightweight, low-fidelity paper prototypes can evolve quickly and may be appropriate for use with novice users, but lack real functionality and/or interaction. High-fidelity prototypes may restore these features but custom programming and infrastructure requirements make them less agile. Patchwork prototyping fills this gap by using readily available open-source software and web services to create interactive prototypes that are easily modified in response to user design suggestions.
Metadata from the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project is used as a test case for exploring the novel design problems of building a collection dashboard that complements traditional textual descriptions of collections. As part of the poster presentation, attendees are invited to participate in live prototyping activities that inform our rapidly evolving design for a collections dashboard.
Xin Wang
Sanda Erdelez
Said Amer Al Ghenaimi
Susan Centner
Jiazhen Wang,
Deborah Ward
Borchuluun Yadamsuren
Understanding Users’ Needs for a Health Literacy Website: The Information Horizons Approach
Inadequate health literacy affects more than 90 million people in the United States (Moore, Bias, Prentice, Fletcher, & Vaughn, 2009). Traditionally, health providers have been the main sources of health information that patients rely on. Kim and Kim (2009) has found that the WWW has generated impact on patient-physicians’ communication. Studies (Eysenbach, Powell, Kuss, & Sa, 2002; Fisher, Burstein, Lynch, & Lazarenko, 2008; Renahy & Chauvin, 2006) have also revealed concerns about the quality and usefulness of web-based health information. Two questions that arise are how best will a website specifically designed for improving health literacy be used by target audiences; and how can a website be designed to meet the needs of diverse users?
Eun-Young Yoo
Exploring the Issue of Cultural Authenticity Portrayed in Multicultural Picture Books: A Collaborative Analysis for Diversity Education
This study attempts to examine the concept of cultural authenticity portrayed in multicultural picture books using a collaborative content analysis by eight coders from diverse ethnic groups. Specifically, this study attempts to examine how the complexity of cultural authenticity can be understood in multicultural picture books that represent four major ethnic groups in the United States including African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Native Americans. A total of sixty picture books, fifteen books per ethnic group, published in 2000 or after were selected in order to meet the currency of the concept of cultural authenticity. A couple of tools such as NoveList and CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center) Choices were used to obtain titles widely sold to the libraries and read by readers. For data collection and analysis, two coders per ethnic group were selected, and each coder performed content analysis of fifteen titles representing his/her own culture.
Hui Zhang
In this poster, we argue that query ambiguity is a major challenge for IR and there is space of improvement for existing approaches. Thus, we propose a novel approach that will resolve both semantic and syntactic ambiguities in user queries. The proposed approach takes advantages of various resources such as query log Wikipedia. Our preliminary result makes us believe that it is a promising direction. We also discuss how a search interface benefits from this approach in supporting faceted and exploratory search by context-based query reformulation.
Jane Zhang
The Principle of Original Order and the Organization and Representation of Digital Archives (Dissertation Proposal)
This dissertation research is designed to test the hypothesis that the principle of original order, originating from the 19th century European paper-based records tradition, should continue to be the guiding principle in the organization and description of digital archival collections. The focus of the study will be to investigate to what extent archivists apply the principle of original order to the organization of digital archival collections. The investigation will be conducted by addressing three research questions: What defines original order in digital archives? Why is original order preserved in digital archives? How is original order represented in digital archives?
The study employs two research methods to address research questions: 1) collective case study of three born digital archival projects to investigate how the principle has been applied in digital archival practice, and 2) email-based qualitative interviews of archival practitioners and researchers to find out their conceptions about the principle of original order and its application in digital archives. Three sources of evidence will be employed to collect data from the selected study cases: project documentation, digital archives site review, and project interviews. A combination of convenience and snowball sampling strategies will be used to select archival professionals and researchers to participate in interviews.
The findings of the study are expected to add new insight into the development of archival theory in digital organization and representation, to offer some guidance to digital archival practice, and to provide some useful references for the organization and description of non-archival digital collections.
