Digital Commons Network^™

Offsetting Carbon With Lemons: Adverse Selection And Certification In The Voluntary Carbon Market, Vahideh Manshadi, Faidra Monachou, Ilan Morgenstern

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

To meet voluntary climate targets, firms often complement internal decarbonization efforts by purchasing carbon credits in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), which finance projects that reduce emissions elsewhere. However, these emissions reductions are difficult to verify, and growing evidence of overcrediting has cast doubt on the VCM's potential to genuinely offset emissions. We investigate how the VCM's defining features shape its climate effectiveness. Our model captures three central elements: adverse selection, as high-quality projects that truly reduce emissions are costlier yet difficult to distinguish from low-quality ones; imperfect third-party certification, as projects are screened based on a noisy signal of …

Expanding Transmobilities: Understanding Genderdiverse And Transgender Travel Behavior Through An Art-Informed Methodology, Nicholas Michael Puczkowskyj

Dissertations and Theses

Transgender and genderdiverse people face discrimination and harassment in public when making trips in Portland, OR. People who identify as genderdiverse or transgender create unique travel behavior due to the influence of their internalized and expressed gender identity and through interactions in public. This dissertation examines how gender identity influences the travel behavior of genderdiverse and transgender people and how these experiences influence their subjective wellbeing when making trips in Portland, Oregon. Traditional one-on-one interviews were conducted in conjunction with allowing the interviewees to produce art as a non-verbal form of expression and communication of their experiences making trips in …

The Shrinking Caspian Sea: Eco‐Hydrological Responses To Human And Climate Pressures, Jesse Duku, Mohammad J. Tourian, Marzi Azarderakhsh, Rovshan Abbasov, Ali Mehran, Ali Torabi Haghighi, Stefanos Xenarios, Azara Boschee, Salih Babagiray, Mojtaba Sadegh, Nima Shokri, Ali Nazemi, Alireza Farahmand, Samaneh Ashraf, Temur Khujanazarov, Elmira Hassanzadeh, Dalal Najib, Daniel Placht, Shamshagul Mashtayeva, Ekaterina Rets, Hamid Norouzi, Kaveh Madani, Manoochehr Shirzaei, Hossein Shafizadeh-Moghadam, Chiyuan Miao, Ali Mirchi, Shuo Wang, Amir Aghakouchak

Publications and Research

The Caspian Sea, the Earth's largest inland water body, faces water level decline, drawing comparisons to the collapse of the Aral Sea. Unlike the Aral Sea, the relative roles of climatic variability, hydrological changes, and anthropogenic pressures on the Caspian Sea remain poorly understood. Here, we integrate satellite observations, in situ hydrological records and reanalysis data to examine recent drivers of the Caspian water loss. We show that total river inflow to the Caspian Sea has declined significantly, primarily due to reduced discharge from the Volga River. At the same time, precipitation over the basin has remained broadly stable, while …

Research Integrity Without Borders: How Getftr Extends Trust Across The Scholarly Ecosystem, Joris Van Rossum

FORCE 2026

As research discovery increasingly happens beyond publisher platforms (through aggregators, institutional repositories, AI tools, and citation networks) maintaining trust in the integrity of the scholarly record becomes ever more complex. Visibility is not enough; researchers need confidence that what they find, read, and cite is current, authoritative, and trustworthy.

GetFTR (Get Full Text Research) addresses this challenge by embedding integrity and transparency signals, including retractions, errata, updates, and license information, directly into the researcher’s discovery experience. Through its cross-publisher API and integrations with major discovery tools, GetFTR ensures that researchers are always connected to the version of record and alerted …

Assessment Beyond Transactions: Measuring Library Impact In Knowledge Synthesis And Research Support, Shameem Nilofar Maideen

FORCE 2026

As newer forms of research assessment emerge that move away from narrow bibliometric indicators toward holistic evaluation of scholarly contributions, academic libraries face both an opportunity and a challenge to articulate their value beyond transactional metrics. Traditional library assessments such as circulation statistics, database logins, and reference transactions fail to capture libraries' increasingly sophisticated roles in knowledge synthesis, research integrity support, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

This session explores emerging and possible assessment methodologies that align library evaluation with broader research assessment reform movements. Through examples from Singapore Management University Libraries' transformation toward knowledge partnership models and an analysis of innovative …

Bridging Metrics And Meaning: Integrating Traditional And Alternative Indicators For Responsible Research Assessment, Junjie Shen, Sarah Ormes

FORCE 2026

How do we recognise great research in all its diverse forms? Around the world, institutions are trying to move beyond simple citation counts toward something fairer and more meaningful. At the University of Bath in the UK, we’ve been experimenting with ways to combine traditional bibliometrics with richer indicators of engagement, such as policy influence, media attention, and real-world impact, to build a more balanced picture of research quality.

