ALISE Conference 2010 WIP Submission Sessions 1

 

Suellen S. Adams
University of Rhode Island

52. Information Needs/ Behaviors of Specific Groups

Information Behavior of Serious Recreational Athletes

 

Nicole D. Alemanne, Besiki Stvilia and Corinne Jorgensen
Florida State University

59. Metadata and Semantic Web

Creating Context for User-Generated Tags: An Exploratory Study

 

Simon Aristeguieta-Trillos
The University of Tennessee

53. Scholarly and Scientific Communication

Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists in Venezuela

 

Christopher Sean Burns
University of Missouri

70.  Users and Uses of Information Systems

Collection Development and Social Computing: Measuring the Relevancy of Scholarly Papers

 

Debi Carruth
Florida State University

52. Information Needs/Behaviors of Specific Groups

Information Behavior of Gifted Youth Related to Hobby Pursuit: An Exploratory Study

 

Hsia-Ching Chang and Hemalata Iyer
University at Albany, State University of New York

59: Metadata and Semantic Web

Metadata Management Meets Folksonomy: A Case Study of Common Tag and Twitter Hashtags

 

Minjie Chen
University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign

46. Children's/YA Literatures

The origin of Chinese American children's literature: A historical study

 

Pok W. Chin
University of North Texas at Denton

54. Organization of Information

Users' concepts of an image and image categorization

 

Songphan Choemprayong
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

51. Information Needs/Behaviors of the Public

The Strength of Outsiders’ Doctrine: Collective Information Behavior during Thailand’s 2006 Coup D’état

 

Clayton A. Copeland
School of Library and Information Science

44. Services for People with Disabilities

Creating a Culture of Collaboration: Working Together to Make Libraries Accessible for
Differently-able Patrons


Jeanette de Richemond
Rutgers University

79. Medical Libraries

What is “enough” information to make a medical decision?

 

André de Souza Pena
Teachers of Federal University of Mato Grosso - Brazil

The State of the Art of studies of scientific collaboration in Brazil

 

Dr. Betsy Diamant-Cohen

41 – Children's Services

Collaborative Partnerships in Children’s Services: Best Practices

 

Carolyn Hank
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

53. Scholarly and Scientific Communication

Scholars and Their Blogs: A Methodological Approach Examining Blogs as an Informal Channel of Scholarly Communication and Implications for Digital Preservation

 

Dana Hanson-Baldauf
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

44. Services for People with Disabilities

Everyday Life Information Needs, Practices, and Challenges of Young Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

 

Mary Ann Harlan
San Jose State University /Queensland University of Technology

52. Information Needs/ Behaviors of Specific Groups

Information Literacy Practices of Adolescent Content Creators.


Heiko Haubitz

70. Users and Uses of Information Systems

The Use of Public Web Portals by Undergraduates in the U.S. and in the Republic of Ireland: Results from a Comparative Study  

 

Rebecca D. Hunt, Ph.D.
Wayne State University

46. Children’s/YA Literature

A Literary Examination of Celebrity-Authored Children’s Books


Yusuke Ishimura and Dr. Joan C. Bartlett
McGill University

43. Serving Multicultural Populations

Integrating information behaviour and information literacy: A comparative study of Japanese and Canadian undergraduate students in a Canadian university

 

Tingting Jiang and Xiaoguang Wang
University of Pittsburgh and Wuhan University, China

53. Scholarly and Scientific Communication

Informal scientific communication in the blogging community: An exploratory study based on blogroll links

 

Weimao Ke
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

67. Information Visualization

Scholarly Impact in the Presence of Preferential Attachment

 

Weimao Ke, Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Javed Mostafa
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

67. Information Visualization

The Impact of Familiarity and Specificity on Scatter/Gather Browsing and User Relevance Judgment

 

Ji-Hyun Kim
Florida State University

19. Distance Education in LIS

Why Students Blog: Exploring their Motivation, Usage pattern, and Satisfaction

 

Soojung Kim
University of Maryland

51. Information Needs/Behaviors of the Public

Does Everyone Want to be a Librarian?: Answerers’ Information Providing Behaviors in Yahoo! Answers

Robin Fogle Kurz
University of South Carolina

46. Children's/YA Literatures

Something Worth Reading: A Critical Analysis of Cultural Representation in State-Level Picture Book Award Nominees

 

Sook Lim
St. Catherine University, Master of Library and Information Science Program

50. Information Needs and Behaviors/Practices

Credibility judgment in the context of Wikipedia

 

Yeo-Joo Lim
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

46. Children’s/YA Literatures

Educational Graphic Novels in Korean Children’s Lives  

 

Charles Meadows
University of Alabama

53: Scholarly and Scientific Communication

A comparative study of the diffusion of online classroom platforms within colleges of communication

 

Lorri Mon and Lauren H. Mandel
Florida State University

38. Electronic Reference Services

Temporal Cycles in Virtual Questioning

 

Barbara J. Montgomery
University of South Carolina

One to Many: An Exploration of the Roots of Illiteracy in the Southeastern United States

 

Jamie Campbell Naidoo
University of Alabama

46. Children's/YA Literatures

Why Are They Kissing?: A Critical Analysis of International Picture Books Depicting Same-Sex Households and Gay Themes.

