Graduate School of Library and Information Science - University of Illinois

May News Digest

kimsch — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:41:01 +0000

News From GSLIS at Illinois

Faculty News

Downie introduces HTRC to scholars in Hong Kong
J. Stephen Downie, professor and associate dean for research, traveled to Hong Kong this spring to speak to scholars at the University of Hong Kong about the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), of which he is co-director. The HTRC enables advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge and ensures that this cultural record is preserved long into the future. Downie shared current and planned projects, including work on enabling the nonconsumptive analyses of copyrighted materials, and discussed the ways in which scholars can work with and through the HTRC, which is open to institutions worldwide.

NSF supports Efron’s work with temporal data in search
The National Science Foundation is supporting Assistant Professor Miles Efron’s work to improve search with a three-year, $408,908 grant. Efron is working on new algorithms that build upon the current strengths of search but add a new dimension—time. “We are at a point where soon we won’t have the luxury of ignoring the temporal aspect of data,” said Efron. “In order for search to be successful, time has to make its way into search engines.”

Jenkins, Stevenson to present at ALSC preconference
Associate Professor Christine Jenkins and Center for Children’s Books Director Deborah Stevenson will each host a breakout session at this year’s ALA ALSC Preconference, “A Wild Ride: 75 Years of the Caldecott Medal,” on Friday, June 28, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Jenkins will lead “The Caldecott Medal and Social Issues,” and Stevenson will co-host a breakout session on “Serving on the Caldecott Committee.”

McDonough appears on CBC
Associate Professor Jerome McDonough recently was a guest on CBC Radio’s Spark with Nora Young. McDonough spoke with Young about digital preservation and gaming, emphasizing the importance of preserving not only the software and the servers, but also the nuances of gaming culture and history.

McDowell travels to Amsterdam
Assistant Professor Kate McDowell recently traveled to libraries that serve youth in Amsterdam as part of a developing research project about current trends and transformations in youth services librarianship. McDowell received the GSLIS Centennial Scholar Award to fund this trip.

Palmer delivers distinguished lecture
Carole Palmer, professor and director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, delivered the inaugural Ed Mignon Distinguished Lecture in Information Science at the University of Washington iSchool on May 16, 2013. Her talk was titled, “Data Curation and the Reuse Value of Digital Research Data: Meeting the Aims of Multiple Disciplines and Stakeholders.” Palmer has led education initiatives in data curation since 2005, including two academic programs: a specialization in data curation in the GSLIS master’s program and a biological information specialist option in a cross-departmental bioinformatics master’s degree. She currently is a member of the National Academy of Sciences study committee on Future Career Opportunities and Educational Requirements for Digital Curation, after serving previously on the study committee on Building Cyber-infrastructure for Combustion Research.

Tilley’s comic research receives media attention
Assistant Professor Carol Tilley’s recent paper, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics,” published in Information and Culture: A Journal of History, has received a great deal of press coverage, including an article in The New York Times, and has been popular in Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. She also has authored a book chapter, “Comics in the Classroom: Using Comics in Language Arts Classrooms in the 1930s and 1940s,” published in Graphic Novels in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art, edited by Carrye Kay Syma and Robert G. Weiner. At the ALA Annual Conference in June, Tilley will headline a program called, “Busting the Comics Code: Comics, Censorship, and Librarians.”

Congratulations to Miles Efron and Kate McDowell!
This spring, faculty members Miles Efron and Kate McDowell were notified that they have been awarded tenure and will be promoted to associate professor effective August 16, 2013. Congratulations to Miles and Kate!

Staff and Student News

GSLIS poster earns honorable mention at iConference
Doctoral student Shameem Ahmed, Associate Professor Catherine Blake, Assistant Professor Kate Williams, doctoral student Noah Lenstra, and master’s student Qiyuan Liu earned an Honorable Mention award at the 2013 iConference for their poster, “Identifying Claims in Social Science Literature.” The poster presented initial findings from the application of the Claim Framework, typically used in biomedical literature, to social science research.

Irish awarded IAS Colston Research Fellowship
Sharon Irish, project coordinator at the GSLIS Center for Digital Inclusion and lecturer at the School of Architecture at Illinois, has been awarded a 2013-2014 Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Colston Research Fellowship from the University of Bristol in Bristol, England. Irish will investigate the roles of historical research and community-based organizations in the engagement, production, and sharing of local knowledge in marginal communities.

Lenstra honored by YMCA
Doctoral student Noah Lenstra was recently named recipient of the Fred S. Bailey Fellowship for Community Leadership, Service, and Activism by the University YMCA. The award supports graduate students who have shown a strong commitment to community organizing, activism, and/or service.

Lenstra, Emery present at Personal Digital Archiving
Doctoral student Noah Lenstra presented his paper, “Connecting Local & Family History with Personal Digital Archiving: Findings from Studies in Four Midwestern Public Libraries,” and master's student Jan Emery presented, "Personal Artifacting," at the Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference at the University of Maryland on February 21, 2013.

