The course assignments are described in detail here. The due dates are also shown on the class schedule. An explanation of the grading policy is at the end of this page.

All of your assignments will be turned in via the Drop Box on Sakai, so they will need to be in digital form. Word documents, Open Office documents, or pdf documents are all acceptable; if you prefer to work in another format, please check with me first to ensure that I can read and comment on your completed assignments.

Assignments are due at noon. Late assignments will be docked 10 points for each day they are late, unless you make alternative arrangements with me ahead of time.

Assignment 1: Evidence Summary (15%)

This assignment is modeled on the evidence summaries regularly published in the journal, Evidence-Based Library & Information Practice (http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/index). As you can see from examining a few examples in the journal, each evidence summary focuses on a particular research study that has implications for the practice of the information professions. While most of the evidence summaries in the journal do focus on the practice of librarianship, this approach can (and will, in this assignment) be extended to any information practice setting that you want to explore for your future career.

Selecting an article

Due August 26

Your first step is to select an article that provides evidence that you'd like to summarize.

• It must be an empirical study, broadly defined; to meet this criterion, the authors must have systematically collected data related to their research question and must have reported their findings. If you have questions about whether a particular article meets this criterion, please check with me prior to beginning the assignment.
• The article should be on a topic/question within the scope of this course, i.e., it should focus on human information interactions of some type.
• It can be an article from our "additional readings" list, but does not have to be; it may NOT be one of our required readings.

The topic of the article for this assignment may be the same as the topic of the article you summarized for the previous assignment. However, you may NOT use the same article for this assignment as for the previous assignment.

Writing the evidence summary

The evidence summary itself is written in a very structured format - basically an extended abstract. It begins with brief descriptions of the study's objective(s), its design, its setting, its subjects/participants, and the methods used to carry it out. Then it reports the main results and the main conclusions that can be drawn from those results. Finally, the author of the summary comments on the implications of those conclusions for practice in the relevant information setting. Additional references pertinent to the commentary should be cited, as appropriate; these can include references in the original article but should also include relevant references not cited in the article being examined.

The full evidence summary, excluding title, study citation, and additional references, should be 1000-1500 words. You should turn in a copy of the study being examined when you turn in your summary.

Sharing the evidence summary with the class

During the appropriate class session, you will be asked to present a brief overview of the article you read: What were its main points? What did you learn from it that was pertinent to the topic being discussed in class that day? The presentation will be informal, in the sense that it will involve no slides and may, if you prefer, be done from your seat in class. The oral presentation should take no more than 3-4 minutes of class time.

Evaluation criteria

The evidence summary will be evaluated on the accuracy of its description of the original article, your understanding of the conclusions of the study being examined (their validity, their pertinence to particular information practice settings), and the depth and validity of your commentary on the study being examined.

Due date: To be scheduled in alignment with the class schedule

Assignment 2: Evidence Review Memo (35%)

The purpose of this assignment is to teach you how to make evidence-based decisions and recommendations in your future career as an information professional. You will select a human information interaction problem or question that has practical consequences in a setting of information practice of your choice (such as an academic library or a corporate IT center). This problem or question should focus on a decision that must be taken in the setting you choose. I encourage you to choose a setting that you think you might want to work in after you graduate. This setting and the problem in the setting can be real or fictional. Some examples might include the development of a library instruction program for a particular purpose, new ways to track IT support questions received at an IT center, or how to convince faculty to deposit their materials in a new institutional repository. These examples are intended to be suggestive, not comprehensive or restrictive.

After selecting your setting and problem, you will gather evidence from the literature that will inform your decision/planning. The procedures to be followed in your literature searching for this assignment are similar to those used in systematic reviews of the literature. Both the procedures for identifying/selecting literature and the procedures for documenting what you did are described in more detail below.

The next step is to analyze the articles that are pertinent to your review. The evidence will then be synthesized and summarized in a structured memo to your organization's administration. Your memo will conclude with a recommendation for action in your organization. For example, using the three examples given above, the recommendation might be the outline of a plan for a new library instruction program, specifications for a new system to track IT support questions, or an initial plan for marketing a new institutional repository to the members of your organization.