 

Sarah Park
St. Catherine University

52 Information Needs/Behaviors of Specific Groups

Information Seeking Behavior, Needs and Resources of Transnationally Adopted Koreans

 

Ellen Pozzi
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

1. History of Libraries and Library Science

Subaltern Studies: Metatheory and Method for Capturing Experiences of Immigrant Library Users

 

Dr. Daniel Roland  
Kent State University

8. Information and Society/Culture

The Interpretation of Major Social Events From the Pulpit: An Analysis of Sermons following 9/11 and the ELCA Decision to Ordain Gay Clergy

 

Abebe Rorissa, Diane Neal, Jonathan Muckell and Alex Chaucer
University at Albany, State University of New York, and The University of Western Ontario

54. Organization of Information

A comparison of tags assigned to still and moving images on flickr

 

Catherine L. Smith and Nina Wacholder
Rutgers University

71. Human-Computer Interaction

Why Users Don’t Take Suggestions: Preliminary Results

 

Sarah W. Sutton
Texas Woman’s University

Identifying core competencies for electronic resources librarians in the twenty-first century academic library

 

Richard J. Urban and Dr. Michael Twidale
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

71. Human-Computer Interaction

Patchwork Prototyping a Collections Dashboard

 

Xin Wang, Sanda Erdelez, Said Amer Al Ghenaimi, Weichao Chen, Jiazhen Wang and Borchuluun Yadamsuren, Susan Centner and Deborah Ward
University of Missouri, MAHEC Digital Library and Health Literacy Missouri

Understanding Users’ Needs for a Health Literacy Website: The Information Horizons Approach

 

Eun-Young Yoo
North Carolina Central University

46 -- Children’s/ YA Literature

Exploring the Issue of Cultural Authenticity Portrayed in Multicultural Picture Books: A Collaborative Analysis for Diversity Education

 

Hui Zhang
Indiana University Bloomington

63. Information Retrieval Theory and Practice

Context-Aware Query Expansion for Ineffective Queries

 

Jane Zhang
GSLIS, Simmons College

The Principle of Original Order and the Organization and Representation of Digital Archives (Dissertation Proposal)

 

Xiaohua Zhu
University of Wisconsin-Madison

25. Licensing

A Historical Investigation into the Access Regimes of Electronic Scholarly Resources

 

Sung Jae Park and Kyungwon Koh
Florida State University

19. Distance Education in LIS

ONLINE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN THE WEB 2.0 ERA

 

Mega M Subramaniam , Sung Jae Park, Laurie Bonnici and Kathleen Burnett
University of Maryland, University of Alabama and Florida State University

LIS ALISE Research Classification Scheme
3. LIS as a Discipline

iSchools Curricula: Indications of Fractal Distinctions in Time

 

Christine Jenkins
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
46. Children’s / YA literature

Crossing borders and negotiating boundaries: A multidisciplinary perspective on immigration narratives for young readers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

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Suellen S. Adams
[email protected]
Assistant Professor
University of Rhode Island

 

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.

 


 

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Nicole D. Alemanne
Doctoral Student
School of Library & Information Studies
Florida State University

 

Besiki Stvilia
[email protected]
Assistant Professor
School of Library & Information Studies
Florida State University

 

Corinne Jörgensen
[email protected]
Professor and Director
School of Library & Information Studies
Florida State University

 

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.


 

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Simon Aristeguieta-Trillos
[email protected]
Doctoral Candidate
School of Information Science
The University of Tennessee


53. Scholarly and Scientific Communication

 

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.

 


 

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Christopher Sean Burns
[email protected]
Doctoral Student
School of Information Science and Learning Technologies
University of Missouri


70.  Users and Uses of Information Systems

 

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.

 


 

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Debi Carruth
[email protected]
Doctoral Candidate
Florida State University

 

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.

 


 

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Hsia-Ching Chang
[email protected]
Doctoral Student
Department of Informatics
College of Computing and Information
University at Albany
State University of New York
Albany, NY 12222

 

Hemalata Iyer
[email protected]
Associate Professor
Information Studies
College of Computing and Information
University at Albany, State University of New York
Albany, NY 12222


59: Metadata and Semantic Web


Metadata Management Meets Folksonomy: A Case Study of Common Tag and Twitter Hashtags


