ACRL Environmental Scan 2015 Presentation

Every two years, the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee releases an environmental scan of higher education, including developments with the potential for continuing impact on academic libraries. The 2015 environmental scan provides a broad review of the current higher education landscape, with special focus on the state of academic and research libraries. The document builds on earlier ACRL reports, including the Top Trends in Academic Libraries. The 2015 environmental scan is freely available on the ACRL website (PDF). This presentation highlights key elements of the 2015 environmental scan.https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/library_presentations/1003/thumbnail.jp

Affording Immediacy in Television News Production: Comparing Adoption Trajectories of Social Media and Satellite Technologies

Scholars have added nuance to debates about technology’s effects on journalism by exploring how news organizations adopt technologies. Extending this work, this article argues that technological adoption occurs at the intersection of technological affordances, journalism practice, and internal power relations. It uses interviews and observations with over 100 journalists at eight mainstream television news organizations in the United Kingdom and Canada to compare the adoption of social media and satellite technologies and their affordance of immediacy, a central television news value. Adoption trajectories and use of each set of technologies are found to vary in three respects: the extent to which they afford and shape immediacy; top-down versus bottom-up investment strategies; and effects on news-gathering and transmission practices

Field Cure, Barn Cure or Make Silage?

Field-cured hay often is rain-damaged-increasing field losses and cutting protein and carotene content. You may want to use improved harvesting methods to reduce such losses. If so, here are the alternatives and what to consider

Programming sex, gender, and sexuality: Infrastructural failures in the "feminist" dating app Bumble

Background Bumble is a self-declared "feminist" dating app that gives women control over initiating conversations with potential matches. Analysis Through a material-semiotic analysis of Bumble's software and online media about the app, this article critically investigates how gender, sex, and sexuality are produced and given meaning by Bumble's programmed infrastructure. Conclusions and implications Since the epistemological underpinnings of Bumble's design centre gender as the solitary axis of oppression, the authors argue that the app's infrastructure generates an ontological relationship between gender, sex, and sexuality that narrows the capacity to achieve its creators' stated social justice objectives. Several infrastructural failures are detailed to demonstrate how control and safety are 1) optimized for straight cisgender women, and 2) contingent on the inscription of an aggressive form of masculinity onto straight male bodies

ACRL Framework for Impactful Scholarship and Metrics

The ACRL Impactful Scholarship and Metrics Task Force was formed primarily to create a framework for the measurement and evaluation of academic librarian scholarship. The framework is designed to address gaps between current scholarly evaluation practices and impactful scholarly activities within academic librarianship, including ways to measure and evaluate the impact of a wide range of research outputs

Facebooking in "face": Complex identities meet simple databases

Online systems often struggle to account for the complicated self-presentation and disclosure needs of those with complex identities or specialized anonymity. Using the lenses of gender, recovery, and performance, our proposed panel explores the tensions that emerge when the richness and complexity of individual personalities and subjectivities run up against design norms that imagine identity as simplistic or one-dimensional. These models of identity not only limit the ways individuals can express their own identities, but also establish norms for other users about what to expect, causing further issues when the inevitable dislocations do occur. We discuss the challenges in translating identity into these systems, and how this is further marred by technical requirements and normative logics that structure cultures and practices of databases, algorithms and computer programming