Martaus attends International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
GSLIS doctoral student Alaine Martaus attended the 34th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts from March 20-23, 2013 in Orlando, Florida, where she chaired panels on “Defining Children’s Fantasy” and “Adaptations in and of Neil Gaiman for Children and Young Adults” and presented on a panel for “Mind(s) Gone Walking: Conceptualizing Gaiman’s Child Characters.”

Roberts, Sweeney travel to Dublin for panel presentation
In June, doctoral candidates Sarah Roberts and Miriam Sweeney as well as Institute for Communications Research doctoral student Ergin Bulut will travel to the International Association for Media and Communication Research annual meeting in Dublin to present their panel, “Demystifying the ‘Digital Economy’: Critical Interventions in Online Moderation, Anthropomorphized Virtual Agents, and Gaming.”

Roberts to attend international Summer School in June
Doctoral candidate Sarah Roberts has been accepted to the International Joint Summer School on Communication and Global Power Shifts in Vancouver, BC, Canada to be held in June. The Summer School examines the mutually constitutive relationships between rapidly transforming global communication systems and shifting structures of global political economic and cultural power.

Takazawa presents co-authored paper at ACM Conference
Doctoral student Aiko Takazawa presented a paper co-authored with Professor Mike Twidale, “When you wish upon a blog: how collaborative information seeking can interleave with CSCW,” at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work held in February.

Yan receives CALA scholarship
Master’s student Liu Yan has received the Sheila Suen Lai Scholarship from the Chinese American Librarians Association based on her outstanding achievements.

School News

GSLIS ranked number one
This spring, U.S. News & World Report once again ranked GSLIS as the top graduate professional school of library and information science, a position held by GSLIS since the publication first started ranking LIS programs. GSLIS also ranked highly in a number of specialty groups, including first place in Services for Children and Youth and second place in Digital Librarianship. The School also placed in the top ten for Archives and Preservation, Health Librarianship, Information Systems, and School Library Media.

Announcing the creation of the UNESCO Center for Global Citizenship
Amani Ayad, coordinator for the LIS Access Midwest (LAMP) Program at GSLIS, and Barbara Ford (MS ’73), director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at Illinois, are among the founders of the newly established UNESCO Center for Global Citizenship (UCGC), a community-university organization founded on the belief that multicultural knowledge and intercultural understanding generate a better, more interesting, more productive, and—above all—more peaceful world in which to live. UCGC is supported by the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois.

CCB hosts Walter Dean Myers
The Center for Children’s Books (CCB) along with the Children’s Book Council, hosted Walter Dean Myers, critically acclaimed author of children’s and young adult literature, during his visit to the Champaign area on March 25-26, 2013. Myers visited as part of his work as this year’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, established in 2008 by the Librarian of Congress to raise national awareness of the importance of young people’s literature as it relates to lifelong literacy, education, and the development and betterment of the lives of young people.

GSLIS hosts Community of Scholars visit
GSLIS hosted fourteen prospective students this spring as part of the campus-wide Community of Scholars (COS) Campus Visit Program, which brings admitted graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to campus to meet with their academic programs and network with current and prospective students. GSLIS welcomed four doctoral students and ten master’s students, the largest group of students of any unit on campus.

Rhinesmith video interview featured on DMLcentral

kimsch — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:07:21 +0000

Colin Rhinesmith, GSLIS doctoral candidate and Information in Society Fellow, was recently featured on DMLcentral, the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Initiative blog. In a video interview, Rhinesmith talks about his study of the Philadelphia Free Library Hot Spots program. He found that creating an atmosphere of safety, trust, support, and respect was integral to community broadband adoption.

Colin Rhinesmith was the lead researcher on the two-year Hot Spots program, which focused on providing access to technology and library services to underserved Philadelphia neighborhoods. Rhinesmith studied what effects this public engagement model had on community member’s everyday experiences with technology. He presented his findings to a group of junior scholars and mentors at the 2012 DML Summer Research Associates Institute in Boston.
During the evaluation process, Rhinesmith discovered that comfort was an essential factor in community broadband adoption. He describes this idea of comfort as one that includes safety, trust, support, and respect…[the] video explores how these findings, which focus on community use of technology in collaborative spaces, can help inform future strategies around federally funded broadband adoption programs.

Rhinesmith’s study was published last fall in a special issue on broadband adoption in the International Journal of Communication.

The DMLcentral blog is produced by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, whose mission is to advance research in the service of a more equitable, participatory, and effective ecosystem of learning keyed to the digital and networked era. It is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Reflections on Inclusion: Carol Tilley

cashwill — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:06:37 +0000

GSLIS Assistant Professor Carol Tilley recently discussed the importance of inclusion in her teaching and research with Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre. Tilley’s remarks are part of a new interview series, Reflections on Inclusion, which explores the School’s efforts to respect varied perspectives and diversity of experiences.

Tilley teaches courses in youth services librarianship, media literacy, and comics. Her research focuses on the history of youth services librarianship; comics and other forms of children’s print culture; information inquiry and instruction in school libraries; information seeking and use; and media literacy.

