INLS 500: Human Information Interactions

Optional Readings, Fall 2015

This selection of articles and annotations was created by Barbara Wildemuth.

INTRODUCTION / BASIC CONCEPTS

1: Trends in human information interaction research

• Saracevic, T. (1999). Information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(12), 1051-1063. [UNC libraries]
  • Saracevic provides his own "personal analysis" of the field of information science (note: more broadly defined than the scope of this particular course), with special emphasis on its origins, the central role of problems in information retrieval, and the relationship between information science and librarianship.

2:Theoretical perspectives and basic concepts

• Buckland, M.K. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 351-360. [UNC libraries]
  • As you read the assigned Marchionini article, you may have noticed that he referenced this article. In it, Buckland examines three meanings of information: information as process, information as knowledge, and information as thing. He argues that the field of information and library science should be particular interested in information as thing. Also, if you've heard references to antelopes as information objects, this is the source.
• Meadow, C.T., & Yuan, W. (1997). Measuring the impact of information: Defining the concepts. Information Processing & Management, 33(6), 697-714. [UNC libraries]
  • Meadow and Yuan have been frustrated by the many different definitions of information used in the field of information science. They begin with the classic Shannon and Weaver model of the flow of information from an information source to a receiver, and then provide an overview of the definitions used along the continuum from data to information to knowledge.
• Case, D.O. (2012). The concept of information. In Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior. 3rd edition. Boston: Academic Press, 45-75. [SILS Library Reserves - ZA3075 .L665 2012]
  • In addition to reviewing the various definitions of information that are currently in use, Case analyzes the problems with each definition.

3: Cognitive approaches to information behaviors

• Ford, N. (2004). Modeling cognitive processes in information seeking: from Popper to Pask. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(9), 769-782. [UNC libraries]
  • Ford is most well-known for his investigations of the effects of cognitive style on searching behavior. In this article, he reviews and integrates a number of models of information seeking that emphasize the cognitive processes involved.
• Jansen, B.J., Booth, D., & Smith, B. (2009). Using the taxonomy of cognitive learning to model online searching. Information Processing & Management, 45(6), 643-663. [UNC libraries]
  • This study examines cognitive activity during searching in terms of a taxonomy of learning tasks. Different search behaviors are associated with different levels of searching/learning tasks.
• Järvelin, K., & Ingwersen, P. (2004). Information seeking research needs extension towards tasks and technology. Information Research, 10(1). http://informationr.net/ir/10-1/paper212.html.
  • In this article, the authors present the model that was included in their book (note: this article was published first), and discuss how it expands the context of information seeking and retrieval research.
• Robson, A., & Robinson, L. (2013). Building on models of information behaviour: Linking information seeking and communication. Journal of Documentation, 69(2), 169-193. [UNC libraries]
  • Robson and Robinson analyze several models of information seeking, selecting key elements they have in common. They then combine those elements with elements from models of communication processes.
• Godbold, N. (2006). Beyond information seeking: Towards a general model of information behaviour. Information Research, 11(4), paper 269. http://informationr.net/ir/11-4/paper269.html.
  • After briefly summarizing some of the major theories of information behaviors, Goldbold extends Wilson's model by considering multi-directionality and additional modes of information behaviors (creating, destroying, and avoiding information).
• Warwick, C., Rimmer, J., Blandford, A., Gow, J., & Buchanan, G. (2009). Cognitive economy and satisficing in information seeking: A longitudinal study of undergraduate information behavior. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 60(12), 2402-2415. [UNC libraries]
  • This is a typical study of information seeking/searching, with its focus on the cognitive aspects of the process. This perspective in many studies of students, partly because the searching activities are associated with school assignments. There are many other studies that you might also look at, as examples, but this is one that is well-designed and well-executed.

