Identifying Topical Coverages of Curricula using Topic Modeling and Visualization Techniques: A Case of Digital and Data Curation

Digital/data curation curricula have been around for a couple of decades. Currently, several ALA-accredited LIS programs offer digital/data curation courses and certificate programs to address the high demand for professionals with the knowledge and skills to handle digital content and research data in an ever-changing information environment.  In this study, we aimed to examine the topical scopes of digital/data curation curricula in the context of the LIS field.  We collected 16 syllabi from the digital/data curation courses, as well as textual descriptions of the 11 programs and their core courses offered in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. The collected data were analyzed using a probabilistic topic modeling technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, to identify both common and unique topics. The results are the identification of 20 topics both at the program- and course-levels. Comparison between the program- and course-level topics uncovered a set of unique topics, and a number of common topics.  Furthermore, we provide interactive visualizations for digital/data curation programs and courses for further analysis of topical distributions. We believe that our combined approach of a topic modeling and visualizations may provide insight for identifying emerging trends and co-occurrences of topics among digital/data curation curricula in the LIS field

Literature on massive open online courses (MOOCs) and library and information science: an analysis

Massive open online courses (moocs) concept has become a hot topic in all disciplines. Therefore, different types of literature on massive open online courses are producing in various disciplines including library and information science domain. Thus, this study aims to analyse the literature produced on massive open online courses (moocs) and library and information science from January 2008 to December 2019. The results of the study revealed that the 2013 year noted as a most productive year, most of the literature contributed by the single author and the United States of America found the leading country in terms of producing literature on the subject. This study may be useful for those users who are looking for the growth of the literature on massive open online courses and library and information science domain at one place for various purposes

Establishing a Shared Vision for an Integrated Approach to Collections and Scholarly Communications

Over the past decade, the University Libraries\u27 Digital Collections have grown from an assemblage of discrete projects into two distinct programs that curate, manage, and publish digitized and born-digital materials online for educational and scholarly uses by Grand Valley State University\u27s community and the wider public. As these collections have grown, the support for creating, sharing, and preserving these materials has expanded from the Special Collections & University Archives into Systems and Technology Services, Knowledge Access and Resource Management Services, and Scholarly Communications, which manages the Libraries\u27 other Digital Collection program, consisting of the Institutional Repository (IR) and a suite of library publishing services. While cross-departmental collaborations have been fruitful, the library staff and faculty responsible for these separate Digital Collection programs are exploring structural evolution that will unify their parallel efforts in order to support a more holistic Digital Collections program that is sustainable and effective into the future. This report summarizes the findings of the group\u27s inquiry, which included reviews of the tasks, skills, and operations of the team, a review of digital collection programs at peer institutions, and review of aspirational digital collection programs. It includes recommendations for moving forward, near future next steps, and opportunities and challenges to consider as we progress

Collaboration Made It Happen! The Kansas Archive-It Consortium

This case study explores the formation, current membership, and future goals of the Kansas Archive-It Consortium (KAIC), one of the larger consortia contracting with the Web archiving service Archive-It. KAIC, which is composed of the state historical society and five public universities, has its foundation in a statewide culture of collaboration, and participants have agreed on an informal governance structure with a strong commitment to broadening accessible web resources for researchers. After establishing consortial consistency during its first two years, members have shared documentation with partners and are beginning to do collaborative collecting. In the future, the consortium will seek additional members and work with Archive-It to develop a consortial search tool. This web archiving collaborative has helped member institutions overcome challenges by having group discussions, sharing documentation and guidelines, and jointly serving a primary user group, Kansas residents

Collaboration Made It Happen! The Kansas Archive-It Consortium

This case study explores the formation, current membership, and future goals of the Kansas Archive-It Consortium (KAIC), one of the larger consortia contracting with the Web archiving service Archive-It. KAIC, which is composed of the state historical society and five public universities, has its foundation in a statewide culture of collaboration, and participants have agreed on an informal governance structure with a strong commitment to broadening accessible web resources for researchers. After establishing consortial consistency during its first two years, members have shared documentation with partners and are beginning to do collaborative collecting. In the future, the consortium will seek additional members and work with Archive-It to develop a consortial search tool. This web archiving collaborative has helped member institutions overcome challenges by having group discussions, sharing documentation and guidelines, and jointly serving a primary user group, Kansas residents

Data Science: A Study from the Scientometric, Curricular, and Altmetric Perspectives

