IOPN Journals (Illinois Open Publishing Network)
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Digital Language Archiving: Reuse and Adaptation of Non-LIS Learning Materials in LIS Education
Get PDFAs a digital repository type of growing prominence, language archives need qualified information professionals to maintain and provide access to their rich collections. Yet, awareness of digital language archives among the US LIS professionals and educators is currently low. Our project’s analysis of available relevant training materials for linguists and community members informed the development of a graduate course that prepares LIS professionals for effective and ethical stewardship of digital language archives. In this paper, following a brief literature review of the latest relevant research and publications, results of examination of three major sources of language archiving learning materials are presented and discussed. This discussion’s focus is on the ideas for reuse and adaptation of these materials in LIS education and on implementation of some of these ideas in our project-developed course at the University of North Texas
“What is all the damage the drugs are doing to my body?” A study of the effect of internalized stigma on harm reduction information-seeking behavior of people who use opioids in Kensington
Get PDFThe United States is in the midst of an opioid crisis. The rate of overdose deaths rose 30% from 2019 to 2020, numbers that represent an escalation theorized to have been brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 112,000 people died of drug overdoses, mainly from synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, in 2023 (CDC, 2024).
This poster will display the results of a mixed-methods survey conducted with 101 people who use opioids in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia- commonly called the epicenter of the opioid crisis. Participants were asked about their experiences with getting harm reduction information and how those experiences interacted with their own feelings of stigma. They were asked about their harm reduction information needs, experiences looking for this information, and how best to provide it to them.
This poster will display current unpublished results to-date. The data analysis has revealed a meaningful impact on information-seeking behavior for participants who have heightened internalized stigma- even to their known detriment. This study is meaningful to stakeholders, including librarians, who may provide public health information to the community of people addicted to opioids. And, to the conference theme, what is more ethical that providing harm-reduction information to the addicted
Examining the Role of School Librarians in Teaching Young Children to Detect and Avoid Misinformation
Get PDFThis study investigates the imperative for implementing an informational literacy curriculum in K-5 school libraries to equip students with essential skills for detecting and avoiding misinformation. Using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected from 141 school librarians across the United States. Quantitative analysis revealed significant gaps in information literacy instruction frequency and resource availability. Qualitative analysis identified four overarching themes: Awareness, Identification, Resources, and Risks/Harm. Together these results highlight the pressing need for curriculum development in this area, emphasizing critical thinking skills through age-appropriate resources. The findings underscore the importance of advocating for dedicated instructional time and the creation of tailored teaching materials to empower students as discerning consumers and responsible citizens. This research contributes valuable insights to the fields of school libraries and information literacy, informing future initiatives aimed at enhancing students\u27 ability to navigate the complexities of the digital age
Meyer, Abbye E. From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives. UP of Mississippi, 2022. 204 pages. ISBN: 9781496837585
Get PDFA common observation in disability studies is that historically, disability has been a unifying marginalisation—the one intersection from which other identities hope for distance or even escape (Mitchell & Snyder 3; Davis 277). Problem novels, often dismissed as an inevitable but undesired aspect of adolescent literature (Miskec & McGee 164), occupy a similar space in studies of youth literature. These texts are often considered representative of young adult literature by those outside of children’s literature studies and are often treated defensively by those of us within it as a stereotype the field must overcome. There is, however, very little scholarship explicitly on problem novels. Abbye E. Meyer’s work, From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives, offers a new defence and reinterpretation of the problem novel as she asks readers to consider these significant gaps in the literature: “the ways in which disability and young adult literature interact” and “the kinds of power these interactions produce” (12). As an analysis of American representations of disability and adolescence, Meyer’s work is often compelling, especially in its recontextualization of “exemplary” didacticism (Meyer 96). While I do question the conflation of adolescence as disabling in early chapters as potentially overly diagnostic and easily misread (and as a non-American reader I lament the limitations in attributing the “young adult voice” (16) so squarely to Holden Caufield and Esther Greenwood), Meyer’s work is an important contribution to both literary and disability studies as we continue to engage on topics of representation, voice, and crip power
Assessing Fatphobia in Public Library Programming: Is Wellness Size-Inclusive?
