Research Seminar Series Archive

In this talk, Rachel M. Magee introduces Young Researchers, an Institute of Museum and Library Services Early Career Development funded project, which collaborates with teens to design, conduct, analyze and present original research on youth technology and information practices. In the project’s current stage, we are connecting findings from research with various stakeholders to inform the design of these original research experiences.

Throughout history, humans have been creating, managing, disseminating, seeking or searching, and using information or content in one form or another to meet various needs. Increased adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the last few decades contributed to the emergence of a strong “information society” and, according to some, even a “knowledge society.” In an information and/or knowledge society, individuals and countries with the necessary means can acquire or gain access to ICTs and information/knowledge, benefit from their use and thrive/prosper while others remain poor, creating inequities or disparities such as the “digital divide.”

Many User Experience (UX) practitioners face organizational barriers that limit their ability to influence product or service decisions, but there is little concrete knowledge about how to overcome these challenges and make organizations more UX-friendly. In this talk, I will introduce a novel concept called User Experience Capacity-Building (UXCB) to describe the process of building, strengthening and sustaining effective UX practices throughout an organization.

The experience sampling method (ESM) allows researchers to study human behavior and cognition on site, capturing the subjective experiences that make up everyday life. The method was developed in the 1970s as Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi looked for ways to study the experience of flow. Library and information science research has begun to utilize ESM to learn more about flow and other experiences users have in libraries and in interacting with technology. This talk will describe how ESM is being used in a study of child welfare workers’ experience using information communication technology in the course of performing their work.

The call for expanding computer science (CS) education in today’s schools has reached a crescendo with the goal of expanding the pipeline of CS and IT majors entering the workforce and powering up young people’s thinking and essential new literacies for the 21st century. However, fewer than half of K–12 schools offer substantive CS courses which include programming (Google & Gallup, 2015). Expanding CS education raises new and unique challenges to already over-stretched schools.

Searching for health information is one of the most frequent online activities. Unfortunately, the results retrieved often are confusing and contain documents from unreliable sources.

Despite widespread usage of the constructs of task complexity and task difficulty in the information science literature, there are no clear or consistent conceptual or operational definitions of these constructs, and no consensus on how to distinguish levels of complexity or difficulty within a set of search tasks.