I teach three somewhat different courses, each with their own unique content areas: Youth Services Librarianship (506), Media Literacy (515), and Comics: Advising Child and Adult (590CR). So it will be easier for me to talk about my approach to each course individually, but there are a couple of ways I approach my courses that have relevance for inclusion.

First, as an instructor, it’s important for me to build on organic opportunities for discussion in the classes I teach. In Youth Services Librarianship (506), for instance, all of my students have the perspective of having once been a child and teen, but many students also have paraprofessional experiences in schools and libraries—from all regions of the U.S. and sometimes from other countries, too—that inform what we do in classes.

Second, I’m a proponent of student choice in terms of assignments (and sometimes readings). I want students to select experiences and topics that are personally meaningful. For example, in Media Literacy and Youth (515), I encourage students to ‘play’ with media and technologies that are new to them. Consequently, students have played complex tabletop games for the first time, created video mashups, scripted interactive digital stories, learned how to engage in Twitter, tried making machinima, and more.

Youth Services Librarianship (506)

Description: Theory and techniques in planning, implementing, and evaluating library programs/services for youth (ages 0-18) in public and school libraries/media centers; the knowledge base, skills, and competencies needed by the library media professional in the development of all aspects of young people’s reading/viewing/listening and information literacy skills.

The idea of community and services for diverse communities permeates our discussions in this class. One of the big issues we discuss is socioeconomic differences, which are central to reading development, library service equity, and the new digital divide. We also address issues such as disability and race. For example, a wiki assignment in this class allows students to select areas of interest and develop content related to youth services librarianship. In previous semesters, my students have developed web pages about topics such as GBLTQ youth, multicultural literature, homeschoolers, disability issues, programming and reading for boys, and English-as-a-new-language (ENL) learners. Each topic is written from the standpoint of how it intersects with youth in libraries.

Students also complete an observation assignment in a library of their choice, which allows them to consider elements of service equities along with issues of collection and representation. For instance, they have observed age-related service inequities for teens in terms of proportional space for collection development and the quality and extent of access to computer resources in libraries. But these assignments also help students consider how libraries in communities provide services. For example, what does a rural library look like in terms of services to young people, or how does a school library in a largely immigrant area reflect the needs of its community?

Media Literacy for Youth (515)

Description: Provides students with theoretical knowledge and practical methods useful to librarians and other professionals working with young people and media. Building on traditional understandings of literacy, media literacy explores the consumption and production of diverse types of texts including print, images, games, and music. Topics for this course may include the role of race in media, media literacy as a catalyst for social change, and intellectual property issues related to media education.

This course includes readings, lectures, and discussion about issues related to race and ethnicity, socioeconomics, gender, and youth civic engagement, with an emphasis on different perspectives. For example, one of our doctoral candidates visited this term and talked with students about strategies for making computer coding (programming) more accessible to middle school girls and other young people.

Diversity and inclusion issues also emerge naturally through the course design. Students have a wide latitude of choices for their assignments through participant observation in settings of special interest, allowing them to gain hands-on experience working with young people, media, and technologies. Students also lead class discussions on topics of their choice, which have included representations of intellect on television, GLBTQ issues and video games, portrayals of teen sexuality in film, and hip-hop and spoken word performance.

Comics: Advising Child and Adult readers (590CR)

Comics—in forms including comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, webcomics, and manga—represent an important cultural medium, which appeals to persons of all ages and is collected by many school, public, and academic libraries. This course introduces students to the comics medium, its history, and its cultural influences. Students will read a variety of comics and learn about materials and techniques key to providing reader's advisory in this medium. Although this course focuses on American comics, some readings and discussions will touch on this medium’s international dimensions.

This is a genre-based class, but students can self-select readings within this framework from a collection of bibliographies. If students wanted to focus on Latino or GLBTQ comics, these selections would be perfectly in scope for the class. To a small degree, we are able to discuss a variety of perspectives, including women and African American cartoonists; international comics, such as Indian, South American, and African; and underground (alternative) comics, which often focus on non-heteronormative sexualities and non-mainstream cultural elements.

GSLIS alumni elected to leadership positions

cashwill — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:40:12 +0000

Several GSLIS alumni were recently elected to serve in leadership positions for state and national library associations.

Elizabeth Beers (MS ’06; CAS ’09), also a former LEEP adjunct faculty instructor, was elected as secretary/treasurer for ALA’s Library Research Round Table (LRRT). Beers will serve a two-year term beginning July 1, 2013.

Keshia Garnett (MS ’01) and Amanda E. Standerfer (MS ’99) have been elected as directors-at-large on the Illinois Library Association (ILA) Board of Directors. They are among four newly-elected directors-at-large who will serve three-year terms beginning July 1, 2013.

Lizz Zitron (MS ’09) has been elected as a councilor-at-large on the Council of the American Library Association (ALA). The 33 newly-elected councilors-at-large will serve three-year terms beginning at the conclusion of the 2013 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

NSF grant supports Efron's work in search

kimsch — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:19:55 +0000

Every day billions of queries are typed into search boxes on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. Data centers around the world swell with vast amounts of information. Twitter and Facebook see a constant stream of activity.

