Mid-Year Conference Abstracts
Panels
The spread of d/misinformation on social media poses serious threats to the social, cultural, political, and economic structures of human societies. This panel is designed to discuss the phenomenon of d/misinformation and fake news on social media, including the motives of its sharing and its impact on society. The panelists will also highlight the role of LIS professionals in educating society to assess the quality of online information before decision-making. Sponsored by the South Asia Chapter and bringing in voices from various South Asian countries and North America, the primary focus of the panel will be on the South Asian perspective in looking at d/misinformation. Synergizing multiple perspectives and firsthand experiences of experts and listeners on the contextual misinformation fact-checking phenomenon while focusing on South Asia, the panel should inform the viewpoints of listeners, while contributing towards the research and practice of information professionals, as well as towards institutional policies.
Amara Malik, University of the Punjab, Pakistan | Naresh Kumar Agarwal, Simmons University, USA | Anwarul Islam, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh | Prasadi Kanchana Jayasekara, University of Ruhana, Sri Lanka | Reshma Dangol, SAARC Secretariat, Nepal; Manika Lamba; University of Delhi, India
Equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) are the core values of librarianship. There has been a wide array of professional and research publications, academic programs, diversity committees, and task forces related specifically to EDIA efforts and developments in library and information science (LIS), varying in focus, length, depth, and issues. Many international organizations, associations, library schools, library leaders, and library professionals are contributing to EDIA for a diverse library services and skills pool, improving performance and progress, increasing innovation in library services and resources, and better decision-making without any discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, abilities and disabilities, sexual orientation, identity and expression, socioeconomic status, and political beliefs. Notably, a cohesive understanding of library schools, library directors, and professional associations on EDIA is missing in the literature. Hence, the panelists have a rich experience of EDIA as an academicians and practitioners and will shed light on EDIA practices, issues, and ways forward to drive sustainability and growth of the profession particularly considering the underserved, disadvantaged, and underrepresented library patrons. The panelist shared their experiences and observations to promote social justice in LIS profession.
Murtaza Ashiq and Nosheen Fatima Warraich, University of the Punjab, Pakistan | Bharat Mehra, University of Alabama, USA | Vandana Singh, University of Tennessee, USA
Collaborative engagement with members is crucial to sustained membership in professional associations. It also empowers members to connect, grow, and build relationships across large special interest groups (SIGs) within a widely networked organization. Disengagement, social disconnectedness, and lack of belonging among members are challenges that professional associations deal with at an increasing pace. The ASIS&T SIG-International Information Issues (SIG-III) has over 600 members. One of the challenges of having such a large member base is maintaining engagement and finding ways to connect with an international community of academics and information professionals. Engaging with geographically scattered and culturally diverse members is a demanding situation resulting in weak ties among community members. The pandemic further accentuated the social disruption with the lack of physical gatherings. In this panel presentation, the speakers are officers and members who planned, organized and conducted various successful initiatives. They will share the initiatives they undertook to promote engagement amongst SIG-III members, the best practices for implementing those initiatives, the lessons learned from their experiences, and the outcomes. Other SIGs, Chapters, and professional associations can benefit from the critical lessons shared during this panel.
Devendra Potnis, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA | Bhakti Gala, Central University of Gujarat, India | Vanessa Reyes, University of South Florida, USA | Manika Lamba, University of Delhi, India | Nosheen Fatima Warraich, University of the Punjab, Pakistan | Leili Seifi, University of Birjand, Iran | Paul Perez, University of the Philippines, Philippines
A tension exists in information science (IS) between the scientific approaches and aspirations of the field’s members, many of whom identify with disciplines such as computer science, and the field’s long humanistic traditions, most notably in librarianship and bibliography as they intersect with areas of study such as history and literature. Bush's “Memex vision,” as just one example, imagines IS as a “scientific” discipline. It is a vision, as the scholar of information history Paul Duguid (2021) has shown, “fostered increasing elision between descriptions of people and machines” (p. 248). This panel investigates elisions such as these and the tensions in IS between modes of scientific investigation and humanistic modes of knowing. Through presentations on bibliography and hermeneutics as they can be understood from diverse cultural and historical perspectives, this panel explores some of the humanistic foundations of information science in an age when intelligence is readily associated with data and science rather than culturally specific methods of human interpretation and understanding.
Lin Wang, Hangzhou Dianzi University, People's Republic of China | Wayne Fremery, Dominican University of California, USA | Luciana Corts Mendes, Monteiro Lobato Library, Brazil | Michael Buckland, University of California Berkeley, USA
Access to information is fundamental to library and information science, and providing information is one of the core missions of librarianship. Partisan politicization of topics such as sexual and reproductive health can serve to limit public access to information. However, questions of how to assess which information to acquire and provide platforms for in libraries can be far from straightforward when considering health-related mis- and disinformation or how to represent and contextualize the views of minority groups that may conflict with with current scientific or medical consensus. This panel features three North American scholars in conversation about current issues and questions arising around access to health information in today’s sociopolitical contexts.
