Ruth Horie: An Oral History Biography and Feminist Analysis

M.L.I.Sc. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

THE ACADEMIC LIBRARY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: A Q-STUDY OF LIBRARIAN ATTITUDES

This study took place on the campus of a Hispanic-serving institution, and used Q methodology to assess the attitudes and perceptions of academic librarians toward a social justice role for the university library. Among librarians and others in higher education, there is a great deal of confusion around social justice as a concept because over the past forty years, it has often been subsumed under, or diverted by the neoliberal discourse of multicultural education, which conflates social justice with providing equal opportunities for under-represented students primarily as a means of enabling them to obtain jobs and become consumers in our neoliberal capitalist society. Unfortunately, this perspective dovetails neatly with the positivist traditions of the library profession, which also eschews political involvement and exhorts librarians to remain neutral in the services and collections they provide. Within this discourse, universities and their libraries are stripped of their political and social potential for addressing the structural problems and inequalities which circumscribe the lives of the very students they purport to serve. The results of this study indicate that many librarians believe that their profession’s ethos of neutrality renders the debate over social justice within the library moot. These librarians equate social justice as equivalent to giving equal access to materials that promote the advancement of marginalized groups, and to those that encourage the continuation of the status quo or opposition to equality. Only a small number of librarians envision themselves as well positioned to promote social justice by empowering students to use the resources currently available within the library. Despite the different viewpoints represented by the factors uncovered in this study, there did emerge areas of consensus from which library leaders can mediate conversations aimed at uncovering and evaluating the principles, practices, and attitudes within the library that arise from the dominant White worldview and hinder the library’s ability to serve all students equitably. Conversations about topics such as those implicated in this study, including institutional racism, diversity, social justice, and White privilege are not always comfortable conversations, but they are required if the library is to enact the changes necessary to allow it to serve all students more effectively and more justly. These discussions are especially needed at this time, when academic librarians as a profession remain 86 percent White, while many of our campuses are becoming increasingly racially diverse. If the library is to retain its place as the center of social and political discourse within the university, it is critical that it fully represent and respect the perspectives of non-dominant groups and recognize alternative epistemologies. Breaking with the positivist traditions of the library will allow opportunities for librarians to authentically connect with more of our students, which is particularly needed at Hispanic-serving institutions

Convivial Making: Power in Public Library Creative Places

In 2011, public libraries began to provide access to collaborative creative places, frequently called “makerspaces.” The professional literature portrays these as beneficial for communities and individuals through their support of creativity, innovation, learning, and access to high-tech tools such as 3D printers. As in longstanding “library faith” narratives, which pin the library’s existence to widely held values, makerspace rhetoric describes access to tools and skills as instrumental for a stronger economy or democracy, social justice, and/or individual happiness. The rhetoric generally frames these places as empowering. Yet the concept of power has been neither well-theorized within the library makerspace literature nor explored in previous studies. This study fills the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of power, as described by the stakeholders, including staff, trustees, and users of the library. Potentially, library creative places could be what Ivan Illich calls convivial tools: tools that manifest social relations involving equitable distributions of power and decision-making. A convivial tool ensures that users may decide to which end they would like to apply the tool, and thus are constitutive of human capabilities and social justice. However, the characterization of library makerspaces in the literature evokes a technologically deterministic entrepreneurialism that marginalizes many types of making, and reduces the power of individuals to choose the ends to which they put this tool. This multi-site ethnographic study seeks to unravel the currents of power within three public library creative places. Through participant observation, document analysis, and interviews, the study traces the mechanisms and processes by which power is distributed, as enacted by institutional practices—the spaces, policies, tools, and programs—or through individual practices. The study finds seven key tensions that coalesce around the concept of conviviality, and also reveals seven capabilities of convivial tools that the users and providers of these spaces identify as crucial to their successful and satisfying implementation. As a user-centered exploration of the interactions of power in a public institution, this study can benefit a range of organizations that aim to further inclusion, equity, and social justice

Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries

Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries examines the library’s role in the development, implementation, and instruction of successful digital humanities projects. It pays special attention to the critical role of librarians in building sustainable programs. It also examines how libraries can support the use of digital scholarship tools and techniques in undergraduate education. Academic libraries are nexuses of research and technology; as such, they provide fertile ground for cultivating and curating digital scholarship. However, adding digital humanities to library service models requires a clear understanding of the resources and skills required. Integrating digital scholarship into existing models calls for a reimagining of the roles of libraries and librarians. In many cases, these reimagined roles call for expanded responsibilities, often in the areas of collaborative instruction and digital asset management, and in turn these expanded responsibilities can strain already stretched resources. Laying the Foundation provides practical solutions to the challenges of successfully incorporating digital humanities programs into existing library services. Collectively, its authors argue that librarians are critical resources for teaching digital humanities to undergraduate students and that libraries are essential for publishing, preserving, and making accessible digital scholarship.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/1032/thumbnail.jp

A study of the relationship between information literacy, online interactions, students\u27 learning, and success in distance learning courses

The number of online courses and degree programs available to students in institutions of higher education has proliferated over the past decades. Despite this growth there continues to be debate as to how to best design these courses so that they promote student learning. One common area of agreement, however, is that effectively designed courses promote interactions among students and faculty that increase and sustain learning. There is also growing consensus of the important role that information literacy may play in student success in online courses. In the context of online courses where interactions with information often replace human interactions, information literacy skills may be critical to student success. This study was designed to explore this possibility. The study was conducted at a mid-size university in the south and had two goals: First, to profile online course offerings at the university using a checklist based on best practices for online courses. Second, the study sought to investigate the relationship of information literacy skills with success in online courses. A mixed methods research design was used in which quantitative methods were used to profile the courses studied and explore correlates of student success; qualitative methods were used to explore the dynamics of the courses and shed light on the quantitative results. The results were as follows: The online courses studied varied with respect to their information literacy requirements and the extent to which they adhered to best practices as reflected in the online course checklist used. Second, information literacy skills were correlated with success, but less so than the quality of instruction and interactions with the course instructor. Third, information literacy skills were positively related to interactions with both course instructors and other students. Fourth, students were generally favorably disposed towards their courses and appeared to rely heavily on the course instructor if their information literacy skills were deficient

Libraries and the system of information provision in the 1930s' United States: the transformation of technology, access, and policy

Examination of developments in technology, access, and policy reveals that American librarianship and the wider system of information provision underwent profound and far-reaching changes—a transformation—during the 1930s. With regard to technology, the 1930s saw the widespread adoption of microfilm, heralded by its advocates as a revolutionary tool that would transform information preservation and dissemination. The number of outlets for library services increased markedly as information was brought to more people, often in creative ways, and on an enlarged scale. Finally, policymaking for libraries, and information provision more broadly, assumed greater prominence. New federal agencies were established, new statistical series offered, and existing information programs were expanded. Librarianship has a long history of critical engagement in times of crisis. Using archival, primary, and secondary sources, I examine the 1930s using the system of information provision as a lens. While the 1930s’ US has been well-traversed by many scholars, no one has foregrounded the system of information provision as a site of transformation. I consider the system in its entirety, using technology, access, and policy as the key vectors of evidence of this transformation. The role of librarians is consistently foregrounded. Many librarians of the 1930s eagerly embraced visionary approaches with regard to imagining the future of libraries, and they were not afraid to act boldly on a range of economic, political, and cultural issues. “Transformation” alludes to different things depending on the context: sometimes it meant redefinition, sometimes it meant expansion, and sometimes a bit of both. The “system of information provision” includes but is not limited to librarianship. Although deeply concerned with the pursuits of libraries and librarians, my dissertation research reveals how library work intersected with that of historians, archivists, documentalists, and with other activities involving access to and preservation of information resources. “Information provision” is intended to gesture at this wider range of associated precepts and practices. Historians make some room for the 1930s, but leave pressing questions: what were the relationships between changes in technology, access, and policy in librarianship during the 1930s; and how were librarians agents in this overall process? This dissertation is an attempt to engage directly with these questions

The Privilege to Select : Global Research System, European Academic Library Collections, and Decolonisation