We may not give it much thought when our fingers sweep rapidly over the keys looking for that article we heard about or directions to the restaurant, but searching through massive amounts of data is no small feat. Nor is the ability to produce an accurate search result, one that gets closely to the core of what we are searching.

Even as good as search can be, Miles Efron wants to make search better. Efron, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is working on new algorithms that build upon the current strengths of search but add a new dimension—time.

“We are at a point where soon we won’t have the luxury of ignoring the temporal aspect of data,” said Efron. “In order for search to be successful, time has to make its way into search engines.” Efron’s three-year project is supported by a $408,908 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Temporal information about data is often available but, to date, there has not been a concerted effort to build technology that incorporates time factors into search. Most people use time, however, to decide whether or not a search result is relevant to their query. Sometimes it is most important that a result be the most current information on the topic, for example, while other times users are interested in results that are bounded by a particular time frame. Efron suggests that if we track the traces of information that are created as documents, collections, and language change over time, we will be better able to predict relevance, thus vastly improving search.

“In domains like search over social media, time gives us an extra piece of information when we try to predict which documents are relevant to a particular person. For instance, one of the most common problems in search is term weighting—identifying which words in documents and queries are the most indicative of their overall subject matter. An early result from this line of research showed that analyzing how a word's usage changes over time gives us a new way to model its more directly semantic properties,” said Efron.

In conjunction with his research, Efron is developing open-source software that can be used to improve information retrieval courses, especially those taught in iSchools. The software will include a series of labs that will illustrate how search engines work and will be informed in large part by the structure of Efron’s current courses in information retrieval at GSLIS.

The grant runs through September, 2015.

Master's students present posters at MAC 2013 Annual Meeting

cashwill — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:23:41 +0000

Several GSLIS master’s students were among fourteen students selected to present posters at the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) Annual Meeting held this past April in Indianapolis.

Rachel Lux took second place for her poster, “All A-Twitter: Archiving the Public Record 140 Characters at a Time,” while Sarah Hoover earned third place for her poster, “Digitization for the Digital Humanities: Addressing Needs and Anticipating Uses.” Liza Booker, Mandi Goodsett, and Rachel Mattson also presented posters. The posters were judged on content, value to the profession, originality of the topic, and how the topic was presented.

The Midwest Archives Conference is the nation’s largest regional professional association for archivists, and their annual meeting brings together archivists, curators, and information professionals from across the country. Several of the posters and presentations from the conference can be found on the MAC website.

GSLIS students, alumni present at ISLMA mini-conferences

cashwill — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:11:42 +0000

Several GSLIS students and alumni presented at a series of mini-conferences held by the Illinois School Library Media Association over the past month.

The following presentations and workshops were given on April 20 at Westfield Middle School in Bloomingdale, Illinois:

"More Than Just a Handsome Face: Male Protagonists in YA Literature and Their Struggles with Body Issues"
Leanne Brown (master's student)
This presentation provided a comprehensive, thematic list of young adult fiction and nonfiction that feature a male protagonist who has some type of physical struggle—a speech impediment, a birth defect, or weight issues, etc.

"Tumblring Storytelling"
Mary Dubbs (master's student)
Tumblr can be used to collect and organize storytelling ideas and experiences, as well as connect with other relevant storytelling Tumblrs for inspiration and networking. This presentation was based on a final project for a storytelling course: http://minnestory.tumblr.com/.

"Exploring Anti-racism in School Libraries: Contributions and Gaps"
Miriam Larson (M.S. ’12; C.A.S. student)
During this workshop, participants examined existing scholarship about racism in librarianship and then looked at several scenarios and discussed how librarians might play a role in working towards racial justice. This workshop was based on Larson’s masters’ thesis project.

"Using Visual Primary Sources"
Jeanné Lohfink (M.S. ’00)
This workshop taught participants how to utilize an analysis tool created by the Library of Congress, learn two ideas on how to bring primary sources that use pictures into the classroom, and where to find them.

The following presentations and workshops were given on April 27 at Charleston High School in Charleston, Illinois:

"Maximizing the Monarch"
Peggy Burton (MS ’03) and Jennifer Muzzy
Burton and Muzzy announced the 2014 nominated titles for the annual Monarch Award list. Concrete activities to tie books to genres, author studies, the Common Core and more were also presented.

"Pin It! Mark It! Tag It!"
Gretchen Zaitzeff (master's student)
This presentation examined social bookmarking sites like Pinterest, Delicious, and Diigo and strategies to help students enhance their personal and academic research.

"Reeling for Literature: A Media Specialist Teaching How to Watch Films in Class"
Anna McClellan (master's student)
In this workshop, participants learned the basics of educating students on film techniques. By having students analyze lighting, angles, and framing as they watch, an educator can combine critical thinking skills with the students’ interests in multimedia.

"What's Happening in the Library?!!?"
Gretchen Zaitzeff (master's student) and Latrice Ferguson
5 BIG programming ideas—one for each day of the week—to draw students and faculty into the library were presented.

