Digital Commons Network^™

Appraisal And Acquisition Strategies In Collecting Repositories, Maureen Cresci Callahan, David Staniunas

Published Works

This chapter explores the principles, values, and practices that shape intentional collecting and acquisitions work in archival repositories. The authors argue that acquisitions are a form of public service, requiring archivists to engage actively and responsibly with communities to diversify the historical record and counteract the biases of passive or unexamined collecting. Drawing on case studies from institutions such as Northeastern University, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the New York State Archives, the chapter outlines models and strategies for building trust with donors, navigating power dynamics, and aligning acquisitions with institutional mission and capacity. Topics include advisory boards, documentation strategy, …

Five Good Things: Incorporating Relational Teaching Practices In Reference Services, Laura Sheets

University Libraries Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Current State Of Student Success At Historically Black College And University Libraries, Harvey Long, Sarah N. Hernandez

Library Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter investigates how academic librarians at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) define and contribute to student success, offering a perspective often underrepresented in library and information science literature. Drawing on a national survey of HBCU librarians, the authors explore how these professionals interpret student success both institutionally and personally, revealing tensions between traditional metrics—such as retention and graduation rates—and more holistic, empowerment-based frameworks. The study highlights the diverse, often under-recognized ways HBCU librarians support students, including information literacy instruction, mentorship, and emotional support. It also critiques the limitations of graduate LIS education in preparing librarians for culturally …

Lights, Camera, Government Documents!, Arizona State University

Film/Movies

Photographs, Bibliography, and Collection Description for a display of government documents from Fletcher Library at Arizona State University.

Note: This collection was inspired by Hanover College's GPO and the Movies display from 2016.

U-Stressed? Do Library Employees Experience More Technology Eustress Or Distress?, Abigail Raper

Library Services Publications

Based on professional conversations regarding library technology usage and its impact on workrelated stress, I inquire whether library employees experience more technology eustress or distress on the job. This question was inspired by Tarafdar et al.’s (2019) Technostress Trifecta. My study explores a facet of this theoretical framework, specifically the relationship between motivating (eustress) and discouraging (distress) technology stress. The research project used a mixedmethods approach. I implemented the Information and Communication Technology Demands, the Eustress-Distress Emotion Regulation questionnaires, and a follow-up semi-structured interview. Study participants received a recruitment email through a professional newsletter read by people who work in …

Fall Wonders, Arizona State University

Wildlife/Nature

Photographs, Bibliography, and Collection Description for a display of government documents from Fletcher Library at Arizona State University.

Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions Of University Libraries’ Services, Resources, And Physical Spaces: A Descriptive Analysis, Amanda Hardin

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Understanding undergraduate students' perceptions regarding university libraries’ services, resources, and physical space allows library leadership to improve student support. The purpose of this needs assessment using cross-sectional survey data of undergraduate students (N = 1733) was to examine how students use the libraries, how they perceive their ability to use resources, services, and physical spaces, and the relationship between use and perception to better understand satisfaction levels with everything academic libraries offer. Interviews with library leadership (N = 3) offer insight into how data received from the needs assessment were utilized to improve academic libraries and highlight the importance of …

Mentoring And Training In Performance Librarianship, Mallory Sajewski

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Performance librarians, or ensemble librarians, consist of a subset of music librarians who serve the music and information needs of orchestras, bands, and other performing ensembles. As there is no formal training system for performance librarians, the skills required to win an audition for a job must be learned by working with a mentor. This study investigated the mentoring process experienced by both mentors and mentees in the training and career preparation of performance librarians. Using a qualitative phenomenological approach, the researcher conducted semistructured interviews with 21 performance librarians in the United States and used thematic analysis to analyze the …

Fy2024 Association Of College And Research Libraries (Acrl) Statistical Survey: University Of Rhode Island Data, Julia Lovett

University Libraries Reports & Statistics

The report contains FY2024 data as submitted by the University of Rhode Island Libraries for the 2024 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Annual Survey.

Copyright...Not Wrong, Natasha J. Jenkins

LWLC Faculty Research

PDF and PowerPoint presentation made during a Staff Opportunity for Learning and Engagement (SOLE) Session at the Levi Watkins Learning Center on the campus of Alabama State University, March 18, 2025. The PowerPoint is a PDF file. The supplemental list of helpful resources is the "Related file".

Reference Interview Recommendations For Text And Data Mining, Laura Egan

Librarian Publications

Text and data mining (TDM) has become increasingly important in research and teaching in higher education. Researchers at all levels are engaging with larger quantities of data than previously feasible. The exponential increase in the availability of text data has resulted in a proliferation of the number of tools that facilitate text data processing and analysis. While TDM skills may have been optional or a disciplinary focus in the past, they are increasingly employed in a broader range of fields. Students and researchers may also be inspired to use TDM tools as they come across examples while looking for new …

Moving Goalposts: Unknowables, And Anxiety In Tenure And Promotion, Mark Diacopoulos, Ruth Monnier

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

In this study, two tenure-track colleagues (Mark and Ruth) examined their process of seeking tenure and promotion. They sought to answer the following question: To what extent do the unknowables in the tenure and promotion process lead to unnecessary anxiety?

