Library and Information Science Commons^™

Religious Studies Encyclopedism: A Recent History, Mark E. Eaton

Publications and Research

As academic reference librarians, we need to historically situate the reference sources we use within changing scholarly disciplines. Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion, for example, is an important text in religious studies, but it is not a neutral text. Rather, it clearly reflects certain intellectual commitments and discursive strategies that need to be situated within histories of scholarship. Failure on the part of librarians to contextualize the perspectives of a reference source is problematic, as it leaves the assumptions of the text unchallenged. More constructively, librarians need to problematize the agendas of reference sources, and make salient their discursive …

Seeing Library Data: A Prototype Data Visualization Application For Librarians, Mark E. Eaton

Publications and Research

Visualizations can add value to raw library data. Tools that programmatically make such visualizations interactive can further increase the value of this data, by giving librarians visual tools to analyze their data sets. To demonstrate these benefits, Kingsborough Community College Library built SeeCollections (http://b7jl.org/seecollections), a web application that visualizes our libraries’ collections of books and ebooks.

This article discusses the how SeeCollections gathers data from Kingsborough’s discovery layer API (Application Programming Interface), and transforms this data to create visualizations for the web. SeeCollections is a lightweight, proof-of-concept data application based on a vendor API. API data is often accessible in …

Open Access And The Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual, Jill Cirasella, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

The process of completing a dissertation is stressful—deadlines are scary, editing is hard, formatting is tricky, and defending is terrifying. (And, of course, postgraduate employment is often uncertain.) Now that dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, students must perform yet another anxiety-inducing task: deciding whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA) or, at universities that require OA, coming to terms with openness. For some students, mostly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, who hope to transform their dissertations into books, OA has become a bogeyman, a supposed saboteur of book contracts and destroyer …

Opening Education, Linking To Communities: The #Inq13 Collective’S Participatory Open Online Course (Pooc) In East Harlem, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz, Polly Thistlethwaite, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

Drawing on experiences with the JustPublics@365 participatory open online course, or POOC, this chapter discusses the politics and possibilities of open access pedagogy and the broader engagement with communities that academics might achieve. We situated the POOC in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood and to use the course to form an academic-community partnership. Rather than replicate the broadcast model employed by many MOOCs, in which an instructor delivers education to a broad audience of otherwise disconnected students, the POOC sought to engage participants through open site-based and online experiences, including lectures and class readings posted openly for any member …

"Afterword" In Library Information And Resource Sharing: Transforming Services And Collections, Beth Posner

Publications and Research

The concept, practice, challenges and opportunities of information sharing through libraries is explored. Traditional interlibrary loan lending and borrowing remain essential, as do new ways of sharing information among libraries and information seekers.

Introduction To Library Information And Resource Sharing, Beth Posner

Publications and Research

This is the introduction to a book that I edited: Library Information and Resource Sharing: Transforming Services and Collections. It presents the thesis that with enough staff and budgetary support, interlibrary loan specialists can work with others in their libraries to provide many innovative services to their library users. Chapters covered include, "Interlibrary Loan Services Today", "From Discovery to Delivery: Providing Access to Library Collections", "Thinking Locally and Sharing Globally: The Impact of Library Policies on Collection Sharing", "Library Collection Building: The Interlocking Functions of ILL, Acquisitions and Collection Development", "Facilitating Information Sharing Through Library Collection Maintenance and Preservation", …

Yoga In The Library - A Research Guide, Beth Posner

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

“There Is Nothing Inherently Mysterious About Assistive Technology”: A Qualitative Study About Blind User Experiences In Us Academic Libraries, Adina Mulliken

Publications and Research

Eighteen academic library users who are blind were interviewed about their experiences with academic libraries and the libraries’ websites using an open-ended questionnaire and recorded telephone interviews. The study approaches these topics from a user-centered perspective, with the idea that blind users themselves can provide particularly reliable insights into the issues and potential solutions that are most critical to them. Most participants used reference librarians’ assistance, and most had positive experiences. High-level screen reader users requested help with specific needs. A larger number of participants reported contacting a librarian because of feeling overwhelmed by the library website. In some cases, …

Mapping Student Days: Collaborative Ethnography And The Student Experience, Andrew Asher, Jean Amaral, Juliann Couture, Barbara Fister, Donna Lanclos, M. Sara Lowe, Mariana Regalado, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

Research on students’ educational experiences demonstrates the importance of a holistic understanding of the complexity of students’ lives in developing library programs, services, and resources that effectively address undergraduate needs. The “A Day in the Life” (ADITL) Project investigated a typical day for over 200 students at eight diverse higher education institutions in the US. Examining the local and individual expressions of student taskscapes – the ensemble of interrelated social activities across time and space – placed each student’s relationship to their library in a larger description of their academic and personal lives. By exploring the whole student experience, this …

Cuny Libraries And Open Source: Wins And Fails, Stephen Klein, Robin Davis, Junior R. Tidal, Leslie Ward, Mark Eaton, Stephen Zweibel

Publications and Research

This panel presentation will highlight free, open-source projects throughout the libraries. This includes digital display systems, web content management, collections management and more.