A large part of the literature published in the ‘Global South’ is barely covered by bibliographic databases. Institutional policies increasingly require researchers globally to publish in ‘international’ journals, draining local infrastructures. The standard-setting power of ‘Global South’ scholars is minimised further. My main aim is to render visible the ways in which European academic libraries contribute to this situation. It is explained as a consequence of specific features of current world society, referred to as coloniality, social injustice, and quantified communication. The thesis analyses peripherality conceptually and scientometrically: based on a sample, how is Southeast African basic social sciences and humanities (SSH) research integrated in global scholarly communication, and how do local dissemination infrastructures develop under these conditions? Finally, how are professional values, specifically neutrality, and workflows of European academic libraries, interrelated with these developments? The methodological approach of the thesis is multi-faceted, including conceptual analyses, scientometrics, and a short survey of collection managers and an analysis of the corresponding libraries' collection policies. The off-mainstream decolonial scientometric approach required the construction of a database from multiple sources. Southeast Africa was selected as a field for some of the empirical studies included, because out of all rarely studied local communities to which a peripheral status is commonly attributed, the large majority of Southeast African authors use English as their primary academic language. This excludes linguistic reasons for the peripheral attribution.The theoretical and conceptual point of departure is to analyse scholarly communication as a self-referential social system with global reach (Luhmann). In this thesis, an unorthodox understanding of social systems theory is developed, providing it with cultural humility, inspired by decolonial thinking. The value of the approach lies in its in-built capacity for social change: peripheries are constructed communicatively, and culturally humble communication avoids adding to the accumulation of peripheral references attributed to the ‘Global South’, for instance by suspending the incarceration of area studies which tends to subsume any research from and about Africa as African studies, remote from the core of SSH. While centrality serves the necessary purpose of reducing the overwhelming complexity of global research, communicative centres can just as well be constructed as topical, and do not require a spatial attachment to be functional. Another advantage of this approach is its awareness of different levels of observation, differentiating, for instance, between whether the academic librarian's neutrality is imagined as playing out in interaction with the user (passive neutrality), as representing the diversity of the research system (active neutrality), or as balancing social bias running through society at large, and hence furthering social justice (culturally humble neutrality)

A Model of Urban Public Library Service for Underserved Groups: Information & Literacy Triage

This study examines the current model of public library service provision to underserved populations. In the context of this study, underserved populations are understood to be socially excluded urban populations which include those living in low income areas, minorities, the homeless and the socially excluded. Because it is an almost omnipresent institution in communities across the United States, the public library is in the unique position of being able to help underserved communities on a nationwide scale. Services provided by the public library can address some of the most conspicuous disparities in society which disproportionally affect underserved groups–such as poor health practices, low literacy levels, and poor information access. Consequently, there is merit in studying the current model of public library services for underserved groups, particularly how public library services are addressing the information needs of underserved groups and how they are working to support basic life needs, providing technology access, and supporting educational achievement. Insight gained from a study of this phenomenon would be useful for public library practice because it sheds light on obstacles to provision of public library services to underserved groups, identifies gaps in service provision, expands the literature on trends in library services to guide future research, and presents recommendations for future approaches to service provision.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 201

A history of History through the lens of our digital present, the traditions that shape and constrain data driven historical research, and what librarians can do about it

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A Model of Urban Public Library Service for Underserved Groups: Information & Literacy Triage

This study examines the current model of public library service provision to underserved populations. In the context of this study, underserved populations are understood to be socially excluded urban populations which include those living in low income areas, minorities, the homeless and the socially excluded. Because it is an almost omnipresent institution in communities across the United States, the public library is in the unique position of being able to help underserved communities on a nationwide scale. Services provided by the public library can address some of the most conspicuous disparities in society which disproportionally affect underserved groups–such as poor health practices, low literacy levels, and poor information access. Consequently, there is merit in studying the current model of public library services for underserved groups, particularly how public library services are addressing the information needs of underserved groups and how they are working to support basic life needs, providing technology access, and supporting educational achievement. Insight gained from a study of this phenomenon would be useful for public library practice because it sheds light on obstacles to provision of public library services to underserved groups, identifies gaps in service provision, expands the literature on trends in library services to guide future research, and presents recommendations for future approaches to service provision.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 201