Devon Greyson, University of British Columbia, Canada| Amelia Gibson, University of Maryland at College Park, USA | Shannon Oltmann, University of Kentucky, USA
Papers
Understanding how practitioners’ beliefs, values and emotions are shaping their engagement with the adoption of data mining and machine learning (narrow AI) is important to enhance knowledge about how cultural dynamics are shaping the uptake of AI across different sectors. Such knowledge can help to enhance understanding of whether and how AI ought to be integrated into specific workflows, and what the challenges, critiques and implications may be.
In this paper, we report early findings from a study exploring these issues in the pharmaceutical industry. Eighteen interviews and one focus group were completed with scientists and managers working across three projects at a multinational pharmaceutical company. Thematic analysis of the resulting data is underway, and here we report three emergent themes identified through our analysis: AI adoption in a commercial context, the desire to bring AI back down to earth, and being a non-computational scientist in the age of AI.
We conclude by arguing that the tensions that surface around AI adoption indicate that further work to mediate the relationship between AI and practitioners in a way that satisfies people in all roles is necessary.
Jo Bates and Itzelle Medina Perea, University of Sheffield, UK
In the prior study(Rohit & Abebe, 2021, 2022), the developed coral reef classification system encountered a massive overlapping between every prediction, which did result in lower precision and recall scores after submission at the Annotation and Localization Challenge(AIcrowd | ImageCLEF 2022 Coral). This study investigates the overlapping issue to improve system performance and classifies the seven coral substrates using the coral Clef dataset. The testing and evaluation are performed on the manually annotated dataset. To improve the performance, the open-source object-detection system was set up using faster RCNN TensorFlow models to test the developed python script and evaluate the CoralClef test Image Dataset predictions. This study will give the effect of the retrieval system using different models’ results(Precision and Mean) to use it for the future LifeClef Challenges 2023 and Mediaeval Tasks. Additionally, this study anticipates facilitating the students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), for multimedia research activities by performing the simple anaconda commands rather than setting up complex IDEs(PyCharm for python programming) and Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-consuming Web-based platforms(Jupyter Notebook for Programming). Therefore, evaluating the effectiveness of the retrieval system using Deep Learning models through this study would play a significant role in future Multimedia tasks.
Rohit Raj Gunti, University of Tennessee, USA
Censorship may be explained through the lens of information behavior. In particular, the theory of information worlds states that information forms the small social worlds of individuals, influencing both what information they access, as well as what information they share. Thus, small worlds censorship can occur when small worlds’ actions shape policy in the larger lifeworld, reflecting the information behaviors of collective individuals who believe that their values are the “right values.” This phenomenon is happening in real time as school and public libraries face an unprecedented number of book challenges and bans that predominately target materials with themes related to the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC experience. If small worlds censorship actions lead to the passing of local laws so that certain cultural goods are removed from public institutions and consequently, books are withheld preventing members of the library’s community from reading freely, then book banning is harmful in multiple, abusive manners. One of the most important tools in the library’s fight against censorship is a strong selection policy, which also has the effect of shaping information behavior. This conceptual paper explores censorship through the lens of information behavior, practice, and policy.
Amanda Hovious, Mirah Dow, and Andrew Smith, Emporia State University, USA
For foreign researchers conducting research in rural Bangladesh, the establishment of relationships with local research collaborators, intermediaries and translators, who can facilitate their access to the communities, is essential. The closure of international borders and restrictions on travel to and within Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic forced researchers to find new ways of reaching rural communities. In this paper, the author discusses her experience as a foreign researcher organising a face-to-face survey in a remote Bangladeshi village with the help of a Bangladeshi research assistant based in Australia and a community participant recruited and trained as surveyor. She discusses problems encountered during the conduct of the survey and argues that these problems are indicative of the different research paradigms adopted by the research team. Whereas the author approached the research within an interpretivist paradigm and was interested in understanding the participants’ stories, the research assistant and the surveyor understood the research within a positivist paradigm and were focused on discovering the “truth”. These problems illustrate the difficulty of doing research remotely with collaborators, intermediaries and translators who may have different understandings of what doing research encompasses and what is ethically appropriate.
