Digital Commons Network^™

Our Common Cause: Advocating For Human Labor For Outreach, Technical Expertise, And The Future Of Institutional Repositories, Grace R. Swinnerton, Dylan Mohr

Librarian Publications

Since 2021, SURFACE, Syracuse University’s institutional repository, has seen substantial growth in both content and commitment to long-term digital preservation. This progress is largely due to the Syracuse University Libraries’ investment in a dedicated three-person team focused on sustainability and development. As we face emerging technologies and AI, we question whether AI can replace human labor to reduce costs. Despite the financial appeal of cost-cutting, our presentation underscores the essential role of human labor. Through community-focused outreach and technical advancements like mass minting DOIs and restructuring our platform, we have demonstrated the irreplaceable value of human involvement. This presentation will …

Review Of Trans And Gender Diverse Voices In Libraries, Adrian Johnson

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This book review summarizes and discusses Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries, a compilation of fifty-three individual essays by and for trans and gender diverse people in the library and information science (LIS) profession. Edited by Kalani Keahi Adolpho, Stephen G. Krueger, and Krista McCraken, the 547-page work was published by Library Juice Press in 2023. This review provides a thorough look at each of the book’s seven sections, which are designated by professional focus or career stage, and emphasizes and contextualizes the importance of the title within the landscape of LIS literature.

Tracing Transformations: (Digitized) World War Ii Correspondence Through The Lens Of The Records Continuum Model, Milan M. Van Lange, Carlijn Keijzer

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This paper traces the transformations of a historical archival collection of personal wartime correspondence. Most of the records in this collection were created in the context of the German Occupation of the Netherlands during World War II (1940–1945) and/or the War of Independence in Indonesia (1945-1950). The collection was gathered and curated by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam from 1945 onwards and was digitised between 2020 and 2023. We navigate the convergence of past and future transformations of the records and illuminate the intricate web of considerations and decisions of historical preservation, archiving, digitisation, …

The Spring 2025 Issue, Destiny Dehart, Laura K. Clark Hunt, Crystal Walker, Austin Bello, Lauren Nimon-Viola, Sarah Gonzalez

Fonds and Feathers

This issue, edited by Destiny DeHart, features “Advances in Storytelling” by Assistant Professor Laura K. Clark Hunt, Ph.D., “Evolving Storytelling in Libraries: Project Techne” by Crystal Walker, “Who’s Rewriting History” by Austin Bello, “Soldiers in Disguise: Women’s Stories from the Civil War” by Lauren Viola, “Once Upon a Map: Storytelling in Libraries with ARCGIS Storymaps” by Sara Gonzalez, “Mold in the Archives: How Bias Influences Stories” by Destiny DeHart, and interview with managing reference archivist Devin McGeehan Muchmore of the GLBT Historical Society. In addition, upcoming conferences are listed. A list of students who will graduate in December 2024 with …

Community Care: Raising The Profile Of The Library Through Programming, Deborah Beagle, Carrie Evans, Maxine Girard, Bridget Kennedy, Mike Mannheim

Librarian Publications

Starting in Spring 2024, librarians at Western New England University D’Amour Library began seeking ways to increase student engagement in response to a new focus on student wellness. Leveraging their own strengths and interests, they began hosting weekly Crochet, Crafting and First-Generation College Student drop-ins, which eventually grew into a total of five regular library programs. These programs have proven overwhelmingly popular, with scores of students attending per week. Additionally, the programs have raised the profile of the library across campus, enabled collaborations with other campus groups, and increased student connections. Staff morale has also been improved, as Librarians have …

Building Media Literacy In Adolescence: A Cognitive Behavioral Clinician's Manual To Combat Misinformation And Misdiagnosis During Sessions, Patricia Sacchetti

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

This paper examines the role of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in countering misinformation that youth encounter on social media and other informal sources, with the goal of creating a manual for mental health clinicians. The use of CBT by clinicians working with adolescents to combat the issue of misinformation and misdiagnosis has received little attention in the literature. Mental health clinicians’ knowledge of media literacy as a psychological construct can foster an effective treatment style by building upon the foundation of well-established theory and practice, such as CBT. CBT is a multifaceted treatment that can help guide mental health clinicians …

Library Workshop On How To Build Effective Prompts In Ai Generators, Daniel G. Kipnis, Erin O'Neill

Libraries Scholarship

The STEM librarian and IT communications director at an public university created a hands-on workshop on prompt engineering. Covering ethical concerns and limitations, data privacy issues and prompt frameworks and techniques, the session concludes in a collaborative exercise where participants refine a basic prompt and compare Microsoft Copilot’s responses. This interactive approach helps attendees learn from peers while observing how small refinements impact AI-generated outputs.

