Library and Information Science Commons^™

Knowledge Organization Practices In Everyday Life: Divergent Constructions Of Healthy Eating, Jill R. Mctavish

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Background. To “classify” in Library and Information Sciences (LIS) usually involves an engagement with formally established classification systems, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification. In this dissertation I suggest an alternative path for LIS scholars – one that considers the application of LIS theories about classification to the investigation of everyday life “classification” processes and technologies. Focusing on the knowledge domain of food, health, and eating, I consider how food experts and non-experts divide foods into groups according to their health properties and how closely these groups reflect the “classification” of food presented in Canada’s Food Guide. Method. The research …

Semantics-Based Automated Quality Assessment Of Depression Treatment Web Documents, Yanjun Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The past decade has witnessed a dramatic expansion in the amount of publicly available health care information on the Web. The health care information on the web, however, is of extremely variable quality. The evaluation of content quality is a big challenge because non-automated methods for information content rating can be easily overwhelmed by the huge data volume. This study proposes an automated approach for assessing the quality of web health care information through comparing the text content with evidence-based health care recommendations. This method relies on semantic analysis and text classification to identify the presentation of evidence-based recommendations in …

Space, Power And The Public Library: A Multicase Examination Of The Public Library As Organization Space, Matthew R. Griffis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study investigates the materially-embedded relations of power between library users and staff within public library buildings and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to library organizational objectives. Most specifically it considers three public library buildings as organization spaces and determines the extent to which their respective spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building “type” ca. 1900.

I adopted a multiple case study design, employing several qualitative data collection methods and analysis. I conducted site visits to three, purposefully-selected public library buildings (i.e., “cases”) of …