Get PDFThis content analysis of wellness-related library programs and programming materials seeks to discover the perception of larger bodies within library health programming. Fatphobia or sizeism is prevalent in the wellness industry and within healthcare. Libraries are trusted resources for health information. Informed by the fields of fat studies, we approached health programming in libraries by asking if larger people would feel welcome and able to attend. We examined twenty libraries’ programs over the past year as well as library conference programs and programming materials from several websites. There was little evidence of explicit sizeism, but some resources reproduced sizeist stereotypes and language. This presentation takes a fat pedagogy approach to focus on methods for ensuring access to all and expanding current definitions of inclusivity so that people with larger bodies recognize that libraries are welcoming spaces
The (mis)Information World of Moms for Liberty: A Digital Ethnographic Case Study
Get PDFMoms for Liberty (M4L) is an American organization that has played an outsized role in the dramatic increase in book bans and challenges in school and public libraries. This group provides an opportunity to study the various ways that information and attention is driven bi-directionally between the public and private spheres. The aim of this digital ethnographic case study was to better understand how the norms and values that underlie the small world of M4L influence the larger lifeworld and social milieus of communities. If public policy is ideologically constructed, what does this mean for information practitioners whose institutions exist in small worlds? Jaeger and Burnett’s theory of information worlds and Engeström’s activity theory model were combined to form the lens of interpretation to analyze the normative behavior and information values of M4L and the impact of its object of motivation for creating information poverty in the lifeworld through censorship efforts via political activism and propaganda. Data sources included public messaging from M4L and affiliated social media pages, primary sources from M4L’s official website, official interview transcripts, news headline data, and relevant public policy data. This poster reports on the early findings and emerging implications of the study, as well as the potential value of the proposed theoretical-methodological framework for ethnographic and case study research within the information disciplines
Ethical and Methodological Considerations in LGBTQ-focused Online Ethnography: A Proposal of a Systematic Review
Get PDFLesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people constitute a vulnerable population that requires research about their needs, representations, and challenges. Among the variant research methods, ethnography is particularly effective in understanding participants and their lived experience. The development of information and communication technologies has transformed traditional ethnography research and contributed to the emergence of online ethnography research that holds potential for studying vulnerable populations (e.g., LGBTQ people) and relevant topics.
We propose a systematic review to explore how researchers have considered and addressed ethical and methodological issues in LGBTQ-focused online ethnography research. We used the core collection of the Web of Science to search for relevant literature. We crafted the search query based on studies of LGBTQ populations, online ethnography studies, and other data sources like the Homosaurus vocabulary. Two groups of search terms were compiled and used in combination, including population-related terms (e.g., “queer”, “LGB*”, “GLB*”, and “sexual minorit*”) and method-related terms (e.g., “online ethnograph*”, “netnograph*”, “digital ethnograph*”, and “virtual ethnograph*”). In this review, we focus on empirical journal articles using any type or variant of online ethnography to investigate LGBTQ-focused topics. The eligible articles may include LGBTQ people as participants or stakeholders (e.g., LGBTQ staff), or analyze LGBTQ-related content (e.g., YouTube videos). Most importantly, we will analyze the ethical concerns (e.g., informed consent, power imbalance, cultural sensitivity, and beneficence and justice) and methodological aspects (e.g., research design, sampling, recruitment, data collection, data analysis, and roles of LGBTQ people) of these studies.
Truth, Knowledge, and Information Literacy: An Aporetic Approach
Get PDFThis paper aims to conduct a critical examination of the foundational assumptions and challenges of information literacy (IL), serving as a timely ‘reality check’ and a constructive instance of ‘problem-posing’. To this end, it advocates for an ‘aporetic’ approach, which constitutes a pivotal tool in philosophical inquiry. This approach posits that aporia—puzzlement rooted in the conflict of reasons—compels us to confront and grapple with (seemingly) insurmountable problems. It thereby creates opportunities to rethink fundamental concepts, theories, and perspectives. Through a critical literature review, this paper scrutinizes IL aporias across six scopes: conceptualization, theorization, philosophical underpinning, challenge, critique, and prospect. As a part of a broader project, the study focuses primarily on two key topics: truth and knowledge. The literature review identifies two aporias in IL: the disjunction between knowing and learning of knowledge, and the tension between information as objective truth and subjective interpretation of information, i.e., informativeness
Methodological Implications for Video-Based Research in the Library and Information Science
Get PDFThe use of video has been popular in psychology and educational research (Erickson, 2011), but still is relatively new to the Library and Information Science (LIS) field. Video technology is a powerful tool for documenting events, allowing them to be preserved permanently and viewed un unlimited number of times for collaborative data analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). In addition, it is important to consider that video recordings start with a choice of the recorder on which part to capture and follow with a deliberate and selective choice on which recordings to focus on analytically. Thus, researchers who choose to employ video-based research need to be reflexive of the affordances and limitations of using certain video technology and be cognizant of the ways in which we can be closer to capturing the phenomenon itself. In this poster, we will demonstrate two cases of family programming at public libraries where video-based research was used for research and explore the methodological implications of video-based research in LIS. We aim to discuss the opportunities and challenges of capturing in-situ data in addition to participants’ retrospective perspectives after their participation in library programming
Skill-Building in Subject Representation: Assessing Learning Outcomes through Analysis of Student-Created Metadata
Get PDFRepresentation of topics, places, events and other entities that information resource is about (referred to as subject representation) is crucial in facilitating access to information. It is an integral part of one of the core competencies of information professionals defined by the American Library Association (ALA). Students in ALA-accredited professional degree programs develop knowledge and skills that prepare them for analyzing what information resource is about and representing this aboutness with a combination of free-text keywords/keyphrases and terms from controlled vocabularies that are widely used by practitioners in the field. This paper reports the results of the evaluation of professional competencies developed by future information professionals in the representation of an information resource’s aboutness in a real-life practical setting. The dataset used in this evaluation consists of over 18 thousand metadata records -- created over 12 years, mostly by students -- in the major digital collection that provides access to historical patent