Metadata management has become an essential issue for information organization since the advent of Web 2.0. Folksonomy represents phenomena of users’ categorizing Internet resources in a collaborative way through assigning tags. Although user-generated metadata (tags) are prevailing in terms of classifying a variety of Internet resources, still relatively little known how metadata management can lead collaborative tagging engagement to collective tag archives in a well-organized manner. Thus, an exploratory study using case study has been undertaken. The aim of the study is to understand how recent ongoing efforts on metadata management can contribute to an effective collaborative tagging system. Towards this end, the Common Tag developed by the Internet companies and the Twitter Hashtags were selected for analysis. The Twitter Hashtags is a new tagging format linking metadata to user defined concepts while the Common Tag has pre-defined tag taxonomy with well-defined concepts developed by the companies. These represent two different organizational structures.  Nevertheless, through using shared tags, both efforts bring together Internet resources in sites such as, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Youtube, etc.  Can the tags generated by these two methods be integrated and structured? A comparison of the results with the existing metadata functionalities will highlight the differences and similarity to managing shared metadata. This, together with a discussion of tag interoperability issues in web 2.0 environment will be presented.

 


 

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Minjie Chen
[email protected]
PhD Candidate
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign


46. Children's/YA Literatures

 

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.

 


 

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Pok W. Chin
[email protected]
Ph. D. Student
University of North Texas at Denton


54. Organization of Information

 

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.


Reference:

Medin, D. (1989). Concepts and conceptual structures. American Psychologist, 45, 1469-1481.
O’Connor, B. C., O’Connor, M., & Abbas, J. (1999). User reactions as access mechanism: An exploration based on captions for images. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(8), 681-697.

 


 

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Songphan Choemprayong
[email protected]
Ph.D. Candidate
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
CB 3360
100 Manning Hall
Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3360
LIS Research Areas Classification Scheme


51. Information Needs/Behaviors of the Public

 

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.

 


 

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Clayton A. Copeland
[email protected]
School of Library and Information Science
Ph.D. student


44. Services for People with Disabilities

 

Creating a Culture of Collaboration: Working Together to Make Libraries Accessible for
Differently-able Patrons

 

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.
Indication of Special Needs: I use a walker for ambulatory purposes.

 


 

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Jeanette de Richemond
[email protected]
Rutgers University
PhD Candidate


79. Medical Libraries

What is “enough” information to make a medical decision?

 

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.

 


 

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André de Souza Pena
Mariza Inez Pinheiro
Alexandre de Oliveira de Meira Gusmão
Teachers of Federal University of Mato Grosso - Brazil

 

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.

 


 

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Dr. Betsy Diamant-Cohen
[email protected]
MLS from Rutgers, Doctorate in Communications Design from the University of Baltimore
not currently affiliated with any particular school – practicing public librarian


41 – Children's Services

 

Collaborative Partnerships in Children’s Services: Best Practices


Many public libraries have created cultures of collaboration by forming partnerships with cultural and academic institutions, government agencies, businesses, and faith-based organizations in order to enrich their offerings.  Overviews of successful projects between children's services in public libraries and different partners give practical ideas for replication, presenting new ways to share and enrich programming, publicize materials and events, expand online services, and reach underserved populations.
Practical examples of some partnerships include descriptions of the libraries, collaborative entities, publicity, and general information that program planners might appreciate. Questions address: how did they get together, where was the program was held, what was the age level of the audience, how many people  attended, what kind/how much staff and equipment was used, what was the object of the program, and what were the costs involved. Special handouts or useful checklists are included.
The result of this research will be a book published by ALA Editions entitled Collaborative Partnerships in Children’s Services: Best Practices, providing an overview of collaborative partnerships, both large and small, long-term and short-term, funded and non-funded that have taken place between public libraries and summer camps, prisons, art museums, children's museums, immigrant agencies, prisons, pharmaceutical companies, artists, schools, churches, and more. The inclusion of logistical information as well as contact information for the librarians and partners connected with each project is meant to give the necessary tools, knowledge and inspiration to library staff serving children and families with young children to form collaborative partnerships of their own.

 

 


 

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Carolyn Hank
[email protected]
Doctoral Student
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
CB 3360,100 Manning Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360


53. Scholarly and Scientific Communication

 

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.
1 Hank, C., Choemprayong, S., & Sheble, L. (2007). Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries: Building and Sustaining the Digital.


2 Sheble, L., Choemprayong, S., & Hank. C. (2007). Preservation in Context: Survey of Blogging Behaviors. In Proceedings of the Third International Digital Curation Conference: Curating our Digital Scientific Heritage: A Global Collaborative Challenge.

 


 

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Dana Hanson-Baldauf
[email protected]
PhD Candidate
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
216 Lenoir Drive
CB#3360, 100 Manning Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360


44. Services for People with Disabilities

 

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.

 


 

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Mary Ann Harlan
[email protected]
PhD student
San Jose State University /Queensland University of Technology


52. Information Needs/ Behaviors of Specific Groups

 

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.  


My research proposal is to answer the question ‘what does an information literate teen “look like” within the context of Web 2.0 context.  Using grounded theory methodology adolescent content creators will be interviewed to develop a deeper understanding of their information literacy practices, focusing how they use information to create and share knowledge.