In this lightning talk, we’ll share what we’ve learned so far: how we co-created guidance with researchers, librarians, and research managers; how we built discipline-sensitive approaches; and how we trained our …

Archiving In Advance Of Mission Completion, Molly Stothert-Maurer

Journal of Western Archives

This paper presents a detailed case study of the born-digital archiving efforts associated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) Asteroid Sample Return Mission at the University of Arizona Libraries Special Collections. From the perspective of an archivist, the project exemplifies the integration of digital archiving into an active scientific mission, conducted in collaboration with multiple departments across the university. By preserving mission-critical content, including project management documents, social media interactions, and web content, this initiative serves as a model for resource light digital products utilizing batch descriptive techniques. The paper …

Enhancing Digital Literacy Programmes For Advanced Search Skills Of Adult Public Library Patrons, Santel Smit Ms., Nikiwe G. Momoti Dr

Urban Library Journal

Digital literacy enables individuals to confidently engage with electronic devices and digital resources. While many adults use these tools to search for information, some still lack the essential skills to do so effectively. This pragmatic paper investigates the basic digital literacy skills of adult patrons at Adriaanse Public Library in Cape Town. Framed by SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy through a Digital Literacy “lens”, we employed a sequential mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative pre- and post-tests with qualitative interviews among 30 purposively selected participants. Quantitative data was analyzed statistically while thematic analysis was used for qualitative data. The findings revealed …

Many Hands Make Light Work: Restoring Edu-Economical Debts For Black Males, Joyice Robinson Myers

VA Engage Journal

A college degree is closely linked to economic stability, yet only 20% of Black men in the United States hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. These disparities are not accidental; they are the cumulative result of systems that have systematically denied Black males equitable access to educational and economic opportunity across generations. This systematic review examines the compounding relationship among family structure, educational attainment, and economic standing for Black males, and considers what restoring that relationship could look like in practice. I integrate three theoretical frameworks—Education Debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006), African American Male Theory (Bush & Bush, 2013), and the R³ISE …

Modeling The Spread Of Competing Narratives In Multimodal Social Media Network, Mayor Inna Gurung

Theses and Dissertations

Social media has fundamentally transformed how narratives are produced, contested, and disseminated, enabling competing interpretations of the same event to spread rapidly across networked populations. Understanding how narratives gain traction over others in these environments is critical for addressing misinformation, supporting informed public discourse, and designing effective counter-messaging strategies. Yet existing research largely treats narrative propagation as a single-process phenomenon and focuses predominantly on textual data, overlooking both the competitive dynamics between opposing narratives and the growing role of visual symbolic communication in shaping how narratives are received. This dissertation addresses these gaps through a multi-platform, multimodal framework applied to …

The Relationships Between Adult Cyberbullying Victimization, Introversion, Extroversion, And Demographic Variables, Amber Paige Arrington

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

User Interaction, Service Effectiveness And Digital Resource Utilization In Private University Libraries Telangana State: An Empirical Study, Chandra Chary Sreeramoj, Dr. M. Sadik Batcha

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The purpose of this study is to observe the operational design, cognizance levels, complications faced and complete fulfillment of users regarding numerical resources in designated private university libraries in the state of Telangana. The study predominantly emphasizes on graduates, postgraduates, research scholars, and faculty members of Malla Reddy University and S.R. University. The study adopted quantitative descriptive design, and data were collected by means of a Google Form survey, resulting in 1796 legal valid responses. The examination included descriptive statistics, Chi-square tests and ANOVA to classify variances across different user groupings. The outcomes reveal that most respondents are mindful of …

Does The Availability Of An Additional Set Of Bunker Gear Impact Firefighter Health, Safety, And Operational Readiness?, Ryan Riley

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Firefighting is a complex and inherently dangerous profession. Firefighters today face a growing array of occupational hazards, not just from the effects of being exposed to fire and smoke, but also from the personal protective gear they wear, commonly referred to as “bunker” or “turnout” gear. While this gear is designed to protect firefighters in dangerous environments, prolonged use and repeated exposure to smoke, chemicals, and products of combustion can compromise the gear. Research has shown that bunker gear contains and can also retain cancer-causing chemicals. To this end, this paper examines whether the availability of an additional set of …

Disaster Justice: Queer And Disabled Mobilities And Infrastructures Of Care In The Pacific Northwest, Rachel Springer

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines the social, political, and environmental pressures that drive LGBTQ+ migration to the Pacific Northwest and the social infrastructures people find on arrival. Drawing on thirty-four semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ+ adults who relocated between 2022 and 2025, it argues that these movements are best understood as responses to slow-onset disasters produced by the compounding interaction of legislative targeting and infrastructural violence.