Irish awarded IAS Colston Research Fellowship

kimsch — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:05:38 +0000

Sharon Irish, project coordinator at the GSLIS Center for Digital Inclusion and lecturer at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded a 2013-2014 Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Colston Research Fellowship from the University of Bristol in Bristol, England. The IAS Colston Research Fellowship is a multidisciplinary award that draws distinguished scholars from around the world to Bristol to enhance research at the university and collaborate on research projects specifically relevant to the Bristol area.

Irish will investigate the roles of historical research and community-based organizations in the engagement, production, and sharing of local knowledge in marginal communities. She will work closely with Productive Margins, a collaborative program between the Universities of Bristol and Cardiff and area residents, as well as the Knowle West Media Centre, a local media and technology center with which she has been working since 2010.

“I am thrilled to have the chance to continue working with the staff of the Knowle West Media Centre, and to have a formal connection to faculty at the University of Bristol,” Irish said. “In my previous work in Bristol, I began forming connections among cultural and educational institutions, like the Local Studies division of the Bristol Public Library. This time, I plan to delve into the Bristol Record Office, the first borough record office in the country, which holds local archives that I never have had time to explore.”

As a fellow, Irish will serve as an IAS Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol’s Department of Drama: Film, Theatre and Television for two months. In addition to continuing her research, the award will allow Irish to share her current and previous work on publicly engaged artists Suzanne Lacy and Stephen Willats and others through a series of workshops, lectures, and film screenings.

“This appointment will support my collaborations with the community-based media centre, assist my research on art practices that emerge out of diverse partnerships, and give me the opportunity to learn from colleagues and archives in Bristol," Irish said.

Reflections on Inclusion: Allen Renear

cashwill — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:36:13 +0000

GSLIS Interim Dean and Professor Allen Renear recently discussed the value of inclusion in his teaching and research with Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre. His remarks are part of a new interview series exploring the School’s efforts to respect varied perspectives and diversity of experiences.

Renear teaches courses in information modeling, data curation, and digital publishing. His research focuses on issues in the development of formal ontologies for managing scientific and cultural objects, and the use of those ontologies in information system design, particularly information systems that support data curation, scholarly publishing, and the digital humanities.

I’d like to speak here primarily as a faculty member not as dean, and I’ll probably be talking mostly about my teaching in the master’s curriculum.

In my commitment statement, I described inclusion as being at the very heart of our mission at GSLIS. We are a professional school at a land-grant public university. As such, our overarching goal cannot be anything other than to advance the public good and meet the varied needs of all members of society. To achieve this, we must empower diverse communities and groups to achieve full participation in all aspects of our information institutions. And this is not just about equal benefits—it is equally about participation in the design, shaping, and operation of these institutions.

My courses, which usually focus on information modeling, are often described as fairly technical and abstract, and so it may not be clear at first glance how the content promotes inclusion. But I think the inclusion connection is profound. When information is poorly organized, or accessed through information systems and services that are poorly designed, then, of course, that information cannot be easily found or effectively used. But the consequences of poor organization and design do not affect all communities uniformly. The damage falls more heavily on those who lack just the right tools, expertise, financial resources, support, background, social connections, language or culture; or who have interests that fall outside the mainstream, or who have distinctive physical or perceptual needs. Groups or individuals without those resources or with needs some distance from the median are therefore disproportionately disadvantaged when systems fail. Moreover, this is not just about simple access, but about effective use and reuse. Poorly organized information cannot be easily adapted to unanticipated needs and applications in the future; it will tend to be used to support the same things in the same way. And even then it will be misunderstood and misused.

I have seen this dynamic over and over in the information industry. If you (or your family, community, company, country, organization) are in the right place at the right time with the right equipment, time, money, expertise, knowledge, craft practices, language, culture, physical and perceptual capabilities, etc., and your interests and objectives are anticipated, then you can often manage, at least somewhat, with poorly designed systems and poorly organized information. But without those advantages you cannot achieve the same access, at least not without much additional effort. I don’t want to minimize the complexity of the “digital divide,” or the potential of that notion to obfuscate realities, but I can’t resist saying that the digital divide is as wide as it is in part because the negative consequences of poorly organized systems and information are not uniformly distributed: they burden some more than others. And the cycle is vicious: Lack of access due to a disadvantaged position creates additional disadvantages.

For instance, creating systems that treat non-Western writing systems on a par with Western writing systems isn’t easy, and to some information system designers it may not seem worth the trouble. But if you don’t accomplish this, then not only will many individual users be at a disadvantage, but there are consequences for entire communities and cultures who will find their visibility diminished and their participation in the modern digital world hampered. During the 1990s, I worked on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which was creating an encoding scheme for culturally significant texts. It was an international effort, and we were all committed to being culturally inclusive. So we were painfully aware that not only was our documentation in English, the TEI elements, attributes, and attribute values were also in English, and our examples were mostly Latin-based Western writing systems based on Latin characters. But accommodating multilingual content and non-Western writing systems was a TEI commitment. So, over the years the TEI and other communities committed to inclusive systems have made much progress.

