Design for the Clarion Free Library: a drawing activity for the local youth

While public libraries have a long history of providing services to teens (Bernier et al., 2005), research has shown contemporary youth have mixed feelings towards libraries. Agosto et al. (2016) studied a group of urban teens in the U.S. and their library use, revealing that urban teens viewed public libraries as irrelevant to their everyday lives because they have access to digital devices with abundant resources on the Internet. Similarly, Howard (2011) found that Canadian teens had a positive impression of their public libraries but they did not use libraries frequently for various reasons. Situated in this background, this project intends to study how rural teens perceive their public library and how they would design it differently. This presented project is timely and necessary as libraries face an increasingly uncertain future due to the pandemic and lack of funding. Understanding teens’ perspectives on what they wish to see in public libraries may help practitioners and researchers envision how to build a resilient future for the library community. In this project, the researchers invite the local teens at Clarion, PA to participate in individual virtual interviews that incorporate a drawing activity (Hartel, 2014) to develop an in-depth understanding of their ideal local public library. Currently, the project is work-in-progress and encounters some challenges in recruiting participants. Challenges in using the drawing activity with teens will be discussed

Information practices of disaster preparedness professionals in multidisciplinary groups

OBJECTIVE: This article summarizes the results of a descriptive qualitative study addressing the question, what are the information practices of the various professionals involved in disaster preparedness? We present key results, but focus on issues of choice and adaptation of models and theories for the study. METHODS: Primary and secondary literature on theory and models of information behavior were consulted. Taylor's Information Use Environments (IUE) model, Institutional Theory, and Dervin's Sense-Making metatheory were used in the design of an open-ended interview schedule. Twelve individual face-to-face interviews were conducted with disaster professionals drawn from the Pennsylvania Preparedness Leadership Institute (PPLI) scholars. Taylor's Information Use Environments (IUE) model served as a preliminary coding framework for the transcribed interviews. RESULTS: Disaster professionals varied in their use of libraries, peer-reviewed literature, and information management techniques, but many practices were similar across professions, including heavy Internet and email use, satisficing, and preference for sources that are socially and physically accessible. CONCLUSIONS: The IUE model provided an excellent foundation for the coding scheme, but required modification to place the workplace in the larger social context of the current information society. It is not possible to confidently attribute all work-related information practices to professional culture. Differences in information practice observed may arise from professional training and organizational environment, while many similarities observed seem to arise from everyday information practices common to non-work settings

Should We Flip the Script?: A Literature Review of Deficit-Based Perspectives on First-Year Undergraduate Students’ Information Literacy

This mixed method systematic review considers recent literature on the information literacy (IL) skills of first-year undergraduate students. The review uncovers the following themes: faculty and librarians perceive first-year students as lacking IL skills; students have varying perceptions of their IL skills; assessment studies yield conflicting findings on first-year students\u27 IL; communication between high school and college librarians is challenging; and some IL researchers emphasise and leverage first-year students\u27 prior knowledge and experience in IL instruction. These themes emerge from extensive searches in four research databases for scholarly and professional articles written in English within the past ten years. With the exception of a few articles, studies reviewed consistently express their findings in terms of students’ gaps or deficits. We question whether this is the most productive basis for developing effective IL programs. Instead, we call for further investigation of students’ existing knowledge and skills as a basis for implementing constructivist and strengths-based pedagogies

Challenges to Teaching Credibility Assessment in Contemporary Schooling

Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and CredibilityThis chapter explores several challenges that exist to teaching credibility assessment in the school environment. Challenges range from institutional barriers such as government regulation and school policies and procedures to dynamic challenges related to young people's cognitive development and the consequent difficulties of navigating a complex web environment. The chapter includes a critique of current practices for teaching kids credibility assessment and highlights some best practices for credibility education

The patterning of finance/security : a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps

Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps

Living with difference in hyper-diverse areas: how important are encounters in semi-public spaces?

