Library and Information Science Commons^™

Decolonizing African-American Museums: A Case Study On Two African-American Museums In The South, Anastacia Jonique Scott

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand how African-American museums’ exhibits help individuals gain their sense of racial identity through public memory. In an era where the United States is supposedly “post-racial” African-American museums are flourishing. As institutions serving an important role in preserving the collective memory of African-American people in the US, African-American museums evoke questions of representation within the larger US narrative that confirm the persistent saliency of race in society, and therefore continue to have a public function in maintaining and developing a racial African-American identity (Jackson 2012; Eichstedt and Small 2002; Wilson 2012; Golding 2009).

My research is …

Northwest Coast Native American Art: The Relationship Between Museums, Native Americans And Artists, Karrie E. Myers

Museum Studies Theses

Museums today have many responsibilities, including protecting and understanding objects in their care. Many also have relationships with groups of people whose items or artworks are housed within their institutions. This paper explores the relationship between museums and Northwest Coast Native Americans and their artists. Participating museums include those in and out of the Northwest Coast region, such as the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Burke Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum. Museum professionals who conducted research for some of these museums included Franz Boas, …

The Lived Experiences Of Women In The Information Technology Field As They Transition From One Leadership Level To The Next: A Phenomenological Study, Marilyn Delmont

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There is an increasing disparity of women in the IT field, when compared to men, specifically within IT executive leadership roles. The number of women in IT executive leadership lags drastically behind men IT executives and has gone down by five percent since 2008. Despite significant growth in the IT field women are not growing with it. IT jobs are expected to increase by 1.5 million in the next decade. The purpose and central question of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of women and how they develop as IT leaders. Beginning with 19 broad questions, …

Decentering The Writing Program Archive: How Composition Instructors Save And Share Their Teaching Materials, Stacy Olivia Nall

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation decenters the writing program archive through research on instructors’ digital archives. Artifacts of composition instruction are no longer saved to print archives alone; rather, digital technologies expand the locations where artifacts of writing pedagogy can be archived and accessed. The following archival ethnography, focused on a community engagement writing course in the Introductory Composition at Purdue (ICaP) program, finds that many digital archives of composition are hidden to outside researchers or not sustained (which are theorized as either “abandoned” or “pop-up” archives). At the same time, some pedagogical materials are publicly visible by virtue of personal web spaces …

Struggle For Survival: The History And Ethics Of Living Collections, Emily Simms

Museum Studies Theses

This thesis explores the ethics involved with institutions caring for living collections worldwide such as zoos, national parks, and aquariums. There are several main concerns that these institutions are currently facing: poaching, keeper negligence, euthanasia within zoos themselves, and public opinion. The moral issues engrained can help guide keepers of these collections to take better care of the animals for which they are responsible. It also explores specific cases in the past in which living collections have managed serious issues and how they resolved these issues.

The Unsung Evolutionist: Charles Rau's Swiss Lake Dwelling Collection At The Smithsonian Institution, Liam C. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

During the second half of the nineteenth century, museums and collectors around the world engaged in a collecting frenzy focused on objects from the Swiss Alpine sites known as Pfahlbauten. Romantic reconstructions of these sites captured the antiquarian imagination and resulted in an artifact diaspora. Charles (Carl) Rau, a German-American archaeologist who became the first Curator of Antiquities at the Smithsonian Institution (SI), collected several hundred Neolithic and Bronze Age artifacts from the lake dwelling sites of Robenhausen and Auvernier, donating this material as well as his library to the SI upon his death in 1886. This thesis investigates the …

A Black Art: Ontology, Data, And The Tower Of Babel Problem, Andrew J. Iliadis

Open Access Dissertations

Computational ontologies are a new type of emerging scientific media (Smith, 2016) that process large quantities of heterogeneous data about portions of reality. Applied computational ontologies are used for semantically integrating (Heiler, 1995; Pileggi & Fernandez-Llatas, 2012) divergent data to represent reality and in so doing applied computational ontologies alter conceptions of materiality and produce new realities based on levels of informational granularity and abstraction (Floridi, 2011), resulting in a new type of informational ontology (Iliadis, 2013) the critical analysis of which requires new methods and frameworks. Currently, there is a lack of literature addressing the theoretical, social, and critical …

The Ultimate Irony: An Information Age Without Librarians, Dawn S. Ady

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, the continuing relevance of the profession of librarianship in the digital age is explored and assessed. After defining the library as information itself, the thesis establishes that electronic formats replacing printed matter is not an indication of libraries becoming extinct. Further, various aspects of the profession of librarianship—including library ethics, information extraction skills, and information literacy instruction—are discussed. Additionally, the potential for librarians to play an important role in a largely “jobless” society (as forecast by some experts and scholars as well as in a recent Oxford University study) is evaluated. Finally, a proposal is made for …

The New Gatekeepers: How Blogs Subverted Mainstream Book Reviews, Rebecca E. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Book reviewing has a fraught history in the United States. Reviewers have long been accused of not being analytical enough. It should be no wonder then with the emergence of social media that online book reviewing has become increasingly popular. Online reviewers, especially book bloggers, are no literary gatekeepers in their own right, shaping the tastes of readers across the world. Book blogs in particular pay special attention to titles which have long been derided by institutions such as libraries, academia, publishers, and bookstores. These literary gatekeepers typically ignore romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, young adult fiction, comic books, and …