Viviane Frings-Hessami, Monash University, Australia
To motivate user contributions, user-generated content sites routinely deploy incentive hierarchies. Badges are given to users for behaviors such as performing a certain number of actions of a given type. Yet the existing empirical literature remains largely unclear whether and how badges can influence and steer user behavior. This paper examines the value of badges on user activities in an online Q&A community, namely StackOverflow.com. By characterizing distinct patterns of change in user effort, we evaluate how users in different trajectory groups react to badges. Our results shows that the group-based trajectory model can identify five distinct behavior patterns and badges play an important role in specific groups. Moreover, we find that the steering effect is different for badges of different classes and categories. From a dynamic perspective, we argue that incentive behavior does not fit all, but it can be an important predictor for user engagement behavior trajectories.
Yao Zhang, Nanjing Agriculture University, People’s Republic of China
Using an online questionnaire, this study investigated the data science skills, core competencies, and career preference of 365 students spread across fourteen universities in Nigeria. Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics: Structural equation modeling. Tables, figures and charts were adopted in the presentation of results. Findings revealed that data science skills had positive significant effects on both core competencies and career preference, while core competencies did not have any positive significant effect on career preference. This paper contributed to existing literature by giving valuable insights into the level of data science knowledge, skills and core competencies of the participants. It also unearthed the trends in data science career preferences of students with implications for curriculum design and training of data scientists in Nigeria.
Oluyemi Ayanbode, Neuropsychiatric Hospital Aro Abeokuta, Nigeria
Broadly, the information science field has grown to encompass a more extensive set of data science competencies as the role of data, data literacy, and data visualization has grown. Schwabish explains, "now more than ever, content must be visual if it is to travel far (2021). Through coding selected years across 20 years of JASIST journal, from the years 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021; we were able to not only inventory the proportion of images that are data visualizations but also to identify trends and changes over time in the data visualizations contained in JASIST publications. Findings suggested that overall, the importance and complexity of data visualizations in publications increased over the date range studied. Additionally, as data visualizations were used more often, they were observed to become more complex. Still, once distilled into their simplest forms, a limited variety of data visualizations was used across the dataset. Therefore, there is a clear need for increased data literacy targeted toward complex data visualizations. Furthermore, opportunities exist to improve the types of data visualizations used in academic writing.
S.O. Jeffcoat, University at Albany, USA
As a work in progress, this paper will demonstrate the disturbing ambiguity concerning what happens to the colossal amount of digital remains - or the photos, videos, and messages left behind by deceased internet users (Lingel, 2013) on online platforms. By describing the current state of scholarly inquiry into how digital remains are conceptualized, this paper will provide a preamble exploration of issues and ethical implications as it relates to information privacy and digital dignity and the potential for commodification of digital remains (Karppi, 2013; Öhman & Floridi, 2017). The intention of this discussion is to demonstrate that the data of the dead should be handled with dignity as a category of information that deserves protection not for implicit harms against the information of the deceased, per se, but for the implications that any violation to this dignity imposes on surviving family, as well as the larger community of mourners. Without effective policies and regulations that provide guidelines for service providers and internet users, the dead are not afforded rights to their privacy or digital dignity, nor is their postmortem data protected.
Nilou Davoudi, University of British Columbia, Canada
This paper proposes and tests a conceptual model that identifies the antecedents of trust in AI, which could in turn lead to users’ willingness to accept AI recommendation systems. An online survey was conducted in the context of stock market investment recommendations. Responses came from 313 participants with prior investment experiences. Data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Results indicate that attitude towards AI and perceived AI accuracy were positively related to users’ trust in AI. Users’ AI anxiety was negatively related to trust in AI. Furthermore, users’ trust in AI was positively related to their willingness to accept AI recommendation systems. The paper extends previous works by understanding the role of users’ trust in AI. It suggests that the uptake of AI systems can be promoted by fostering favorable attitudes, greater perceived AI accuracy, and lower AI anxiety.
Anjan Pal, University of York, UK
Libraries and cultural institutions use cataloging and metadata standards to describe works and those responsible for creating them. These standards are used to create name authority records (NAR) to collocate creators’ works under single, authorized versions of their names. NARs employ controlled vocabulary to describe individuals and disambiguate names. NAR production is costly; therefore, few are updated when standards are revised, and controlled vocabularies are slow to adapt to a rapidly changing information landscape. Artificial intelligence provides opportunities to leverage social tagging to update and enhance NARs, while simultaneously improving user search and discovery. Our research demonstrates that social tags in the popular music domain align with the Resource Description and Access cataloging code’s NAR constructs. Next steps will examine how social tags relate to controlled vocabulary terms, as well as explore the use of artificial intelligence to enhance NARs and library search interfaces.