State-level legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people—particularly transgender individuals—has fractured the geography of safety in the U.S., producing a landscape where civil rights, healthcare access, and everyday security vary dramatically across space. For those navigating these conditions at the …

Values Driven Priming: Engaging Ai With Reflective, Purposeful Interaction, Carrie Fry, V. Dozier, Amanda Makula

Copley Library: Faculty Scholarship

This librarian-led immersive session seeks to set the human at the center of Generative AI use, beginning by exploring the themes and connections between the foundations of Catholic higher education and the integration of emerging technologies, and then moving to a practical exploration of how the tools can be primed to give outputs that reflect those values.

Librarians are uniquely positioned in AI discussions because of our background in information literacy, and our training in the evaluation of data including provenance of data, reducing misinformation, and bias awareness. Librarians are also interdisciplinary mediators with cross-curricular reach, and connections with student …

“I Was Well Informed. It Was A Great Advantage”: Pre-Arrival Information Seeking, Information Intelligence, And Immigrants’ Settlement, Nafiz Z. Shuva, Paulette Rothbauer

Publications and Research

This study reports on the role of pre-arrival information seeking and informed decision making in the settlement experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants in Canada. Despite the importance of immigrants in shaping Canada’s future in innovation, economy, and population, this research shows a significant mismatch between immigrants’ expectations and their actual settlement experiences, particularly in terms of their employment. This mismatch can lead to depression, frustration, and anxiety, affecting integration into Canadian society. While there has been a recent increase in immigrants’ settlement information behavior research in LIS, most focus on post-arrival information needs and seeking. Research findings of this study contribute …

Wrack Lines Spring-Summer 2026 Volume Number 1, Margaret Cozens, Johann Heupel, Owen Placido, Paul Salopek, Judy Benson

Wrack Lines

“Building community around the places we love,” is the theme of the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Wrack Lines magazine. Learn about the work of the Six Lakes Park coalition in Hamden, Riverfront Recapture in Hartford, MyCoast in southeastern Connecticut and the statewide land conservation conference. Additional stories tell about the artistry and mission of photographer-videographer Tomas Koeck, and National Geographic explorer Paul Salopek, who is traveling the world on foot.

Holistic Strategies For Optimizing Municipal It Operations And Cost Efficiency, Joseph Yazdanpanahi

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Municipalities work to deliver secure and impactful IT (information technology) services while often working within tight budget constraints. To address this problem, this article offers an experience-based and comprehensive framework to optimize municipal IT operations. It emphasizes leveraging automation, streamlining hardware and software management, and forging strategic partnerships to drive cost savings and efficiency gains. Designed to equip municipal IT leaders with practical tools and insights, this article aims to help modernize IT processes.

The Sustainable Autonomy Framework: Explaining Autonomy In Aceh And Southern Yemen, Abdulsalam Saad, Arie Kusuma Paksi

Jurnal Politik

This article examines why post-conflict autonomy consolidates into durable self-governance in some cases while remaining fragile and externally dependent in others. While Aceh has maintained stable self-governance since the 2005 Helsinki Agreement, Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council remains a fragmented authority sustained by external patronage. To explain this divergence, the article develops the Sustainable Autonomy Framework (SAF) and asks: under what conditions does post-conflict autonomy become viable and sustainable? The SAF argues that durability depends on the alignment of three mutually reinforcing pillars: elite legitimacy, resource sovereignty, and mediation credibility. Using a most-similar systems comparison of Aceh’s Free Aceh Movement and …

National Agricultural Library (Nal) Search., Leah Everitt, Sonya Lemke

Publications

SEARCH is the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL)'s main discovery platform that provides integrated access to the NAL Digital Collections, Special Collections, PubAg and AGRICOLA. NAL SEARCH is a valuable tool for health science librarians, students, and professionals seeking veterinary science, nutrition, or animal experiment alternatives. This article aims to give users a comprehensive overview of this resource.