Presentation: Generative AI in Libraries (GAIL) conference (https://shsulibraryguides.org/genailibraries/schedule)

Evaluating The Impact Of Information Literacy Workshops On Student Success, Amanda Shannon, Aaron Skira, Ying Chen, Matt Shreffler

Roesch Library Faculty Publications

Objective – This study was designed to identify the impact of standalone information literacy tutorials on student success indicators. The study was conducted in two different phases to compare findings across different modalities and to identify whether online, asynchronous delivery of substantively similar content affected outcomes.

Methods – Using institutional records from a mid-sized, Midwestern public university, and attendance and completion data from student participation in asynchronous library workshops, the authors used propensity score matching to construct a control group that mirrored library workshop participants based on like characteristics. Statistical analyses were then conducted comparing the GPA, semester completion, and …

Contributions Of California Teacher Librarians To Student Achievement, Keith Curry Lance, Caitlin Gerrity

Learning Hub

This article assesses the contributions of California Teacher Librarians (TLs) to student achievement, specifically in the area of English Language Arts and Literacy. This comparison-of-means analysis employed two major datasets: the California Department of Education (CDE) school library evaluation survey and California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) data, both for the 2022-23 school year. This study found that students who met or exceeded ELA standards were more likely to be in schools with: a full-time, certified TL rather than a part-time TL or no TL; a TL–full- or part-time–rather than no TL; a TL staffing a single library …

Navigating Campus Partners, Dymond Bush, Sarah Campbell, Olivia Seymour

Library Staff Publications, Presentations & Journal Articles

Demonstrating the value of the library’s resources to campus partners can be challenging for librarians. In this session, learn how Bryant University Research and Instruction Librarian Dymond Bush built relationships with the Athletics Department to bring this community into the library. Olivia Jones with Salve Regina University’s McKillop Library will discuss her partnership with the Office of Multicultural Programs and Retention and their Inclusive Reading Club. Sarah Campbell, Research and Instruction librarian at JWU will explore how developing partnerships with the graphic design department and the Center for Teaching and Learning created new opportunities for instruction and pedagogy-focused professional development. …

Ai Literacy Initiatives At Bryant University: Cross Campus Collaborations, Allison Papini, Abby Dolan

Library Staff Publications, Presentations & Journal Articles

Teaching students how to use and understand the information they receive from generative AI is a current dilemma for many educators. In this presentation, librarians Abby Dolan and Allison Papini will discuss their current work with increasing AI information literacy across the Bryant University Campus including supporting the creation of multiple chatbots and building an AI literacy curriculum for first-year students.

Sisyphus And The Digital Library: Keep Rolling That Boulder Up The Hill (Careful, It's Heavy), Ruth E. Bryan, Sarah Dorpinghaus, Megan M. Mummey

Library Presentations

Oftentimes, archivists and programmers feel like Sisyphus of Greek myth, continually rolling our boulder, the digital library, up the hill of stakeholder expectations. Since 1998, the University of Kentucky Libraries has provided online access to digital and digitized archival content through ExploreUK.uky.edu and other sites. Like many other institutions, UK Libraries has faced technological, organizational, and communication challenges in this endeavor. This presentation explores how UK Libraries responded to these challenges by expanding the decision-making team, after years of unclear responsibility and ownership, to reinvigorate internal interest and investment in the local digital library system and workflows.

Increasing Global South Knowledge Representation With Oa And Library Resource Sharing, J. Silvia Cho

Publications and Research

In this peer-review session, I present ideas to study and overcome barriers to digital interlibrary loan exchange with Latin America under Fair Use (and equivalent provisions). Materials published in Latin America and the Caribbean are more difficult to discover and access from the United States, creating silos and under-representation of points of view from these regions in Global North scholarship. Open Access is key towards overcoming barriers to access, but much of Southern knowledge continues to be in non-Open Access publications with traditional copyright. As a result, library resource sharing and interlibrary loan must facilitate a greater flow of Southern …

Shrink: Story Of A Fat Girl [Book Review], Jj Pionke

Disability in LIS (DisLIS)

Shrink is a graphic memoir and graphic medicine title that chronicles one woman's journey with her fat body. Along the way, she educates the reader about the politics, history, health, medicine, and perspectives of fatness.