This paper proposes a hierarchical model for human-robot interaction which consists of three tiers that together account for robot anthropomorphism, whether the robot is classified into social categories, and which factors may influence human-robot communication. The top level of the model is based on the initial impression that individuals form of robots which is determined primarily by the robot’s physical appearance. At the mid-level of the model, Social Identity Theory is used to describe how people place robots into social categories as a function of the perceived race, ethnicity, and gender of the robot. An important consequence of categorizing robots by social factors is that the category determines whether the robot is judged to be an in-group or out-group member. The lowest level of the model focuses on the process of communication between human and robots and is guided by the Computers as Social Actor paradigm.
Jessica Barfield, University of Tennessee, USA
Video games provide excellent opportunities for people to manage their emotional well-being in everyday settings. In this study, the research team explores how video game players use games to regulate their moods and enhance their emotional and mental well-being to understand affective gameplay needs and behaviors. Using an online focus group study method, ten video game players’ gameplay behaviors and needs were investigated. Findings suggest that repetitive and meditative gameplay mechanics, in-game trophies and the availability of achievements, overall world-building and narrative aspects of the game, and the number of players supported by the game are important elements in supporting individual players’ various affective needs. The current study suggests that providing more options for selections and searches in retrieval and recommendation services to video game players would be helpful in satisfying their diverse affective needs.
Hyerim Cho and Joe Kohlburn, University of Missouri, USA
This study analyzes the characteristics of questions asked on social question and answer (Q&A) sites and explores how the characteristics of those questions affect deliberation quality. We collected COVID-19 virus discussions from an English (Quora.com) and a Chinese (Zhihu.com) social Q&A site. Content analysis found that certain question characteristics (i.e., length, type, emotion) significantly influenced user engagement and content quality. Longer questions were more likely to trigger answers with higher user engagement yet lower content quality. Conversational questions tended to develop answers with a higher engagement level, while informational questions were more like to lead higher content quality in diversity. Neutral questions might trigger higher user engagement level and higher rationality. Cross-platform and cross-culture aspects are also discussed.
Jieli Liu, Indiana University Bloomington, USA
Past research on accessibility and usability has primarily focused on digital accessibility but has paid less attention to how middle-skill jobs could be made more accessible. While accessibility is still an important issue in many sectors, accessibility in middle skill jobs is particularly important given the disproportionate number of Deaf workers in manual labor jobs. Due to language deprivation and discrimination, Deaf workers face limited employment opportunities. However, welding can provide uniquely rewarding job opportunities for Deaf workers because of its visual and spatial nature. This research study examines accessibility in the welding industry and asks how Deaf welders experience welding training and work and how technology and training can be made more accessible. In this research, we take a participatory and user-centered design approach to understand the experiences and needs of Deaf welders. As a team of Deaf and hearing researchers, we conducted in-depth interviews with four Deaf welders. Our findings point to the need for accessible training resources and improvements to welding technology. Overall, our research sheds light on the everyday training and employment experiences of Deaf welders and highlights advantages and disadvantages of being a Deaf or hard of hearing welder.
Voice assistants (VAs) are a unique type of semantic media that transects visual, oral and audio interaction and at the same time is heavily personified in its design, and often anthropomorphised by its users (Moriuchi, 2021). They are also dependent on the use of AI models to provide an accurate response to a user’s inquiry. This paper uses semi-structured interviews to examine the attitudes and experiences of long term users of VAs in regards to improving the AI model of their devices to help their user experience of VAs. Findings suggest that long term users have mixed sentiment towards providing their data for improving the AI model. It also reports on experiences with feedback mechanisms reformatted to voice mediums. The attitudes towards AI transparency and interpretations of how user’s contributed to the improvement of their VAs are discussed. Implications of the research provide insight on how users perceive their AI VAs, and how they are motivated and action continuous improvements to VAs through their everyday interactions.
Indra Mckie, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
This study reports the findings of the investigation on the sense-making of teachers during the transition to remote learning drawing from the experiences of the four teachers who were interviewed for this study as well as the experiences of the researchers who are also teachers. The analysis is anchored on the sense-making theory of Dervin (1999) in its senses as a methodology of getting an insight into how people bridge the gaps in their understanding and as a metatheory.
Kathleen Obille, University of the Philippines, Philippines; Marina Giron, Ilocos Norte College of Arts and Trades, Ilocos Norte
The aim of this paper is to describe some main findings from studies concerning the mental health information seeking of the university students. It also will present the research with an interdisciplinary approach whose purpose is to explore how university students in Croatia seek information about mental health, and what information sources they use to find necessary information. Quantitative method is used in the research and university students are filling out an online questionnaire (which is still in process). Preliminary research results revealed that respondents mostly seek information about stress and anxiety on the Internet. Students search for mental health information sometimes or rarely. Although most of the students faced mental health difficulties in the past academic year, they didn't use psychological counselling. This study can contribute in providing mental health support to university students by implementation of some psychological content in higher education.