 


 

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Heiko Haubitz
School Affiliation: none, self-employed
PhD, possible adjunct professor


70. Users and Uses of Information Systems


The Use of Public Web Portals by Undergraduates in the U.S. and in the Republic of Ireland: Results from a Comparative Study  


This poster will present selected results of a dissertation that explored how and why (or why not) 144 respondents of a randomly selected sample of 431 undergraduates from a large university in the U.S. used public Web portals such as, for example, Yahoo! or MSN in comparison to the results from a similar study that was conducted with undergraduates in the Republic of Ireland that included 112 respondents from a randomly selected sample of 550 undergraduate students at one of the leading Irish universities.  Demographic and use variables about participants' behavior and preferences were collected with a questionnaire.  A second phase consisted of tape-recorded focus groups.  In addition, individual interviews were conducted.  Survey data were analyzed using Chi-Square (alpha = 0.05) to test hypotheses for statistical significance.  The focus groups, interviews, and open-ended questions were content analyzed.  The results of the study shed light on why and how undergraduates in the U.S. and Ireland seek information on public Web portals, what they do on these sites, and reasons for using and not using portals and particular portal features.  


While about 50% applied personalization in the U.S. only 25% did so in Ireland.  However, personalizers used portals to a greater extent and were satisfied in both countries.  Non-use of personalization, frequent redesign, privacy concerns, and other factors such as cultural differences contributed to limited use of portals.  According to the introduced Popularity Index of Public Web Portals (PIPWP), Yahoo, Google and MSN were the most popular portals, while searches, e-mail, world and national news were the most popular features.  The study's results contribute to a better understanding of undergraduates' information needs and behavior on public Web portals in the two countries that are characterized by surprisingly different access conditions to the Internet.

 


 

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Rebecca D. Hunt, Ph.D.
[email protected]
Lecturer
Wayne State University
SLIS, 106 Kresge Library
Detroit, MI 48202


46. Children’s/YA Literature

 

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.

 


 

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Yusuke Ishimura
[email protected]
Ph.D. student
School of Information Studies
McGill University
3661 Peel Street
Montreal, Quebec H3A 1X1

Dr. Joan C. Bartlett

[email protected]
Assistant Professor
School of Information Studies
McGill University
3661 Peel Street
Montreal, Quebec H3A 1X1

 

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.


The number of international students, particularly from Asian countries, has greatly increased in recent decades in North American post-secondary institutions. Improvement of information literacy skills is essential to students’ academic success in today’s information-intense environment. However, academic libraries struggle to answer the question of how they can provide support for international students with diverse needs, experiences, and expectations. Before planning strategies to improve their skills, it is critical for academic institutions to understand how students conduct research and to what extent they are information literate.
This study takes a unique approach in combining information behaviour models (process-oriented) and information literacy standards (quality-oriented). How and why students behave in certain ways and to what extent students have information literacy skills is investigated. Using several qualitative research methods, namely 1) research portfolios, 2) semi-structured in-depth interviews, and 3) flowcharts, students’ behavior during academic tasks will be analyzed, and their skills will be assessed according to ACRL’s information literacy standards. Systematic comparison will highlight differences and similarities between the two groups of students.
Since the inclusion of international students in campus communities is increasingly significant, the results of this research will help academic libraries better meet international students’ needs and facilitate their intellectual contributions to North American academic institutions.

 


 

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Tingting Jiang
[email protected]
Ph.D. student
School of Information Sciences
University of Pittsburgh

 

Xiaoguang Wang
[email protected]
Assistant professor
School of Information Management
Wuhan University, China

 

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”.

 


 

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Weimao Ke
[email protected]
Ph.D. candidate
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


67. Information Visualization

 

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.


Results show that existing success explained a very large portion of future gain. Existing citation scores of authors and publication venues significantly influenced a work's future citations. Referring to highly cited publications also helped the current work get cited more frequently. Factors solely based on these existing citation patterns explained nearly fifty percent of the variance in later citations. The large coefficient of determination (R^2) found in the current analysis, to be verified in other domains, is too significant to ignore. This invites thoughts on how the broader discipline of LIS can maintain research momentum by rewarding recognized scholars while supporting new researchers and encouraging diverse research directions.

 


 

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Weimao Ke
[email protected]
Ph.D. candidate
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

Cassidy R. Sugimoto
[email protected]
Ph.D. candidate
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

Javed Mostafa
[email protected]
Ph.D. candidate
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

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.


Furthermore, several subjects indicated that when they were familiar with the search topic, the Scatter/Gather system was less helpful -- they felt the system slowed them down and would have preferred keyword based searching. Nonetheless, quantitative analysis reveals that higher levels of familiarity and specificity in fact led to significantly improved retrieval effectiveness, particularly on recall and precision for highly relevant items. We discuss important implications on relevance judgment and evaluation in IR.

