A Community-grounded approach to understanding preservation of the cultural heritage of refugee communities

Project APRCH (Agency in the Preservation of Refugee Cultural Heritage), is an effort to ask refugees to speak in their own voice, attaining agency, about the direction they wish to take in the preservation of their (refugee) cultural heritage. Project APRCH focuses on learning from/about the refugee population in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina, USA, as a microcosm of similar communities across the United States. It seeks to understand the relationships of particular community members to their intangible cultural heritage as a process for authentic cultural heritage preservation

Building an Institutional Repository in Hard Times

This poster presents an overview of an exploratory research initiative to examine and assess the viability of developing an institutional repository system at a teaching-oriented four-year university with minimal monetary commitment. A need has been identified for an institutional repository and necessary steps have been taken to implement it. Several departments worked together to create a prototype Institutional Repository using DSpace, an open source repository software. This repository represents a unique endeavor, in that it has been instituted at a non-research based university and has chosen to involve students in the planning, design, implementation, and documentation stages of the project. In addition, the university\u27s Library Science students will also be involved in creating and maintaining collections. This poster focuses on the steps taken to set up and the plans to maintain a quality Institutional Repository at Valdosta State University without placing a large demand on the institution\u27s resources

The Potential for Web Services to Enhance Information Access to Legacy Data: An Exploratory Study and Application

This poster presents an overview of an exploratory research project to identify, describe, and investigate the applicability of a Web services (WS) approach to access legacy data. In the Z Texas Implementation Component of the Library of Texas (ZLOT) project, the ZLOT technical team implemented a multi-purpose Texas Library Directory Database (TLDD) that is used as a back- end database to support the Library of Texas (LOT) Resource Discovery Service (RDS). The researchers developed and implemented a prototype WS application to show how a legacy system can be accessed and its data can be searched and retrieved. This study focused on understanding how requests and responses between software applications are encoded in Extensible Markup Language (XML)

Faculty Members’ Perceptions towards Institutional Repository at a Medium-sized University: Application of a Binary Logistic Regression Model

Purpose – The study aimed to investigate the perceptions of faculty members at a medium-sized university towards self-archiving and participation in institutional repositories (IRs). Design/methodology/approach – The research participants were from a medium-sized university. An online survey was distributed and a total of 217 responses were received which yielded a 40 per cent overall response rate. Faculty perceptions of the IR were measured through nine dimensions, the results of which were later summarised using principal component factor analysis. Findings – Faculty members’ perception of IRs and willingness to contribute to the IRs were closely associated with scholarly productivity rather than prior knowledge of and experience with IRs. Those who possessed scholarly materials were significantly more likely to have a positive perception of IRs and, therefore, were more likely to contribute to IRs than those who did not. Seniority in faculty rank contributed negatively to faculty members’ perception of the repository. Research limitations/implications – The study used a non-probability sampling technique to collect data about the faculty’s perception of IRs at a single institution of higher education. Variables for faculty background were limited to rank and academic discipline. Originality/value – In three ways: First, the study contributed to research on faculty perception of IRs in academia and approached the issue from the perspective of a teaching-oriented institution. Second, the relationship between faculty's willingness to participate in and their perception of IRs was measured. Third, a binary logistic regression model was used to estimate factors that influence faculty's perception of the institution's IRs

Texas Library Directory Web Services Application: The Potential for Web Services to Enhance Information Access to Legacy Data

This paper presents an overview of an exploratory research project to identify, describe, and investigate the applicability of the Web services (WS) approach to access legacy data. In the Z Texas Implementation Component of the Library of Texas (ZLOT) project, the ZLOT technical team has implemented a multipurpose Texas Library Directory Database (TLDD) that is used as a back-end database to support the Library of Texas (LOT) Resource Discovery Service (RDS). The researchers developed and implemented a prototype WS application to show how a legacy system can be accessed and its data can be searched and retrieved. This study focused on understanding how requests and responses between software applications are encoded in XML

Library Blogs and User Participation: A Survey about Comment Spam in Library Blogs

The purpose of this research is to identify and describe the impact of comment spam in library blogs. Three research questions guided the study: current level of commenting in library blogs; librarians' perception of comment spam; and techniques used to address the comment spam problem

Preferences for course delivery in library and information science programs: a study of master's students in Canada and the United States

Objectives: This paper reports on Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) students' preferences for course delivery (online, blended or face-to-face) and how their preferences differ based on demographic variables. This research is part of a bi-national study that investigated the motivations and experiences that MLIS students had with online education, while completing their graduate degree in an American Library Association (ALA)-accredited institution.Methodology: The study used an online survey to gather data from Master's degree students enrolled in LIS programs accredited by ALA, a professional association which accredits programs in the US, Puerto Rico, and Canada. The online questionnaire was administered with the assistance of the administration and their student associations of LIS programs. Thirty-six programs from Canada and the US were represented by the 1,038 students who responded to the online survey. Respondents who had taken and completed at least one online course constituted the sample (n=910) that was used for analysis and the reporting of the results.Results: The findings show that there were five statistically significant indicators associated with preferred instructional delivery for MLIS core courses: age (generational cohort), employment status, metro status, commute distance, and program modality. The results show that younger students who had part-time employment, resided in urban areas, and lived closer to the campus showed greater preference for a course delivery mode that required some form of in-person instruction (face-to-face or blended) than their older peers who had full-time employment, resided in rural areas, and lived farther from campus

URL Decay at Year 20: A Research Note

All text is ephemeral. Some texts are more ephemeral than others. The web has proved to be among the most ephemeral and changing of information vehicles. The research note revisits Koehler's original data set after about 20 years since it was first collected. By late 2013, the number of URLs responding to a query had fallen to 1.6% of the original sample. A query of the 6 remaining URLs in February 2015 showed only 2 still responding