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]

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]

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]

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]

The issue of sharing course material outside of the classroom is very much intertwined with academic integrity and information literacy issues. This chapter explores the key issues surrounding this topic. First, this chapter explores the ill-conceived notions that might exist around students’ perceptions that everything on the internet is free a…[Read more]

This paper explores the extent to which the ideals of ‘openness’ are being applied to physical knowledge resources and research spaces. The study investigates the relationship between academic library access policies and institutional positions on open access/open science publishing. Analysis of library access policies from twenty academic ins…[Read more]

There is a traditional narrative within information studies regarding precision and recall measures. Precision and recall have been the most commonly used retrieval metrics and are the basis for more complicated and accurate information retrieval evaluations. Relevance, which is the criterion by which both recall and precision are judged, is…[Read more]

Over recent years Web 2.0 has brought information into the hands of the public, and we are increasingly seeing non-professionals doing sophisticated information tasks not merely for work, research or personal interest, but also for leisure – and even pleasure. This paper looks at an online fanfiction repository, Archive of Our Own (AO3), and i…[Read more]

Library and information center services are at risk during times of extensive budget reductions. Publicly funded institutions labeled as inessential or as auxiliary departments may lose the revenue necessary to maintain full staffing. Financial circumstances of recent years highlight the importance of strategic planning in library and information…[Read more]

A traditional expectation for publicly funded libraries is that they should be institutions where patron records are kept confidential and a standard of privacy is maintained. After the events of 911, methods increasing search and surveillance powers and reducing legal protections were drafted into law as the “Patriot Act”. Searching patron rec…[Read more]

In response to a lack of funding during the 2007–2009 recession, many library systems reduced or eliminated professional and library support positions. Traditional outcome measurements were not sufficient to convince tax-depleted legislatures to allocate more funds to libraries. In response to the crisis authors recommended cost-saving measures a…[Read more]