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Library Spring Symposium 2015: What's really going on?
Held April 14, 2015
Recent Submissions
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“I’m comfortable with it”: User stories of health information on WikipediaApplying a critical-constructivist approach, 21 semi-structured interviews conducted from June to October 2021 were analyzed thematically. Qualitative analysis suggests that users reported that Wikipedia’s health content can facilitate personal agency, is familiar and convenient to access, and that individuals’ trust in Wikipedia is contextual, conditional, and framed by their personal experiences.
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Scaffolded, embedded required: information literacy education in undergraduate health sciencesBackground: The Health Sciences Library and the Bachelor of Health Sciences (Honours) Program (BHSc) at McMaster University worked together to build a multi-year information literacy (IL) curriculum embedded within the program under a suite of courses called Praxis Pathways. Description: Praxis Pathways consists of four Threads. Thread 4: Information Literacy is the focus of this case report. The authors will describe the multi-year embedded IL curriculum, which is scaffolded to build both IL skills, such as database searching, and introduce students to key conceptual conversations in IL, production and dissemination. Outcomes: BHSc program graduates in 2023 will be the first to have completed all four years of the Praxis Pathways courses, including the IL program developed and delivered by the library. The authors will describe how the impact of the program will be evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively going forward. Conclusion: Embedded librarianship for multi-year, scaffolded IL education in undergraduate programs continues to be a rarity, despite the acknowledgement that one-shot instruction has several limitations. The authors present this case report to share how they embedded a for-cred IL curriculum in an undergraduate program that looks beyond the one-shot, skill-based tutorial and focuses on developing adaptive, information-literate lifelong learners.
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"It's a very straight space": gender-diverse students' narratives about the libraryHow do students with diverse gender identities experience and perceive the academic library? What can we learn from our students to help develop services, spaces and collections that support their safety and well-being? This presentation will highlight results from a qualitative case study at an academic library by exploring themes related to the students’ experiences with library workers, the library’s physical environment and its collections. The study results position the library as both a source of positive, transformational potential and site of harm and oppression. Students reported experiencing great discomfort while using library bathrooms and study spaces and were distressed by encountering library materials containing outdated, inaccurate information about gender identity/sexual diversity. Gender diverse students described affirming experiences with library workers while being confronted with library technology – e.g. computers – which deadnamed them. And they questioned why libraries provide platforms to transphobic speakers in the name of intellectual freedom and highlighted the dangers of espousing neutrality. While themes surfaced by this study reflect the participants’ individual lived experiences, they are broadly reflected in survey results, scholarly literature and other research documenting these concerns. Finally, this presentation will describe students’ suggestions for how academic libraries can bridge the gaps to become safer and more inclusive. Attendees will be invited to reflect on changes they could incorporate in their home libraries.
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"It's a very straight space": gender-diverse students' narratives about the libraryHow do students with diverse gender identities experience and perceive the academic library? What can we learn from our students to help develop services, spaces and collections that support their safety and well-being? This presentation will highlight results from a qualitative case study at an academic library by exploring themes related to the students’ experiences with library workers, the library’s physical environment and its collections. The study results position the library as both a source of positive, transformational potential and site of harm and oppression. Students reported experiencing great discomfort while using library bathrooms and study spaces and were distressed by encountering library materials expressing outdated, inaccurate information about gender identity/sexual diversity. They described affirming experiences with library workers while being confronted with library technology – e.g. computers – which deadnamed them. And they questioned why libraries provide platforms to transphobic speakers in the name of intellectual freedom and highlighted the dangers of espousing neutrality. While themes surfaced by this study reflect the participants’ individual lived experiences, they are broadly reflected in survey results, scholarly literature and other works documenting these topics. Finally, this presentation will describe students’ suggestions for how academic libraries can become safer and more inclusive.
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Subduing the “moral panic”: Sustaining a nuanced conversation about predatory publishingIntroduction: Predatory publishing has long raised alarm bells among faculty, librarians and research administrators. Often falsely conflated with open access publishing as a whole, predatory publishing is painted as a grievous threat to the sanctity of scholarly research and a waste of research funding. However, the 'moral panic'* over predatory publishing may be unjustified. Equipping researchers to make informed decisions about publishing is a more sustainable approach. Building partnerships and sharing evidence about faculty publishing patterns can support this type of advocacy. Description: Librarians at institutions without subscriptions to costly citation analysis tools such as Scopus may find it difficult to analyze open access publishing patterns. However, freely available academic search tools such as The Lens can provide useful snapshots to guide education and support for researchers. Data from Brock University indicates that our faculty are overwhelmingly publishing in OA journals which would not typically be deemed predatory. Partnering with institutional research services via outreach and workshops has allowed the Library to share this data and other information about open access with key audiences of research administrators and faculty. Outcomes: This outreach helps the Library to guide researchers towards a more robust understanding of open access and scholarly publishing and away from reliance on problematic tools such as blacklists. In addition to helping authors make informed decisions about where to publish, such programming has boosted uptake for research consultations around publishing and open access. Discussion: The presenter will share tools and strategies for implementing this collaborative approach at other libraries.