A Year Of Designing And Revising Instruction With Chatgpt:​Leveraging Ai For Information Literacy Instruction Using The Parts Approach, Omer Farooq

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

No abstract provided.

Leveraging Reddit In Academia, Katherine A. Laflamme

Librarian Publications

This study investigates how integrating Reddit into academic environments can enhance authentic learning experiences and strengthen information literacy skills. As a crowdsourced platform with diverse communities, Reddit provides access to a wide range of perspectives, hard-to-reach populations, and both qualitative and quantitative insights. While Reddit holds potential as a research tool, this article focuses on its application in supporting information literacy and authentic learning assignments. It examines the benefits and challenges of using Reddit in academic settings, highlighting practical applications such as project-based learning (PBL) and renewable assignments that cultivate critical thinking and collaborative learning. By incorporating Reddit into the …

You Are Here: Defining Our Hidden Born-Digital Backlog, Andrew Mcdonnell

Library Presentations

The digital archivist position was created at the University of Kentucky two years ago to help create and refine workflows and process born-digital collections in our manuscripts and university archives collections. While much of the initial work of these last two years was on newly acquired collections and materials, in the decades prior, a variety of born-digital materials on physical media had been gathered in hybrid collections and stored and described in myriad ways. This presentation will demonstrate my processes for discovering and assessing unmigrated born-digital materials on physical media hidden throughout our collection. The process is built on documentation …

Unspoken Boundaries: The Silent Contract, Essraa Nawar

Library Articles and Research

"

Something shifted in me this weekend.

Not in a loud or obvious way — but in the quiet, aching kind of way that lingers.

There were moments that left marks.

Trusts stretched too far. Lines crossed without permission.

Words spoken too carelessly.

Stories overheard that weren’t mine to carry.

And emotions — joy, sadness, envy, intimacy — woven tightly into conversations I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

In the middle of it all, one theme kept surfacing: boundaries. "

It's Lonely At The Centre Of The Earth [Book Review], Jessica D. Gilbert Redman

Disability in LIS (DisLIS)

It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth focuses on the author/artist’s battle with depression and anxiety—and the overwhelming urge to end her own life. Readers who are dealing with anxiety or depression will recognize themselves over and over again, as they read the graphic novel and identify the myriad of ways they themselves are trying to function and “make it” in a world that doesn’t seem to be built for them—or to understand them.

How To Gender Include, Stephen Krueger

Library Faculty and Staff Publications

Gender inclusion is not an optional part of library work—at least, it isn’t if we want all those “Libraries Are For Everyone” signs to be true. And yet, the reality is that many libraries fail the most basic aspects of gender inclusion for patrons, employees, or both. Even in libraries where Trans 101 trainings do occur and are well received, or where the baseline of knowledge among employees is relatively high, the question remains: What now?

This article intends to answer that question. Very broadly speaking, gender inclusion work in libraries means sustained action to ensure that some patrons and …

Mulberry Leaf Disease Detection By Cnn-Vit With Xai Integration, Mohammad Asif Hasan, Fariha Haque, Hasan Sarker, Rafae Abdullah, Tonmoy Roy, Nishat Taaha, Yeasin Arafat, Abdul Karim Patwary, Mominul Ahsan, Julfikar Haider

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Mulberry leaf disease detection is vital for maintaining the health and productivity of mulberry crops. In this paper, a novel approach was proposed by integrating explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques with a convolutional neural network (CNN) and vision transformer (ViT) for effective mulberry leaf disease classification with three disease classes. Initially, in this proposed CNN-ViT model, features are extracted using a customized CNN architecture, and then the extracted features are fed into ViT for leaf disease classification in a more streamlined approach. The CNN-ViT model achieved promising results with a projection dimension of 64, utilizing 8 heads and 8 transformer …

Student Use Of Public Access Computers In The Library: A 10-Year Comparison Study, Holt Zaugg

Faculty Publications

Why did you do this activity, project, or research?

In 2014, across the BYU campus, the use of student-accessible public computer labs was declining. At this time, the library was not experiencing this decline; rather, public computer use in the library was increasing. Ten years later, we re-administered a similar survey in the same manner to determine what, if any, changes occurred.

