Digital Commons Network^™

Digital Inclusion In The Lis Literature: An Intersectional Analysis, Hannah Nichole Fountain

Masters Theses

Digital inclusion refers to the conditions and degrees of access to information and communication technologies (ICT) among individuals and communities. This includes the variable determinants and outcomes associated with ICT connectivity, as well as efforts to mitigate digital exclusion. With the proliferation of ICT in the past 30 years, digital inclusion (and related concepts like the digital divide and digital literacy) has been a major focus of policymaking and public service efforts, with libraries serving as leaders in offering free public ICT and digital skills training. Digital inclusion research has commonly relied upon sociodemographic variables to survey determinants of …

Lgbtq+ Catalog Users: A Brief Survey, Karen Snow, Heather Moulaison-Sandy, Brian Dobreski

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

To promote social justice, recent work in knowledge organization (KO) has focused on providing access for members of marginalized groups including LGBTQ+ persons. Expanding on this work, the current project explores demographics and library usage as well as the participant-provided identity terms of LGBTQ+ library catalog users. Using a survey methodology that collected 141 respondents’ information, researchers found that LGBTQ+ catalog users who responded were primarily young, educated, and identified as either Black or White. The majority of respondents reported regular use of the library catalog, though also found materials in a variety of other ways, including social media. When …

Burning The Candle At Both Ends How And Why Academic Librarians Who Are Parents Experience And Combat Burnout At Work, Amy Chew, Michael Holt, Jessica Lee, Robert Griggs-Taylor

UT Libraries Faculty: Other Publications and Presentations

Academic librarians already wear many hats, juggling a multitude of skills and duties in order to meet the needs of their patrons. When one of those hats is parenthood, however, balancing work and home life can sometimes seem like an insurmountable task. In this chapter we explore how and why academic librarians who are also parents experience burnout, as well as methods used to combat burnout by examining the results of a nationally distrib­uted mixed-methods survey. The survey also addresses practices to combat and prevent burnout, both on a personal and institutional level, and the perceptions of their effectiveness.

Consequences Of Information Exchanges Of Vulnerable Women On Facebook: An "Information Grounds" Study Informing Value Co-Creation And Ict4d Research, Devendra Potnis, Macy Halladay, Sara-Elizabeth Jones

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) research sporadically leverages information science scholarship. Our qualitative study employs the “information grounds” (IG) lens to investigate the consequences of information exchanges by pregnant women on Facebook, who are vulnerable in the doctor-centric birth culture in rural America. The thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with members and administrators of the Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) group shows that positive consequences outweigh negative consequences of information exchanges and lead to the following progression of outcomes: (1) VBAC group as an information ground, (2) social capital (e.g., cognitive, structural, and relational capital) built on the …

Information Practices Of Administrators For Controlling Information In An Online Community Of New Mothers In Rural America, Devendra Potnis, Macy Halladay

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Rarely does any empirical investigation show how administrators routinely control information in online communities and alleviate misinformation, hate speech, and information overload supported by profit-driven algorithms. Thematic analysis of in-depth phone interviews with members and administrators of a “Vaginal Birth After Cesarean” (VBAC) group with over 500 new mothers on Facebook shows that the administrators make 19 choices for recurring, authoritative but evolving 19 information-related activities when (a) forming the VBAC group over Facebook for local new mothers, (b) actively recruiting women who had a VBAC or have related competencies, (c) removing doctors and solicitors from the group, (d) setting …

A Quantiative Study: Public Perceptions Of Medical Librarians And Implications For Communication And Practices, Chelsea C. Jacobs

Masters Theses

The purpose of this research study is to investigate and assess whether medical librarians, clinical medical librarians, medical informationists, etc. (referred to collectively as “medical librarians”) have an obligation beyond their particular institutional role to, or aspirationally should, provide the public with medical literature that has the potential to improve an individual’s health or the public health. The survey will examine the opinions of members of the United States (U.S.) public regarding the practices of medical librarians as these practices pertain to health promotion, patient care, medical education, and clinical research.