 


 

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Ji-Hyun Kim
[email protected]
Doctoral student
Florida State University
College of Communication and Information


19. Distance Education in LIS

 

Why Students Blog:
Exploring their Motivation, Usage pattern, and Satisfaction

 

Introduction
One of the newest trends in the Internet is the weblog (or blog). Scholars explain the dramatic growth in the number of weblogs with technical advancement, including the development of search engines, and surge of major news events. Weblogs have been used in some educational settings to promote student collaboration and to develop more interactive learning environment.


Purpose of the study
While several researches have examined the purpose of using weblog and the way bloggers actually used in practice, few studies have examined students’ motivation of weblog usage in class activity. Therefore, this research explores students’ intention to keep using weblogs for class activity and focuses on motivations influencing the decision to use weblog.  This study also attempts to identify gender inequality of weblog usage, especially for class activity. As a theoretical background, this paper adopts Imposed Query model, which explains the stage of students’ information seeking activity in class.

Research Questions
Overall research questions to be addressed include:
1. What factors affect students’ intention to keep using weblogs for class activity?
2. How do students use weblog for class activity?
3. What is students’ attitude for weblog?
4. Are students satisfied with using weblog for class activity?
5. Is there gender inequality of weblog usage for class activity?

Methodology
The present study is conducting an intensive interview method in order to find adequate answers for research questions completely and in detail. The interview uses semi-structured open-ended questions. Students, who have used weblog for class activity, are recruited via a campus electronic mail notice.

 


 

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Soojung Kim
[email protected]
Instructor
College of Information Studies
University of Maryland
Hornbake South Wing
College Park, MD 20742-4345


51. Information Needs/Behaviors of the Public

 

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.


To understand how lay information providers search and provide information for strangers who they met online, this study interviewed 44 answerers from Yahoo! Answers, the most popular social Q&A site in the U.S. The interviews were conducted between November 2008 and May 2009 via email, Internet chat, and over the phone.
The preliminary findings of the study include: (1) the answerers tend to select a question for which they already know answers to minimize additional searches although Web searching is sometimes performed to support one’s claim; (2) the answerers use a variety of strategies to provide a credible answer and they are categorized into four groups - Content, Source, Attitude, and Others; (3) although explaining one’s qualification is a popular strategy to make an answer look credible, many answerers are skeptical about the truthfulness of the self-claimed expertise; and (4) the answerers usually volunteer to answer questions without being requested, but through Answers Network, a user can ask a particular person to answer his question and build social ties with other people.  


This study has implications for the design of social Q&A sites and user instruction by providing a guideline to help lay information providers in the provision of credible information.   

 


 

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Robin Fogle Kurz
[email protected]
School of Library & Information Science    
University of South Carolina
PhD Student


46. Children's/YA Literatures

 

Something Worth Reading: A Critical Analysis of Cultural Representation in State-Level Picture Book Award Nominees


Researchers have shown that books can influence the attitudes and perceptions of the young, particularly children of color.  If these children do not see themselves portrayed positively in books, they are at a greater risk of facing issues with regard to racial identity development, literacy, and self-esteem.  Each year, young children across the United States read the picture books nominated by adult professionals for state-level book awards; yet, it is unclear how accurately and extensively these nominated titles portray cultural diversity at the state & national levels.  As many librarians, teachers, and parents look to these lists of nominees as sources of quality literature for children, it is vital that these books provide positive and accurate representations of communities of color.  


This research project encompasses forty-eight book awards from forty-three states, covering the nominees from the past five years.  Each nominated title is analyzed for the inclusion of characters of color in text and illustrations, the race/ethnicity of the author/illustrator, and the ways in which any characters of color are portrayed.  The final step in the research process will be a comparison of the cultural diversity of the nominated books to the current racial demographics at the state and national levels.  This poster details the findings from the completed pilot study and the preliminary data collected from an analysis of the state-level picture book award nominees in the United States.

 


 

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Sook Lim
[email protected]
St. Catherine University, Master of Library and Information Science Program
Assistant Professor
50. Information Needs and Behaviors/Practices

 

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:
1) What credibility cues do people use in Wikipedia?
2) Do credibility cues differ according to types of information or genre?
3) Do people verify information? Why or why not?  Finally,
4) Does verification behavior differ according to types of information?

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.


Flanagin, A. J., & Metzger, M. J. (2007). The role of site features, user attributes, and information verification behaviors on the perceived credibility of web-based information. New Media & Society, 9 (2), 319-342.


Iding, M. K., Crosby, M. E., Auernheimer, B., & Klemn, E. B. (2009). Web site credibility: Why do people believe what they believe? Instructional Science: An International Journal of the Learning Sciences, 37(1), 43-63.


Metzger, M. J. (2007). Making sense of credibility on the Web: Models for evaluating online information and recommendations for future research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58( 13), 2078-2091.