News From The States, Blake Denton

The Southeastern Librarian

Library news reports from SELA member states

The Promise And The Punishment: A Critical Analysis Of Pbis At The Intersection Of State Discipline Policies In Louisiana, Ashley D. Willis-Brooks

Doctoral Dissertations

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) emerged as a preventative instructional alternative to exclusionary and punitive school discipline practices emphasizing tiered systems of support, data-based decision making, and proactive behavioral instruction. Despite its strong theoretical foundation and widespread adoption, PBIS implementation has produced uneven outcomes, particularly in policy contexts where state discipline statutes continue to authorize exclusionary practices. In Louisiana, PBIS is promoted through state guidance as an evidence-based framework; however, governing discipline policies simultaneously permit suspension, expulsion, and zero-tolerance provisions. This coexistence raises critical questions regarding alignment, coherence, and equity within the state’s discipline system. The purpose of this …

Category Learning Under Verbal Interference, Yawen Xue

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

What happens to cognition when you disrupt language? What does language actually do as a representational medium for cognition? Much literature shows a facilitative role of language on categorical thinking. This work specifically examines the role of language in category learning using a verbal interference paradigm. I ran two experiments where participants learned to distinguish between two novel categories of bugs while under conditions of verbal or visuospatial interference. In Experiment 1, category membership was determined by an XOR rule; in Experiment 2, category membership was determined by an AND rule.

In Experiment 1, participants on average did not succeed …

Knowledge To Freedom: Implications Of Race, Gender, Socioeconomic Status, And Spiritual Health On Adolescent Well-Being Under Westernization, Doralis Maria Allen

Masters Theses

The aim of the current study was to extend the understanding of the well-being of adolescents and to further information on the psychological relationships between wellbeing, spiritual health, intersectionality, and Westernization. A total of 315 students from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette were recruited via SONA to participate in a study entailing of a five-part online survey through Qualtrics, and 301 respondents in total were measured. The survey measured five aspects of each participant’s health through the perspective of their adolescent selves; well-being, spiritual health, subjective socioeconomic status, and their perception of their race/ethnicity and gender. Well-being is a …

Analyzing Speeding-Related Crash Severity On Louisiana’S Highways, Nelly Akweley Ankrah

Masters Theses

Speeding is a major contributing factor to roadway crashes and remains a significant safety concern. Understanding the factors influencing speeding crash severity and how they vary across roadway environments is essential for developing effective safety countermeasures. A total of 22,151 speeding-related crashes recorded in Louisiana between 2015 and 2024 were analyzed. Crashes were categorized by FHWA functional classification into three roadway groups: Interstates and Principal Arterials, Minor Arterials and Collectors, and Local Roads. Four spatial machine learning models, GXGBoost, SDT, GRF, and GeoKNN, were evaluated to classify crash severity outcomes, as traditional models do not account for the spatial dependence …

From Fear To Action: The Role Of Media In Scam, Goodness Okhumode

Masters Theses

Scams have existed for a long time and are still prevalent today, with little indication of decline. Understanding how media exposure influences scam perceptions and motivates protective behavior among young adults has become pertinent in communication research. Drawing on Cultivation Theory and Protection Motivation Theory, this thesis examines how self-reported exposure to scam-related media content influences threat perceptions, efficacy beliefs and the adoption of preventive safety measures among young adult social media users. A quantitative online survey was used to collect data from undergraduate students of the CMCN 100 Spring 2026 class at a U.S. university. Seven hypotheses and two …

Exploration Of Maryland African American Veterans’ Experiences Utilizing Information On Federal Benefits And Services, Shontrea Bazemore

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Law Enforcement Officers' Perception Of Human Trafficking And The Efficacy Of The Training They Receive, Christian Jones

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Novice Counselors’ Stress And Burnout: Experiences, Perceptions, And Help-Seeking Behaviors, Jillian Towar

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Towards An Inclusive Labour Market: Skills For The Future, Eva Erjavec

Economic and Business Review

In the transition to a knowledge-based society, human capital has become a key driver of economic growth, innovation, and social progress. As industries evolve and new technologies reshape labour markets, the development of future skills plays a crucial role in ensuring workforce adaptability, productivity, and long-term competitiveness. A bibliometric analysis aims to examine the importance of human capital for economic growth and the transition to a knowledge economy, synthesizing existing research and academic discussions. By systematically reviewing the literature, this paper seeks to provide insights into how skills and education contribute to sustainable economic development and social resilience. Furthermore, it …