Darko Lacović, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia
Multidisciplinary research (e.g., information behavior, software development, agile) requires appropriate combinations of methods for collecting rich information to inform new perspectives, theories and practices. Agile methodologies like Scrum can address rapid, continuous technological developments. They provide adaptive solutions to complex problems, cross-functional teams, stakeholder participation, rich information sharing and fostering trusted communication. Agile methods nurture open cultures of idea exchange where team members learn from shared experiences (lessons-learned, advice, solutions) offered during sprints (retrospective, recurring meetings). Various agile activities (e.g., collaboration) in conjunction with information-related activities (e.g., information sharing, expression of information needs, sense-making) manifest during such meetings. It is essential to make informed, purposeful choices on the combination and sequencing of data collection methods to foster the collection of rich information in agile information environments marked by their own methodologies. This paper presents data collection insights from a multimethod qualitative information behavior study that used observation, diaries and interviews to explore information sharing during product software development. It focuses on how data collection methods and method sequencing can enlighten similar research, e.g., how starting with diaries foster trust and promote openness during interviews, and how observation nurtures stronger awareness and sensitivity for theories and improved information practices.
Anika Meyer, University of Pretoria, South Africa
With social media platforms playing an increasingly important role during major public health emergencies, the algorithmic divide caused by the gap in algorithmic literacy is a new form of digital inequality and impact the information distribution. This study constructs a model of algorithmic divide in information epidemics of major public health events based on Risk Information Seeking and Processing model, perceived risk, affective response, information insufficiency and algorithmic content awareness and algorithmic awareness of FEAT in algorithmic literacy are considered as antecedent variables of algorithmic resistance behavior. The result of SEM was found that perceived risk positively influenced users' emotional responses; information insufficiency positively influenced algorithmic resistance behavior. Meanwhile, algorithmic content awareness positively influences information insufficiency, while algorithmic awareness of FEAT positively influences algorithmic resistance. This study provides a theoretical perspective of algorithmic divide for the study of risk communication and provides a theoretical reference for subsequent studies as well as for the management of public opinion under major public events.
Yutong Liu, Jilin University, People’s Republic of China
Increasingly, users of social networks engage in multicultural discussions involving nostalgia for a shared past.
The current study explores the impact of nostalgia and social network participation among Moroccan Jewish and Muslim online community users dealing with their cultural heritage.
The relationship between nostalgia and well-being has been extensively discussed, but as far as we know, there is little research exploring nostalgia as a moderator of social network discussions.
In the current study, we hypothesize that mood at nostalgic moments moderates the dealing with Morocco and multicultural communities from June to February 2020.
Four questionnaires were used in the study: demographics, social network participation, nostalgia mood, and well-being. As a result, 93 Jews and Muslims born in Morocco answered the questionnaires.
Our results confirm that nostalgia contributed significantly to the well-being and that among participants with a high level of nostalgia, a higher level of well-being contributes to a higher level of social network participation.
These findings are important as a positive effect of the contribution to social networks could lead to a higher time spent on social networks, which should be investigated in further research.
This article's dataset will be published in an online repository.
Yohanan Ouaknine, Independent Researcher, Israel
This paper for SIG-USE reports work in progress on qualitative content analysis research exploring documentary practices for oral history projects through the lens of human information behavior. It is the first study to bring sensitizing concepts in LIS to the oral history format. On-site research took place in fall 2022 to determine two units of analysis and investigate census and purposive samples of oral histories at the Science History Institute, Philadelphia, PA. Sensitizing concepts on information practice, information work, and communities of practice foregrounded human-centeredness in the oral history genre. Results suggest that documentary practices in the purposive sample reflect information use by multiple stakeholders whose frames of reference layer visible and invisible work in the conception, production, and documentation of oral history projects and co-authored interviews. The conclusion offers three directions for future research. Recommendations include conceptualizing stewardship as collaborative information practices and attributing information work.
We present a preliminary analysis of post types of asynchronous discussions in an online graduate course of Information and Library Science (ILS). Content analysis rendered a taxonomy with seven types, namely (1) reflecting on readings or lectures, (2) relating to personal experiences, (3) stimulating further discussions, (4) relating to real-life situations, (5) pointing to additional resources, (6) seeking answers, clarifications, or help, and (7) critiquing readings or lectures. The usefulness of the taxonomy is corroborated by a high inter-annotator agreement. The number of posts responding to the initial post of a thread, which can be regarded as an indicator of the popularity of the thread, is correlated to the initial post’s type. The usefulness of the dataset produced from this line of research is discussed and future work is outlined.
