404 Reasons to Use Perma.cc

A 2013 study found that 70% of URLs in law journal articles and 50% of URLs cited by U.S. Supreme Court cases had suffered from reference rot and additional studies have demonstrated that reference rot increases over time. Information published online by government agencies is not immune to this phenomena. One startling example is the removal of climate change information from the Environmental Protection Agency\u27s website. Perma.cc is a service developed by the Harvard Innovation Lab to preserve web-based content cited by scholars and the courts. Unlike archiving techniques that rely on random captures of web content, Perma.cc creates a permanent link at the request of a user, ensuring future scholars can review a source as it appeared at the time of citation. Learn how you can use Perma.cc to preserve citation integrity

Peacebuilding Through Food Recovery

The United States wastes approximately 133 billion pounds of food annually while 15 million American households are food insecure. Current and proposed U.S. legislation attempts to encourage food recovery efforts to address both of these problems by incentivizing donation of surplus foods by businesses to charitable organizations, yet legislation has failed to deliver. Food insecure individuals who use food banks or other safety net programs are often required to provide personal information and are subject to scrutiny in the process of acquiring food. Information can be leveraged in different ways to stigmatize or marginalize those in need. This presentation discusses the relationships between current legislation, safety net programs, and food insecure individuals to demonstrate that food recovery legislation is not a magic bullet that will address food insecurity or food waste in a system that has a long history of treating poverty as a character flaw

Beyond the Academy: Connecting Research and Policy

In April 2021, members of New York State Covid-19 and Minority Health Disparities Engaged Researchers Working Group began contributing a series of white papers to a collection in Scholars Archive, University at Albany\u27s institutional repository. This poster reports on the reach of that collection after one year. The literature suggests that information users beyond the academy rely on a variety of sources in the course of their work, most of which can be described as grey literature. The poster will also present preliminary data collected from information users in the nonprofit and government sectors of New York State. It illustrates the potential for community-focused research published outside of traditional channels

Content Analysis: A Research Method You Can Count On (Or Not)

Content analysis is a flexible research method used by library scholars. This poster presentation describes some content analysis basics, differences between methods, such as quantitative vs. qualitative, and some examples of questions answered using this method by LIS researchers

A Review of Grey Literature Cited by Food Loss Law and Policy Scholarship

In the United States, state and federal programs, rules, and legislation attempt to address the social, economic, and environmental impacts of food waste. Research on the efficacy of these interventions rely on a variety of grey literature resources. Grey literature is valuable to policy research but may be overlooked because it is not published commercially and is often deemed unauthoritative. This review focuses on the use of grey literature in food waste law and policy scholarship to identify the most used sources and to determine what, if any, archiving strategies authors use. Recommendations for librarians and researchers are discussed

Leadership, Development, and Expertise: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Scholarly Communication Librarian Position Announcements

In 2012, the Association of Research Libraries reported that 95% of libraries identified their libraries as leaders of scholarly communication efforts on campus. While academic librarians have long been responsible for SC issues, institutions have explicitly tasked positions with these responsibilities increasingly over time. This qualitative analysis of position announcements focuses on the ways libraries expect these librarians to engage with SC issues and responsibilities, rather than describing the prevalence of SC-related functions. Specifically, this study asks the following questions: (1) How do administrators communicate leadership expectations of SC librarian roles through job advertisements? (2) In what ways could these leadership expectations be challenging or problematic for SC librarians in non-administrator positions? The dataset consists of job advertisements posted to ALA JobList and are predominantly from North American academic libraries. Prevalent themes in position announcements include leadership, development, and expertise. These themes are discussed in terms of the SC librarian as a boundary spanning role. Issues associated with identified themes in such boundary roles may manifest in poorly defined authority of non-administrator positions. Suggestions for institutions and potential further research are discussed

Food Waste Legislation Scholarship: A Mapping Study

The purpose of this study is to examine research activity on food waste legislation published in law journals to identify top sources and experts cited by recent scholarship. Searches for food loss and food waste were conducted in three legal research databases for law journal articles published between January 2013 and January 2018. The core list of selected articles consists of 13 law journal articles. The citations from each of the core articles were collected to form a database, which was analyzed to determine what kinds of resources legal scholars rely on when conducting research in food waste legislation. Government Sources and Primary Law contribute approximately 48% of the citations in the database. News, Nonprofit, and Law Reviews and Journals contribute approximately 31% of database citations. This study provides some insight into the complexity of food law and the facets of agriculture, industry, and society that affect the success of food waste reduction legislation

Catching Killers with Consumer Genetic Information

In April 2018, Joseph James D\u27Angelo was arrested as a suspect in the Golden State Killer case. DNA evidence collected at a 1980 crime scene finally shed light on the murderer\u27s identity in early 2018 when investigators turned to GEDMatch, a service that allows users to upload and share DNA data obtained from consumer genetic tests. Consumer genetic testing, DNA collection, and familial DNA searching all raise ethical and privacy concerns. If investigators are using genetic genealogy to solve cold cases, where does that leave consumers

Beyond the Academy: Readership and Impact of a White Paper Collection

In April 2021, members of the NYS Covid-19 and Minority Health Disparities Engaged Researchers Working Group began contributing a series of white papers to a collection in Scholars Archive, University at Albany\u27s institutional repository. This poster reports on the reach of that collection after one year and illustrates the potential for community-focused research published outside of traditional channels