Another example is competing proprietary data formats. In LIS our professional values encourage us to identify and analyze cases where market failures have damaging social effects, and then to look for solutions. In my electronic publishing class, I describe my own experience as chair of the working group developing a data format for ebooks (now in use as ePUB). There was a danger that commercial companies might deploy several different proprietary data formats in an effort to lock in users to their products, control third party tools, and erect high barriers to smaller or newer businesses wishing to enter in the market. These formats would not only have the obvious negative social effects of artificially discouraging competition, innovation, and new businesses, but also would establish as industry standards inflexible, non-interoperable, low-performance formats that would not support low-cost reading systems, non-Western textual content, readers for the blind, and such, and that would discourage innovative specialized tools and applications. Indeed it looked to us like this competition on format might actually doom the industry as a whole, benefitting no one in the end.

My group, which included other members from the LIS community, took on this threat and worked with industry partners to develop a single XML-based content specification that was built on top of existing nonproprietary standards and fundamental principles of information organization. We wanted to ensure broad access regardless of language, culture, and financial resources, and to shift industry competition away from wasteful format lock-in strategies to innovation in functionality and support the development of a wide range of useful third-party tools. In helping students see how well-defined (and well-defended!) standards can be used as instruments to maximize participation and long-term economic benefit, I hope I am preparing them to become agents of inclusion not just as individuals but also in support of collective efforts. Obviously good intentions aren’t enough. The LIS and nonprofit participants in this industry group had to work with industry representatives to carefully craft a format specification that met the very complex requirements of multiple stakeholders. And we had to find our way to the best compromise: Proprietary formats still exist, and can be socially damaging (unfortunately), but at least we have larger framework where an alternative principled nonproprietary format has a privileged position.

A complete account of the connection between inclusion and the principles of information modeling is a long story, but I think I can sum up the key ideas. At the heart of principled information system design is, of course, a needs analysis that considers all possible stakeholders, and involves all possible stakeholders, and that continues to respond to user experiences as systems and services are deployed and achievements and drawbacks emerge. Within the resulting information systems and services are information models that reflect the results of this initial and ongoing needs analysis. In constructing these models it is critical that the underlying assumptions be explicitly identified, documented, and, most importantly, capable of being easily changed—whether the change is an adaptation or a correction. Models of this sort not only support flexibility and responsiveness and remove barriers to adjustments, but they also make their commitments open to public inspection and provide opportunities for analysis and conversation.

At GSLIS, everything we teach about information organization not only improves effectiveness and efficiency of information access and management, but also levels the playing field, bringing more people to the table, both designers and users, right from the beginning. The inclusion of all stakeholders is about finding and mobilizing all the insight and understanding and ingenuity needed to make progress, and then making that case for good design clearly and forcefully.

Let me also say a little bit about how my approach to teaching my MS classes is inclusive. At the foundation of my approach to teaching here at GSLIS is the assumption that my students are all adults who are taking control of their own professional education. They come to my class from many different backgrounds and preparations, and they come for many different reasons. I want to accommodate this diversity and meet their needs. To do that I make as few restrictive assumptions as possible about backgrounds or interests. And I focus my courses directly on what I believe to be the most important content for twenty-first century information professionals, removing from the course curriculum anything that is unnecessary, that might a reduce participation and benefit without some compensating advantage. My courses are not contests optimized to discriminate relative performance at the end of the semester; that is something I have little interest in (beyond what it tells me about my own performance as an instructor). I structure my courses to maximize learning for diverse audiences, and I never trade off that objective for anything else. There are enough contests in the world; no need for me to add another.

This does not mean that I focus on the practical needs of the first job. Just the opposite, as all my students will attest (which is not to say they all approve). To optimize a course for the first year in the workplace only ensures that students will be at a relative disadvantage in the second year, and even more so in the tenth and twentieth. Few things are as damaging to an information professional’s career, or effectiveness, than a curriculum designed to prepare them for their first job. My courses are relentlessly and unapologetically theoretical precisely because that is what is empowering in the long run. Moreover, while a superficial and excessively vocational education is a disadvantage to everyone, this is yet another disadvantage that is not distributed uniformly: if you have modest resources or are situated away from the median in background and interests then you will suffer much more from not having acquired a solid theoretical foundation for lifelong vocational learning. And those you are trying to serve will also suffer for your missed opportunities.

I’ll end by saying that in the classroom I get an enormous benefit from diverse perspectives, either when I am being presented with unanticipated problems, or with innovative solutions. I welcome challenge and contradiction and find losing an argument more satisfying than winning one. I’d like to think that part of my expertise in the classroom lies in eliciting the often superior insights of others, insights based on different experiences, interests, and intellectual commitments. This is a collaborative dynamic that I think benefits everyone.

McDonough speaks with CBC about preserving games, culture

kimsch — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:53:05 +0000

Associate Professor Jerome McDonough recently was a guest on CBC Radio’s Spark with Nora Young. McDonough spoke with Young about digital preservation and gaming, emphasizing the importance of preserving not only the software and the servers, but also the nuances of gaming culture and history.

