Library and Information Science Commons^™

Convivial Making: Power In Public Library Creative Places, Shannon Crawford Barniskis

Theses and Dissertations

In 2011, public libraries began to provide access to collaborative creative places, frequently called “makerspaces.” The professional literature portrays these as beneficial for communities and individuals through their support of creativity, innovation, learning, and access to high-tech tools such as 3D printers. As in longstanding “library faith” narratives, which pin the library’s existence to widely held values, makerspace rhetoric describes access to tools and skills as instrumental for a stronger economy or democracy, social justice, and/or individual happiness. The rhetoric generally frames these places as empowering. Yet the concept of power has been neither well-theorized within the library makerspace literature …

Portraits, Preservation & Pedigrees: An Introduction To Photographic Portraiture, Photographs As A Means Of Genealogical Research, And A Preservation Case Study Of The Howard D. Beach Studio Collection Of Glass Plate Negatives, Kirsten Feigel

Museum Studies Theses

Photography is an established art form that combines the knowledge of chemistry, light, and optics to render an image. Initially, the image is captured on a flat surface coated with emulsion and combined with an exposure to sunlight or another illuminating source. Today, images are captured by digital methods. Artistically, the photograph may reveal sceneries of landscapes, of treasured belongings and of people, as they are seen to the human eye. Photographic portraiture is the oldest style of photography next to landscape imagery, due to commercial photographers setting up studios and experimenting with photography’s many cameras, plates, and emulsions. In …

The E-Writing Experiences Of Literary Authors, Kathleen Schreurs

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The e-writing experience is new and not yet fully understood and there is a story to be told about the enigmatic term e-writing and its impact on authors in the e-paradigm. In this study I collected understandings of e-writing by exploring the experiences of literary authors through qualitative case studies. I set out to find answers amidst two interconnected plots of inquiry. The first plot examined e language, in particular the term e-writing, and asked how authors understand the term e-writing and how their experiences contributed to that meaning. The second storyline asked how the digital revolution and resulting e-culture …

How Context Matters In Digital Library Use, Swati Bhattacharyya

Dissertations - ALL

This research investigates how organizational context contributes to the use of digital libraries, an ICT-enabled information infrastructure. Traditionally digital-library use is measured with the help of statistical analysis of download and other related data, but statistics alone have limited power to explain how such an expensive information infrastructure is used to meet organizational goals. Such limitation was overcome in this study by relating digital-library use to the context of such use.

In the last decade many Indian research organizations have witnessed the abundance of such information infrastructures accessible directly by end-users. The convergence of several phenomena such as current business …

The Public Library As Health Information Resource?, Mary Grace Flaherty

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Public libraries have adapted a variety of services into their institutional missions, including: promoting early literacy, publicly available Internet access, children's summer reading programs, and the dissemination of tax forms. Libraries are disproportionately rural institutions, often serving people with limited health care access. Thus, by public demand they have evolved to become important resources for rural health consumers to acquire information. Some public libraries have approached this role by subscribing to health databases, or by providing a link on their homepage to a health resource such as MedlinePlus, but most have undertaken little organizational change to meet growing patron demand. …

Eliciting User Requirements Using Appreciative Inquiry, Carol Kernitzki Gonzales

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Many software development projects fail because they do not meet the needs of users, are over-budget, and abandoned. To address this problem, the user requirements elicitation process was modified based on principles of Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry, commonly used in organizational development, aims to build organizations, processes, or systems based on success stories using a hopeful vision for an ideal future. Spanning five studies, Appreciative Inquiry was evaluated for its effectiveness with eliciting user requirements. In the first two cases, it was compared with traditional approaches with end-users and proxy-users. The third study was a quasi-experiment comparing the use of …