Urban populations increasingly diversify in their socio-economic, cultural, religious and linguistic profiles as well as in their lifestyles, attitudes and activity patterns. This hyper-diversification can complicate feelings of belonging and community. Since diversity is negotiated at the neighbourhood level, micro spaces are central in building communities. Micro spaces tend to be semi-public and stimulate diverse groups to intermingle, which results in on–off as well as repetitive and structural interactions. Understanding the creation and impact of encounters is central to capturing contemporary notions of belonging and living with difference. This paper compares encounters experienced in two semi-public spaces in the hyper-diverse neighbourhood of Feyenoord in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Although encounters at the library were lighter and shorter than at the community-centre, all positively impact collective life in the neighbourhood. At the community-centre, encounters result in light as well as deeper relationships, making visitors feel more at ‘home’ because they recognize others elsewhere in the neighbourhood. At the library, encounters are lighter but visitors become familiar with diversity, making them feel more at ‘home’ and safe in their neighbourhood as well. The study suggests that fleeting encounters require more serious attention within the context of negotiating diversity

Conference Roundup: Smart Cataloging - Beginning the Move from Batch Processing to Automated Classification

This article reviewed the Amigos Online Conference titled “Work Smarter, Not Harder: Innovating Technical Services Workflows” keynote session delivered by Dr. Terry Reese on February 13, 2020. Excerpt: As the developer of MarcEdit, a popular metadata suite used widely across the library community, Reese’s current work is focused on the ways in which libraries might leverage semantic web techniques in order to transform legacy library metadata into something new. So many sessions related to using new technologies in libraries or academia, although exciting, are not practical enough to put into everyday use by most librarians. Reese’s keynote, titled Smart Cataloging: Beginning the Move from Batch Processing to Automated Classification, was unique and powerful in that he discussed the more practical applications of machine learning for tomorrow, rather than a decade or more into the future

Gender And Culture In Psychology: Theories And Practices

Gender and Culture in Psychology introduces new approaches to the psychological study of gender that bring together feminist psychology, socio-cultural psychology, discursive psychology and critical psychology. It presents research and theory that embed human action in social, cultural and interpersonal contexts. The book provides conceptual tools for thinking about gender, social categorization, human meaning-making, and culture. It also describes a family of interpretative research methods that focus on rich talk and everyday life. It provides a close-in view of how interpretative research proceeds. The latter part of the book showcases innovative projects that investigate topics of concern to feminist scholars and activists: young teens\u27 encounters with heterosexual norms; women and men negotiating household duties and childcare; sexual coercion and violence in heterosexual encounters; the cultural politics of women\u27s weight and eating concerns; psychiatric labeling of psychological suffering; and feminism in psychotherapy

Framing Social Values:\ud An Experimental Study of Culture and Cognition

How and why does a given social value come to shape the way an individual thinks, feels,and acts in a specific social situation? This study links ideas from Goffman’s frame analysis to other lines of research, proposing that dramatic narratives of variable content, vividness,and language-in-use produce variation in the accessibility of schematic, internal cultural frameworks, and, thereby, variation in the social value frames that gain situational primacy. Hypotheses derived from the argument are experimentally supported, and results encourage further research on the process of social value framing, which operates as a person crosses oundaries in the complex subcultural mosaic

Doing Interview-Based Qualitative Research: A Learner\u27s Guide

For many students, the experience of learning about and using qualitative methods can be bewildering. This book is an accessible step-by-step guide to conducting interview-based qualitative research projects. The authors discuss the \u27hows\u27 and \u27whys\u27 of qualitative research, showing readers the practices as well as the principles behind them. The book first describes how to formulate research questions suited to qualitative inquiry. It then discusses in detail how to select and invite research participants into a study and how to design and carry out good interviews. It next presents several ways to analyze interviews and provides readers with many worked examples of analyses. It also discusses how to synthesize findings and how to present them. Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research equips readers in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, education, counseling, nursing, and public health with the knowledge and skills necessary to embark on their own projects. People continually reflect on themselves and their worlds, and they are continually called upon to give accounts of themselves. People have hopes, fears, reasons, intentions, and values, and they may experience times of satisfaction, confusion, and demoralization. The premise of this book is that researchers ought to and can study these matters. In this book, we give readers the conceptual framework and practical tools to do so