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It’s Time to Recognize Wikipedia as a Health Information ResourceWith more than 300 language editions, Wikipedia offers accessible health information written in plain language to a wide audience. Having survived more than twenty years, it is broadly considered the “grown-up” of the internet due to its sheer longevity and maturity. Along with evidence that Wikipedia is more reliable than widely believed, it has emerged as the most frequently accessed web site for health information despite a lingering stigma. Grounded in real-life examples of health events, the author reinforces Wikipedia as a tool for public health education. With wider acceptance of Wikipedia as a health information resource, existing opportunities for education, investment, and improvement of the world’s largest encyclopedia can be cultivated.
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No Justice, Only Struggle2022 has been a year of overlapping crises. The so-called “Freedom Convoys” paralyzing Canadian communities, the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to cause excess death and disability, the war in Ukraine, the intensifying effects of climate change, and increasing inflation have all signaled that we find ourselves in a new era, one that can be described as authoritarian capitalism. In this article, we view the restructuring of Canadian universities as yet another facet of authoritarian capitalism, which uses overlapping crises to further proletarianize library labour and fully subsume it into the “learning factory.” Using Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s theorization of the politics of capital’s operations, we examine the library restructuring processes taking place at four Canadian universities: Alberta, Brock, Laurentian, and OCAD. We view the reorganizations taking place there as efforts on behalf of university administrators to use the intensification of global forces of capitalism to exploit academic librarian labour. Ultimately, we argue that Canadian librarians are witnessing both formal and real subsumption in Canadian universities, precipitated by the overlapping crises outlined earlier. As a result, we insist that librarians need to develop a politics of struggle to build collective consciousness and action in the face of authoritarian capitalism.
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“Put the fucking salary in the job ad!”In February 2016, I activated the @lis_grievances Twitter bot. The dynamics of the bot are straightforward and can be described in three steps: First, a person sends a direct message to the account; second, the message is stripped of all identifying information; and third, upon passing a minimal list of posting criteria, the message is tweeted. More than five years on, the bot has collected a corpus of thousands of tweets, some safe to publish on Twitter and some not, ranging from benign takes on the library establishment to profanity-laden tirades. Quite often, the tweets invoke feelings that range from pathos to disgust, and sometimes even situational irony and humor as evidenced, for example, in this tweet from June 1, 2018: “How can we innovate when we don’t have permissions to install software?” This chapter examines tweeted content through the online disinhibition effect (ODE), a theory explaining how anonymity pushes sentiment into extreme directions. According to ODE, users of @lis_grievances experience a lack of restraint due to their anonymity and, thus, feel comfortable venting and otherwise offering observations of and comments on perceived flaws in their individual workplaces and in the LIS profession at large. Using text analysis and a new custom metric called the grief index, a qualitative and quantitative examination of the corpus of tweets is presented and explored as evidence of systemic dysfunctional library states.
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Data Analysis as the Next StepArticle outlines the importance of community action for providing infrastructure to support analysis and use of whistle-blower data. Datashare from ICIJ (https://datashare.icij.org/) is described.
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Information Seeking Behaviors, Attitudes, and Choices of Academic MathematiciansMathematicians in academic institutions utilize a variety of resources and strategies to seek, find, and use scholarly information and news. Using a sample of mathematicians, researchers surveyed 112 students and faculty at four Canadian university institutions to explore self-perceived success rates, resources consulted, databases used, use of social media, and citation management systems. Further, 12 follow-up interviews were completed with mathematicians to better interpret survey results, resulting information-seeking behaviors, choices, strategies, and feelings on keeping up to date with information needs. According to survey results, a minority of mathematicians (12.5 percent) acknowledged that they were successfully keeping up to date. However, a significant number of mathematicians (28.6 percent) indicated that they were unsuccessful and could do better in remaining current with information needs. Co-investigators, using qualitative analyses, identified four emergent themes related to remaining current: (1) The “slower pace of math” pervades all aspects of this discipline;” (2) There are “too many papers – and not enough time” to effectively search, evaluate, and read scholarly papers of interest; (3) Mathematicians collectively acknowledge that they are open to strategies and technologies where they “could do better” keeping up to date; and (4) Mathematicians have divided loyalties using databases when searching for information by means of “MathSciNet in a Google world.” Additional insights document how mathematicians are guided by mathematical peculiarities and discipline-specific practices. This study helps to shed light on opportunities for academic librarians to identify and meet mathematicians’ evolving information needs.