 


 

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Yeo-Joo Lim
[email protected]
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
doctoral student


46. Children’s/YA Literatures

 

Educational Graphic Novels in Korean Children’s Lives  


Abstract:

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.”


In this research, I look at the uses of EGNs in children’s daily lives; the reasons of EGN’s sudden and explosive popularity in Korea; and the meaning of EGN for different groups of people – teachers, librarians, and children themselves. In order to explain these, I use three different methods – (1) content analysis of EGNs, (2) group discussions with children, and (3) interviews with teachers and librarians.

 

 Hwang, H. Y. (2006). A Study on the Educational Roles of Learning Comics. Master’s Thesis. Kyung Hee University.
*Although there exist about twenty master’s theses about EGN in Korea, no doctoral dissertation about EGN is published yet. This is partly because EGN’s popularity is a very recent phenomenon, and partly because comics in general have been recognized as a low-brow medium in Korea.

 


 

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Charles Meadows
[email protected]
University of Alabama
Communication and Information Sciences
Doctoral Student


53: Scholarly and Scientific Communication

 

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.


The most popular alternative instructional platform, e-learning, has addressed many of the issues facing expanding institutions of higher education. Adoption of instructional delivery via distance education modes has not been fully embraced by university faculty. Due to resistance among some faculty, there is an unbalanced adoption of e-learning platforms among faculty, departments, and even colleges. The purpose of this study is to explore the fragmented diffusion of online classroom platforms among faculty within colleges of communication that include library and information studies. A comparative analysis will be implemented between five U.S. institutions. This comparative analysis will determine whether the type of innovation decision (online course delivery), as well as attitudes of faculty toward online course delivery contributed towards the success or repudiation of the innovation. The theoretical framework will be based on a cultural-evolutionary paradigm. This research will apply a mixed method approach to data collection using online questionnaires, and personal interviews.

 


 

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Lorri Mon
[email protected]
Assistant Professor
Florida State University
College of Communication and Information

Lauren H. Mandel
[email protected]
Doctoral candidate
Florida State University
College of Communication and Information, email:

 

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.


This study utilized unobtrusive analysis of e-mail reference transcripts to explore information behavior and temporal patterns of user questioning by American users of the Internet Public Library (IPL) (http://www.ipl.org), a digital library in which LIS graduate students and librarian volunteers collaborate in answering e-mail questions received from the worldwide Internet community.  Over 14,000 questions were examined, and a systematic, stratified random sample taken for in-depth analysis of 10% of all e-mail questions received from U.S. users in 2007.  Data were cleansed of personally identifying information, and researchers focused on user-supplied details of question topic, reason for asking, and question content.  Coding also highlighted activities motivating questioning including homework, teaching, and writing, and life areas which generated questions such as education, work, or personal interest.  Ongoing analysis indicates activities and life areas for which Americans seek answers from the IPL and the influence of cyclical events, such as school science fairs and holidays, on temporal patterns of virtual questioning.  

 


 

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Barbara J. Montgomery
[email protected]  
PhD Student 3rd Year
University of South Carolina
School of Library and Information Science
History of Libraries and Library Science

 

One to Many: An Exploration of the Roots of Illiteracy in the Southeastern United States

In the State of South Carolina, less than half of the African American students achieve test scores that indicate that they are proficient or above on state reading assessments. Adult illiteracy, especially among older residents in South Carolina, remains high, and there is little scholarship that explores the relationships that lay the intergenerational foundation for this situation in terms of the availability of reading materials.  This study begins to address this topic using data from annual reports submitted by the South Carolina State Superintendent of Education that describe the progression of public school library service to blacks in South Carolina between 1945 and 1955, including the number of schools that African Americans could attend, the number of books per pupil in these schools and representative monetary expenditures.
Analysis shows differences between white schools and black schools in terms of the 1945 per capita expenditure, number of schools, total number of students, presence of libraries, and number of books in their respective collections. In terms of total funding received from the state, white schools were allocated 93% of the budgeted funding. By 1950, 56% of the white schools had libraries which housed 81% of the average book collection available to students; while 41% of the black schools had libraries which housed 19% of the total books available.


These data suggest a disparity in allocation of public funding to white schools and black schools during the period that those who are now our oldest African American citizens came of age. Research points to the importance of these factors, suggesting an intergenerational impact that merits further observation.

 


 

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Jamie Campbell Naidoo
[email protected]
Assistant Professor
School of Library & Information Studies
University of Alabama


46. Children's/YA Literatures

 

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.
Notwithstanding the importance of critically understanding the collective content within these books, previous studies of same-sex characters in international children’s literature have primarily highlighted singular titles rather than examining the diverse body of literature available around the world.  This investigation, funded by an American Library Association 2008 Diversity Research Grant, provides this critical examination of the social messages and content (visual and textual) of all the readily available international picture books with same-sex parents and gay-related themes. The study examines over 40 works from Canada, Australia, England, France, and Spain and highlights the strengths and deficiencies in the books, identifying the countries that publish high quality, gay-themed picture books and the various topics emphasized by each.

