Research Seminar Series Archive

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?

It is more challenging to uncover how and why people read than what they read, or when and where they read. Times of political crisis and social change are productive contexts for examining these elusive features of reading, and South Africa during the apartheid era is a useful locale for investigating these features. In this paper, I analyse the roles of professional and non-professional librarians who sourced, circulated, hid and sometimes helped to produce banned reading materials, and who used their libraries as ‘safe’ spaces for readers to debate liberation strategies. I also explain how readers used these materials in clandestine reading networks. I conclude with a critical reflection on the range of methods I used to tell the stories of ordinary South Africans who confronted an authoritarian and racist regime.

Engagement and participation are key concepts framing a large part of the social media discourse across many research domains (Lutz, Hoffmann and Meckel 2014). As quasi-government agencies public libraries increasingly value Twitter as it provides a freely accessible, low-cost structure for improved engagement, relationship-building and communication with a wide spectrum of library followers. The Social-biblio.ca project, initiated in 2012, contributes to this work from the perspective of the public library organization.