Library and Information Science Commons^™

Connecting Their Stories: Black Educators’ Experiences Within Cultural Heritage Institutions That Document The Long Arc Of The Civil Rights Movement, Constance Marie Caddell

Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to examine Black educators’ experiences within cultural heritage institutions that are documenting topics that include the long arc of the American Civil Rights Movement. Black educators are powerful conduits of the African American story because they align with African American cultural heritage institution’s goals to foster equality, identity, pride, and honor in the community. These shared goals lead to Black educators using teaching methods that liberate, advocate, and empower students. This allows them to share new knowledge, strategies, techniques, and concepts on diverse topics. Considering their fundamental mission, it is essential to gain an awareness of the …

The Divine Consumptive: The Depiction Of Tuberculosis In Jane Eyre, Haley Highfield

Theses and Dissertations

Disease was a constant and unavoidable facet of life in British society during the Victorian Era. Despite the overwhelming prevalence of disease, the true cause of these illnesses remained mysterious until the turn of the century. With the origins of many of these diseases being either unknown or ascribed to mistaken sources, effective treatment was an impossibility. Tuberculosis is a prime example of this conundrum. Even with an estimated twenty-five percent of the British population dying from this particular disease during the nineteenth century, the actual provenance for infection was not discovered until 1882 with Robert Koch’s identification of the …

“Describing Without Identifying”: The Phenomenological Role Of Gender In Cataloging Practices, Travis L. Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores gendering practices of visual information catalogers. The work aims to understand how catalogers perceive gender when describing persons within visual information. The qualitative study deployed queer interpretative phenomenological analysis to understand how catalogers think broadly about describing identity. The infused queer theoretical tenets helped to understand that while participants may not directly name gender as challenging, the conflation of gender into cisnormative monoliths (assuming every person's gender matches their sex-assigned-at birth) or silence around gender produce telling opinions concerning nonbinary gender. The research also utilized a Think Aloud exercise wherein participants undertook in-the-moment cataloging three moving images. …

In My Skin, Her Skin: An Artistic Exploration Of The Intersection Of Queer Femininity And Body Image, Stephanie Allen

Senior Theses

This project aims to visually record the feeling of being seen and queer women and non-binary people’s developing knowledge of their identity. Using interview questions that focused on body satisfaction, body selectiveness in partners, queer identity, and one’s relationship with femininity, a series of “floating collages” was created to record and juxtapose the appearance of the body with one’s internal relationship to the body. By realistically showing a variety of different body types that all relate to queerness and femininity in some way, one may expand their presupposed notions about the body enforcing identity. Additionally, despite these varying appearances of …

School Wide Digital Devices And The Impact On The Role Of School Librarians, Laura Jeanne Haverkamp

Theses and Dissertations

This mixed methods study examines what happens to the role of the school librarian when schools move to a 1:1 model where every student has a digital device. Using the literature to understand expectations for librarians, the researcher surveyed experienced South Carolina school librarians to determine how 1:1 computing was implemented and supported in schools and if the role of the school librarians has changed as schools transition to a digital environment. The researcher found that there was little uniformity in deployment and support of devices in 1:1 schools, but that librarians felt their roles had changed and their overall …

Implications Of Social Networks On Medication Information- Seeking Among Middle Eastern International Students: An Exploratory Study, Esra Abdoh

Theses and Dissertations

The study examined how international students use their social networks to seek medication information, how their social networks provide social support, and how perceived social support is related to seeking medication information online. While there has been a paucity of research on the way international students seek information in their day-to-day lives (Sin and Kim, 2013), there is still a gap in the literature regarding how social networks employed by international students have a positive impact on building bridges toward home. In particular, no studies on the use of social support in social networks to retrieve medication information exist.

This …

The Claude Henry Neuffer Diaries: The Story Of A Signal Corps Serviceman In The China-Burma-India Theater Of Wwii, Kyle Brady Henderson

Senior Theses

This senior thesis project involved working with an unprocessed collection from the Manuscripts Collection of the South Caroliniana Library. The collection (which mainly consists of two diary volumes) documents Claude Henry Neuffer’s service in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II. The goal of this thesis was to aid in the processing and digitization of this collection through the creation of full transcripts, a map, and a narrative description of the collection. This work will help to preserve the collection, improve accessibility to future researchers, and provide additional historical context.