Each step in this process is described in more detail below.

The human information interaction problem/question and setting

You will identify a practical/realistic problem in an information practice setting, requiring that a decision be made or an action be taken. It should be a problem whose solution would benefit from evidence published in the research/scholarly and professional literature. Some examples are:

• What type of instructional methods will be most effective for introducing first-year college students to library resources?
• What is the most efficient way to make sure that our IT center can track and resolve all the problems reported to it?
• What types of incentives will promote faculty deposits to an institutional repository?
• What are the most important and/or authoritiative reference sources to students of information and library science?
• How do the needs of distance education students differ from on-campus students?
• What are the most serious barriers to using the local public library?
• Are internet users more knowledgeable about local issues than non-internet users? How might a local organization integrate its internet-based and more traditional information dissemination?
• Who blogs, who reads blogs, and why? Should my organization establish a blog? Should it be the province of organizational staff, or should clients of the organization be allowed to post new articles?

Coming up with a good question is probably the most difficult part of this assignment. A good question is one that you can place in a theoretical context, for which there is a bit of existing empirical data but not so much that the question is already answered, and whose answer will either inform practice or contribute to the knowledge base. You should be able to explain why the question is worth answering.

Milestone assignment (Due Monday, September 16): You will write three short paragraphs for this milestone assignment:

• One paragraph summarizing the problem or question to be pursued.
• One paragraph explaining why you selected this problem.
• One paragraph describing the professional setting that is the context of your problem.

Identifying the literature to be included in the review

You will begin by planning your review procedures. You should decide which databases/sources you will search and what search strategy(ies) you will use in each. You should specify inclusion and exclusion criteria for which studies will be included in your review. (Generally, systematic reviews consider only high-quality empirical studies, but for the purposes of this assignment, you may also include conceptual articles and possibly opinion pieces as well.) More guidance on how to conduct a systematic review is provided in: Handoll, H.H.G.., & Smith, A.F. (2004). How to perform a systematic review. Current Anaesthesia and Critical Care, 15(3), 227-234 (available in UNC libraries).

The process of search for literature will also help you to identify aspects of the problem. For example, the question "Who blogs, who reads blogs, and why?" is more complex than it may seem. How does blogging compare with other self-publishing options (pamphleteers in the 18th Century, columnists in modern newspapers, for example)? What factors attract readers to blogs? What are the characteristics of bloggers (age, race, gender, other)? What subjects are covered in blogs? Is there a blogging life cycle? Your literature review should draw upon the relevant theories or models that apply to your population and the problem you are investigating. Thus, your plan for conducting the review will evolve over time and it is likely that the methods you describe in your final paper will be somewhat different than the methods described in your preliminary plan.

There will be a lot of variability in the number of citations included in the reviews completed for this assignment, but here is a bit of guidance on scope/scale: I would expect that you might identify hundreds of potentially useful documents through your literature search; I would expect that you would closely examine the abstracts of over 100 documents; I would expect that you would examine the full text of 30-60 articles; I would expect that you would identify 20-30 articles to be included in your review.

Milestone assignment (Due October 7): You will develop a preliminary plan for identifying the literature to include in their review. The plan should include the list of databases/sources to be searched, the search strategies to be used, and the inclusion/exclusion criteria to be used to evaluate the literature retrieved.

Final deliverable (Due November 15 as an appendix to your memo): For the final deliverable, please include ayour updated plan from October 7th as an appendix. Using Booth's STARLITE mnemonic, as described in Table 3 and illustrated in Table 4 of: Booth, A. (2006). "Brimful of STARLITE": Toward standards for reporting literature searches. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 94(4), 421-429 (available online), describe your sampling strategy, the types of studies included, the general approaches used, the range of years included, limits you placed on searches, inclusions and exclusions, terms used (a complete list, rather than the reference to a list that Booth uses in his illustration), and the specific databases search. This appendix should be no longer than 2 single-spaced pages.

Extracting and synthesizing knowledge, writing up what you've learned, and making a recommendation for action

Using the structure you developed as you were analyzing the identified articles, you will synthesize and present your findings. What do we know in relation to your problem/question, generally, and in relation to specific aspects of it? Do the findings from the articles you reviewed indicate that we should change any of our current practices? If so, in what way?