Jianqiang Wang, University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA
SAGE (a Semantic Annotator for knowledge Graph Exploration) is a “Thing” annotation system. Here, “Thing” refers to any concept, named individuals (aka entities), entity relations, and attributes. The system is primarily built based on the idea of “string to thing” where the “string” is any given text (e.g., abstract of an article) as input by the user. For annotation, the system utilizes the knowledge graph(s). SAGE can be used by anyone for annotating Things and for their exploitation on the Web. The annotation of things is done through exact and partial matches. For the exact matches, the system makes explicit the name of the knowledge graphs it is sourced from. It also shows the type hierarchies for the matched named entities. The system is designed following the rule-based approach. In the current work, we describe the SAGE annotation system along with its features and various usage, and the experimental results.
Biswanath Dutta, Indian Statistical Institute, India
The objectives of the Middle East(ME) chapter are to facilitate personal networking and professionalism in the ME and other parts of the world. For this purpose, six Middle Eastern countries were randomly and analyzed by bibliometric methods between 1979-2022 overall years’ scientific productivity in the Information Science and Library Science research area. R programming language and Biliometrix Packages are used for analysis. The relevant data were collected from the Web of Science on December 10, 2022. The productivity of ME countries in all document types was only 1.47% percent in article and review documents. Although academic productivity has increased considerably over the years, the contribution to the global literature was very low. It emerges as an area open to development. Among the randomly selected ME countries’ scientific production are respectively; Turkey(f:1,375),Iran(f:1,268),Kuwait (f:244),Egypt(f:232),Oman(f:164), and Iraq(f:48).The institutions that stood out with their scientific productivity were Hacettepe University(f: 259,Turkey),Islamic Azad University(f:212,Iran), Egyptian Knowledge Bank(f: 207,Egypt). The study is critical to see the general situation of the field in geography where the cities that have hosted the largest libraries in history (such as Alexandria,Ephesus,Pergamon) have important heritage for information and library science and to discuss the question of how we can achieve better.
Muhammet Damar, Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey | Reham Alshaheen, Kuwait University, Kuwait
Social media's "dark side"—including dis/misinformation and harassment—is increasingly problematic. What strategies do people use to cope with such issues in their daily life? Based on Lazarus and Folkman's Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (TMSC), this study investigated how individuals cope with such issues on Twitter. An online survey, including the Ways of Coping Questionnaire, was used to analyze 800 US adult Twitter users' coping strategies. The study found Folkman and colleagues' 8-strategy grouping applicable to this context. The top coping strategies were Distancing (e.g., "Went on as if nothing had happened"), Self-Controlling (e.g., "I tried to keep my feelings to myself"), and Planful Problem-Solving (e.g., "I made a plan of action and followed it"). Primary and secondary appraisals were associated with most strategies (7 out of 8). Significant demographic differences were found, especially with Twitter usage frequency and gender. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Sei-Ching Joanna Sin, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
With the increasing popularity of short video applications, health information recommendation has played an important role for health information dissemination and health management. However, a prominent issue is that its effect on self-management behavior and the mechanism of its influence are still unclear. Based on the SSO framework, this paper combines health belief model and self-validation theory to construct a model from the perspective of perceived stress. A diary study was conducted to collect panel data on users' daily status and fluctuating behaviors, while a multilevel data analysis method was used to analyze the influencing mechanism. The results found that health threats (perceived susceptibility and perceived severity) had no significant effect on users' willingness to consistently adopt health information recommendations; self-validation (perceived effectiveness and perceived accuracy) positively influenced users' willingness to consistently adopt health information recommendations; and individuals' self-management behavioral decisions were inhibited by their willingness to consistently use.
SiGuLeng WuJi, School of Business and Management, Jilin University
Major efforts to combat disinformation and trolling on Twitter, due to its impact on election results across the globe, have been documented while trolling seems to be as prevalent as ever before. We aim to examine if and how the extent of trolling toward political figures on Twitter changed between the 2016 and 2020 US presidential election cycles, analyzing outrage comments made towards Tweets by 20 Democrat and Republican candidates for President/VP and Senate/House. Based on content analysis of 9,461 comments, we found significantly more trolling towards Republicans than Democrats, both for presidential candidates, as well as candidates for the Senate and the House, demonstrating trolling asymmetry. We also found that between 2016 and 2020 there was a significant increase in overall trolling and in trolling towards Republicans, but not in overall trolling towards President/VP candidates, highlighting the increase in domestic trolling rather than external interference in election results.
Pnina Fichman, Indiana University, USA
As a result of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the American Library Association revised its Code of Ethics to increase awareness of and recommend actions to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Still, given that past research into library service equality shows mixed findings, there is a need today more than ever before to examine if public libraries provide equitable online reference services. Based on an analysis of over a thousand email responses, we found that public libraries provided equal service to all users regardless of their gender and race most of the time; however, females received significantly faster and friendlier responses than male users did, and Caucasians, particularly female Caucasians received more emails than Black users of either gender.
