Miranda's Quest

Searching is basic to all work with books. Often routine and obvious, it can also be laborious, problematical, time-consuming, and dependent on special skills, expertise, and insights. It requires a knowledge of bibliographical sources, often uncommon, idiosyncratic, and unusual in their citation practices. Above all, especially when it is difficult, it can be a learning experience.Copyright 2023 University of Illinois Board of TrusteesEmbargoe

Public Libraries, Digital Equity Coalitions, and the Public Good

In this presentation to the American Library Association Digital Inclusion Working Group, I present findings from my recent journal article, with the same title, published in Public Library Quarterly. The research seeks to address a gap in the literature on the role of public libraries in digital equity coalitions

Tracing the interdisciplinarity and the evolution of information science through a study of the Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T) and iConference proceedings

Interdisciplinary academic fields are challenging to understand and manage due to their complexity and dynamic nature. The composition of academic programs, curricula, and faculty in these fields varies significantly across institutions and within academic and research communities. Text analysis of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T) and the iConference Proceedings over a sixteen-year period provides evidence of shifting topics and communities within information science. Understanding these changes in an interdisciplinary field helps clarify its identity, which, in turn, supports knowledge production and the administration of academic programs and research

"The Teaching of Reference Must Keep Pace": Teaching Sources and Searching in an Evolving Reference Environment

Since the advent of the web, libraries have seen a steady decline in the number of questions being asked at the reference desk, especially for ready reference questions requiring brief, factual answers. Reference work has moved away from ready reference questions to emphasize in-depth research consultations, information literacy instruction, and curating online collections and patron guides. As library and information science education evolves to keep pace with the changes in reference work, traditional "sources" assignments in which students seek answers to factual questions do not adequately reflect the work of contemporary reference librarians. At the same time, knowledge of reference sources and search skills are still valued by practitioners. LIS instructors teaching reference courses must develop new learning activities and assignments to help students develop the source evaluation, selection, and search skills needed for contemporary reference work.Copyright 2023 University of Illinois Board of TrusteesEmbargoe

Makerspaces in Libraries: Social Roles and Community Engagement

The maker movement is an important phenomenon in re-conceptualizing libraries, because library makerspaces have the potential to retain and reinvigorate the core values and roles of librarianship. This chapter discusses social roles library makerspaces might assume in communities, as well as examples of ways library makerspaces promote active community engagement. The chapter begins with four perspectives to conceptualize library makerspaces, including library as place, new librarianship, radical change theory, and communities of practice. The chapter also discusses the concept of community and its differing meanings, using case studies to illustrate varying conceptions of community. Implications for LIS educators and researchers are included with reference to the case studies. Library makerspaces can promote knowledge creation, access, learning, and equity and diversity within and through their communities. Grounded in the core values of librarianship, library makerspaces have the potential to articulate these concepts and draw attention to new ways of understanding of the role of libraries in the contemporary knowledge society

Now what? Lessons Learned from a Diversity Audit

Diversity audits are frequently used as an assessment method to measure the diversity of a library collection. Yet, there is not frequent research on the aftermath of diversity audits, especially in the context of comparing data from several audits to assess the difference in the makeup of a library collection. In this article, the author discusses the changes a small academic library made in response to a diversity audit conducted several years before, as well as the results of a new, smaller audit to confirm that the initial audit had an impact. This article shares the results of the new audit and reflects on the lessons learned during the process

Protecting Indigenous Cultural Heritage Across Borders: A Delphi Study of International Traditional Cultural Expression Laws

WIPO has been struggling with issues surrounding how to protect TCEs on an international level since the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore (IGC) was established in the year 2000. While many iterations of legal principles for the international protection of TCEs have been drafted, commented on by member states, and revised, no binding treaty has been enacted. The purpose of this study is to gather a group of international legal experts with experience in the area of the protection of TCEs to determine the areas of consensus using the Delphi impirical method. The data reveals areas of national law that are adequately protecting TCEs within the borders of a particular nation, as well as national laws that could use some additional areas of protection or enforcement. The research team seeks to accurately summarize and report on the areas of agreement among the international experts involved in this research to further explore areas for progress in protecting TCEs internationally across borders.Campus Research Board, Center for Global Studie