“What do we need to preserve about the game, that isn’t the game? What do we need to document in terms of social history of games…because if we don’t have that history, how are scholars really going to interpret this game in the future? It was a particular problem for us when we looked at Second Life because I can preserve the server software. I can preserve the databases. I can preserve the client software used to interact with Second Life. But I can’t preserve the people. And if I don’t have a record of the social activity and the social interactions that occurred there, what I’m going to have in 50 years is basically the neutron-bombed version of Second Life. I’ve got a lot of architecture, I’ve got a lot of landscape, and no people and no history.”

The full podcast is available here and McDonough’s interview begins at minute 42:45.

Downie introduces HTRC to scholars at the University of Hong Kong

cashwill — Wed, 01 May 2013 18:03:19 +0000

J. Stephen Downie, GSLIS professor and associate dean for research, recently presented "Unlocking the Secrets of 3 Billion Pages: Introducing the HathiTrust Research Center," at the Centre for Information Technology in Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. Downie is co-director HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC).

In his presentation, Downie outlined the mission and goals of the HTRC, a collaborative research center launched jointly by Indiana University, the University of Illinois, and the HathiTrust Digital Repository. The HTRC enables advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge and ensures that this cultural record is preserved long into the future. Downie also shared current and planned projects, including work on enabling the nonconsumptive analyses of copyrighted materials. He concluded with a discussion of the ways in which scholars can work with and through the HTRC, which is open to institutions worldwide.

"GSLIS has a long and rich history of working with scholars in China, so I was very pleased to introduce the HTRC to this group of Hong Kong scholars," said Downie.

The Centre for Information Technology in Education promotes the use of information technology for quality education in Hong Kong, supporting several academic programs offered by the Faculty of Education to teachers, educators, and education-related professionals to enhance their knowledge and skills. It also offers in-service professional development training to educators and consultancy services to the community concerning the educational use of information technology.

Students to present at LOEX Annual Conference

cashwill — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:15:00 +0000

Five GSLIS master's students will make presentations at the LOEX Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 2-4, 2013. The conference, which focuses on information literacy and instruction, is a long-standing event in a field that is highly competitive for presentations and registration. Presentations include:

Blogging is Half the Battle: Best Practices for Content Development, Implementation and Addressing Patrons’ Needs with Social Media"
Presenter: Rachel A. Lux

Social media is regularly used in the Undergraduate Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an instructional tool. Blogs, social network platforms and photo/visual accounts can all highlight and point to resources and services around the library. But simply linking to items isn’t enough. This poster explores ways to create dynamic social media use policies and procedures; develop content that is timely, meaningful and makes the biggest instructional impact; and use analytics and online patron interactions to guide future content decisions.

"Drawing Out the Melody: An Approach to Organizing and Analyzing Qualitative Assessment Data"
Presenter: Emma Clausen

Met with a voluminous stack of files filled with rich feedback, a librarian’s biggest barrier to utilizing qualitative assessment data is implementing a streamlined method for organization and analysis. This poster presentation will illustrate an analytical approach that grew out of working with over 4,000 qualitative comments from 15 events. Librarians will benefit from learning how to preserve necessary relationships among data points that facilitate analysis and encourage a move away from static text files. This time-saving approach will empower librarians to use everyday tools to complete the assessment process and effect change on assessment results reporting and decision making.

"LibGuides and Savvy Shorts for Distance Learners: An Assessment of Impact"
Presenters: Ben Murphy and Cate Kompare

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library offers a series of popular Savvy Researcher workshops on topics ranging from library orientation to organizing a job search to getting started with GIS. But many non-traditional students, especially those enrolled in LEEP—the distance education option at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science—have requested an online or asynchronous alternative. This poster describes using LibGuides embedded with Savvy Shorts videos as a way to model both the structure and active learning elements of an in-person Savvy Researcher class, and reports on a survey of LEEP students who used the LibGuide.

"Personal Information Management"
Presenter: Erik Radio

The task of organizing personal information is a process that has grown more complex as new kinds of information become available and in different mediums. The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a Personal Information Management workshop on building effective methods of information management, focusing on new software and applications to aid in this endeavor. Additionally, there is an emphasis on how to stay current with new developments in information management. This poster describes the content of these workshops as well as their considerable utility in equipping students for academic success.

GSLIS graduation tassels now available

cashwill — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:27:25 +0000

Graduation is approaching, and at this time of the year, we reflect on those individuals who have made a difference in our lives. New graduates and alumni are encouraged to honor GSLIS faculty and/or staff through the LSAA Tassel Project, which was established in 2011 by the Library School Alumni Association (LSAA) to support the creation of an endowed professorship in the School.

With a contribution of $20, you can honor a faculty or staff member who had an impact on your GSLIS educational experience. To thank you for your contribution, you will receive a commemorative yellow GSLIS tassel. All who participate will be recognized in the GSLIS Alumni Newsletter, and those faculty or staff honored will be notified.

The LSAA has designated the LSAA Endowed Professorship to receive proceeds from the Tassel Project. Family and friends may wish to recognize the achievement of new graduates by purchasing a tassel on their behalf.

