Library and Information Science Commons^™

A Collaborative Intervention: Measuring The Impact Of A Flipped Classroom Approach On Library One-Shots For The Composition Classroom, Maureen Garvey, Anne Hays, Amy F. Stempler

Publications and Research

Instruction Librarians teaching one-shot information literacy (IL) sessions to freshman composition classes at academic universities across the U.S. experience a familiar set of issues. In response, librarians have produced a bounty of literature detailing flipped instruction approaches, collaborative case studies with outside departments, and critiques of the library one-shot, but there is little research describing attempts to combine these three approaches in one study. Both a case study and an impact-assessment study, this article describes a collaborative intervention between the Library Instruction team, the Writing Across the Curriculum program, and the English Department, with the purpose of studying the intervention’s …

Learning The Basics Of Scholarly Communication: A Guide For New Subject Liaison Librarians, Madeline Cohen

Publications and Research

Academic librarians are playing a greater role in scholarly communication at their institutions. Scholarly communication has become a part of every academic librarian’s work. In particular, the role of subject liaison librarian often includes responsibilities related to advising discipline faculty on scholarly publishing, open access, institutional repositories and copyright. Liaison librarians might take on these responsibilities without having a firm grasp of the landscape of scholarly communication due to lack of experience or education in this area. This article is a guide to the key issues and concepts of scholarly communication for librarians new to this facet of academic librarianship. …

Librarians Building Digital Learning Objects Supporting Cultural Understanding: Fulbright-Hays Seminar Abroad In Morocco And Tunisia, Michael J. Miller

Publications and Research

Chapter explores a 2011 Fulbright- Hays Seminar experience in Morocco/Tunisia related to comparative religion. The grant process is explained, Seminar is detailed, and the curriculum project is detailed.

New Outreach Initiatives At A Community College, Sharell Walker

Publications and Research

This article explores the development and initiation of new outreach programs by the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) Library department after the hiring of a new librarian. The literature review will address current research that was used in the decision making process whilst putting together outreach initiatives and literature used to develop future ideas. The article discusses the development of these outreach initiatives, the problems encountered during their initial implementation, the outcomes of the programs that were offered, feedback, and the future goals of the library department.

Cataloging Backlogs: Perennials, Seaweeds, Or Others?, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Many Hats, One Head: Considering Professional Identity In Academic Library Directorship, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Faculty Visions For Teaching Web Accessibility Within Lis Curricula In The United States: A Qualitative Study, Adina Mulliken, Mireille Djenno

Publications and Research

This qualitative study explores the understanding and perspectives of faculty in US library and information science (LIS) programs about teaching web accessibility. “Web accessibility” can be defined simply as making websites accessible for all, including people with disabilities. Eight LIS professors and two graduate LIS students or recent alumni with interests in accessibility were interviewed for the study. Results showed that, although some faculty were novices, most interviewees thought it would be beneficial to teach web accessibility in a variety of LIS courses. However, despite the seeming consensus, discussion of incorporating web accessibility into curricula was rare. This study explores …

Teaching Systematic Searching Methods To Public Health Graduate Students: Repeated Library Instruction Sessions Correlate With Better Assignment Scores, John Pell

Publications and Research

Objective – The objective of this study was to devise an assessment plan to determine if repeat attendance at two library instruction sessions is statistically associated with overall assignment scores or specific assignment qualities.

Methods – The author used SPSS to calculate correlations between attendance and assignment scores and cross tabulations between attendance and assignment item analysis scores.

Results – Repeat attendance at two library instruction sessions was statistically associated with higher overall assignment scores and higher scores on specific assignment sections. The effect is statistically significant.

Conclusion – Students who attended two library instruction sessions applied skills and concepts …

Library Information Sharing. Best Practices And Trends. Challenges And Prospects, Beth Posner

Publications and Research

Libraries share information with each other, through interlibrary loan services, so that their library users can access more of the world of information than is available in any one library. When supported with enough budget, staff and authority to do so, library resource sharing specialists can facilitate information access in a variety of traditional and innovative ways, including and beyond lending and borrowing print and digital information. Best practices, trends and new solutions for library resource sharing are reviewed. International cooperation is also highlighted.

Why Is The Journal Of Critical Library And Information Studies Needed Today?, Andrew J. Lau, Alycia Sellie, Ronald E. Day

Publications and Research

The editors’ introduction to the first issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, which was established in response to a perceived need in the landscape of library and information studies scholarship for an open platform and venue for critical discourse and inquiry.

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, …

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 …

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.

“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.