The research design for this study is a single-phase …

Automated Parsing Of Personal Identity Facets For A Collection Of Visual Images, Brian Dobreski, Melissa Resnick, Benjamin D. Horne

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Collections of digitized, historical images serve as rich primary sources for digital humanities research, though access to these resources has been hindered by inadequate subject metadata. In this study, researchers explored the feasibility of performing subject analysis for a collection of historical images of persons through an automated procedure. Building on previous work that developed a faceted system for representing the identities of persons depicted in 19th century visual images, the present work attempted to automate the process of person and facet parsing for images from the A.S. Williams III Collection at the University of Alabama. A case-based model was …

Ancient Ancestors For Modern Practices: An Evolutionary Concept Analysis Of Digital Marginalia, Brianna Blackwell

Masters Theses

Marginalia, the notes readers write in the blank spaces of their books, are significant objects of study in bibliography and book history, among other fields. Due to factors including findability and fragile book materials, marginalia from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are difficult to study. The same does not necessarily have to be true for similar objects from the twenty-first century. This thesis uses Rodger’s evolutionary concept analysis to analyze the usage of digital marginalia in the scholarly literature from 1991 to 2020. Beginning with an overview of bibliography and the history of marginalia, this thesis situates digital marginalia in …

In Our Very Blood: The Use Of Social Media In The 2018 West Virginia Teachers' Strike, Everette Scott Sikes

Doctoral Dissertations

The 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike exemplifies the changing shape of social movements and events of dissent and protest in the digital age. The use of information communication technologies (ICT) and social media have changed the ways such events develop and unfold. These technologies offer new tools for organizing and strategizing, for generating large numbers of participants, and for communicating crucial information while reducing temporal and spatial barriers. The teachers’ strike presents an opportunity to increase our understandings of these issues and to widen the scope of research in the field of information sciences to include the impact of ICTs …

Documenting Social Justice In Library And Information Science Research: A Literature Review, Joseph Winberry, Bradley Wade Bishop

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of social justice research in Library and Information Science (LIS) literature in order to identify the research quantity, what populations or settings were included, and future directions for this area of the discipline through examination of when related research was published, what contexts it covered, and what contributions LIS researchers have made in this research area.

Design/Methodology/Approach – This study reviews results from two LIS literature databases—Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) and Library and Information Science Source (LISS)—that use the term “social justice” in title, abstract, …

Unique Features Of The Person Class In Cultural Heritage Models, Brian Dobreski, Barbara H. Kwaśnik

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Knowledge organizations systems (KOSs) model important entities of interest within a domain. In the cultural heritage domain, KOSs are often designed around cultural information resources, though many other kinds of entities must be modeled and described in the process. Of these, the “person” entity may appear straightforward, but is surprisingly challenging with complex implications. Within cultural heritage, personhood is closely associated with certain kinds of creative responsibilities and rights, though modern technological advances are challenging these traditional notions. In an era marked by AI creators, digital recreations of the dead, and deepfakes, it is worth asking, in cultural heritage, what …

Managing The “Backend” Of Lis Research Projects: A Project Management Perspective, Devendra Potnis, Bhakti Gala

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is very little guidance in library and information science (LIS) literature about how researchers should manage the scope, time, costs, quality, human resources, communications, and risks associated with LIS research projects. To fill this gap, researchers tested the utility of project management principles (PMP) for planning and managing a project designed to enhance the information, digital, and financial literacy of the people earning less than $2 per day in India. The customization of PMP through 29 mechanisms and 60 action items was used to conduct focus groups and in-person surveys with over 150 participants, in their native language, at …

Changes In Scholarly Reading In Finland Over A Decade: Influences Of E-Journals And Social Media, Elina Late, Carol Tenopir, Sanna Talja, Lisa Christian

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Nationwide surveys of researchers in Finland in 2007 and 2016 distributed with the assistance of FinELib, the Finnish national consortium, show that researchers use a growing range of sources to find and access scholarly articles and that some reading patterns are changing. The percentage of articles found by searching and browsing are decreasing, while researchers are using more social ways to locate articles. Research social networking sites are rated as important to their work. They read more onscreen, although still print some material out for final reading. Reading patterns for books are different, as researchers still rely more on printed …

Proposing “Mobile, Finance, And Information” Toolkit For Financial Inclusion Of The Poor In Developing Countries, Devendra Potnis, Bhakti Gala

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since 2015, the Government of India has been designing policies for transforming the country with over 400 million unbanked adults into a cashless economy so that a majority of financial transactions can be carried over mobile devices, the most widely used information and communication technology in the country. However, over 200 million adults earning less than $2 a day have a low or little mobile, financial, or information literacy. This short paper reports a newly proposed interdisciplinary, six-step toolkit operationalized using a survey questionnaire, focus group prompts, and hands-on training for developing mobile, financial, and information literacy among the poor …

Open Peer Review: The Current Landscape And Emerging Models, Dietmar Wolfram, Peiling Wang, Hyoungjoo Park