How did you do this?

Initially (2014), we used a pop-up survey to help determine similarities and differences. When students logged on to a library computer, an invitation to participate in the survey popped up with the option …

Review Of Records And Information Management (3rd Edition), Kathleen Broeder

Journal of Western Archives

Review of the third edition of Records and Information Management by Patricia C. Franks.

New Definitions Of Library Use: Experimentation, Discovery, And Creation (Edc) Within A Library, Holt Zaugg

Faculty Publications

Why did you do this activity, project, or research?

Over the last decade, libraries have shifted from being primarily repositories for information and resources to active learning centers. Physical resources (e.g., books, journals, manuscripts) have moved to online access. Librarian roles have adjusted how they help patrons find and access resources in their local library and beyond, resulting in impactful input on research, learning, and scholarly endeavors. Additionally, due to a reduced need for storing materials, libraries have developed collaborative and innovative spaces to meet patrons’ needs. These spaces include group study rooms, experiential studios, makerspaces, green rooms, and podcast …

Creation Of An Open Access Textbook, Sue Ann Gardner

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

Slide presented during the PRCA Research Celebration, June 3, 2025, in the University Libraries, University of Nebraska-Lincoln titled Creation of an Open Access Textbook, about the development and publication of Concepts in Animal Parasitology, co-edited by Scott L. Gardner and Sue Ann Gardner and published by Zea Books (Lincoln, Nebraska, USA) in 2024.

The Library Is Open: Making The Case For Academic Libraries As The Planning Hub For Frederick Douglass Day, Shaina V. Anderson

Urban Library Journal

This case study showcases the value of having a library act as the central planning and event location at a public, land-grant university. Frederick Douglass Day is a hybrid day of “…collective action for Black history” (Center for Black Digital Research, n.d.) that was founded by Dr. Jim Casey, an African American Studies faculty member at Pennsylvania State University. It is a day where students and community members from higher education institutions, archival institutions, and museums from around the world log onto a transcription program and participate in transcribing historical documents. Some of the participants are assigned to be “transcribers” …

7 Million Global Downloads: Expanding The Reach & Impact Of The University Of Northern Iowa, Ellen Neuhaus

Library Documents & Reports (entire collection)

UNI ScholarWorks, UNI’s institutional repository, reached 7 million global downloads on June 2, 2025! The repository showcases the knowledge, creativity, and innovative spirit of UNI. UNI ScholarWorks demonstrates the global reach and impact of campus departments and programs. Works by UNI authors are being used to help solve global societal issues and challenges. The repository contains over 51,000 works and receives over 1.5 million downloads per year. The top downloaded work is a student article, “Factors Affecting Economic Growth in Developing Countries” in Major Themes in Economics, by Parash Upreti, which has over 88,000 downloads. The Graduate Studies page …

Arts-Based Sustainability: From New York To Malawi, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Recognizing that libraries serve multiple constituencies and subject areas, this chapter documents and advocates for development of transdisciplinary arts-based research (ABR) and culture-related projects linked to environmental challenges. Libraries contribute collections and spaces, as well as the research of library and information scientists. Libraries are currently among invisible contributors to sustainability planning and services. The chapter will link this invisibility to the value of what visual arts refer to as negative space elements in subjects ranging from traditional ecological knowledge to environmental science. Library collections, projects, and research contribute to education for sustainable development (ESD) as required to achieve the …

Why University Libraries Should Not Overlook Research Staff, Bella Ratmelia

Research Collection Library

In a commentary, the uthor noted that university libraries often overlook research staff due to the transitory nature of these roles. She emphasised that these staff are key drivers of research productivity, bringing specialised skills and adaptability to evolving methodologies. To better support them, the author urged libraries to engage research staff through initiatives like SMU’s workshops co-taught by librarians and researchers and the SMU Researcher Club, which fosters their professional and personal growth while building future collaborations across academia and industry

Financial Data Stewardship: A Librarian's Approach To Data Discovery And A Call For Coding As A Path To Data Comprehension And Verification, Lip Hwe Tee

Research Collection Library

This conference presentation calls to advocate and emphasise coding as a means to understand datasets, to be able to correctly interpret table structure and relevant fields to extract the correct data, to ensure accuracy and relevance.