Topic mining and evolution analysis of digital literacy research topics abroad

The paper employs text analysis techniques to conduct a systematic quantitative analysis of literature in the field of digital literacy, aiming to recognize and organize the research topics and their evolutionary process within this field. The study selected literature data on digital literacy from the Web of Science database between 2004 and 2023 as research subjects, dividing them into ten stages. Subsequently, the LDA2vec method was used to recognize research topics in the field of digital literacy, and the evolutionary process of these topics was analyzed from two aspects: the evolution of topic content and the evolution of topic intensity. The results indicate that scholars in the field of digital literacy primarily focus on research topics such as education, digital technology, digital practice, and cybersecurity. The research process of these topics can be summarized into three stages: exploration, practice, and expansion. In terms of the evolution of topic content, the identified types of evolution include division, merging, inheritance, disappearance, and generation. In the aspect of topic intensity evolution, it was found that changes in topic intensity are influenced by factors such as policy, research content, and the primary field of study. In the future, the topic of education and digital technology will remain the focus of research in the field of digital literacy. At the same time, the field will concentrate on conducting in-depth research into social topics such as health, aging society, and the challenges and risks associated with digital transformation

A Shift to Life-Centered Systems Thinking: Teaching Modules to Design Regenerative Futures.

This paper critiques the use of design thinking (DT) to solve wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973) and proposes life-centered systems thinking (LCST) as a better process to design for systemic positive impact. It presents a series of LCST modules that design educators can use to either start a prompt or act as a provocation to pause and pivot a project already in motion. This paper also details the strengths and weaknesses of each teaching module and how it was created, revised, and adapted based on student and instructor feedback in design courses at three different universities. The results are exciting and hold promise to increase designers’ ability to design more climate and socially responsible outcomes. Design is taught through a linear approach, with project prompts that historically focused on the intended visual outcome, leaving little room to investigate the root causes of an issue. Over the past two decades, DT has emerged from research done at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design to “...tackle society’s most intractable problems” (McCarthy, 2022, p. 40). It adapted the design process (largely known only to design disci- plines) into a formulaic, step-by-step, human-centered, solution-focused method that any profession can understand and implement to address simplistic to systemic problems. However, as DT hopes to be more successful in solving systemic global issues, it still is a comparatively reductive toolkit that most often fails to meet the complex challenges at hand. It is unable to gaze beyond our anthropogenic perspective where “...the prevailing theories of design thinking in organizations remain entrenched in the making or techne - paradigm. Ironically, this serves to maintain the status quo and stifle progress” (Lee, 2021, p. 497). Instead, a more holistic approach for adapting to our cultural shifts and growing climate crisis is to engage in LCST. LCST, as the authors see it, differentiates itself as a practice and mindset that is framework agnostic, discipline inclusive, nature- inspired, life-centered (not exclusively human-centered), and intersectional in its approach to problem framing. Like systems thinking (ST), it gives ... designers a powerful tool for circumnavigating the problems of the age. Focus on relationships over parts; recognize that systems exhibit self-organization and emergent behaviors; analyze the dynamic nature of systems to understand and influence the complex societal, technological, and economic ecosystem in which you and your organization operate. (Vassallo, 2017) LCST is a fluid practice that does seek solutions but is problem focused. It is also a mindset, a way of seeing the big picture and the details simultaneously by visualizing connections, causes and effects, and relationships between people, the planet, and their actions. In other words, LCST shows how everything is connected and that our natural systems depend on a dynamic non-equilibrium trying to achieve balance. Indigenous biol- ogist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015) builds upon this definition more poetically: “The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It’s the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world” (p. 344)

Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen: Social Networks of Rejected Applicants

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cherokee Freedmen—the people of African descent formerly enslaved by the Cherokees—and their descendants were required to apply for enrollment on Cherokee census rolls, administered by the United States, to receive land allotments, annuities, and benefits as Cherokee citizens. A chronological examination of the lives of rejected Freedmen applicants through their interview transcripts, combined with a non-linear visualization of their social networks, this project revitalizes the rejected Cherokee Freedmen applicants who are multiply marginalized from the Cherokee Nation, the United States, and the Cherokee Freedmen community. This visualization further aims to offer a less hierarchical experience of digitized archival materials. This project also explores the goals, process, and limitations of the Cherokee census rolls to contextualize how the Cherokee Freedmen status has been determined by a particular racial, economic, and bureaucratic dynamics within the Cherokee Nation.History of Black Writing’s Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) Digital Publishing Scholars ProgramNEH Digital Humanities Advancement GrantAfrican American Studies Publishing Without Walls 2 (AFRO-PWW 2) at the University of Illinoi