The Importance Of Interdisciplinarity: Redefining The Health Belief Model, Ross F. Lordo

Senior Theses

Throughout academia, there lacks an existence of a commonly utilized multicomponent and interdisciplinary approach in understanding our outside world. This thesis provides an analysis of the current state of interdisciplinarity and the need to develop interdisciplinary theory. Through this effort, the researcher utilizes the health belief model as a framework that is severely limited in applicable scope due to its constructs. Contrastingly, systems theory and game theory are validated as examples of theories with an interdisciplinary nature. Through the coding of the literature pertaining to the qualitative characteristics of the health belief model, game theory and systems theory, guidelines in …

Characterizing Health Behavior Information: Developing A Surveillance Text Mining Framework Using Twitter For Diet, Diabetes, Exercise, And Obesity, George Shaw Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies have documented the relationship that exists among diabetes, diet, exercise, and obesity. Obesity increases people’s risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Exercise and proper dieting are modifiable lifestyle behaviors that can help with reducing people’s overall weight and risk to various chronic conditions like diabetes. A national survey conducted by the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) is the annual Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS). Twitter provides researchers with a new opportunity and alternative data source to collect information regarding health behaviors using real-time data. Previous studies have demonstrated Twitter’s ability to monitor …

Knowledge Practices In Professional Web Design, T. Zachary Frazier

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the use and construction of knowledge by individuals involved in the professional design of websites. Its focus is on the knowledge practices of those who identify as web designers; professionals engaged primarily in the aesthetic design of websites. This study employs a qualitative semi-structured interview to explore this population’s practices, and adopts a constructivist approach built on critical realist ontology in analyzing the data. The study addresses the general lack of scholarship focusing on web designers, and helps build an understanding of the processes and forces that govern the development and creation of websites. The findings of …

Rural Public Library Assets And Socioeconomic Demographics: A Multi-Classification Study, Karen A. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Rural public libraries hold economic, cultural, and social capital assets in trust for the benefit of their communities. Filling a gap in the study of those assets, 2012 through 2015 rural library statistics from the Institute of Museum and Library Services were combined with public data from the United States Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services to: (1) reveal interrelationships between rural public library assets and socioeconomic factors, (2) explore the implications of those relationships in terms of potential community services and asset strengths, (3) investigate differences in those relationships over time, and (4) consider rural library asset …

Intersection: Reading, And Adult Homelessness And Public Libraries, Deborah W. Yoho

Theses and Dissertations

A deeper understanding of reading as more than a set of word-attack and decoding skills may help to guide public librarians seeking to fully implement the ethical professional standard of equitable access to information for everyone, including marginalized patrons such as adults experiencing homelessness. As public libraries respond to questions about their continued relevance in a digital age, an understanding of how libraries can contribute to solutions to community social needs such as homelessness has the potential to broaden community support for more inclusive library programming. In this qualitative study of the experience of reading among eight adults in a …

Worth Fighting For: Factors Influencing Selection Decisions In School Libraries, April M. Dawkins

Theses and Dissertations

Intellectual freedom is one of the basic tenets of the library profession. However, most librarians will face attempts to censor or control access to information at some point in their careers. School librarians might choose to self-censor because they fear facing a challenge that calls into question not only their professionalism but also their personal values and ethics. While there have been numerous studies on censorship in other types of libraries, there is little research in the area of censorship and intellectual freedom as it pertains to the school library field. The purpose of this study is to understand the …

Reproductive Healthcare Information-Seeking Behavior In Undeserved Women: An Exploratory Study, Margaret S. Zimmerman

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the reproductive health-related information-seeking of low-income women which has been found to be affected by digital divide disparities. Included in this is an assessment of what reproductive health-related information needs they have, which sources they consult most frequently, if they trust the sources that they use, and how their information-seeking interacts with the variables of perceived risk and perceived barriers. While there have been many studies on the end effects of a lack of accurate and accessible reproductive health information little research has been conducted to examine the reproductive healthcare information-seeking patterns of women who live in …