 


 

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Sarah Park
[email protected]
St. Catherine University
Assistant Professor
Services to User Populations


52 Information Needs/Behaviors of Specific Groups

 

Information Seeking Behavior, Needs and Resources of Transnationally Adopted Koreans

Since the Korean War (1950-1953), more than 200,000 Korean children have been sent from Korea to western countries for adoption. Now, thousands of Korean adoptees, mostly but not exclusively as adults, return to Korea to tour, work, and study. Many also search for birth parents and details regarding their abandonment and subsequent adoption. I propose to investigate the information seeking behaviors of these transnationally adopted Koreans, their particular needs, and the resources available to them. First, I examine how adoptees currently search for information regarding adoption practices, policies, and their personal histories, particularly in the globalized, transnational context of the Internet Age. Next, I uncover adoptees’ specific information needs based on autobiographies, records and observations of their searches. Finally, I analyze the existing resources available to Korean adoptees to assist them in searching.


As adoption is largely unregulated in Korea, there is no official roadmap for adoptees that search for their birth histories. However, based on my experience attending the 2007 International Korean Adoptee Associations Gathering conference, where hundreds of adoptees from around the world came together to discuss Korean adoption-related issues, and my ongoing research on Korean adoption, the Korean adoptee community and their allies are developing mechanisms and resources to aid in searching. By providing an overall picture of the information seeking behaviors, needs and resources available to transnationally adopted Koreans, I hope to develop a theory and model that are applicable to other transnational adoptees in their own search processes.  

Indication of special needs: none

 


 

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Ellen Pozzi
[email protected]
Doctoral Candidate
School of Communication & Information
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey


1. History of Libraries and Library Science

 

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.

 


 

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Dr. Daniel Roland  
[email protected]
Assistant Professor
School of Library and Information Science
Kent State University


8. Information and Society/Culture

 

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.

 


 

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Abebe Rorissa
[email protected]
Department of Information Studies
University at Albany, State University of New York
Draper Hall, Room 113
135 Western Avenue
Albany, NY 12222.

 

Diane Neal
[email protected]
Faculty of Information and Media Studies
The University of Western Ontario
North Campus Building, Room 240
London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7

 

Jonathan Muckell
[email protected]
Department of Informatics
University at Albany, State University of New York
7A Harriman Campus, Suite 220
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12222.

 

Alex Chaucer
[email protected]
Department of Informatics
University at Albany, State University of New York
7A Harriman Campus, Suite 220
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12222.

 

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.

 


 

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Catherine L. Smith
[email protected]
Co-principal investigators, Research Associate and Faculty Member
Rutgers University

 

Nina Wacholder
[email protected]
Co-principal investigators, Research Associate and Faculty Member
Rutgers University

 

71. Human-Computer Interaction


Why Users Don’t Take Suggestions: Preliminary Results


Our study seeks to understand why searchers frequently fail to use potentially valuable suggested query terms. We hypothesize that the format in which suggested terms are presented interferes with a searcher’s ability to recognize the semantic relationship between an original query and a suggested term. Our work pilots a new approach to investigating how semantics affect information search. This poster presents results from the first two phases of the study.


We use a lexical decision methodology (LDM, from psychology and linguistics) to measure a searcher’s recognition of semantic relationships between words. In the LDM, people respond more quickly to a word when it is preceded by the presentation of a word that is semantically related. This difference in response time is termed the semantic priming effect. In our study, we experimentally manipulate semantic relationships, presentation formats, and the subject’s task, as independent variables, and we measure semantic priming as the dependent variable.


In the first phase of the study, we have established baseline measurements of semantic priming for 180 sets of words. In the second phase, we will compare baseline measurements with effects produced by our experimental manipulations. The poster will present preliminary results such as (1) effects due to the order of words in a display, and (2) effects due to the subject’s task. Examples of tasks include looking for a word on a list, or typing a word.    
This work has been funded by Google.

 


 

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Sarah W. Sutton
[email protected]
Texas Woman’s University
Doctoral Candidate

 

Identifying core competencies for electronic resources librarians in the twenty-first century academic library


Electronic resources librarianship is a new specialization among librarians but one that has become nearly indispensable to libraries in the face of rapidly evolving technologies for information organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination. In this poster I present my doctoral dissertation proposal which will compare and contrast the qualifications for electronic resources librarians sought by libraries and those obtained through formal librarian education in the Master of Library Science/Information Science degree as well as through continuing education opportunities. I propose to conduct a qualitative content analysis of position advertisements for electronic resources librarian in academic libraries, masters level library science course syllabi, and  course descriptions and syllabi for continuing education opportunities available to electronic resources librarians. Using existing core competencies for other areas of librarianship as a framework, the results of the data analysis will be used to construct a list of core competencies for electronic resources librarians in academic libraries in the twenty-first century.
Indication of special needs: none

 


 

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Richard J. Urban
[email protected]
Doctoral Student
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Michael Twidale
[email protected]
Professor
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

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.