Flipping The Classroom In Business And Education One-Shot Sessions: A Research Study, Madeline Cohen, Jennifer Poggiali, Alison Lehner-Quam, Robin Wright, Rebecca K. West

Publications and Research

In response to the challenge of maximising the effectiveness of one-shot information literacy (IL) sessions, library faculty at Lehman College experimented with the flipped classroom model. This research paper reports the results of a multi-semester quantitative study of the flipped classroom in business management and education one-shot sessions. Researchers explored two research questions: Do students in a flipped session demonstrate greater knowledge before their session than students in a control session? and Do flipped and control students demonstrate significant, positive improvement in knowledge after their session? The researchers used pre- and post-tests to evaluate two crucial aspects of the flipped …

The Future Of Web Citation Practices, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

Citing webpages has been a common practice in scholarly publications for nearly two decades as the Web evolved into a major information source. But over the years, more and more bibliographies have suffered from “reference rot”: cited URLs are broken links or point to a page that no longer contains the content the author originally cited. In this column, I look at several studies showing how reference rot has affected different academic disciplines. I also examine citation styles’ approach to citing web sources. I then turn to emerging web citation practices: Perma, a “freemium” web archiving service specifically for citation; …

The Social Work Librarian And Information Literacy Instruction: A Report On A National Survey In The United States, Margaret Bausman, Sarah Laleman Ward

Publications and Research

As an interdisciplinary profession encompassing macro, mezzo, and micro fields of praxis, well-informed and ethical social work practice necessitates the continual utilization of information literacy skills across a wide and ever-evolving range of information sources and access points. In response to a dearth of scholarship concerning information literacy instruction in social work education, this article reports on an initial endeavor to quantify and describe the nature of information literacy instruction in social work education on a national level in the United States. In addition to a review and discussion of the National Social Work Librarians Survey's descriptive data, this article …

Being A Scholar In The Digital Era: Transforming Scholarly Practice For The Public Good, Polly Thistlethwaite, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

What opportunities do digital technologies present scholars? How do developments in digital media support scholarship and teaching, and how can academics apply them to further social justice activism? The authors, a sociologist and a librarian, examine scholarly practice in the digital era to explore how academics, journalists, and activists can combine efforts to support social justice issues. With scholarly communication undergoing rapid change, and with digital innovation applied in higher education for many reasons, authors outline what scholars can do to channel their work to benefit the public good.

Shortened Not Stirred: Managing Eresources With Yourls, Junior R. Tidal

Publications and Research

Presentation that highlights the use of YOURLs, an open-source URL link shortener program to improve the workflow of managing eResources across various web platforms. Presented to the ACRL New England Chapter eResources Management Program.

Migrating And Usability In Libguides Version 2, Junior R. Tidal

Publications and Research

Online presentation outlining City Tech Library's migration to LibGuides, a research guide content management system. It was presented to the Association of College and Research Libraries' Universal Accessibility Interest Group LibGuides SubCommittee virtual meeting.

One Site To Rule Them All Redux: The Second Round Of Usability Testing Of A Responsively Designed Website, Junior R. Tidal

Publications and Research

This article examines the usability testing of a responsively redesigned library Web site. Responsive design provides a unified user experience regardless of the device used to view a site. The study's aim is twofold: to determine if the responsively designed site and its external online services support users’ information seeking needs, and to discover if there is a singular experience across different devices. A cognitive walkthrough was the main testing instrument used in gathering input. Over two rounds of testing, students of various class years and technological skill from the New York City of Technology (City Tech), CUNY participated in …

Chapter 7: Sharing Digital Collections And Content, J. Silvia Cho, Leetta Schmidt

Publications and Research

The information environment that librarians help information seekers to navigate has experienced a radical shift. With the addition of electronic content to print materials, how information seekers access information, as well as how librarians collect, manage, and share information resources, is evolving. As for interlibrary loan (ILL) services, new challenges and opportunities in library resource sharing are emerging, now that interlibrary loan specialists facilitate the sharing of digital, as well as print, information. This chapter examines the successes that library resource sharing specialists have achieved, as well as the challenges they face, with respect to providing access to e-books and …

Scholarship That's Scholar-Led: An Introduction To Open Access, Megan Wacha

Publications and Research

This webinar provides an introduction to open access publishing models, and the foundation for understanding them not only as a recent development in scholarly communication, but as a return to scholar-led publishing practices.

Untangling Medium Of Performance For The Linked Data Environment, Kimmy Szeto

Publications and Research

Medium of performance is critical for music retrieval and has long been a complex facet of music cataloging. Recent years saw significant strides towards standardizing the vocabulary and encoding medium of performance data in the MARC environment as well as in the linked data environment. In the course of leading the MLA BIBFRAME task force to examine the potentials of expressing, standardizing, and implementing music-related data and data structures, I discovered our handling of medium of performance has not been consistent with respect to the FRBR constructs of “work” and “expression,” as well as the concept of “event.” After the …

Piwik And Clickheat, Junior R. Tidal

Publications and Research

This is a presentation on the how the New York City College of Technology's Ursula C. Schwerin Library utilizes web analytics tools to understand their users. This webinar was given to the Library Information Technology Association's Altmetrics and Digital Analytics Interest Group October 2016 online meeting.