Perspectives 2025, Oberlin College Libraries

Perspectives Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Grand Challenge In The Archives: Exploring Bias Through Experiential Learning, Karen W. Morse

Technical Services Faculty Publications

Considerations of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility can inform and enhance all aspects of archival work, even and especially our most challenging. When tasked with creating a new course for the University of Rhode Island’s General Education Program, I focused on how to engage students from various disciplinary backgrounds with archives on a deeper level. The result is Bias: Interrogating the Archive (LTI 350G), which debuted in fall 2021. While based on my ongoing work on bias and silences in the documentary record, the course highlights the wider real-world implications of bias. A successful example of incremental growth, LTI 350G …

How To Dump Dewey: Developing Your Own System Of Classification, Emily Roberts

Scholarship Day 2025

A poster about the development of new library classification schemes highlighting the case study of The University of New Mexico Center for Development & Disability (CDD). The poster includes a sample process for developing an autism spectrum disorder classification tailored to the needs of the case study library.

Validating Search Strategies For Healthy People 2030’S Leading Health Indicators: An Update On The Ph/Ha Caucus’S Structured Evidence Queries Project, Samantha Guss, Anita Kuiken, Erin Wentz, Dani Lapreze, Erin Reardon, Laura Zeigen, Courtney Pyche

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

The Public Health/Health Administration (PH/HA) Caucus’s work in developing Structured Evidence Queries (SEQs) for Healthy People 2030’s leading health indicators, an initiative from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aimed at improving the nation’s health in measurable ways highlights their search validation strategy and plans for outreach and assessment as the project nears completion. The SEQs, developed for PubMed, are designed to measure progress toward specified health outcomes while addressing health disparities and promoting health equity. The team collaboratively developed and peer-reviewed these SEQs, refining criteria and creating a validation strategy using resources from HHS. Plans for …

Disability As Identity, Jessica Schomberg

Library Services Publications

This chapter will focus on disability as an identity category: who gets to claim it, who gets to refuse it, and who has it thrust on them against their will. It will also talk about the power that comes from claiming disability identities and being in community with disabled people. This chapter will not discuss nondisabled as an identity category, nor will it discuss caregiver identities. With that basic understanding, we can work to move conversations about disability in libraries beyond the minimal expectations of inclusion and to a more joyous celebration of disabled people as full participants in library …

Small Changes, Big Returns: Decision-Making And Progress Towards Equitable Service Delivery, Kourtney Blackburn, Christina Hillman

Lavery Library Faculty/Staff Publications

Lavery Library is the sole library for St. John Fisher University and its five schools. The university is located in a small suburb in western New York State. Over the past decade we experienced many transformational changes. Some of these changes include our parent institution’s designation moving from college to university and the expansion of hybrid and online programs. The program expansions, combined with exploring textbook borrowing and changes to library services post-Covid, propelled the library staff to reimagine Interlibrary Loan (ILL) services for distance patrons. From our first online program policies in 2012 to the present day, this chapter …

Intro To Systematic Reviews, Or, How To Make A Peach Cobbler, Emily Metcalf

Videos/Slide Decks

This slide deck is for a workshop provided for students new to systematic and scoping reviews. It uses the metaphor of making a peach cobbler to illustrate the steps of creating a systematic or scoping review. It includes a few review questions, a link to evaluating the presenter's instruction (Which should be changed for any derivatives), and a link to a peach cobbler recipe.

Contributing Material To Jmu Scholarly Commons – Jmu Faculty, Becca Kruse, Mark Lane

Libraries

No abstract provided.

The Green Advantage: An Analysis Of Open Access Publications At A Mid-Sized University, Lisa M. Rose-Wiles, Maria A. Barca

Library Publications

Introduction: The escalating cost of journals, loss of access to research results, and mandates by funding agencies favor Open Access (OA). The suggestion that OA publications are cited more than those behind paywalls should appeal to faculty where citations are critical for promotion and tenure. Further, the option to publish Green OA without cost would be advantageous to faculty who lack financial support for OA publications.

Methods: We used data from Scopus to analyze field weighted citation counts (FWCI) for OA publications over 20 years in terms of OA type, document type, subject area, and subject normalized impact factor.

Results: …

Pace Zine Library - A Mini Zine Guidebook, Riley Natalova

Student Zines

This 8-page mini zine is a brief introduction to the Pace Zine Library, what type of materials can be found in its collection and how to visit. This zine was created as part of Pace Zine Library Research Assistantship to promote student and faculty interaction with the collection, promoting it as a great on campus resource for research and creativity. Click here to flip through the pages of the zine.

