Library and Information Science Commons^™

Rebuilding The Ship Of Theseus: Navigating Faculty-Librarian Relationships Through Changing Waters, Alan Witt

Milne Library

The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical paradox that poses a question of identity: If you repair every plank of a ship, replacing each with new wood, at what point does the ship cease to be the same ship? This is a useful metaphor for academic liaison librarians to consider when thinking about outreach to departments: your relationship to a department as a whole consists of the component connections, which change as individuals retire or leave. The goals of this chapter are to acknowledge the primacy of relationships in library outreach (and the consequences to the library of those relationships …

Conceptualizing A Model For Transforming Academic Search With Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Nikesh Narayanan

All Works

This study conceptualizes the transformative potential of RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) in academic research, addressing limitations of traditional search methods reliant on keyword matching, Boolean logic, and metadata analysis. RAG combines precise data retrieval with the generative capabilities of advanced AI models, synthesizing dispersed information into coherent outputs. By bridging retrieval accuracy and contextual generation, RAG offers a framework for providing researchers with comprehensive, nuanced, and up-todate insights tailored to their queries. This article explores the integration of tools like ChatGPT and LangChain to outline a RAGbased system, illustrating its potential to enhance academic discovery by harmonizing natural language processing, semantic …

2026 Cancelled Titles With Alternate Access, Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library

Himmelfarb Library Liaison Letters

No abstract provided.

Government Documents For All: Occupational Outlook Handbook, Tim Dodge

The Southeastern Librarian

The Government Documents for All column for the Winter 2026 issue of The Southeastern Librarian

Breaking Glass Ceilings: Clara Stanton Jones And The Detroit Public Library, Ariana Baker

The Southeastern Librarian

Renate L. Chancellor

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024

ISBN: 9781538157015

114 pp. $90.00 (Hbk)

News From The States, Blake Denton

The Southeastern Librarian

No abstract provided.

Editor's Notes: Winter 2026, John H. Barnett

The Southeastern Librarian

No abstract provided.

Instruction Request: Podcasting In An Academic Library To Connect Library Instruction With Campus And Community, Lauren Odom, Beryl White-Bing

Library Faculty Presentations & Publications

The Instruction Request podcast is co-hosted by two librarians at the University of North Florida: Beryl White-Bing, Virtual Learning Librarian, and Lauren Odom, Instruction Librarian. Both of us serve in the Instruction Unit at the Thomas G. Carpenter Library. In an era where digital content is essential for engagement, we sought a way to modernize our library outreach without compromising our instructional mission. Podcasting emerged as the perfect format for highlighting educational content while being accessible and scalable.

Law Librarianship And Legal Information Science In The Age Of Genai, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

This article examines the relationship between law librarianship and legal information science in the age of generative AI (GenAI), arguing that closer integration between the two is essential to navigating a rapidly evolving legal information landscape. It contends that law librarianship—long grounded in stable classification systems and cognitive authority—must adopt the analytical methods of legal information science to remain effective in the digital era. Together, these fields can reinforce the rule of law by improving the organization, retrieval, and stability of legal information. The article identifies emerging subfields of legal information science that support this integration and develops several concepts …

Artificial Sense-Making Dataset, Jason A. Bengtson, John Sandstrom, Nathan Camp

NMSU Library: Datasets

No abstract provided.

Library Guide Assessment Standards For Quality-Checked Review Workbook, Sarah H. Moukhliss, Trina Mccowan Adams

Library Faculty Presentations & Publications

This OER workbook introduces the Library Guide Assessment Standards (LGAS), a practical, rubric-based framework for evaluating and improving LibGuides. Adapted from established online course quality models, LGAS provides a shared language for reviewing guide design, accessibility, usability, and maintenance. Designed for both individuals and teams, this workbook offers adaptable tools that support consistent, sustainable assessment in academic library contexts.

Reorienting Library Technology Through Slowness And Care, Sanjeet Mann

Library Faculty Publications & Presentations

Nearly all operations and services in contemporary libraries are mediated by technology. This makes systems and technology work an important place in the organization from which to address issues of time, power and culture.

In this essay, published as a chapter in a collection of essays about Slow Librarianship, I describe the origins of the associations between time, speed and technology in Western society. I articulate an alternative understanding of technology as relational, grounded in the needs and lived experience of those who work in and use libraries. I draw from several emerging concepts, including Slow Librarianship, feminist ethics of …

The Open Knowledge Fellowship: An Opportunity For Transformative Learning At The Doctoral Level, Elvis Bakaitis, Jill Cirasella, Patrick Mcgee

Publications and Research

How can we integrate the principles, practicalities, and complexities of open educational resources (OER) and open access scholarly literature into graduate-level education? At the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), the popular and successful Open Knowledge Fellowship offers a much-needed intervention in doctoral education by addressing these topics and associated debates. Between 2020 and 2025, the intensive six-week Fellowship program was offered 12 times and trained over 200 doctoral students from across the disciplines in the selection and use of openly licensed resources in the courses they teach. These 200+ students then taught their revamped courses …