A brief article that will guide you through the process of extracting and synthesizing knowledge for a literature review is: Webster, J., & Watson, R.T. (2002). Analyzing the past to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review. MIS Quarterly, 26(2), xiii-xxiii (available in UNC libraries via JSTOR). It is most likely that your analysis will be structured around the aspects of the problem you identified as you examined the literature; Webster and Watson's advice is particularly useful for helping you to structure your review.

Milestone assignment (Due November 4): Develop a detailed outline for your evidence review memo. The document to be turned in should include: a very brief summary of your problem/question (note that it may have evolved/shifted/changed since you began working on it), the summary of your findings in outline form, and a bulleted list or brief description of your recommendations for action.

Final memo (Due November 15): The final memo should include:

• an executive summary, briefly describing the problem, summarizing the evidence related to the problem, and specifying your recommendation for action (no more than 1 single-spaced page);
• the main body of the memo (no more than 8 single-spaced pages), to include:
  • an introduction that includes a statement of your research question and a discussion of why the problem is important (practically and/or theoretically) and should be studied;
  • a brief summary of the methods you used to identify the literature you examined;
  • a synthesis/summary of the findings from your literature review;
  • a discussion of the findings in terms of their implications for practice or future research;
  • your recommendation for action to be taken;
• a bibliography of resources used; and
• the STARLITE appendix (see above), which provides a clear description of your methods for conducting the literature review, including which databases were searched, the search strategies used, and your inclusion/exclusion criteria (it can be a bulleted list or outline, rather than narrative; no more than 2 single-spaced pages).

Evaluation criteria

The final memo will be evaluated based on the significance of the problem studied, the thoroughness and rigor of the literature review methods, the quality of the synthesis of the literature included in the review, the logic connecting those findings to your recommendation(s), the quality and feasibility of your recommendation(s), and the clarity of expression of the memo. The milestone assignments will not be individually graded, but failure to complete them will result in a lower final grade for the entire assignment.

Summary of milestones and due dates for evidence review memo

Problem/question specifications are due on Monday, September 16.
Preliminary plans for identifying the literature are due on Monday, October 7.
Preliminary outline for the review memo is due on Wednesday, October 30.
Final review memo is due on Friday, November 15 at 5 pm.

Assignment 3: Diary and Analysis of an Information-Seeking Event (20%)

[Based on an assignment prepared by Dr. Verna Pungitore, SLIS, Indiana University, with modifications by Dr. Deborah Barreau and Dr. Barbara Wildemuth]

As information professionals, we are concerned with designing systems and services that help our clients. For this assignment, you are the client. You will keep a short diary over a period of hours or days that covers a real-life information-seeking experience with an identifiable beginning and end. It does not have to be a unique event and it may or may not have been resolved. You will write up what you thought, felt, and did, and how you understand the experience based upon our readings and discussions in class. The two final deliverables for this assignment are (1) the diary itself, and (2) your analysis of the event described in the diary.

The diary

Start by describing your information need. This can be any kind of problem and doesn't have to be something you take to an information system. For example, I needed to buy a foot pedal, headphones, and transcription software to conduct interviews for my dissertation last April. I needed these tools as soon as possible.

Milestone assignment (Due September 25): Send me 1-3 sentences outlining your information problem before class.

To solve my problem, I did some preliminary shopping (both online and in a Best Buy store), consulted with other qualitative researchers in the department, and asked a question about what I was looking for online. Through an iterative process, in which additional focus was gained with each iteration, I eventually settled on a particular foot pedal and the other peripherals I would need to accompany it. This process occurred over several weeks; for your assignment, you should choose an information need that is occurring during the period in which you're working on the assignment.

Take notes or record your experience in some way. How did you know when you needed to look for information? What steps did you take and what motivated you along the way? Did you make any incidental discoveries that influenced your behavior? When and why did you finally stop looking (or are you still looking)? How did your emotions affect the search process?