Xiaohua Zhu
This study aims to explore and analyze the recent history of the access regimes olicensed electronic scholarly information in different licensing settings from the early 1990s to the present. The term access regimes is defined as the temporary stabilizations of how the practice of providing certain users with access to intellectual and cultural property is carried out. A general research question will guide this study: how have the access regimes of licensed electronic scholarly information taken root and evolved in different licensing settings from the early 1990s to the present in the United States? A historical constructionist approach is taken in this study, which rests on the premise that objective knowledge of the past is impossible and that history is a product of perspective-laden constructions of the past. Following the historical investigation approach, this study relies on carefully selected historical sources and theory-laden interpretations to reconstruct the past. These sources include not only various primary sources (key stakeholders’ discussions of electronic publishing and licensing during the study period) and secondary documents (official and unofficial reports and statistics, white papers, mass media articles, and research papers), but also oral historical evidence. To collect oral evidence, the researcher plans to conduct retrospective interviews with stakeholders of licensed electronic scholarly information, including librarians, publishers, and venders. To recruit participants, online recruitment survey and snowball sampling strategies will be employed.
Sung Jae Park
Kyungwon Koh
19. Distance Education in LIS
ONLINE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN THE WEB 2.0 ERA
In the changing environment of education and information, often referred to as Web 2.0, new digital technologies provide the potential to enhance collaborative learning experiences for students, and Web 2.0 appears to be creating a dominant participatory culture in this digital age. However, a pilot study conducted by the investigators revealed various gaps and tensions that prevented students from effective online collaborative learning in the Web 2.0 era—such as gaps between students, e-learning tools, and instructional designs. The proposed exploratory study applies Activity Theory as a theoretical and analytical framework in order to (a) model LIS (Library and Information Studies) students’ online collaborative learning activities and (b) discover any contradictions that occur during students’ learning. Using a mixed method approach, multiple forms of data will be collected in an online master’s class offered by the School of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University in Spring 2010 through the diary method, intensive interviews, and anonymous survey. The triangulated data will result in recommendations to inform LIS educators and online education system developers of ways to improve students’ online collaborative activities in LIS online education.
Mega M Subramaniam
Sung Jae Park
Laurie Bonnici
Kathleen Burnett
LIS ALISE Research Classification Scheme 3. LIS as a Discipline
iSchools Curricula: Indications of Fractal Distinctions in Time
As informed observers of the evolution of LIS, we noticed that the patterns Abbott (2001) observed in sociology and documented in his book, Chaos of the Discipline were present in our own field. Currently, as an extension of previous research (Bonnici, Subramaniam, and Burnett, 2009), we are seeking evidence of repackaging of LIS course content or renaming of LIS courses that would support the third concept from Abbott’s theory, “fractal distinctions in time”. Abbott describes this concept as successive generations prevailing over the preceding generations. Upon conquest, the new generation revitalizes the ideas of the previous under the pretext of enhancing new knowledge and a new scheme materializes. Repackaged in new language, the old idea now appears distinct (Abbott, 2001). Through content analysis, we examine the titles and descriptions of courses offered in 1999 and 2008 by iSchools that offer an ALA accredited master’s program. Initial investigation revealed instances of paraphrasing course titles (with minor focus change). Also discovered was substantive evidence of repackaging of course content, including cases where two or more 1999 courses were consolidated into one 2008 course; one 1999 course was expanded into two or more 2008 courses; and evidence of minor and major changes in course content. In almost all cases, the new courses expand the definitions of certain terms specific to library science into more generalized concepts of information and apply them to digital technologies.
Christine Jenkins
Crossing borders and negotiating boundaries: A multidisciplinary perspective on immigration narratives for young readers.
Children’s and young adult literature is primarily studied in three different disciplines: Education, English, and LIS. Despite the three fields’ common focus, however, cross-disciplinary conversation has been—and remains—minimal. Scholars in English and literature tend toward a text-oriented approach that historically excluded the reader from view. Scholars in Education focus on the reader, but may well ignore the insights to be gained from the text being read. And scholars in Library and Information Science (LIS)—a discipline with a long history of scholarship in children’s and young adult literature—are often absent from the intellectual worldview of either end of the text-reader continuum, despite the fact that their professional work is located precisely in the intersection between texts and young readers. Despite widespread rhetoric within the academy in praise of interdisciplinarity, the study of children’s and young adult literature remains a discipline-centered endeavor.
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