Podcasting As Pedagogy, Nora Almeida

Publications and Research

The podcast has become a pervasive mode of cultural knowledge production— at turns a public radio echo chamber, an alternative to old-fashioned reading, and a trendy vehicle for commentary, comedy, and news. While podcasting is not typically a medium associated with literacy, a podcast assignment presents an opportunity for instruction librarians to harness students’ interest in media production and embed critical digital and information literacy skills in their classrooms. Through podcasting, students actively engage in public cultural dialogues, create and share unique digital artifacts, leverage their previous experiences as “content consumers and producers,” and apply knowledge and skills they’ve learned …

“Filling The Gaps”: Oral Histories And Underdocumented Populations In The American Archivist, 1938–2011, Jessica Wagner Webster

Publications and Research

During the 1970s and 1980s, archivists and historians discussed, in their literature, the ways that oral histories could be used to fill in the documentary record with stories from all parts of society, not just stories from white men of means, whose stories often were retained as part of business, government, and university records. This article analyzes pieces from the journal The American Archivist to determine how frequently archivists actually published about using oral history techniques to document people of color, women, the working class, and other consistently underdocumented populations. A survey also was conducted to determine whether archivists undertake …

Mobile App Usage Assessment In The Academic Library, Rebecca Arzola, Stefanie Havelka

Publications and Research

This column discusses different approaches, and methods to assess app usage. In the following we exemplify mobile strategies and initiatives set up by some universities that libraries can adopt.

The Invisibles: Becoming And Being A Reader In A Fan-Dominated Community, Lucia Cedeira Serantes

Publications and Research

The study of comics consumption has regularly focused on the study of teens and young people. However, the association between the fan experience and comics has colonized the experience of reading comics, especially in mainstream culture, leaving almost no room for the possibility of other recognizable experiences: if you are committed to reading comics, inevitably you are, will become, or are expected to be, a fan. However, Gabilliet (2010), Pustz (1999), Parsons (1991), and Barker (1989) point at the presence and need for more research about what they labelled as “casual readers,” or the bulk of the comics readership.

This …

Resource Description And Access: Internationalizing, Teaching And Learning Rda Cataloging Abroad, Sheau-Yueh J. Chao

Publications and Research

This article presents the history and development of cataloging codes, an overview of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) training courses, the author’s experiences in library teaching and learning, cultural exchanges with the Chinese librarians at the National Central Library (NCL), international librarianship in cataloging, library technology and development in Taiwan as well as the National Central Library and the Library Association of China (LAC), and key findings of RDA in its development and transition, implementation, and implications.

Hackathons For Libraries And Librarians, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

Hackathons can be ideal opportunities for libraries and librarians to promote new services and tools. In these social events, attendees form teams and work on a project together within a given time limit. This article explains hackathons, provides a brief history, and details how libraries and librarians can get involved. Similar event structures, like hack days and edit-a-thons, are also considered.

Inducing Application Of Interdisciplinary Frameworks: Experiences From The Domains Of Information Literacy And Responsible Conduct Of Research, Anne E. Leonard, Jean E. Hillstrom

Publications and Research

Constructivist frameworks for information literacy and research ethics can be developed and nurtured in the context of an interdisciplinary course. Using the frameworks of two disciplines, students went on an experiential journey in support of ethics foundations through guest lectures and active learning exercises. This study describes the development and content of the responsible conduct of research and information literacy modules and discusses the role of each in an interdisciplinary course. Learning goals for both modules were evaluated by examining student responses in a free-writing exercise at the end of the semester, concluding with a discussion of the structural and …

Should The New England Education Research Organization Start A Journal In The Age Of Audit Culture? Reflections On Academic Publishing, Metrics, And The New Academy, Edward Lehner, Kate Finley

Publications and Research

A large regional educational research association can straightforwardly establish a scholarly journal associated with its annual meeting. However, this work underscores the complicated scholarly ecosystem that an association enters when publishing a journal. The social sciences’ scholarly literature exists in a related series of networks that could be described as a type of “audit culture.” Within audit culture, two major academic publishers, Elsevier and Thomson Reuters, have established competing, yet strikingly collinear, journal metrics systems: Scopus and Web of Science, respectively. These and other bibliometrics systems are used to assess, order, and rank the supposed value of a researcher’s work. …

In Vivid Colors: The Impact And Relevance Of The Browne Popular Culture Library At Bowling Green State University, William Blick

Publications and Research

“Popular Culture,” as a field of study, has often been met with skepticism. However, it has now been acknowledged by academics that the study of popular culture is an important component for the understanding of social theory and criticism, as well as many other areas of research. The United States has a vibrant background of cultural history due to the diversity of world influences on its music, literature, film, and artwork. The Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green offers a varied selection of American pulp, music, film, literature, memorabilia and ephemera. In fact it is so comprehensive, that it …