The American Religious Sounds Project, a joint effort from Michigan State University and Ohio State University, has been gathering sound recordings of American religious life since 2014. The project is undertaking a dual process of expanding to other institutions and ingesting the collection into the Vincent Voice Library at MSU.
With thousands…[Read more]

The user experience movement is gaining momentum in libraries, but its adoption and adaptation into an organizational culture may present unexpected challenges. In June 2014, the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries created a User Experience unit and in a short time, established a solid and reputable team of practitioners. This success,…[Read more]

This article describes an active-learning exercise intended to help teach copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. In the exercise students use a worksheet to draw original pictures, create derivative pictures on tracing paper, select Creative Commons licenses, and explore commercial usage, fair use, and copyright infringement.…[Read more]

The two books of Robert M. Pirsig have been milestones for Design Theory through the development of a Metaphysics of Quality. This article analyses the design history of his two books that have been in print for more than 40 years. The editions range from cheap mass-market paperbacks to gilded collectors’ hardcovers. The underlying challenge for a…[Read more]

This article explores the author’s journey to understand the value and history of digital scholarship as he considers charting his on course to pursue digital scholarship in connection with institutional requirements for scholarly and creative publication activity.

Semantic and syntactical judgments play a central role in the development of classification systems. Syndetic relationships are relationships between indexing terms, sometimes referred to as cross references. Due to the extensiveness of synonyms for different concepts in natural languages, subject indexing has historically focused on developing…[Read more]

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant…[Read more]

Social organizations, institutions, governments, and bureaucracies are all manifestations of power distribution. Many contemporary theories on power are at least partly informed by notions that were introduced in General Systems Theory. Public libraries are open systems. In an average organization, a hierarchy divides tasks, sets rules, and…[Read more]

The author adopted a timeline of emerging educational technologies in an Irish journal paper by e-learning expert Gráinne Conole and, with her permission, expanded it into this chart. In the study of technology for papers or presentations, researchers and students often ought to report when the technology originated, along with which technologies…[Read more]

Teaching ICT-related classes, this chart helps to clarify at what levels students could aim to analyze and explain an Internet site or technology: 1) The User Level: what can the site or technology be used for? 2) The Knowledge Level: what key technical terms need to be presented? 3) The Developer Level: how does the site or technology work? 4)…[Read more]

What Do You Mean?” was an undeniable bop of its era in which Justin Bieber explores the ambiguities of romantic communication. (I pinky promise this will soon make sense for scholarly communication librarians interested in artificial intelligence [AI].) When the single hit airwaves in 2015, there was a meta-debate over what Bieber meant to add t…[Read more]

Poster presentation for 2019 United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association annual conference.

Just as dissertations are a requirement for most PhD programs, culminating recitals are a degree requirement for students in the University of Washington (UW) School of Music (SoM) Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Performance program.…[Read more]

Although conversations about information literacy have grown substantially since the ACRL Competency Standards (2000) and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) were introduced, a significant amount of fuzzy concept use remains concerning certain information literacy ideas. Sometimes this fuzziness is the result of…[Read more]

Short review with episode highlights of the New York Times Music Popcast podcast. Written specifically for librarians with an interest in the similarities/disparities between popular digital media content models and scholarly digital media. This includes a short overview of the podcast, its general relation to scholarly communication, a highlight…[Read more]

Opening keynote address on the conference theme of Global Digital Society: Impacts on Humanities and Social Sciences. The topic of disruptive technology and our calling suited the author’s background in online education and international faculty development. The author has also worked for the impact to go the other way, from the Humanities and…[Read more]

Inspired by discussions at the 2017 Library Publishing Forum, An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing 1.0 was created by the members of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing Task Force, with the assistance of many community members who served as peer reviewers and workshop participants, as well as the staff of the Educopia Institute.…[Read more]

The movement for open access publishing (OA) is often said to have its roots in the scientific disciplines, having been popularized by scientific publishers and formalized through a range of top‐down policy interventions. But there is an often‐neglected prehistory of OA that can be found in the early DIY publishers of the late 1980s and early 199…[Read more]

Historic Nova Scotia is a digital humanities and public history project that aims to bring community histories to life online (https://historicnovascotia.ca/). This paper will explore how collaborative, digital-storytelling can help bridge the gap between heritage theory and practice. We will provide an overview of the project followed by specific…[Read more]