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Opening The "Preschoolers' Door To Learning": An Ethnographic Study Of The Use Of Public Libraries By Preschool Girls, Lynne (E Mckechnie
Opening The "Preschoolers' Door To Learning": An Ethnographic Study Of The Use Of Public Libraries By Preschool Girls, Lynne (E Mckechnie
Digitized Theses
This ethnographic field study gathered evidence about the use of public libraries by preschool girls. Thirty girls within three months of their fourth birthdays were tape-recorded and observed during one of their usual visits to their local public libraries with their mothers. During the week following the visits, mothers maintained diaries where they reported incidents involving their daughters' use of library materials and other library-related activities. Follow-up interviews were conducted with mothers to verify and find out more about the behaviour observed during the library visits and reported in the diaries. Visit, diary and interview transcripts and field notes were …
The Effectiveness Of Labelled, Typed Links As Cues In Hypertext Systems, Lisa Baron
The Effectiveness Of Labelled, Typed Links As Cues In Hypertext Systems, Lisa Baron
Digitized Theses
This research examines the classification of link types within hypertext databases. It is proposed that labelled links act as cues, enabling understanding of the structure and leading to more informed navigational choices. Although there is anecdotal evidence that indicating link types to readers is useful in hypertext systems, there is no experimental data to support this position. The goal of the proposed research is to provide a basis for the development of labels identifying link types, by focusing primarily on the hypertext readers' use of links. It addresses whether labelling the different types of links changes the effectiveness of searching …
The Information Needs And Information-Seeking Patterns Of Women Coping With And Adjusting To Multiple Sclerosis, Lynda Mary Baker
The Information Needs And Information-Seeking Patterns Of Women Coping With And Adjusting To Multiple Sclerosis, Lynda Mary Baker
Digitized Theses
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurological disease with an unpredictable course and no known cause or cure. Coping strategies of people with MS may therefore yield insights into information-seeking patterns. This study of information preferences was based on Miller's (1980) theory of information-seeking, which states that some people (monitors) cope by actively seeking information, while others (blunters) reject information. In this study, 251 female MS clinic patients were classified through the Miller Behavioral Style Scale (MBSS) as either monitors or blunters and by the length of time since diagnosis. It was hypothesized that monitors (in contrast to blunters) would …
To Advocate, To Diffuse, And To Elevate: The Culture And Context Of Medical Publishing In Canada, 1630 To 1920, Jennifer Jean Connor
To Advocate, To Diffuse, And To Elevate: The Culture And Context Of Medical Publishing In Canada, 1630 To 1920, Jennifer Jean Connor
Digitized Theses
Although medical publications have traditionally provided the primary medium for research, communication and education in medicine, scholars have not yet attempted to analyze them to understand how they varied; how they interacted with authors and publishers; how they were disseminated; how they changed and why; and how they were received (owned, read or used) by the medical profession or the general public. Typically, scholars have provided brief historical surveys of medical literature and have focused mainly on one genre, the medical journal. Even less is known about medical literature in Canada. This thesis therefore examines medical publications and the process …
The Social Organization Of Birth Control Information In Public Libraries, Norma June Lundberg
The Social Organization Of Birth Control Information In Public Libraries, Norma June Lundberg
Digitized Theses
This thesis aimed to discover how difficult it might be for women to obtain birth control information from public libraries, especially information produced by women and relevant to women's control of our reproductive health. I examined the public library as a social institution, birth control information as a socially organized process, and within this framework the availability of women's knowledge.;I used the methodological approach of institutional ethnography to explore the social relations that organize librarians' work and connect it to other social institutions. The ideology of doing library work, the discourse that organizes the work, and the textual manifestations of …
Bibliographic And Text-Linguistic Schemata In The User-Intermediary Interaction, Bryce Laverne Allen
Bibliographic And Text-Linguistic Schemata In The User-Intermediary Interaction, Bryce Laverne Allen
Digitized Theses
Information systems require input from their users in order to perform information retrieval. In many systems, that input is provided by interaction between users and intermediaries. The way users understand and express their information needs may be affected by the cognitive structures (schemata) by which they have organized their knowledge of the search topic, or by the schemata introduced in the questions which intermediaries ask.;The bibliographic and text-linguistic schemata studied in this research are related to two ways of thinking about textual materials. The bibliographic schema leads to an emphasis on elements of bibliographic description: authors, titles, and subject keywords. …
