Research Seminar Series Archive

Survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) may seek assistance from governmental agencies (e.g., local police, family courts) and social service agencies (e.g., domestic violence shelters, job training programs). That assistance, however, comes with conflicting goals and priorities which are instantiated as information-dependent processes and procedures.

Diversity is a term that is both important and often misunderstood. Yet, despite this very nebulous understanding, it has been a continuous focus in the LIS professions, particularly in regard to recruitment and retention initiatives. According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, librarians are predominately Caucasian, with just over 13% of professionals identifying as African American, Asian American or Hispanic/Latino (BLS, 2015). Archives and museums report even lower levels of diversity. Hence, as a predominately Caucasian profession, the concept of White Privilege and the role of White Culture in the profession should be important discussion points.

As social creatures, our online lives just like our offline lives are intertwined with others within a wide variety of social networks. Each retweet on Twitter, comment on a blog or link to a YouTube video explicitly or implicitly connects one online participant to another and contributes to the formation of various information and social networks. Once discovered, these networks can provide researchers with an effective mechanism for identifying and studying collaborative processes within any online community.

The iSquare Research Program is an arts-informed, visual study in which people answer the question “What is information?” in the form of a compact line drawing, coined an “iSquare” (Hartel, 2014). Since 2011, more than 2,000 iSquares have been collected from diverse academic disciplines and from around the world. In this presentation, Dr. Jenna Hartel will provide an overview of the iSquare project and report recent insights into the pictorial metaphors associated with information.

The e-book reader revolution is already here. The questions we asked ourselves were: What are the reading preferences of Information Science students of the second decade of the 21st century? How do different variables, such as relative advantage, comprehension, and learning strategies, affect students’ reading preferences? The research was conducted in Israel during the first semester of the 2015 academic year and encompassed 177 LIS students in an Information Science Department in Israel.

This presentation features results from the Cyber Synergy: Seeking Sustainability through Collaboration between Virtual Reference and Social Q&A Sites project funded by IMLS which investigated the possibility of new models to enable Virtual Reference Services (VRS) to remain viable despite today's tight budgets and increased need to share resources, improve referrals, and broaden collaboration.

Various methodological approaches are utilized in user engagement research, including self-report methods (e.g., questionnaires, verbal elicitations), neurophysiological methods (e.g., eye tracking, facial expressions), and observational methods of user behavior (e.g., mouse clicks, navigation patterns). Yet, seldom do we evaluate the methods and measures themselves. This talk will draw upon the User Engagement Scale (UES), a self-report measure developed by O’Brien, to focus on two intersecting and fundamental challenges: 1) How do we operationalize and measure multi-dimensional, complex, subjective concepts such as user engagement? and 2) How do we evaluate the robustness of such measures?