Municipal Approaches in Maine to Reduce Single-use Consumer Products

Maine’s solid waste management hierarchy prioritizes reduction and reuse over recycling. While most municipalities in Maine have focused on increasing recycling, they have undertaken minimal efforts to specifically foster source reduction and reuse. In this paper, Travis Wagner examines the approaches adopted in Maine by the state and by municipalities to reduce the consumption of single-use consumer products including bans, fees, consumer education, choice architecture, and retail take back

"Describing without identifying”: The phenomenological role of gender in cataloging practices

This dissertation explores gendering practices of visual information catalogers. The work aims to understand better how catalogers perceive gender when describing persons within visual information. The qualitative study deployed a queer interpretative phenomenological analysis to understand how catalogers think broadly about describing identity within their work. The infused queer theoretical tenets helped to understand that while participants may not directly name gender as challenging, the conflation of gender into cisnormative monoliths (assuming every person's gender matches their sex-assigned-at birth) or silence around gender produce telling opinions concerning non-binary gender. The research also asked participants to engage in a Think Aloud exercise wherein they described in-the-moment cataloging three moving images. One image represented “neutral” cisgender identities, and two clips represented subversions to gender binaries. Thirteen catalogers were interviewed, and data produced noteworthy findings. Catalogers describe work with visual information as inherently challenging since describing anything without context requires caution. Catalogers also noted a broad hesitance around describing humans given societal complexities around identities like race and gender. Nevertheless, participants during the Think Aloud exercise relied on gendering as descriptive shorthand (pronouns, male/female labels) and only reflected on these presumptions when engaging with the footage whose contents challenged gender binaries. Implications suggest a need for training catalogers around contemporary notions of gender identity to be more inclusive. Further, given the impact of the gender non-conforming footage on cataloger’s perceived practices, another implication suggests value in increased access to and representation of gender diverse materials within cultural heritage

Reeling Backward: The Haptics of a Medium and the Queerness of Obsolescence

This article considers the haptics of queer activist footage shot on video, and more specifically footage shot on magnetic media. Despite ideal methods of care, magnetic media faces extreme concern from a preservation standpoint. As a format that is both subject to rampant deterioration (known colloquially as “sticky shed”) and obsolescence (with the ceasing VCR production), the queer activist videotape is an archival artefact irretrievably stuck in a liminal space. To play a tape is to contribute to its destruction, yet to not play the tape is to overlook potentially unique moments in queer history. As such, this article explores the very thing that is the videotape, an item latent with queer potentialities and reminders of queer failure. By approaching the ethical implications of magnetic media and the iterative nature of using magnetic media as a recording method, the article examines this format as key figure in rhetorics of queer time. Infused with archival discourses of the desire for a queer historic touch (borrowing as the title suggests from Heather Love’s Feeling Backward), the article lands decidedly on the side of caution, noting that each move to save queer history chronicled on the failed format of video is to destroy the very thing it longs to embrac

Teaching through Activism: Service Learning, Community Archives, and Digital Repository Building in MLIS Classrooms

This paper reflects upon a set of Service Learning (SL) courses taught in the University of South Carolina’s Library and Information Science (LIS) program. The classes discussed helped community archives build digital repositories and provided LIS students skills demanded by potential employers, while affording students chances to experiment with technologies and information organization practices in low-risk, innovative ways. While SL is not pedagogically new to LIS instruction, this paper expands discussion on how SL courses translate between undergraduate and graduate students and within in-person and online variants. The paper concludes with an exploration of the ethical challenges of teaching a course that worked with a community archive possessing express feminist politics, necessitating discussions of accessibility, organization and classroom engagement divergent from student’s previous experiences

Moving up the Waste Hierarchy in Maine: Learning from “Best Practice” State-Level Policy for Waste Reduction and Recovery

As Maine residents look toward the future, it is increasingly clear that more sustainable waste and materials management solutions will be necessary. A recent stakeholder engagement process involving nearly 200 industry professionals, municipal representatives and citizen groups confirmed this point. As we move together toward a more sustainable waste management system, participants in the engagement process identified an outstanding need to learn more about policies options. This article responds to that need with a review of state level policies designed to reduce waste generation and increase material recovery rates. We find there are a wide variety of state-level policy tools available, each of which involves a series of complex tradeoffs to balance decision criteria ranging from diversion potential and cost to social acceptability and environmental protection. While there is no magic formula, it is clear that the most successful state-level programs are those that utilize a variety of tools, selected as part of a comprehensive and data-driven long term planning process

Seeking Information Between and Beyond Binaries: How Queer Theory Can Inform LIS Theories