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Open peer review (OPR) is an important innovation in the open science movement. OPR can play a significant role in advancing scientific communication by increasing its transparency. Despite the growing interest in OPR, adoption of this innovation since the turn of the century has been slow. This study provides the first comprehensive investigation of OPR adoption, its early adopters and the implementation models used. We identified 174 current OPR journals and analysed their wide-ranging implementations to derive emerging OPR models. The findings suggest that: 1) there has been a steady growth in OPR adoption since 2001 when 38 journals initially …

What Is Innovative To Public Libraries In The United States? A Perspective Of Library Administrators For Classifying Innovations, Devendra Potnis, Joseph Winberry, Bonnie Finn, Courtney Hunt

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Innovations are critical for public libraries but rarely any primary research studies the scope and interpretation of the term “innovation” by public libraries. Also, few of the existing innovation typologies are based on data collected from public libraries. This study fills in the gap by eliciting 80 innovations reported by the administrators of 108, award-winning public libraries in the United States, and proposes the first organic classification of innovations for public libraries, with the following four types of innovations: Program (access-oriented/use- oriented), Process (efficiency-driven/effectiveness-driven), Partnership (internal/external), and Technology (web-based technologies/assistive technologies/artificial intelligence). Findings can advance the state of innovations in …

Research Data Sharing: Practices And Attitudes Of Geophysicists, Carol Tenopir, Lisa Christian, Suzie Allard, Josh Borycz

DataONE Sociocultural and Usability & Assessment Working Groups

Open data policies have been introduced by governments, funders, and publishers over the past decade. Previous research showed a growing recognition by scientists of the benefits of data-sharing and reuse, but actual practices lag and are not always compliant with new regulations. The goal of this study is to investigate motives, attitudes, and data practices of the community of Earth and planetary geophysicists, a discipline believed to have accepting attitudes toward data sharing and reuse. A better understanding of the attitudes and current data-sharing practices of this scientific community could enable funders, publishers, data managers, and librarians to design systems …

Factors Influencing Undergraduate Use Of E-Books: A Mixed Methods Study, Devendra Potnis, Kanchan Deosthali, Xiaohua Zhu, Rebecca Mccusker

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Academic libraries invest millions of dollars to make electronic resources available to students for free. However, free access might not necessarily result in students’ sustained interest in and use of e-books. This interdisciplinary, mixed methods research investigates the factors influencing the intention of 279 undergraduate students to use e-books at a land-grant university in the southern US. Structural equation modeling of the survey responses suggests that organizational environment for information technology, external locus of control, subjective norm, perceived enjoyment (i.e., joyfulness), and information technology features play a significant role in influencing the intention of students to use e-books. Based on …

Team Science: Development Of An Immersive Curriculum For Information Professionals To Play An Expanding Role In Scientific Collaboration., Suzie Allard, D. Pollack

DataONE Sociocultural and Usability & Assessment Working Groups

No abstract provided.

Film For Four: Teaching The Libraries Through Film Production And Instructional Design, Michelle H. Brannen, Ingrid Jovonne Ruffin

UT Libraries Faculty: Peer-Reviewed Publications

This book chapter focuses on the development of the Four-Hour Film Festival at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In it’s third year, the Four-Hour Film Festival is a partnership between university librarians and resident assistants. The Four-Hour Film Festival provided a novel experience for students and housing staff to learn more about the libraries’ resources, people, and spaces while developing media literacy skills and relationships. This chapter covers how the partnership was formed; development of goals and learning outcomes; structuring the video contest; assessment of the contest; and conclude with a reflection on the triumphs and challenges of instructional design …

Inequalities Creating Economic Barriers To Owning Mobile Phones In India: Factors Responsible For The Gender Digital Divide, Devendra Potnis

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

In India, men own around 70% of mobile phones, creating a gender digital divide for the most widely owned information and communication technology (ICT) in the world. This study investigates the factors responsible for the inability of 245 female slum-dwellers in India earning less than $2 a day to own a mobile phone. Open, axial and selective coding of survey responses shows that socio-cultural, economic, demographic, psychological, communication-related, and health related inequalities in the lives of the respondents create eight economic barriers precluding respondents from owning some of the least expensive mobile phones worth $15 or so on installments of …

Undergraduate Women In The Stem Fields And The Use Of Academic Library Resources And Services, Rebecca O'Kelly Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