Partnering To Change Culture: Advancing Rigor And Transparency In Neurosciences Through Pie Chart, Melissa L. Rethlefsen, Danielle Maurici-Pollock, Leah Everitt, Will White, Ingrid Hendrix, Alexa Copeland, Sam Mckenzie, C W. Shuttleworth

PIE CHART

PIE CHART (Policies, Infrastructure, and Education to CHAmpion Rigor and Transparency) is a new program seeking to develop, test, and iterate sustainable models for improving the culture of rigor and transparency within the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. This program is a unique partnership between the Health Sciences Library & Informatics Center and the Department of Neurosciences. This partnership enables departmental interventions, but also aims to benefit the broader community at the University of New Mexico. Using the Center for Open Science's Strategy for Culture Change framework, PIE CHART aims to incentivize rigorous and transparent neuroscience research through …

Pie Chart Overview And Tenure And Promotion, Melissa L. Rethlefsen

PIE CHART

This presentation gives an overview of PIE CHART and additional material relating to open science in tenure and promotion. Materials included in this project were supported by the National Institute Of Neurological Disorders And Stroke of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number RC2NS138557. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Assigning Library E-Books As Textbooks: An Examination Of Collection Development Policies And User Education Practices At Minority-Serving Institutions, Michelle Ehrenpreis

Publications and Research

Assigning library e-books as course textbooks can help to alleviate the financial burden of college for many students. Accordingly, libraries include e-books in their collection development policies and strive to educate users on the availability of these texts via the use of library research guides. Previous studies discuss library collection strategies and intentions to use e-books as textbooks, but do not discuss continuous or permanent plans. This study examined library policies at Hispanic Service Institutions (HSI’s) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s) to evaluate how these libraries approach and document their acquisitions of library e-books. Research guides at the …

Modeling Rank Distribution And The Relative Importance Factor Index In Discrete Power-Law Models: Application To Social Resilience Using The Scopus Database, Brian Llinas, Jose Padilla, Humberto Llinas, Erika Frydenlund, Katherine Palacio

VMASC Publications

Prior research on power-law distributions has primarily focused on modeling frequency patterns, with less attention given to rank distributions and how ranked positions reflect relative importance among elements. In discrete power-law distributions, frequency-based metrics often provide limited discrimination in the tail, where elements may exhibit similar counts but differ in relative dominance. These patterns are especially evident, for instance, in academic publishing, where keywords, affiliations, and citations commonly exhibit power-law behavior. To address this limitation, we introduce the Relative Importance Factor (RIF) Index, a statistical measure derived from the estimated discrete power-law rank distribution rather than an additional independent parameter. …

“We’Re All In The Struggle Together”: The Experiences Of First-Generation Graduate Students During Covid-19, Rebecca Stallworth, Danielle E. Maurici-Pollock, Jade Obler, Rachel A. Starr

Publications

This study explores the experiences of first-generation graduate students (FGGS) during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically the positive and negative impacts of the pandemic on their learning experiences and their implications for the design of online graduate programs that foster a sense of belonging.

"When I Think Of The Public Library, I Think Of White": Black Families Counter-Narratives Of Library Irrelevance And Community Repair, Amber Matthews

STEMPS Faculty Publications

While public libraries espouse equitable access, few studies examine Black community disengagement. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and the theme "Information in Repair," this paper analyzes semi-structured interviews with seven Black parents of youth aged 13-24 in London, Ontario. Findings reveal that their lack of library engagement stems not from access barriers but from libraries functioning as racialized spaces irrelevant to Black lived experiences in Canada. Where libraries fall short, Black-led organizations perform continuous, invisible reparative labour through culturally responsive programming and trusted information networks. Meaningful repair requires confronting institutional whiteness, redistributing resources to Black-led organizations, and sustaining authentic relationship-building …

Visual Aids And Numeracy In Healthcare: Leveraging The Drawing Effect, Zephyr J. Markley

Capstone Showcase

Healthcare decisions often require patients to interpret numerical risk information under stress, yet many struggle with low numeracy, which can distort comprehension and undermine informed consent. Well-designed visual aids can improve diagnostic inference, calibrate confidence, and support better choices, especially for patients with limited numeracy, but their impact depends on whether users can actually interpret the format accurately. Drawing may further enhance these tools by adding a tactile, generative layer that engages visual, semantic, and motoric processing while helping patients organize information into concrete models.

Passive visual aids appear useful but limited because they often position patients as observers rather …

A Digitized History Of Undergraduate Student Government At The University Of Akron, Samuel Stillion

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The digitization process of a representative sample of the physical records of the University of Akron's Undergraduate Student Government held in the University Archives and Special Collections, including notes for future archive projects with the larger records of Undergraduate Student Government

Agricultural Evidence Synthesis At A Critical Juncture: Quality Gaps And Implications For Evidence-Based Agriculture, Chao Cai, Jane Yatcilla, Justyna Czader, Sylvie Brouder, Jeffrey Volenec

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have become essential tools for synthesizing evidence to guide agricultural policy and practice, yet whether these syntheses are themselves conducted with sufficient rigor has rarely been systematically assessed. This study provides a field-wide assessment of reporting quality in agricultural evidence synthesis, examining whether existing reviews are conducted with sufficient transparency and rigor to support the policy and practice decisions they are meant to inform. We drew a random sample of 244 systematic reviews and meta-analyses from a bibliometric dataset of 1,709 articles published between 1997 and 2023, evaluating reporting quality using a 12-indicator rubric across four …

Digital Scholarship At Parkland College, Donica Swann

Library Scholarship

Presentation highlighting the benefits and capabilities of digital scholarship platforms available to students, faculty, and staff at Parkland College.

