Engage, Enrich, Enlighten, Energize: Explorations in Instructional Humor

This chapter describes the use of classroom humor in the teaching of a government information course, employing the four Es (engage, enrich, enlighten, energize) to educate and empower library & information science students in a proactive approach to government information in order to help their communities both understand and make better use of these critical information resources, which are intended to facilitate the government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."YesAll book chapters underwent editorial board revie

Can We Talk About Vocational Awe?

Text of talk given by Dr. Betsy Van der Veer Martens at the March 7, 2022 Lambda chapter initiation ceremony of the Beta Phi Mu international honor society for library and information studiesN

Information and Design: Book Symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of Information

Purpose – To review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions. Findings – Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects. Research implications – Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS. Originality/value – The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas

The Impact of Outliers: Practice Theory and Bibliometrics

This comparative case study explores the impact of four ???practice theories??? in the separate domains of finance, military strategy, nursing, and theology, and discusses potential ???outputs??? in each field that might be developed into new metrics to enrich the current practice of informetrics

An Illustrated Introduction to the Infosphere (preprint)

This introduction to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (PI) provides a short overview of Floridi’s work and its reception by the library and information studies (LIS) community, brief definitions of some important PI concepts, and illustrations of Floridi’s three suggested applications of PI to library and information studies. It suggests that LIS may just be as important to PI as PI is to LIS in terms of deepening our mutual understanding of information ontologies, the dynamics of informational domains, and the variety of evolving relationships among information organisms and information objects.YesThis work was published in Library Trends, a peer-reviewed journal

Approaching the Anti-Collection

This conceptual article explores similarities and differences among libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) and significant sectors of what Atkinson termed "the anti-collection" in order to better understand the evolving universe of digital publication and its possibilities.published or submitted for publicatio

Theories at work: Functional characteristics of theories that facilitate their diffusion over time

This dissertation contributes to research on scientific communication by a comparative case study of the careers of eight different theories in the social sciences over a period of approximately twenty years. These theories include work on institutional isomorphism, organizational citizenship behavior, vertical dyad linkage and leader-member exchange, electronic markets and hierarchies, marketing channel structure, social influences on technology adoption and utilization, the antecedents of whistleblowing behavior, and the development of pseudo-community in virtual environments. The theories range from those that have received minimal levels of citation since their original publication, to several around which larger or smaller invisible colleges have already crystallized, to one citation classic that can be considered foundational to a sociological paradigm. Using citation analysis, citation context analysis, content analysis, surveys of editorial review boards, and personal interviews with theorists, a model of functional theory characteristics that appear to promote theory diffusion into particular channels around various epistemic communities is presented. It is then compared to Everett Rogers\u27s classic typology of innovation characteristics that promote diffusion, and considered in the context of a variety of other ongoing research programs in diffusion, bibliometrics, and computational epistemology that study theories as part of the commodification of justification

Do citation systems represent theories of truth?

This article suggests that the citation can be viewed not only as a "concept symbol" but also as a "boundary object". The scientific, legal, and patent citation systems in America are examined at the micro, meso, and macro levels in order to understand how they function as commodified theories of truth in contemporary knowledge representation. This approach also offers a meta-theoretical overview of existing citation research efforts in science, law, and technology that may be of interdisciplinary interest

The Oklahoma Mesonet: A Pilot Study of Environmental Sensor Data Citations

This pilot study of 110 scientific papers utilizing environmental sensor data from the Oklahoma Mesonet during its first two decades of operations demonstrates the diversity of potential purposes in scientific research for a robust, rigorously maintained, accessible source of environmental sensor data, as well as the challenges involved in identifying uses of that data within scientific papers. The study authors selected three publication years (1995, 2005, 2015) from an extensive corpus of peer-reviewed journal publications, identified each paper’s specific citation of and uses of the Mesonet’s environmental sensor data, and derived a typology of those usages (assimilation, experimentation, observation, simulation, utilization, validation) found to be most common. The rapid increase in data assimilation research projects today is discussed in terms of the difficulty and importance of correct attribution to individual data sources in these complex research projects. The study examines the possible role played by highly-cited papers that describe the quality assurance procedures in sensor data sources, which may serve as surrogates to signal the quality of the data provided by such sources, and which may also provide a useful contribution towards understanding data citation as a special form of scholarly citation