Academic Library Behaviors And Perceptions Of A Community College’S Distance Learners, Cantrell Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Over 1,200 community colleges nationwide enroll over ten million students each year, with more than one in four of these students taking some of their courses at a distance. Many of these post-secondary institutions also struggle to retain and graduate students enrolled as distance learners. In a continuing effort to address college completion gaps, research attempts to identify barriers to success and provide insights on how to decrease college completion gaps. Given post-secondary education’s increased focus on students’ use of resources beyond the classroom, a logical line of exploration is the link between academic library usage and library aptitudes and …

Anatomy Of A Social Media Movement: Diffusion, Sentiment And Network Analysis, Md Hassan Zamir

Theses and Dissertations

Social media has increased the availability of abundant user interaction data. Technology-mediated social participation tools like Twitter can inform us about collective actions and social movement mobilization. Current focus of social media and social movement research are on usage and impact of technology during historical uprisings. But online social networks are participatory mediums, and filled up with multi-dimensional user interactions, which requires more concrete attentions and need investigations at granular levels. Moreover, limited attention has been paid on how activists develop online social networks. This study stressed on Twitter’s ability of helping in making sense of online debates and present …

Causes Of Satisfaction And Disatisfaction For Diversity Resident Librarians – A Mixed Methods Study Using Herzberg’S Motivation-Hygiene Theory, Jason Kelly Alston

Theses and Dissertations

Diversity residency librarian programs are post-MLIS programs aimed at providing recently graduated professionals with real work experience, with the expressed goal of recruiting and retaining a more-diverse workforce in professional librarianship.

This mixed-method study is one of the first empirical studies examining diversity residencies, which – at the time of this writing – have existed for more than 30 years. The study identifies concerns raised in the mostly anecdotal literature about diversity residencies, and 102 individuals identified as current or former diversity resident librarians participated in the quantitative portion of the study. In the quantitative portion of this study, there …

Exploring The Role Of Culture In Online Searching Behavior From A Cognitive Perspective, Sara Chizari

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates differences in Web search behavior from a “cultural cognition” perspective, which was introduced by Nisbett and Norenzayan (2002). To explore the impact of culture and thinking styles on searching behavior is the objective. The overarching hypothesis is that there are cultural differences in cognitive styles and that these differences may lead into different searching behaviors. The findings help search engine designers provide an adaptive navigation support to users from different cultural backgrounds and cognitive styles. The fundamental research question underpinning this research becomes what are the relationships between users’ cognitive styles and cultural background, and their Web …

Shifting The Aircraft Carrier: Why Race Matters In Museums And Historic Sites: An Examination Of Inclusive Practices, Porchia Moore

Theses and Dissertations

This study addresses the increased urgency in the field of cultural heritage informatics (specifically museums and historic sites) to articulate clear methods for inclusive praxis. Less than 10% of all museum visitors are people of color. Coupled with the fact that 80% of the museum workforce constitutes a demographic of white women; with changing racial demographics in this country, museums and historic sites are grappling with how to address and understand “doing” diversity and inclusion in museums. This study is a critical case study of a brand new historic site and museum that is attempting to be wholly inclusive by …

In Your Experience: Pathways And Barriers For Female Students Of Stem, Elizabeth J. Hartnett

Theses and Dissertations

This study addresses the gender gap that exists in the STEM professions. The number of jobs in STEM is climbing rapidly, but participation by women is disproportionately low. Although they make up roughly half of the overall population, women account for only about one quarter of the STEM workforce. A similar gap exists among undergraduates majoring in STEM fields. This is an exploratory study intended to identify and explore factors contributing to this gender gap, as perceived by undergraduate students. Through an online survey and follow-up interviews of undergraduates at two universities in the southeastern United States, data were collected …

Circling The Reality Of Public Institutions Anchoring Gentrification: An E-Delphi Study Of Information, Culture, And Community Stakeholders Voicing The Way Forward In Detroit, Michigan, Celeste L. Welch

Theses and Dissertations

Information, culture, and memory centers increasingly anchor urban redevelopment projects in historically marginalized communities challenged with contemporary social and economic disparities. This dissertation situated libraries, archives, and museums within a socio-cultural context and examined the role of cultural heritage institutions in gentrification. Librarians, archivists, curators, and community advocates in Detroit, Michigan shared their viewpoints and experiences of gentrification in a legacy city. Using a modified Delphi process, the e-Delphi panel explored the need for assessing policy, service delivery, and programming in a city of color at-risk to gentrification-induced displacement.