 


 

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Xin Wang
[email protected]
Ph.D Candidate
School of Information Science & Learning Technologies
Information Experience Laboratory
University of Missouri

 

Sanda Erdelez
[email protected]
Associate Professor
School of Information Science & Learning Technologies
Information Experience Laboratory
University of Missouri

 

Said Amer Al Ghenaimi
[email protected]
Ph.D Student School of Information Science & Learning Technologies
Information Experience Laboratory
University of Missouri

 

Susan Centner
[email protected]
BSN
MAHEC Digital Library
Health Literacy Missouri

Weichao Chen
[email protected]
Ph.D Student
School of Information Science & Learning Technologies
Information Experience Laboratory
University of Missouri

 

Jiazhen Wang,
[email protected]
Ph.D Candidate
School of Information Science & Learning Technologies
Information Experience Laboratory
University of Missouri

 

Deborah Ward
[email protected]
MLS
Health Science Libraries
University of Missouri
Health Literacy Missouri

 

Borchuluun Yadamsuren
[email protected]
Ph.D Candidate
School of Information Science & Learning Technologies
Information Experience Laboratory
University of Missouri

 

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?


The Missouri Foundation for Health is supporting several partners from around the state of Missouri in developing the Health Literacy Resource Inventory (HLMRI). HLMRI is a centralized web-based interactive digital library. To identify the needs of health literacy materials from different groups, the investigators employed a theoretical framework and methodology called Information Horizons, developed by Sonnenwald and Wildemuth (2001) to study three key user groups (health care providers, health care educators, and patients) of the HLMRI. Information Horizons methodology allows researchers to capture users’ preferences and preference criteria for health literacy resources, and to identify the relationship among them.


The data collection includes graphical maps of information horizons and in-depth interview transcripts from 15 patients, physicians, nurses, and health care educators. This poster will present the preliminary findings for user-centered design of the HLMRI website.

 


 

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Eun-Young Yoo
[email protected]
Assistant Professor
School of Library and Information Sciences
North Carolina Central University
1801 Fayetteville St.
Durham, NC 27707


46 -- Children’s/ YA Literature

 

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.


Currently, a preliminary data analysis has been completed.  The preliminary findings indicate that most picture books depicted the culture authentically in text as wells images. However, authenticity depicted in some books, especially in African-American and Native-American groups showed that it needs to be understood with relation to other concepts such as stereotypical features and inaccuracy. The coders suggest that they need to examine how stereotypical features and inaccuracy would affect the overall cultural authenticity of the story. The findings of the study can provide implications for library youth services and diversity education in a society with increasing ethnic diversity.

 


 

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Hui Zhang
[email protected]
Ph.D. Candidate in Information Science
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University Bloomington


63. Information Retrieval Theory and Practice


Context-Aware Query Expansion for Ineffective Queries

 

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.

 


 

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Jane Zhang
[email protected]
Ph.D. Candidate
GSLIS, Simmons College
Organization of Information

 

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.

 


 

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Xiaohua Zhu
[email protected]
PhD Candidate
School of Library and Information Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison


25. Licensing


A Historical Investigation into the Access Regimes of Electronic Scholarly Resources

 

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.

 


 

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Sung Jae Park
[email protected]
Doctoral Candidate
School of Library & Information, College of Communication & Information
Florida State University

 

Kyungwon Koh
[email protected]
Doctoral Candidate
School of Library & Information, College of Communication & Information
Florida State University

 

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.

 


 

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Mega M Subramaniam
[email protected]
Assistant Professor
College of Information Studies
University of Maryland

 

Sung Jae Park
[email protected]
Doctoral Candidate
College of Communication & Information
Florida State University

 

Laurie Bonnici
[email protected]
Assistant Professor
School of Library and Information Studies
University of Alabama

 

Kathleen Burnett
[email protected]
Associate Professor
College of Communication & Information
Florida State University

 

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.


References
Abbott, A. (2001). The chaos of disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bonnici, L., Subramaniam, M., & Burnett, K. (2009, forthcoming). Everything old is new again: The evolution of library and information science education from LIS to iField. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 50(2).

 


 

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Christine Jenkins
[email protected]
Associate professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


46. Children’s / YA literature

 

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.  


My current work-in-progress is the Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Routledge 2010), a text that challenges the prevailing paradigm of disciplinary isolation.  The four editors (one from English, two from Education, and I) have worked together for the past two years to assemble a 37-chapter handbook that is the first comprehensive text to include all three disciplines’ contributions.   
My poster describes the distinct but interrelated approaches that each discipline brings to the study of literature for young readers via an examination of three fictional texts (picture book, novel, and graphic novel) depicting the immigration experience.