4: Alternatives: Affective and physical approaches

• Kuhlthau, C.C. (1988). Developing a model of the library search process: Cognitive and affective aspects. RQ, 28(2), 232-242. [Available online via UNC libraries (in html); also in SILS Library]
  • This is, I believe, the earliest report of Kuhlthau's dissertation work, that is the basis of her information search process model.
• Kuhlthau, C.C. (1991). Inside the search process: Information seeking from the user's perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 361-371. [UNC libraries]
  • This is my personal favorite description of Kuhlthau's information search process model.
• Fainburg, L.I. (2009). Information seeking and learning: A comparison of Kuhlthau's information seeking model and John Dewey's problem solving model. New Library World, 110(9/10), 457-466. [UNC libraries]
  • This analysis emphasizes the close relationship between thinking and action in both models, that both processes are easier when the problem is more focused, and that the two models differ in their explication of the role of emotions.
• Nahl, D. (2007). Social-biological information technology: An integrated conceptual framework. Journal of the America Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(13), 2021-2046. [UNC libraries]
  • In this article, Nahl lays out a fairly complex, but comprehensive, socio-biological model of information behaviors. It includes affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor (i.e., physical) activities, and also depicts a social dimension. You can also read a similar overview of the model in the first chapter of: Nahl, D., & Bilal, D. (eds.), Information and Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory. Medford, NJ: Information Today (for ASIST), 2007.
• Nahl, D., & Tenopir, C. (1996). Affective and cognitive searching behavior of novice end-users of a full-text database. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(4), 276-286. [UNC libraries]
  • Over multiple sessions, novice searchers conducted searches of a full-text magazine database. Some of the cognitive behaviors of interest were the actual uses of the information retrieved. Quesitons users asked during the searches were recorded; affective questions outnumbered cognitive and sensorimotor (physical) questions 2 to 1.
• Fulton, C. (2009). The pleasure principle: The power of positive affect in information seeking. Aslib Proceedings, 61(3), 245-261. [UNC libraries]
  • This is an example of a study focusing specifically on the affective aspects of information behaviors by interviewing amateur genealogists who were hunting for information about their Irish ancestors. They found pleasure in the search process.
• Tenopir, C., Wang, P., Zhang, Y., Simmons, B., & Pollard, R. (2008). Academic users' interactions with ScienceDirect in search tasks: Affective and cognitive behaviors. Information Processing & Management, 44(1), 105-121. [UNC libraries]
  • Students, faculty, and librarians participated in this study of online searching. Learning style was captured through a questionnaire; affective behaviors were captured by coding particular words uttered during think-aloud protocols; and search behaviors were videotaped. The authors examined the relationships among these different variables.
• Norman, D.A. (2002). Emotion & design: Attractive things work better. interactions, 9(4), 36-42. [UNC libraries]
  • In this magazine for HCI practitioners, Norman reviews recent research that indicates that people perform more successfully if they are happy when they're interacting with a system. This idea is elaborated in his 2003 book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.
• Kalbach, J. (2004). Feeling lucky? Emotions and information seeking. interactions, 11(5), 66-67. [UNC libraries]
• Kalbach, J. (2006). "I'm feeling lucky": The role of emotions in seeking information on the Web. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57(6), 813-818. [UNC libraries]
  • The titles of these two articles by Kalbach tell you what they're about. The JASIST article is more scholarly; the interactions article is intended for an audience of interface designers.
• Mathwick, C., & Rigdon, E. (2004). Play, flow, and the online search experience. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(2), 324-332. [UNC libraries, via JSTOR]
  • Research on consumers also is interested in their affective reactions to Web interactions, including searching. This article sees "play" as the link between flow theory and the online consumer attitude formation process.
• Kari, J., & Hartel, J. (2007). Information and higher things in life: Addressing the pleasurable and the profound in information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(8), 1131-1147. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors argue that information behavior research primarily focuses on "lower things" (i.e., everyday, quotidian things), and might profit from research on "higher things". Some example of higher things are those that are pleasurable (e.g., beauty, hobbies, fun, wealth) or profound (e.g., altruism, creativity, spirituality and religion, virtues).
• Lottridge, D., & Moore, G. (2009). Designing for human emotion: Ways of knowing. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 15(2), 147-172. [UNC libraries]
  • Interest in people's emotions as they interact with tools/technologies is now of interest in a number of fields -- computer science, psychiatry/psychology, language and literature, information science, market research, and industrial design -- all related to computer-human interaction. This article analyzes 7 papers from these fields, in terms of researcher motivation, conceptualization and operationalization of "emotion", the knowledge claims made, and the assumptions underlying the research.
• Klemmer, S.R., Hartman, B., & Takayama, L. (2006). How bodies matter: Five themes for interaction design. Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, 140-149. [UNC libraries, via ACM Digital Library]
  • As the title indicates, this paper discusses five themes (thinking through doing, performance, visibility, risk, and thick practice) that are important for interaction design. They demonstrate the central role our bodies play during interactions with information tools.