Queer theory offers a rich set of ideas, epistemologies, and methodological interventions whose incorporation into theories of information allows for growth, expansion, and potential alteration of library and inforamtion science scholarship, pedagogy, and research praxis. This presentation provides a primer for queer theory and applies tenets from its vast canon of thought to three ongoing LIS-based research projects. Each project and application engages with existing information science theories and illuminates how queer theory challenges, unsettles, and even reconstitutes the epistemological assumptions latent within them. The first project deploys queer phenomenology to understand how one’s embodied queerness, or lack thereof, informs their perception of difference and identity within information seeking and creation. The second project examines how authenticity shapes insider/outsider dynamics within queer communities as it relates to information flow. This work presents realness, as developed by queer and trans people of color, as an alternative approach to envisioning these dynamics that leaves space to privilege individual subjectivities regarding information interactions. The third project uses notions of queer imaginaries and futurities to critique utoptic conceptions of information systems in sociotechnical work. The presentation culminates in a discussion of what queering information science could and should do, and suggests ways in which queer theoretical perspectives may be applied to the field of library and information science more broadly

We Try to Find Something for Whatever Obstacle Might be in Our Way”: Understanding the Health Information Practices of South Carolina LGBTQ+ Communities

Objective: LGBTQ+ people experience health disparities compared to heterosexual, cisgender peers. Individual and systemic barriers produce these disparities. One barrier is informational, as LGBTQ+ people experience challenges when learning about their health needs, navigating the healthcare system, and overcoming obstacles to care. This paper investigates the future of libraries and the health sciences by exploring how they can address these informational barriers. Methods: This paper reports on ~30 ongoing interviews with LGBTQ+ community leaders from South Carolina (SC) using a semi-structured protocol. The protocol asked participants to discuss their community’s health questions and concerns, how the community addresses them, and the barriers experienced along the way. Qualitative data analysis of interview transcripts and drawings from an information worlds mapping exercise is iterative and inductive. The researchers employ the constant comparative method to generate open codes and then organize them into broader thematic categories. Results: Findings denote that SC LGBTQ+ communities are keenly aware of their health information needs, however, they perceive a lack of institutional knowledge to address them. Moreover, participants mistrust experts like medical practitioners due to their perceived lack of cultural competence when serving LGBTQ+ communities. In turn, participants orient themselves and their communities through and around barriers to health information and resources via defensive and protective information practices. Conclusions: Implications suggest that LGBTQ+ people do not view themselves as experiencing deficits regarding how they engage with health-related information. Therefore, it is not the job of librarians to “correct” information practices that they may find to be risky or problematic. Instead, it is their duty to provide systems and services to meet the health needs of LGBTQ+ people, which may include reorienting their own approaches to information provision and assessment. This reorientation can be accomplished by leveraging defensive and protective information practices in which SC LGBTQ+ communities already engage

Moving up the Waste Hierarchy in Maine: Learning from “Best Practice” State-Level Policy for Waste Reduction and Recovery

As Maine residents look toward the future, it is increasingly clear that more sustainable waste and materials management solutions will be necessary. A recent stakeholder engagement process involving nearly 200 industry professionals, municipal representatives and citizen groups confirmed this point. As we move together toward a more sustainable waste management system, participants in the engagement process identified an outstanding need to learn more about policies options. This article responds to that need with a review of state level policies designed to reduce waste generation and increase material recovery rates. We find there are a wide variety of state-level policy tools available, each of which involves a series of complex tradeoffs to balance decision criteria ranging from diversion potential and cost to social acceptability and environmental protection. While there is no magic formula, it is clear that the most successful state-level programs are those that utilize a variety of tools, selected as part of a comprehensive and data-driven long term planning process

Improving security requirements adequacy: an interval type 2 fuzzy logic security assessment system

Organizations rely on security experts to improve the security of their systems. These professionals use background knowledge and experience to align known threats and vulnerabilities before selecting mitigation options. The substantial depth of expertise in any one area (e.g., databases, networks, operating systems) precludes the possibility that an expert would have complete knowledge about all threats and vulnerabilities. To begin addressing this problem of fragmented knowledge, we investigate the challenge of developing a security requirements rule base that mimics multi-human expert reasoning to enable new decision-support systems. In this paper, we show how to collect relevant information from cyber security experts to enable the generation of: (1) interval type-2 fuzzy sets that capture intra- and inter-expert uncertainty around vulnerability levels; and (2) fuzzy logic rules driving the decision-making process within the requirements analysis. The proposed method relies on comparative ratings of security requirements in the context of concrete vignettes, providing a novel, interdisciplinary approach to knowledge generation for fuzzy logic systems. The paper presents an initial evaluation of the proposed approach through 52 scenarios with 13 experts to compare their assessments to those of the fuzzy logic decision support system. The results show that the system provides reliable assessments to the security analysts, in particular, generating more conservative assessments in 19% of the test scenarios compared to the experts’ ratings