This paper explores the potential for using a voice interface to improve access to reading materials for students who are blind. Students who are blind face many barriers to higher education, including access to reading materials due to graphical library database interfaces that are often not designed to be accessible. This paper reports findings from semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 25 academic librarians with experience serving students who are blind. Themes emerging from the interviews included challenges in developing a voice interface for accessing library materials in terms of the academic library context, user behavior, and voice interface technology. For the academic library context, the challenges included cost, technical expertise, and spatial limitations. For user behavior, the challenges involved developing complex search queries using a voice interface. For voice interface technology, librarians identified the lack of interconnectivity among library databases, the difficulty in presenting search query results via voice, and the potential for bias as challenges. These findings demonstrate broad interest in such a voice interface among academic librarians and provide guideposts for steering the design of such a voice interface.
Jaxsen Day and Kenneth Fleischmann, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Posters
In the era of digitization, audio-visual content is gaining much importance in the archives. The research focuses on digital film archives at a global level with an aim to ensure that digitized films are organized, discovered, utilized, and understood in the future. This poster presents the findings of eight digital archives with different domains, geographic origins, and purposes for wider adaptability. The study identified the metadata elements found across the access points studied and analyzed whether these help in promoting resource discovery. We also took into consideration parameters such as the controlled vocabularies used, overlapping access points, and search options among others. The authors end with a future scope to further investigate the availability and applicability of access points present in existing metadata schemas and uniformity at the item level.
Bhakti Gala, Central University of Gujarat, India | Ananya Deka, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India
This study aims to understand how big data researchers see value in big data curation. Researchers’ understanding of curation value is critical to preparing data for future use and working with curation professionals in a timely manner. Based on the literature analysis, the findings suggest that big data researchers acknowledge the value of curation in staying abreast of technology and data quality, but social aspects (e.g., legal and ethical issues) are less recognized.
Ayoung Yoon, Indiana University Indianapolis, USA
Computer science and information science and technology fields have long struggled to increase gender representation. The lack of female/women authors and researchers in these fields has been noted in several studies in past decades. A recent analysis of ten top computer and information science journals indicates that efforts to increase female participation in computer science and information science research fields may have had some effect, as representation of female authors has grown by a significant margin in the past decade. However, there remains a substantial gulf between the number of female authors in these fields compared the male authors.
Brady Lund, University of North Texas, USA
This work in progress examines LIS students’ perceptions of Twitter using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Previous research has employed the TAM to examine social media adoption among students and students’ use of social media as an information source. The current research will take a qualitative document analysis approach to analyze student papers (n=77) reflecting on their experience using Twitter. This research is expected to extend our understanding of Twitter use by emerging information professionals. Findings will be relevant for educators in library and information science programs and employers to help set expectations of the technology skills of future employees.
Africa Hands, University at Buffalo, USA
This poster reports the objectives and design of the research, which aims to explore the user experience of graduate students collaborating on a hypothetical class assignment in a virtual environment through VR technologies (i.e., Meta Quest headset, “Horizon Workrooms”). The project contains two phases. Phase I investigates participants’ assessment of the usability of VR technologies in supporting their collaboration to identify potential usability issues. In Phase II, students will perform comparable tasks in Zoom and in person to draw comparisons of their collaboration experiences in the three modalities. The results will imply VR technologies' feasibility, strengths, and weaknesses in collaborative work for information-intensive tasks. A pilot session in Mid-November suggested that students were enthusiastic about learning VR technologies and were highly engaged during the session, yet, with some usability issues. For instance, most felt tired and motion-sick after wearing the headset. They were unsatisfied with the half-bodied avatar and the unusual twisting of body parts in certain motions. Hand tracking was sometimes delayed and difficult for sophisticated tasks, etc., The research team expects to run the testing sessions in Spring 2023, which will reveal more interesting findings regarding the role of VR technologies in academic collaborative work.
Zhan Hu and Jie Jiang, Simmons University, USA
Infertility is a physically and mentally-taxing medical condition that impacts one in every eight couples. This qualitative study employed semi-structured interviews to explore how individuals with infertility seek, use, and share information. As self-described knowledgeable experts, study participants identified seeking information as a way to counteract difficult emotional responses and as an opportunity for a sense of control. Thematic analysis of the findings unveiled that individuals with infertility often feel consumed by the need to constantly search for information. This work seeks to expand discussions about how individuals engage with information and how high levels of emotional and physical investment in a topic may lead to the experience of feeling consumed by information.