To participate, visit our Opportunities for Giving page and select the "Faculty" tab, choose "LSAA Endowed Professorship," and click the "Make your gift" button. Be sure to include the name of the faculty or staff member you would like to honor in the "Special Instructions" box.

For students who are on campus and wish to have their tassels for graduation day, please stop by the Advancement Office at 122 LIS (8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.) to make your gift and pick up your tassel.

Lenstra receives YMCA fellowship for community service

cashwill — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:39:14 +0000

GSLIS doctoral student Noah Lenstra was recently named recipient of the Fred S. Bailey Fellowship for Community Leadership, Service, and Activism by the University YMCA. The award supports graduate students who have shown a strong commitment to community organizing, activism, and/or service.

Lenstra is the project director of eBlack Champaign-Urbana, a collaborative program focused on creating a digital library of historical and cultural material, blogs, videos, and other media of the African-American community in Champaign-Urbana. The award recognizes Lenstra’s efforts to build new networks and linkages between the University of Illinois and this community.

“The quality of the applicants exceeded our expectations, but I think what really set Noah apart were the varied and diverse ways he works within the Champaign-Urbana African American community to ensure equal access to both the acquisition and creation of information,” said Kasey Umland, program director at the University YMCA and administrator of the fellowship. “Noah applies his skill and expertise as a librarian in very direct ways that impact members of our community across generations in ways that are simultaneously very personal and yet essential to our collective understanding.”

The University YMCA has awarded Bailey scholarships to undergraduate students for a number of years, but 2013 is the first year graduate fellowships have been offered. “We hear so frequently that graduate students are not given time or support to engage in community development work because of the emphasis on research and publishing, and we wanted to challenge that idea while finding ways to support and reward those who apply their knowledge locally and globally,” said Umland.

An example of Lenstra’s efforts is a series of workshops he implemented in 2012 in cooperation with the Community Informatics Research Laboratory at GSLIS, led by Professor Abdul Alkalimat and Assistant Professor Kate Williams. In partnership with libraries and schools throughout central Illinois, the workshops introduced community members to basic social and technical procedures for launching, building, and sustaining community-based digitization programs. Williams noted that these workshops also served as data for an analysis of family and community history completed by Lenstra, which will be submitted for publication. "This work and this award reflect Noah's research focus as well,” she said.

Lenstra credits much of his success to the supportive people with whom he has worked throughout his research, both in the community and at GSLIS. “I personally consider the fellowship to be a great honor and can say that it would not have been possible without the confidence and commitment placed in me by the individuals who wrote letters of recommendation—Professor Abdul Alkalimat, Anke Voss of the Urbana Free Library, and Carol and Joe Lewis from Salem Baptist Church, as well as by many others in the local community,” said Lenstra, “My adviser Kate Williams and the Community Informatics Research Lab she and Professor Alkalimat run has served and continues to serve as a vital infrastructure making this kind of engaged research possible.”

The award provides a monthly stipend and covers tuition and fees for the academic year. Lenstra plans to use the time afforded him by the fellowship to inspire and engage undergraduate students, particularly those who are Bailey scholarship recipients and others who are active in University YMCA programs.

New tools available to mine world's largest digital repository of books

kimsch — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:45:30 +0000

This week the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) announced the availability of data mining and analytics tools for the HathiTrust Digital Library, a collection of digital texts from over 70 research libraries around the world. The new tools provide a much-needed entry point to large-scale analysis of HathiTrust’s contents.

“All of us at Indiana University and the University of Illinois, who have been working toward this release for the last year, can be proud of enabling a first round of shared computation tools for the HathiTrust corpus,” said Beth Plale, professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing and co-director of the HTRC. “Now we can share this framework for analytical (non-consumptive) research.”

Indiana University and the University of Illinois are the founding partners of the HTRC. The new infrastructure release follows an aggressive development path set forth by the HTRC Executive Management Team at the 2012 HTRC UnCamp, a gathering of HTRC developers, researchers, and librarians. Users can now apply sophisticated computational research methodology across the large-scale collection, leveraging metadata crafted over time by libraries.

In phase two of the HTRC (September 2012-March 2013), the HTRC Technical Working Group created production versions of the beta services previewed at the 2012 UnCamp event. They are now working to open the resources to community testers who are part of the HTRC User Group Community. (For subscription details, see: http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc and join htrc-usergroup-l.)

“This represents a major step forward in understanding how new knowledge can be derived from one of the largest digital library collections in the world,” notes J. Stephen Downie, professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and co-director of the HTRC.

The HTRC software and services provide the analytical entry point to the digital texts and are based on a completely new technical foundation. This foundation leverages existing analytics tools such as SEASR, digital library software such as Blacklight, and a services-oriented architecture application interface. The current production phase includes a HTRC Sandbox that is open to scholars for evaluation of the HTRC software and services as part of their experiments.

"This is a significant step forward in making the HathiTrust digital collection a valued source for creating new scholarship," remarked Laine Farley, member of the HathiTrust Board of Governors and executive director of the California Digital Library.