Beyond Circulation Statistics: Patterns Of Book Use By Undergraduate Students In An Academic Library, Jamshid Beheshti
Beyond Circulation Statistics: Patterns Of Book Use By Undergraduate Students In An Academic Library, Jamshid Beheshti
Digitized Theses
Librarians have used 'use' and 'user' studies as management techniques for improving and ensuring effective provision of information to the users. Many of these studies equate circulation statistics with the use of documents. The book-charge data are merely a representative of finding something of interest in the documents, and may not constitute 'use'. The primary focus of this research study is to investigate and measure the use of the documents by a specific group of users. Users are defined as the undergraduate students in two academic institutions and documents are the books that are borrowed by the students from the …
Angus Mcgill Mowat And The Development Of Ontario Public Libraries, 1920-1960, Stephen Foster Cummings
Angus Mcgill Mowat And The Development Of Ontario Public Libraries, 1920-1960, Stephen Foster Cummings
Digitized Theses
This thesis provides a biography of the professional life of Angus McGill Mowat (1892-1977). Mowat was the Librarian of the public libraries in Trenton, Ontario (1922-1928); Belleville, Ontario (1928-1930); Windsor, Ontario (1930-1932); and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (1932-1937) before becoming Inspector of Public Libraries for Ontario in 1937. Mowat's position as head of the Public Libraries Branch of the Ontario Department of Education changed during his tenure, and he was Inspector of Public Libraries (1937-1947, exception 1940-1944 when he served a second tour of duty in the Canadian Army), Director of Public Libraries (1948-1959), and Director of Provincial Library Service (1959-1960). Mowat …
The Effects Of Training Reference Librarians In Interview Skills: A Field Experiment, Patricia Helen Dewdney
The Effects Of Training Reference Librarians In Interview Skills: A Field Experiment, Patricia Helen Dewdney
Digitized Theses
This field experiment investigated the effects of training librarians in communication skills appropriate for the reference interview. Two types of training were compared: neutral questioning, an approach based on extensive research into information-seeking behaviour (Dervin, 1977) and microskills, a counselling-based model adapted for librarians by Jennerich (1974). The study was designed as a 2 x 3 factorial experiment with a control group. The independent variables were time (before and after training) and the type of training. Outcome was assessed through satisfaction ratings assigned by library users, and through expert ratings of skills observed in transcribed reference interviews.;Twenty-four reference librarians from …
Towards An Optimal Level Of Participation Of The Intermediary In The User-System Interface Of Bibliographic Online Search Services, Gilles H. Deschatelets
Towards An Optimal Level Of Participation Of The Intermediary In The User-System Interface Of Bibliographic Online Search Services, Gilles H. Deschatelets
Digitized Theses
The present research project focuses on the user/system interface of on-line bibliographic search services and more specifically on the role of the human intermediary in the context of on-line searching. A quasi-experimental study was designed with 34 end-users and 22 intermediaries who performed 102 online searches in 6 different organizations (3 academic and 3 special libraries). Each end-user was given a one-day training session and then prepared three different search questions. An on-line search was performed for each question: one direct search (the end-user alone), one delegated search (the intermediary alone) and one combined search (the end-user and intermediary together).;Numerous …
Probabilistic Models For The Simulation Of Bibliographic Retrieval Systems, Michael John Nelson
Probabilistic Models For The Simulation Of Bibliographic Retrieval Systems, Michael John Nelson
Digitized Theses
A general model of a bibliographic retrieval sytem is presented which has five main elements: the documents, the queries, the thesaurus of indexing terms, the search algorithms and the physical storage locations. This is adapted to produce a probabilistic model which is suitable for simulation purposes, concentrating on the assignment of index terms to documents. This is accomplished by using the distribution of terms over documents and over queries, the distribution of exhaustivity over documents and over queries, the distribution of co-occurrences (occurrences of pairs of terms), the distribution of relevant and non-relevant documents over the number of terms matching …
The Colon Classification As A Basis For Automated Full Text Retrieval, Michael Alan Shepherd
The Colon Classification As A Basis For Automated Full Text Retrieval, Michael Alan Shepherd
Digitized Theses
No abstract provided.