The diary does not need to be neat and orderly. It's more important that you record what's happening and what you're thinking/feeling as it's happening than that you present it neatly. It only needs to be neat enough so that you can interpret and remember what happened for your later analysis of the event.

While the diary is a necessary deliverable for this assignment, it will play only a minor role in the grading. I will refer to it only as needed to understand and evaluate your analysis of the event.

The analysis

Assess which (if any) of the information seeking and use models we have discussed in class apply to your situation - as motivation, as information-seeking process, or as use.

Write a brief report (3-4 single-spaced pages) that interprets the experience. Concentrate on analyzing what happened instead of recounting each step. For example, it is more important to hear your reactions to what you did than to hear what you did - how important was the information to you? What sources were consulted? What barriers or surprises did you experience? If you consulted systems or online sources, describe the interaction and why it worked, or did not. If you consulted other people, describe the interaction and how you were able to convey your need to this person. Why do you think your experience was a successful (or unsuccessful) one? What did you learn that you did not know beforehand? What would you do differently if a similar problem arises in the future?

Be sure to relate your observations to readings and discussions from class. Cite them as appropriate.

Evaluation criteria

Grades will be based upon the quality and depth of your analysis of the experience. A description of the need and what motivated it, any obstacles you experienced, sources used, tasks performed, and results obtained along with your evaluation of those results should be included in the paper. While this paper is relatively informal in style, it should be formatted using a standard publication style (APA Style is recommended) and should include citations to the literature as appropriate.

Due date: Wednesday, October 16

Assignment 4: In-Depth Analysis of an Example of Scholarly Communication (20%)

To be completed in teams of 2-3 people. Teams will be formed in class on November 20.

In this assignment, you will work with a few of your classmates to review and reflect on an example of scholarly communication. Specifically, your team will choose and analyze a set of related scholarly articles, including references and citations from, to, and among them.

Selecting the articles

Choose a small set of articles (at least one for each member of your team, with a minimum of 3 articles for the team) from a concept area or research area of particular interest to the team.

The set can include one or more of the articles from class (required or optional readings), one or more of the articles cited in something you're reading for class, or it can include a different set of articles altogether. Any scholarly articles within the scope of INLS 500 are eligible for inclusion, in terms of their topic area.

The set of articles should include several different authors or research groups. While some overlap in authorship is acceptable, selecting the entire set from the works of one principal investigator or team leader is not appropriate for this assignment. Please see me if you have questions about whether the set of articles you've selected meets this criterion.

The articles should have been published sometime between 1960-2010. The reason for  choosing older papers is that it usually takes two years or more for  papers to be cited in the literature and their potential impact to be visible.

In addition, one or more of the articles should have been deemed significant. In other words, it/they must have been cited at least 20 times in the scholarly literature since being published.

It is also required that each article in the set be directly linked to at least one other article in the set, i.e., it must cite or be cited by at least one other article in the set.

Milestone assignment (Due November 25): A bibliography of the articles your team has identified for this analysis is due on November 25.

Analysis of the article

Write an analysis of each article in your set. The analysis should reflect your team's impressions of the paper with respect to the article's structure and content. The review should describe what you found useful in the article, what you liked about it, what the article's deficiencies or limitations are, and how the article has influenced your thinking about the field or about practice. You should relate your discussion to other readings or topics from the class.

Pay particular attention to the visual elements of the paper - how it is structured, illustrated, and how the ideas are presented. How successful was the author (or authors) in making an argument or conveying their ideas? What appealed to you about the presentation (structure, illustrations, writing style, length, level of detail, etc.)? How much of the article's appeal was due to your own point of view, preferences, or familiarity with the topic? Who was the intended audience for the paper and how is this made evident?

Note: It may be more fun to be critical, but one of the goals of this assignment is to recognize that the author is trying to make a point, to convey information that he/she/they believe is important, so it is important to appreciate that and place your comments in context. Consider the target audience when assessing the appropriateness of form and content. When the authors have failed in their effort, be precise about how they failed and offer suggestions for improvement.

Analysis of the scholarly context of the article

To understand the scholarly context of this article, you will analyze its references and the citations to this paper.

