Research Seminar Series Archive

Researchers across disciplines have been tracking and promoting impact of their work for decades using various metrics (e.g., citation counts). Today, many alternatives exist for documenting impact of research outputs and building your academic profile. Social media tools and qualitative measures of community-based research, alongside a range of metrics, provide options for researchers who want to enhance their academic and public research profiles. This talk will explore a range of strategies for promoting research and measuring impact in the community.

Compassion fatigue is a serious condition impacting health, quality of life, professional well-being, and work productivity. It manifests in many professional sectors, especially those dealing with people in vulnerable positions such as in healthcare, law enforcement, spiritual settings and social work. Related terms — sometimes used interchangeably — include burnout, secondary traumatization and vicarious traumatization.  Very little research dealing explicitly with information behavior and compassion fatigue has been reported.

This talk explores a novel research partnership and its contribution to community engagement with health promoting information. Indigenous youth co-researchers were recruited for a community-based participatory study investigating concerns about healthy eating and food security in a Cree community. Youth contributed to research planning, conducted interviews with elementary school Photovoice participants, contributed to data analysis and participated in the development of a knowledge translation tool. Hands-on interaction with research findings fostered critical thinking about health information and practices. Findings suggest that a broad understanding of information use may be helpful in the context of health promotion.

It used to be the girls who were thought to be the problem. Until recently, both research and practice in fields like education and library and information science were more interested in uncovering and addressing the unfair, unequal treatment of girls. But times have changed. Everyone agrees that girls have improved on almost all performance indicators at school while boys have not. This presentation reports on an interview study with 43 Canadian boys (4 to 12 years old) which captured the boys’ own perspectives on their reading. Results indicate that boys are reading, but their preferred reading materials (e.g., nonfiction, comic books, and game manuals) are not those usually privileged by librarians, teachers and parents.

Recommender Systems are springing up everywhere, collecting the judgments and clickstreams of Web users, and processing them to recommend everything from diapers to dioramas. The research presented here revisits to the earliest roots of recommender systems, HyperCat and the SXR, and asks how such systems can support the activity of researchers with a long-term, shared interest in some difficult topic.

This talk centers on the speaker’s own personal experience helping an academic library and a public library conduct research. In particular, the speaker will share insights on his current role as a faculty member in residence at the McMaster University Library. Specifically, the speaker will reflect on the progress he has made, the challenges he has encountered, and the factors that have led to success in fostering a research climate within the library.

This presentation will review a series of research projects extending from the early 1990s until the present conducted by the speaker and focused upon the information behavior of elementary school children when using a variety of information technologies. It will trace the emergence of children from being mere participants to active collaborators in the research process. Center stage will be the design of interfaces, including interactive, virtual and visualization techniques, that are intended to facilitate the identification, retrieval and use of information by children.