Women majoring in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields are few in number. This research will be conducted in an effort to understand the use of academic library resources and services by undergraduate women in the STEM fields. Data collection methods consisted of three focus groups and five interviews with undergraduate women in the STEM fields, and three focus groups and two interviews with academic librarians and library staff familiar with library resources and services in each of the STEM fields conducted at a Research I University in the USA. Grounded theory principles provided a basis for the …

Scholarly Article Seeking, Reading, And Use: A Continuing Evolution From Print To Electronic In The Sciences And Social Sciences, Carol Tenopir, Donald W. King, Lisa Christian, Rachel E. Volentine

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Electronic journals are now the norm for accessing and reading scholarly articles. This article examines scholarly article reading patterns by faculty in five US universities in 2012. Selected findings are also compared to some general trends from studies conducted periodically since 1977. In the 2012 survey, over threequarters (76%) of the scholarly readings were obtained through electronic means and just over half (51%) of readings were read on a screen rather than from a print source or being printed out. Readings from library sources are overwhelmingly from e-sources. The average number of articles read per month was 20.66, with most …

Applying Information Science Lens For Advancing Critical Research On It Adoption: Insights From Continued Usage Of Mobile Phones By Poor Women In Rural India, Devendra Potnis

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Critical research on IT adoption dominated by cognitive models grounded in psychology and communication is always in search of new theoretical perspectives to understand, explain, and interpret social issues. Since information plays an important role in IT adoption, this study applies an information science lens to investi-gate the factors affecting the continued usage of mobile phones in rural India. Analysis of interviews with 22 women earning less than a dollar day reveals the influence of social, economic, cognitive, technological, and information-related factors on their continued usage of mobiles. Micro- and meso-level socioeconomic motives and active information-seeking behavior emerge as the …

Beyond Access To Information: Understanding The Use Of Information By Poor Female Mobile Users In Rural India, Devendra Potnis

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Digital inclusion research has focused overwhelmingly on access to information. But access to information by itself is of limited value unless the intended beneficiary has the capacity to use it. It is the use of information that delivers the benefits. However, in ICT for development literature, there is little empirical work on the process by which use of information delivers benefits. This study fills the gap by studying information use by poor female mobile phone users in rural India. It identifies six stages in the information use process and models them.

Addressing Data Collection Challenges In Ict For Development Projects, Devendra Potnis

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper equips researchers for addressing a wide range of data collection challenges experienced when interacting with marginalized communities as part of ICT4D projects in developing countries. This secondary research categorizes data collection challenges reported in multiple disciplines, and summarizes the guidance from the past literature to deal with the challenges. The open, axial, and selective coding of data collection challenges reported by the past literature suggests that it is necessary to manage scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communication, and risks for addressing the data collection challenges. This paper illustrates the ways to manage these seven dimensions using (a) …

Interface, Fall 2014, School Of Information Sciences

Interface Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Measuring And Applying Data About Users In The Seton Hall Library, Rachel E. Volentine, Lisa Rose-Wiles, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

We present data on how faculty and students at Seton Hall University use scholarly articles and books, how the library can present its findings to stakeholders, and how librarians can learn from these findings to better meet user needs. The data were gathered using questionnaire surveys of university faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students as part of the IMLS Lib-Value project and based on Tenopir and King Studies conducted since 1977. Many questions used the critical incident of the last article and book reading to enable analysis of the characteristics of readings, in addition to characteristics of readers. Seton Hall’s …

Public Libraries And Homeless Lgbtq Youth: Creating Safe Spaces Through Cultural Competence, Julie Ann Winkelstein

Doctoral Dissertations

This social justice research case study was conducted in an effort to understand the role of the public library in the daily lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) homeless youth. Concerns about the influences of space, power, human rights, and marginalization informed the researcher and served as critical guides. To gain insight into this question, one-on-one interviews were conducted with public librarians, service providers who work with homeless youth, and the youth themselves. Grounded theory provided a basis for the analysis of the collected conversations.

Six theoretical concepts of time, attitude, building relationships, welcoming, feeling safe and …

What Does It Take Them Just To Get The Job? An Analysis Of Employability Skills Of Today’S Lis Graduates: Implications For Lis Curricula, Stan Trembach, Liya Deng, Andy Thomas

Annual Research Symposium of the College of Communication and Information

The information world is changing every day and so are the skills and competencies that an information professional needs. The school curricula, however, cannot be changed so fast. Therefore, a good curriculum has not only to be able to cover today’s needs but also to be adaptive enough to accommodate tomorrow’s needs. In order to have a better understanding of the information skills and competencies, the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina conducted a survey in 2010. Although there was limited response to the survey (17 in total), the results revealed that knowledge of …