Research Seminar Series Archive

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.

Using Stamper’s (1991) semiotic framework for information systems research, this presentation details results of a multi-sited ethnography involving observations at three outpatient hemodialysis facilities in the United States, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 28 facility patients.

This presentation describes the findings of a study of the information practices of archaeologists excavating at two sites: the Iron Age Broch of Gurness and Neolithic Ness of Brodgar excavations in Orkney, Scotland, through the course of two digging seasons. It focuses in particular on those practices by which participants made sense of the artefacts they uncovered, and through these, the site they were excavating.

From 1970–72, the graduate library and information science (LIS) program at the University of Illinois welcomed twenty-nine students of color known as the Carnegie Scholars. The Carnegie Scholars Fellowship Program was designed to increase the numbers of minority librarians in the profession and denoted a radical change at the school; it is a radical change we need to see again as we envision the future of the information profession and librarianship.

This session will discuss the findings of two studies conducted to explore user-generated content in public library catalogues, and its potential contribution to readers’ advisory (RA) services. The session will explore how user content, in the form of tags and reviews, provides a rich data set that connects to traditional RA access points. Further, the session will discuss the creation of three taxonomies for memory, emotion and mood based on user content, and the use of these taxonomies to enhance discovery and the reading experience.

Information literacy has been a hot topic among educators and information professionals for over 20 years now, and it has shaped my own research agenda for the past decade. This presentation will trace my information literacy research journey, focusing on three projects: information literacy competency among college freshmen; teachers and public and school librarians as information literacy collaborators; and the Peritextual Literacy Framework as a strategy for teaching information literacy to middle school students. With all three projects, I’ll discuss the research questions posed, the methods used, and the results obtained.