Oakwood Cemetery Register, Book 1, Computational Dataset, Department Of Digital Stewardship

Collections as Data

This computational dataset was developed from a transcription of Book 1 of the Oakwood Cemetery Registers, held by Oakwood Cemeteries of Syracuse, Inc. in Syracuse, New York. The project to digitize and transcribe the handwritten register was initiated by Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications and accomplished as a joint project between Newhouse, the Syracuse University Libraries, and the Central New York Library Resources Council.

The register documents interments from 8 November 1859 through 27 March 1902 and includes pertinent information about the deceased. The transcribed information has been normalized by Libraries staff for use as computational data. Please …

Oakwood Cemetery Register, Book 1, Transcription Dataset, Department Of Digital Stewardship

Collections as Data

This dataset contains a transcription of Book 1 of the Oakwood Cemetery Registers, held by Oakwood Cemeteries of Syracuse, Inc. in Syracuse, New York. The project to digitize and transcribe this handwritten register was initiated by Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications and accomplished as a joint project between Newhouse, the Syracuse University Libraries, and the Central New York Library Resources Council.

The register documents interments from 8 November 1859 through 27 March 1902 and includes pertinent information about the deceased.

Please scroll to the bottom of this page to access the read_me under "additional files."

Improving Queries To Retrieval-Augmented Generation Ai Tools By Inferring The Sources Of Bad Results, Julie Arendt

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Since ChatGPT’s wide release, businesses have rushed into expanding their use of generative artificial intelligence. Information providers, including suppliers of library databases and integrated library systems, are joining the trend, with many products combining the verifiability of direct source access and citation with the conversational answers produced through large language models. Retrieval-augmented generation is a common technique that overlays search results with text extracted and processed through generative artificial intelligence. This poster provides an overview of retrieval-augmented generation and summarizes ways that it can produce errors. Strategies for improving results, based on those error modes are suggested.

Longitudinal Growth And Use Of Open Repositories In The U.S. Since 2015, Jimmy Ghaphery

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

One indication of the maturity of institutional repositories (IRs) in 2015 was that the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) added two questions focused on IRs to their Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey. ACRL has continued to collect this data annually, documenting the number of IR items and downloads. This lighting talk will take a longitudinal dive into this data for a quantitative IR portrait of the past decade and include the type of U.S. higher education institution as defined by Carnegie classification. By looking at this self-reported data from the past decade, growth trends and benchmarks can …

Navigating Censorship: The Impact Of Book Challenges On Library Professionals And Advocates In Virginia, Hope Y. Kelly Phd, Easter Digangi

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

This work seeks to document the effects of book challenges and other censorship efforts on library professionals and advocates in Virginia in the early 2020s. The results offer insights into the lived experiences of individuals, highlighting the implications of censorship across the state. This work was a collaborative effort with a Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Librarian and an active member of Virginia Library Association’s (VLA) Intellectual Freedom Committee that developed after initial interviews from association leaders (VLA & Virginia Association of School Librarians) had been collected in 2023.

Raising Student Engagement With Instructional Videos Through Personalized Feedback, Hope Y. Kelly Phd

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Discover how personalized feedback and targeted video content impacted student engagement and completion rates in a library instruction module at Virginia Commonwealth University.

• Understand the theoretical reasoning that supports simple methods of personalized feedback and its impact on student engagement.

• Gain insights into the benefits of action research in instructional design utilizing analytics tools from a video streaming platform (Kaltura).

• Explore strategies for improving persistence and completion rates of library instruction modules.

Demonstrates how libraries can uplift and support students through reflective instructional strategies. By sharing the methods and results of this action research, gain practical insights into enhancing student …

Toward Positive Retention In Academic Libraries: A Conceptual Framework, Jennifer Stout, Sojourna Cunningham, Samantha Guss

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

It’s been nearly 25 years since ACRL and ARL named recruitment and retention of BIPOC librarians a priority for the profession, but the numbers have stagnated or even decreased. One reason for this could be that research on "recruitment and retention" in academic libraries tends to conflate these concepts and focus on recruitment, which can be more easily quantified. As a result, less attention has been paid to defining, measuring, and improving retention. Here, the researchers present a framework to better define the multiple dimensions of retention and how retention is related to organizational culture in academic libraries.

Rising To Meet The Needs Of All Our Students: The Inclusive Service Excellence Working Group At Vcu Libraries, Jennifer A. Stout, John T. Glover, Laura Crouch, Isabella Pence-Lanctot

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

VCU Libraries’ Inclusive Service Excellence Working Group was established to enrich the patron experience with public service units. Equity and inclusion were its guiding principles as its members reviewed the literature, sought user feedback, and engaged with focus groups. Stop by to learn about the group’s work and long-term impact.