Library and Information Science Commons^™

Can You Hear Us Now? Investigating The Effects Of A Wireless Grid Social Radio Station On Collaboration And Communication In Fragile Populations, Sarah Anna Chauncey

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

The ability to interact with peers and coworkers in online digital networks is essential in learning and business environments. Our digital participatory culture is based on communication in response to purposeful activity and is facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT). Students with emotional, behavioral, and learning disabilities are often disengaged and excluded from this knowledge-building conversation. This disengagement results in a cycle of failure exhibited through diminished self-efficacy and inadequate academic and emotional self-regulation. A critical goal of those who work with these students is to bolster their resilience, persistence, participatory, and communicative skills--to invite them back into the …

Ambient Intelligence With Wireless Grid Enabled Applications: A Case Study Of The Launch And First Use Experience Of Wejay Social Radio In Education, Helen Patricia Mckenna

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Wireless grid and ambient intelligent (AmI) environments are characterized as supportive of collaboration, interaction, and sharing. The conceptual framework advanced for this study incorporated the constructs of innovation, creativity and context awareness while offering emergence theory -- emergent properties, structures, patterns and behaviors -- to frame and investigate a wireless grid enabled social radio application which was theorized to be potentially transformative and disruptive. The unintended consequences and unexpected possibilities of wireless grid and smart environments were also addressed.

Using a single case study, drawing upon multiple data collection methods, this research investigated the deployment and use experience of …

Becoming Artifacts: Medieval Seals, Passports And The Future Of Digital Identity, Mawaki Chango

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

What does a digital identity token have to do with medieval seals? Is the history of passports of any use for enabling the discovery of Internet users' identity when crossing virtual domain boundaries during their digital browsing and transactions? The agility of the Internet architecture and its simplicity of use have been the engines of its growth and success with the users worldwide. As it turns out, there lies also its crux. In effect, Internet industry participants have argued that the critical problem business is faced with on the Internet is the absence of an identity layer from the core …

Community Interest As An Indicator For Ranking, Xiaozhong Liu

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Ranking documents in response to users' information needs is a challenging task, due, in part, to the dynamic nature of users' interests with respect to a query. We hypothesize that the interests of a given user are similar to the interests of the broader community of which he or she is a part and propose an innovative method that uses social media to characterize the interests of the community and use this characterization to improve future rankings. By generating a community interest vector (CIV) and community interest language model (CILM) for a given query, we use community interest to alter …

A Temporal Model Of Mindful Interactions Around New Service Conception, Joe Rubleske

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

The organizational ability to innovate is widely acknowledged as crucial to sustained success. For libraries and other service providers, innovation entails the continuous development of new services that propose value to customers. This new service development process can be understood as comprising a "front end," in which new service ideas are conceived and developed, and a "back end," in which selected ideas are implemented. Our understanding of the former - that is, of new service conception in libraries - is particularly underdeveloped.

To build a conceptual foundation for research in this area I used qualitative data collection techniques and constant-comparison …

Image-Enabled Discourse: Investigating The Creation Of Visual Information As Communicative Practice, Jaime Snyder

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Anyone who has clarified a thought or prompted a response during a conversation by drawing a picture has exploited the potential of image making as an interactive tool for conveying information. Images are increasingly ubiquitous in daily communication, in large part due to advances in visually enabled information and communication technologies (ICT), such as information visualization applications, image retrieval systems and visually enabled collaborative work tools. Human abilities to use images to communicate are however far more sophisticated and nuanced than these technologies currently support. In order to learn more about the practice of image making as a specialized form …

International, National, And Local Notions Of The Public Library: An Extended Case Study In Namibia, Sarah M. Webb

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of library use in a poor neighborhood in Windhoek, Namibia, to understand the diffusion of public libraries around the world. I used a sociological approach and the Extended Case Method (Burawoy, 1991; 1998). Two theories framed the research: World Society Theory (Meyer et al. 1997) and New Institutional Theory (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). World Society Theory was developed from evidence of similarities in governmental, health and educational organizations globally that demonstrates the growth of a world culture based on a rationalistic and scientific approach to knowledge. The findings show that international notions of public libraries …

Crowdsourcing Scientific Work: A Comparative Study Of Technologies, Processes, And Outcomes In Citizen Science, Andrea Wiggins

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Citizen science projects involve the public with scientists in collaborative research. Information and communication technologies for citizen science can enable massive virtual collaborations based on voluntary contributions by diverse participants. As the popularity of citizen science increases, scientists need a more thorough understanding of how project design and implementation decisions affect scientific outcomes.

Applying a comparative case study methodology, the study investigated project organizers' perspectives and experiences in Mountain Watch, the Great Sunflower Project, and eBird, three observation-based ecological citizen science projects in different scientific domains. Five themes are highlighted in the findings: the influence of project design approaches that …