Emily Vardell, Emporia State University, US
The purpose of this study is to identify the top (by frequency) research methods and theories in information seeking articles published in health communications journals. Content analysis was used to identify the methods and theories used in relevant articles. The findings indicate that information seeking research in this discipline is homogeneous in top methods (questionnaire) but employs a wide range of theories. This study provides an overview and investigation of information seeking research that is likely to support the design of future research within the health communication field.
Ting Wang, Emporia State University, USA
Serendipity, also known as information encountering (IE) in human information behavior, is the unexpected discovery of information that has drawn much interest from the scientific community and popular culture. Personal productivity apps typically offer services like task management and focus maintenance which are not seen as compatible with IE. This study explores if IE is present in features of personal productivity apps. Forty-four popular personal productivity apps were examined for the presence of IE features. A text analysis was also conducted to determine if IE steps were mentioned on these companies’ websites. The results showed that 65.9% of the apps offered IE features. Additionally, 34.1% of the web-sites included names of IE steps. This implies that personal productivity apps are offering IE features and their websites are mentioning IE steps. This is evidence that IE features have a presence in the world of personal productivity.
Jennifer Yoon Sunoo, Simmons University, USA
Background: HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the US. However, the HPV vaccine recommended as protection for pre-pubescents has been a controversial subject over its 12 years. The controversy is seen more in the interaction between culture and vaccination among US immigrants. Therefore, the study explores the information behaviors of African foreign-born mothers (FBMs) in relation to HPV and vaccination.
Method: Guided by Elfreda Chatman’s normative behavior theory, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 FBMs in the US.
Results: This population’s HPV vaccination-related information behavior is largely passive/accidental information encountered while engaging in other activities (e.g., doctor’s visits), often leading to information seeking or avoidance. African FBMs wavered between hesitancy and the need to protect their children in the host culture (acculturation). Vaccine hesitancy stems from their cultural and religious support for abstinence. Furthermore, sex as cultural taboo implies that little HPV vaccination-related information occurs within the purview of the women either in discussions at home or in their small groups. Their preferred sources include the internet and medical professionals--co-ethnic providers.
Conclusion: The findings suggest stronger collaboration between health stakeholders and minorities concerning effective vaccinations. This also calls for a more diverse physician workforce in healthcare delivery.
Obianuju Aliche and Mia Liza Lustria, Florida State University, USA
This poster presents the first phase of a study into the effect of paywalls on online information seeking behavior. Using a narrative review approach, the authors have reviewed and synthesized the literature on the effect of paywalls on information seeking behavior. This was done as a first phase to a study of the effect of paywalls on online information seeking behavior. Contradictory findings were found. Important questions were raised about institutions and associations paying for access on behalf of their members. Aside these, suggestions are made on the gaps that need to be filled, such as; (a) the need to examine how the different types of paywall configuration affect online information seeking behavior; (b) the need for more interviews and surveys to better understand the phenomenon and (c) the need to examine the role paywalls play in other aspects of online information seeking behavior other than demand for content, article view times and number of downloads.
Richmond Yeboah and Joan Bartlett, McGill University, Canada
This paper details the motivation, methods, and preliminary results of an exploratory analysis investigating the impact of lay summaries on the type and level of engagement by non-academic sources such as Twitter and news media. Data from Web of Science and Altmetric Explorer was collected and combined to create a dataset with article-level metadata and mentions for analysis. Preliminary results indicate that lay summaries may facilitate the dissemination of research to the general public; however, further exploration into how these patterns are exhibited in different subject areas is required.
Deanna Zarrillo, Drexel University, USA
Invited Talk
Abstract
Information historians argue that the shift from pre-modern to modern understandings of information was not the same everywhere. And they acknowledge that transnational perspectives reinforce universal ideals of freedom of access to information, and freedom of expression. Socio-political and cultural analyses of information deserve their place on a continuum of applications in which time and place matter.
This paper presents a biographical analysis of three ‘information heroes’: a Cape slave’s use of Tamil-language medical information in the first Dutch colonial period (1652-1795); a printer’s information campaign in the Apartheid period (1948-1994); and a whistle-blower’s revelations about corruption in the ‘new’ South Africa. Their stories embody an ongoing struggle for information freedom in South Africa.
Bio
Archie Dick, Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Archie is an Emeritus Professor, and former Head of the Department of Information Science, and Chairperson of the School of Information Technology. He previously taught at the University of the Western Cape, and the University of South Africa. International positions include: Visiting Professor at Wayne State University, in Detroit; Endowment and Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champaign; Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Centre for the History of Print and Digital Culture; Participant in the Thai Royal Golden Jubilee Ph.D. program under the Thailand Research Fund, 2017-2019. Archie served as Deputy Chairperson of IFLA’s Committee of Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression, 2006-2007, and is a past-Chairperson of the National Council of Library and Information Services (NCLIS) in South Africa. Cambridge University Press published his recent book: Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850-1920s.