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Information Seeking Behaviors, Attitudes, and Choices of Academic PhysicistsPhysicists in academic institutions utilize a variety of resources and strategies to seek, find, and use scholarly information and news. Using a sample of physicists, researchers surveyed 182 students and faculty at seven Canadian university institutions to explore self-perceived success rates, resources consulted, databases used, and use of social media and citation management systems. To complement the survey, 11 follow up interviews/focus groups were completed with participants to further uncover information-seeking behaviors, choices, strategies, and feelings around keeping up to date with information needs. According to survey results, a minority of physicists (15.4%) acknowledged that they were successfully keeping up to date. However, a significant number of physicists (28.6%) indicated that they were unsuccessful and could do better in remaining current with information needs. Co-investigators, using qualitative analyses, identified four emergent themes: (1) There are “too many papers – and not enough time” to effectively search, evaluate and read scholarly papers of interest; (2) Staying up to date is important especially in competitive research areas; (3) Graduate students seek information differently than faculty and experienced researchers; and (4) The arXiv database is important to many physicists. Additional minor themes included physics-related publishing is constantly evolving; physicists use a variety of information-seeking behaviors; and, information-seeking methods can differ between physics subdisciplines. This study aims to shed light on opportunities for academic librarians to identify and meet physicists’ evolving information behaviors, attitudes, choices, and needs.
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InfoSkills PLUS: Your Key to Research SuccessDiscover the advantages of collaborating with other campus partners to develop, promote, and deliver a unique non-credit interactive information skills workshop series. Learn the importance of flexibility interactivity and modularity to the success of a non-credit information skills program. Learn how to incorporate the knowledge management practices of Learning Before, Learning During, and Learning After into team project activities.
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I still haven't found what I'm looking for: Reflections on 10+ years of providing library orientation and instruction to a Business English bridging programA librarian's personal reflection on 10 plus years of providing orientation and information literacy instruction to graduate students in a Business English bridging program at Brock University.
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Benchmarking business database holdings in Canada: Results of a gap analysisThis lightning talk presents the results of an exploratory study of the database holdings of an aspirant group of ten AACSB/Equis accredited Canadian business schools with doctoral programs. Who had the most databases? What were the most widely held titles? What does a gap analysis reveal about how Brock University fares against this aspirant group?
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Book Review: RabbitsBook Review of 'Rabbits' written by Terry Miles.
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DESIGN SPRINTS AND DIRECT EXPERIMENTATION: DIGITAL HUMANITIES MUSIC PEDAGOGY AT A SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGEIn this essay, we detail the pedagogical collaboration between a digital humanities librarian, a professor of music and digital media, and a second-year music student that took the form of a design sprint. The product of the design sprint was the Mapping Sentiments through Music (MStM) application. Using this project as a case study, we argue that both digital humanities and music education share a commonality: both disciplines can incorporate elements of design thinking to be successful. As a result, our efforts center direct experimentation with a team, and foster design thinking by promoting descriptive exchange, creative problem solving, and the creation of emergent rather than explicitly delimited meanings. We conclude with several remarks on overlaps between music and design pedagogy, and on librarian-faculty collaborations. This article was published in the Music Library Association’s journal, Notes 77, 4, June 2021, and 561-585. The version of record is available at https://proxy.library.brocku.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=150204301&site=ehost-live&scope=site. This material may not be copied or reposted without written permission of MLA
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Scaling up research data services: a saga of organizational redesign gone awryAn academic library may initiate organizational renewal and redesign in order to better pursue new strategic priorities. In the case of the Brock University Library, one of these priorities was active engagement throughout the research life cycle. The draft organizational design framework proposed the creation of a new unit that takes a holistic life cycle approach to research, including data literacy, research data management and other services. Unfortunately, it also called for the elimination of the role of subject liaison librarians, who would be redeployed in other ways. No one was more shocked at this turn of events than me, because as the Business and Economics Librarian, I know how crucial it is to understand the disciplinary landscape with respect to research practices in order to develop research data services that align with researcher needs. This study provides evidence for the discipline-specific needs of business and economics researchers for data reference, data literacy, and data retrieval assistance, derived from a content analysis of graduate student theses and a review of consultation statistics. Will this evidence be sufficient to preserve this role, or will this become a saga of organizational redesign gone awry?
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Business data: issues and challenges from the Canadian perspectiveThis paper explores the issues and challenges that we have faced as Canadian academic business librarians when working with business data. As this is an exploratory study, we hope only to start a discussion among data librarians about some key challenges facing the academic community related to supporting the teaching and research use of business data. Our paper begins with a brief discussion of general data trends, followed by a detailed exploration of business data trends and trends in Canadian business education. We discuss challenges and issues related to working with business data from both the collections and reference service perspectives, including the pros and cons of providing business data services and support within the library environment. We conclude by suggesting some measures that both academic business librarians and data librarians can take to address some of these challenges.
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The End of Libraries and Librarianship - Part 34Librarians have bemoaned the constant clatter overheard from commentators that libraries are obsolete and no longer relevant. This observation is contrary to the lived experiences of those that serve in and depend upon public and academic libraries. A call to action challenges librarians everywhere to change this narrative by intentionally sharing stories of their essential work, service, community building… with anyone who will listen. An annotated list of readings and streaming videos is provided that builds on the inspirational work of David Lankes, Lisa Peet, Lance Werner, Mark Smith, Shamichael Hallman, Catherine Murray-Must, Michael Stephens and others. Libraries are observed to be places of transformative change. Librarians are found to be passionate, courageous and indispensable. Story telling is a powerful instrument for librarians and people that volunteer and serve in libraries to make the seemingly invisible work of libraries - more visible.
