Scholarship

Chapter summary: The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) offers a broad and inclusive outlook regarding the core concepts necessary for responsible, informed, and generative information use. Just as the Framework is adaptable for many disciplines and teaching strategies, it implicitly supports opportunities for librarians and other instructors to discuss the legal and social structures underlying information creation, use, and reuse. Copyright shapes the information landscape to which students are formally introduced within the Framework; therefore, the Framework presents a singular opportunity to discuss topics—no matter how basic—related to copyright and fair use.

The frame “Information Has Value” is perhaps a natural starting point for a discussion about copyright due to its explicit mention of “intellectual property laws,” but other frames such as “Information Creation as a Process” and “Scholarship as a Conversation” are opportunities to renew that discussion. These frames prompt questions about the academic publishing process and accessibility of information that can only be answered by including a discussion of copyright. Although no single information literacy-focused course can hope to cover all of the frames in their entirety, the Framework offers an opportunity to incorporate a consciousness of copyright into other lessons about the information landscape.

Of course, the Framework outlines knowledge practices that are useful for a greater number of students than just first-year learners. As related to copyright, this can be a major knowledge gap for students producing scholarship for public display and publication. Upper-level students producing scholarship and graduate students writing theses and dissertations are often unaware of their own copyright and the legal structures that may impact their reuse of others’ copyrighted material. Although these learners may have mastered many of the core concepts of the Framework, it is important to remember the iterative nature of information literacy and to identify opportunities to work with these students, likely outside of an institution’s formal information literacy curriculum.

This chapter seeks to examine opportunities within the Framework itself to discuss copyright with students in an accessible and understandable way. To extend the conversation, the chapter will then briefly identify gaps in information literacy instruction that may occur for upper-level students as they begin to encounter copyright in concrete ways within their academic lives, and will offer some suggestions regarding outreach.

Abstract: Libraries make use of a great number of vendor-branded platforms and systems: catalogs and discovery layers, inter-library loan services, institutional repository platforms, and more. However, we often adopt the branding, jargon, and naming conventions of those systems when we present them to our patrons. This talk will discuss the importance of finding opportunities to take ownership of our services, even when they are facilitated by a paid software or platform. The reasons that we will discuss include: to increase visibility and find spaces for consistent branding, to future-proof our practices in the event of a platform transition, and to take ownership of core library services that—while facilitated—are efforts on the behalf of library workers for library patrons. This presentation will come from the perspective of a Digital Scholarship Librarian and Outreach and Communications Librarian, and will hope to prompt ongoing dialogue among participants.

These data-related works were prepared by the research data management team at Duquesne University. To read more about the work of this team, please see Research Data Management Services.

Abstract: Librarians at Duquesne University did a soft rollout of their institutional repository in 2016, with a full rollout planned for 2017. Elsevier’s acquisition of Digital Commons prompted a reevaluation of the marketing plan. The Outreach & Communications Librarian, Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Systems Librarian approached this problem collaboratively to craft (and rebrand) a marketing message.

Abstract: Graduate students completing an electronic thesis or dissertation (ETD) may encounter issues related to copyright, either their own or that held by others, at several points throughout the creation and submission of their ETD. Since ETDs are often hosted in an institutional repository or other online collection hosted by the library, library personnel involved in the process must be aware of these points of failure and understand the nuances of copyright with regard to reuse of materials, their institution’s policies governing student scholarship, and the policies of their institutional repository or online collection. This poster will review the relevant literature related to copyright and ETDs, outline the major junctures where librarians may contribute to copyright education for graduate students (and others), and offer suggestions for librarians seeking to engage with graduate students completing their ETDs.

This presentation was prepared for an interdisciplinary audience, partially in response to concerns about “fake news” but more generally in order to discuss the concepts of information anxiety and information overload.

Introduction: Our lives are continuously affected by the information that we encounter in ever-increasing volume. The growing awareness of the dangers of uncritical information consumption (e.g. “fake news”) heightens the relevancy of questions investigating the nature of truth and fact. This anxiety manifests on a more personal level in terms of our vulnerable digital selves—identities can be stolen, personal archives can be lost. Anxiety is deeply personal but can affect public lives, professional lives, teaching, and scholarship as it leads to a loss of nuance and an unwillingness to participate in information creation and exchange. Our personal lives suffer, and so too does public discourse.

Our goal is to give you a framework to understand the concepts in Information Science which deal directly with the issue of reliable information sources and trust in the age of the internet. We are a group of information professionals working in the library and archives fields. Our professional values are specifically codified in order to deal with information anxiety and promote critical thinking, and our daily work is to foster responsible interactions with information. We will draw upon these values as examples in order to find interdisciplinary points of similarity among our audience, and demonstrate strategies for approaching information anxiety across the professions represented.

As a member of the Systematic Review Team at the Gumberg Library (stemming from my participation in the Systematic Review Workshop led by librarians at the University of Pittsburgh HSLS), I consult and sometimes collaborate on advanced reviews. This poster represents the first deliverable of a project designed to systematically locate and synthesize literature about the role of occupational therapy in criminal justice settings. This project, a scoping review, is meant to uncover the gaps in the literature written about this area of practice. As a collaborator on this project, I designed and ran searches in several relevant databases, taught the collaborators how to batch import results into EndNote and Covidence, provided education about transparent and consistent methodology following the PRISMA reporting standard, and prepared the methodology section of the poster presentation. The next step in this process will be to update the search to expand this research into a full publication.

This poster was completed with a colleague from the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Science. We conducted a literature review of documents related to usability and user experience in libraries to attempt to ascertain whether librarians tended to use these terms interchangeably. We then made recommendations about how the field could interact more robustly with these concepts.

Introduction: Current case studies tend not to draw a distinction between usability and user experience. Gallant and Wright’s 2014 article “Planning for Iteration-Focused User Experience Testing in an Academic Library” is the notable exception for its reliance on literature beyond the field of LIS. The authors turn to ISO standards regarding human-system interaction (ISO 9241-210) as well as to examples from online marketplaces in order to frame their distinction between usability and user experience. This investigation mirrors Gallant and Wright’s methods but focuses on more recent library literature in an attempt to chart change over time. We sought out three different categories of materials for this literature review: (1) case studies detailing the redesign processes of library websites, (2)foundational texts about usability and design, and (3) materials outside of the field of LIS related to usability and user experience.