Designing Ai-Aware Media 101 Curriculum Through Faculty–Librarian Collaboration, Miranda Gale Smith, Elizabeth Oppe

2026 Scholarly Teaching Conference: Concurrent Session Papers

This presentation explores faculty–librarian collaboration as a teaching practice. It will inform attendees about the work done by a faculty member (Elizabeth) and a Student Success & Instruction Librarian (Miranda) to design and implement an AI-aware curriculum into an existing Media 101 course at West Virginia University. This resulted in the careful integration of subject-specific and information literacy expertise into the course’s curriculum. More broadly, this is meant to illustrate that in terms of practice, treating AI-aware curriculum development as a shared, iterative process grounded in mutual respect for distinct but complementary forms of knowledge has the potential to yield …

Info 7000: Fundamentals Of Library And Information Science, S E. Hackney

Open Educational Resources

This course is designed to serve as a broad introduction to the field of Library and Information Science, to give you a general idea of the history, norms, prevailing trends, and future directions of the field and the professions associated with it. This includes ‘traditional’ librarianship, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, as well professions in the information, data, and technology sectors. This course will delve into the labor that the people in these professions do, and introduce some of the skills and knowledge needed to do that work.

Generative Ai Peer Tutoring To Support Peer-Reviewed Source Identification And Evaluation, Rae Mair, Michelle Kelley, Taylar Wenzel, Andrea C. Borowczak, Yuqing Li, Mike Borowczak

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This chapter explores the design and evaluation of a generative artificial intelligence peer tutor prompt to support college students in identifying and evaluating peer-reviewed sources for academic research. Grounded in literature on peer tutoring, Socratic dialogue, and AI-supported learning, the authors describe an iterative prompt engineering process designed to transform large language models (LLMs) into Socratic-style peer tutors capable of scaffolding student reasoning without completing tasks for them. Five guiding criteria for an effective peer tutor shaped development and evaluation: cognitive congruence, step-by-step guidance, avoiding giving answers, adaptability to student level, metacognitive transparency, and following assignment directions. Across multiple human-centered …

Practical Strategies For Instructional Faculty And Librarians Designing Accessible Instructional Materials, Rachel E. Trnka

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

While discussions of the accessibility of instructional materials are not new, librarians and instructional faculty are facing increased pressure to ensure the accessibility of their materials in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’s rapid shift to online education. Many faculty and librarians, however, do not receive adequate training and support in the area of accessible design. In addition, there is often confusion about who is responsible for ensuring the accessibility of instructional materials in higher education environments. This paper presents practical strategies for librarians and instructional faculty to identify readily available resources, create inventories of their own instructional materials, identify …

Determinants Of Digital Piracy: An Integrated Model, C. Christopher Lee, Peiyao Chen

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Digital piracy is a form of copyright infringement, and challenges persist in addressing it effectively. Accordingly, understanding why people engage in digital piracy is crucial. Although prior studies have examined digital piracy from multiple perspectives, existing studies on the explanatory factors of digital piracy remain fragmented. To address this research gap, this study develops an integrated model that incorporates key theoretical perspectives, neutralization theory, social learning theory, and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), along with key determinants including gender, age, and the technology factor. Rather than conducting a meta-analysis of previous studies, this study adopts a survey-based approach to …

Too Warm To Win Big? Unpacking The Backer Dynamics Behind Female Crowdfunding Success Using A Warmth And Competence Perspective, Dan Liu

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

While crowdfunding is often heralded as a democratized funding avenue that empowers women with higher success rates, this study reveals a more nuanced picture of gender dynamics. The Stereotype Content Model suggests that women are often perceived as warmer but less competent. Using a large dataset from Kickstarter, we find that female-led projects can attract more backers, likely due to warmth-driven appeal, but receive smaller average contributions, potentially due to concerns about risk linked to lower perceived competence. However, the total funding raised by female-led campaigns is comparable to that of male-led ones, showing no clear advantage or disadvantage. This …

Online Community Dynamics: An Analysis Using Louvain During Major Sporting Events, Anushka Jaint, Yashodhan Karulkar, Kashish Jindal, Sri Sai Harshita Gadavarthi, Sanya Gulati

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

With the power of social media transforming the way people connect and interact with each other, the dynamics of community formation on platforms such as X during major events are of crucial importance. While social media is an increasingly key driver in determining interactions, little is known about the online influence forming and developing fan communities in high-stakes events. This study looks into the development of user communities for datasets drawn from Kaggle on two of the world’s largest sporting events: the FIFA World Cup 2022, or football, and the T20 World Cup 2022, or cricket, with the aim of …