Begin by examining the reference lists in your selected papers. How old are the citations? Who wrote the work that the author(s) cited? Is the author's (or authors') prior work cited? In what journals or other media were the references published? What clues do the references give you about the purpose of the paper or the intended audience? How much overlap is there between the reference lists of the several articles in your selected set?

Your next step is to discover who has cited the papers you selected. You may check the following online citation indexes: ISI Web of Science (available online through the UNC Library e-research tools), Google Scholar, CiteSeer X (from Penn State University), the ACM Digital Library (for some technical papers), other online databases that might include your paper and that include citation data, and/or Scopus (if you have access to it). At a minimum, conduct citation searches in the ISI Web of Science database and at least one of the other citation databases. Be sure to keep track of which citations were discovered in which database.

Write up your citation analysis. How many times has each of the selected articles been cited? Who has cited each? Are there examples of bibliographic coupling (i.e., where two or more of your selected articles are citing the same article/document)? In what fields/disciplines are your selected articles cited? What do these citations tell you about the importance (or lack of importance) of this work? If you feel the paper has not received the attention it deserves, reflect on why that may be so. If the paper has received more attention than it deserves, reflect on why that may be so.

Finally, examine the context of citations to your papers. Selected at least one citation to each of your selected papers and examine it directly. Find the point in each paper at which the selected paper is cited. In which section of the paper is it cited? What does the citing author say about it? Is it cited in combination with any other papers? What does the citation context tell you about the influence of your selected paper? In addition, analyze in a similar way any instances that you found in which multiple papers from your set of selected papers were cited in the same article/document.

In evaluating the citations, what, if anything, did you learn about citation behaviors or about the citation sources themselves? (Feel free to graphically represent some of your findings, if that would be useful in discussing them.) Based on your analysis, are there particular sources, categories of readers, topics, or functions that may have found the paper particularly useful?

Writing up your analysis

Write up what your team has learned in a brief paper, 6-8 pages, single-spaced. Be sure to include the references to all the specific papers that you'll want to discuss (i.e., the original set of papers, possibly one or more references from each, and several examples of papers citing papers in your selected set). Your writing style for this paper should be relatively formal/academic, in comparison with other assignments in this course.

Due date: December 6, 2013 by 5 PM

Evaluation criteria

Grades will be based on evidence of your understanding of the selected papers, the depth and thoroughness of your analysis of the set of papers and their scholarly context, evidence of your understanding of scholarly communication and scholars' use of information, and clarity of expression.

Class Participation (10%)

This class is a cooperative venture toward which you are encouraged and expected to contribute. this includes asking questions and sharing insights from class readings and other course content. The purpose of the discussions is to help you to think critically about research and theory and the implications of research and theory for the practice of the information professions.

Read at least the required readings before each class session; dip into the additional readings as you are able. For each reading, as appropriate, consider:

• What are the key point(s) of the reading?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the authors' arguments?
• What are the implications of the reading for your area of professional interest?

There are a variety of ways in which you can contribute to the class discussion of each reading. These include:

• Juxtaposing: You may have an experience, or have encountered ideas in another reading that complements the ideas in the reading.
• Contradiction and reconciliation: Your experiences or ideas encountered in other readings may appear to represent very different understandings of information behavior. Examine those differences and the possible ways that they might be explained.
• Extension: Your experience or ideas might suggested an extension of the ideas presented in a reading, or you might see limitations in the applicability of those ideas. Critically examine those possible extensions or limitations.

Evaluation criteria

Class participation will be evaluated on the substance and quality of your comments, either in class or on the online discussion board (exclusive of those evaluated for the Bonus Reading Report assignment).

Grading

UNC-CH graduate students are graded on the H/P/L/F scale. The following definitions of these grades will be used for this course. While assignments are not graded "on a curve," most grades for graduate students are expected to be P's.

The INLS 500 website, designed by Barbara M. Wildemuth, UNC-CH, 2011, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This course benefitted greatly from earlier development by Earl Bailey, Laura Sheble, and Dr. Barbara Wildemuth. Address all comments and questions to Kaitlin L. Costello at kaitcost@email.unc.edu. This page was last modified on August 25, 2013, by Kaitlin L. Costello.