This mixed research study used a concurrent triangulation design. A panel …

No End In Sight: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of U.S. National Newspaper Coverage Of The Iraq War, Anmol Rattan Kalsi

Theses and Dissertations

On May 1, 2003, standing in front of a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished” aboard the warship U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, President Bush announced an end to major combat in Iraq, referring to the war as “one victory in the war on terror.” Over seven years later, on August 31, 2010, President Obama in a televised speech also announced an end to the combat mission in Iraq. On October 21, 2011, President Obama once again reaffirmed that U.S. military personnel would be leaving Iraq, saluting the troops on their “success” and remarking on the Iraqi government’s readiness for governing. And finally, on …

What Makes Information Strategic ? An Examination Of Access To Information Resources For Entrepreneurs And Business Performance, Yao Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of the relationship between the access to and use of information resources of entrepreneurs and their business performance. The survival and competence of organizations relies heavily on their recognition of information as important strategic resource. Entrepreneurs, specifically, face a constantly changing environment and are in a disadvantaged competitive position in finance and experience compared with large companies. Access to, and use of information resources, will help them improve their business performance.

This study collects both qualitative and quantitative data, investigating the entrepreneurs’ business performance and their behaviour in accessing and …

Equity Of Access To Cultural Heritage: The Influence Of The Museum Experience On Learning In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Liya Deng

Theses and Dissertations

Autism is one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the United States. Due to impairments in social interaction and communication, autistic children face challenges in traditional education settings where instruction is based mainly on one-way communication between teachers and students. On the other hand, current research indicates that the museum environment offers opportunities for free-choice, object-based, and inquiry-based learning suitable for the educational and social needs of autistic children. However, there is a paucity of professional literature assessing the impact of such unconventional settings as museums on the learning experience of autistic children.

To narrow this gap in our knowledge, …

Exploring Undergraduate Students' Information Seeking Motivation: A Self-Determination Perspective, Ana Dubnjakovic

Theses and Dissertations

Human motivation is a widely debated construct in psychology and many disciplines in social science as well as education and health sciences have adopted various psychological theories in an effort to understand motivational forces behind many human activities from dieting (e.g., Schelling, Munsch and Margraf, 2011), psychotherapy (e.g., Martens, 2010) and academic achievement (e.g., Artino, Holmboe and Durning, 2012) to political participation (e.g., Hersh, 2012). Case (2012) devotes an entire chapter in his seminal text on information behavior to an overview of what he calls a “motivational puzzle” tying it to information need as the predominantly discussed dimension of motivation …

Empowering The Enemy: The Cold War And The East-West Battle For Information Superiority, 1945 - 1969, Stan Trembach

Theses and Dissertations

This comparative study employs a historical perspective to narrow the gap in the existing knowledge of the origins of an information explosion phenomenon that dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century. It argues that the root cause of the unprecedented growth of the overall amount of documents was the rapid expansion of scientific and technical advances across the world and the subsequent spread of modern technologies, particularly those applied to scientific and technical information (STI).

This research is based on the premise that the thriving of the Soviet militaryindustrial complex went hand in hand with the rise …

One Too Many: An Exploration Of The Roots Of Literacy Of Older African Americans In South Carolina Before Brown Versus The Board Of Education, Barbara Johnson Montgomery

Theses and Dissertations

Drawing from 1992 data, The National Adult Literacy Survey recently indicated that a large portion of the US population lacks the literacy skills typically required to complete complex tasks and take advantage of a wide range of employment opportunities. This report also indicated that the reading proficiency of African Americans was substantially lower than that of the White population, particularly within the elder population. A similar picture emerges in the more recent report, Literacy in Everyday Life: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. As a group, African American adults ages 65 and older had the lowest average …