This research explores the emerging field of data science from the scientometric, curricular, and altmetric perspectives and addresses the following six research questions: 1. What are the scientometric features of the data science field? 2. What are the contributing fields to the establishment of data science? 3. What are the major research areas of the data science discipline? 4. What are the salient topics taught in the data science curriculum? 5. What topics appear in the Twitter-sphere regarding data science? 6. What can be learned about data science from the scientometric, curricular, and altmetric analyses of the data collected? Using bibliometric data from the Scopus database for 1983 – 2021, the current study addresses the first three research questions. The fourth research question is answered with curricular data collected from U.S. educational institutions that offer data science programs. Altmetric data was gathered from Twitter for over 20 days to answer the fifth research question. All three sets of data are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The scientometric portion of this study revealed a growing field, expanding beyond the borders of the United States and the United Kingdom into a more global undertaking. Computer Science and Statistics are foundational contributing fields with a host of additional fields contributing data sets for new data scientists to act, including, for example, the Biomedical and Information Science fields. When it comes to the question of salient topics across all three aspects of this research, it was revealed that a large degree of coherence between the three resulted in highlighting thirteen core topics of data science. However, it can be noted that Artificial Intelligence stood out among all the other groups with leading topics such as Machine Learning, Neural Networks, and Natural Language Processing. The findings of this study not only identify the major parameters of the data science field (e.g., leading researchers, the composition of the discipline) but also reveal its underlying intellectual structure and research fronts. They can help researchers to ascertain emerging topics and research fronts in the field. Educational programs in data science can learn from this study about how to update their curriculums and better prepare students for the rapidly growing field. Practitioners and other stakeholders of data science can also benefit from the present research to stay tuned and current in the field. Furthermore, the triple-pronged approach of this research provides a panoramic view of the data science field that no prior study has ever examined and will have a lasting impact on related investigations of an emerging discipline

CHANGING MINDS OR TRANSFORMING SOCIAL WORLDS? RE-ENVISIONING MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION AS FEMINIST ARTS-ACTIVISM

This dissertation project seeks to address the sociological processes, dynamics, and mechanisms inflecting how and why U.S. society reproduces a sexually dimorphic, binary gender structure. The project builds upon the work of sociologists of gender on the doing gender framework, intersectional feminist approaches to identity formation, and hegemonic masculinity and relational theories of gender. In a 2012 article in Social Science and Medicine presenting contemporary concepts in gender theory to the health-oriented readers of the journal, R. W. Connell argues that much public policy on gender and health relies on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Connell contends that poststructuralist theories highlighting the performativity of gender improve on the assumption of a categorical binary typical in public policy, but they ignore the insights of sociological theories emphasizing gender as a structure comprising emotional and material constraints of the complex inter-relations among social institutions in which performances of gender are embedded. According to Connell, it is the task of social scientists to uncover “the processes by which social worlds are brought into being through time – the ontoformativity, not just the performativity, of gender.” This project explores the ontoformativity of gender in consideration of Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of the four domains of power. According to Collins, matrices of domination are intersecting and interlocking axes of oppression including but not limited to race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, ability, place, and religion that reproduce social inequalities through their interoperation in the cultural, interpersonal, structural, and disciplinary domains of power. West and Zimmerman contrast gender as an axis in the matrix of oppression with site-specific roles, arguing that gender is a master status that is omnirelevant to all situations such that a person is assessed in terms of their competences in performing activities as a man or a woman. The doing gender approach has been accused of theorizing gender as an immutably monolithic social inequality. This project seeks to explicate the dynamics of gender ideology by probing its weaknesses in the interpersonal and cultural domains of power. As Collins and coauthor Sirma Bilge posit, for people oppressed along axes of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, place, ability, and other binaries that constrain their actions in the structural and disciplinary domains of power, “the music, dance, poetry, and art of the cultural domain of power and personal politics of the interpersonal domain grow in significance.” Each of the three components of the dissertation project addresses a facet of mechanisms and processes of the interpersonal and cultural domains of power in (re)producing the binary gender structure in U.S. society. Paper #1, titled, “Integrating Black Feminist Thought into Canonical Social Change Theory,” explicates how people in marginalized social locations mount definitional challenges to their received classifications in the cultural domain of power by rejecting the consciousness of the oppressor and wielding rearticulated collective identity-based standpoints as contextually attuned technologies of power to recast historical narratives. Paper #2, with teenaged co-researcher Emma Draper, titled “Ordering Gender: Interactional Accountability and the Social Accomplishment of Gender Among Adolescents in the U.S. South,” maps how youth theorize interactional accountability processes to binary gender expectations in the interlocking social institutions of medicine, the family, schools, and peer social networks. Paper #3 is a book proposal comprising an introductory chapter. The book will tell the story of how young feminist arts-activists challenge the binary gender structure through resistance in the cultural and interpersonal domains

Volume 42, Number 3, September 2022 OLAC Newsletter

Digitized September 2022 issue of the OLAC Newsletter

Volume 43, Number 3, September 2023 OLAC Newsletter

Digitized September 2023 issue of the OLAC Newsletter

Educating 21st Century Technology Career Professionals: Perspectives on Soft Skills

This study used the theories of Pedagogical Constructivism, Transformative Learning, and Social and Cultural Capital to understand better the soft skills competencies that need to be imparted to adult learners to thrive in a technological world. The study was set at Midwest Tech Company, a suburban software technology company located outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The research design was qualitative, using a phenomenological approach. Data were collected within interviews, focus group activities, and from documents. Analysis of the data collected revealed lived experiences of career technology professionals that described effective communication, willingness to learn, and the value of mentorship within technology professional work