INFORMATION NEEDS

5: Experiencing an information need

• Savolainen, R. (1993). The sense-making theory: Reviewing the interests of a user-centered approach to information seeking and use. Information Processing & Management, 29(1), 13-28. [UNC libraries]
  • Savolainen's earlier explanation of Dervin's theory provides both a brief overview (pages 15-18) and a critique of the theory.
• Dervin, B. (1998). Sense-making theory and practice: An overview of user interests in knowledge seeking and use. Journal of Knowledge Management, 2(2), 36-46. [UNC libraries]
  • If you want to hear about Sense-Making Theory and Methodology from its originator, try this article. It provides a brief overview.
• Dervin, B., & Frenette, M. (2001). Sense-Making Methodology: communicating communicatively with campaign audiences. In Rice, R., & Atkin, C.K. (eds.), Public Communication Campaigns. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 69-87. [Davis Library - HM1226 .P83 2001]
  • This chapter provides more details about Sense-Making Theory and how it might be used to shape a communication study and campaign.
• Wilson, T.D. (1997). Information behaviour: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Processing & Management, 33(4), 551-572. [UNC libraries]
  • Wilson also proposes a comprehensive model of the information needs-seeking-use process, adding some psychological components that other models do not have.
• Allen, B. (1997). Information needs: A person-in-situation approach. In Information Seeking in Context: Proceedings of an International Conference on Research in Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts, 14-16 August 1996, Tampere, Finland. Taylor Graham, 111-122. [SILS Library - Z674.2 .I558 1996]
  • Allen's model of information behaviors emphasizes the individual situation in which an information need is experienced (similar to Dervin's model), and also includes some additional contextual dimensions of interest.
• Savolainen, R. (2013). Approaching the motivators for information seeking: The viewpoint of attribution theories. Library & Information Science Research, 35(1), 63-68. [UNC libraries]
  • As someone experiences an information need, there is still the question of whether they will act to address that need. Here, Savolainen examines attribution theory and how it might be applied to understanding information seekers' motivations.

6: Expressing information needs

• Hert, C.A. (1996). User goals on an online public catalog. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(7), 504-518. [UNC libraries]
• Osheroff, J.A., Forsythe, D.E., Buchanan, B.G., Bankowitz, R.A., Blumenfeld, B.H., & Miller, R.A. (1991). Physicians' information needs: Analysis of questions posed during clinical teaching. Annals of Internal Medicine, 114(7), 576-581. [UNC libraries]
• Miyake, N., & Norman, D.A. (1979). To ask a question, one must know enough to know what is not known. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18(3), 357-364. [UNC libraries]
• van der Meij, H. (1990). Question asking: To know that you do not know is not enough. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(3), 505-512. [UNC libraries]
• Pomerantz, J. (2005). A linguistic analysis of question taxonomies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 56(7), 715-728. [UNC libraries]
• Saracevic, T., & Kantor, P. (1988). A study of information seeking and retrieving. II. Users, questions, and effectiveness. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 39(3), 177-196. [UNC libraries]
• Spink, A., & Ozmutlu, H.C. (2001). What do people ask for on the web and how do they ask it: Ask Jeeves query analysis. ASIST 2001: Proceedings of the 64th ASIST Annual Meeting, 38, 545-556. [SILS Library]
• Crestani, F., & Du, H. (2006). Written versus spoken queries: A qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57(7), 881-890. [UNC libraries]
• Thellefsen, T., Sorensen, B., & Thellefsen, M. (2013). The information concept of Nicholas Belkin revisited - Some semeiotic comments. Journal of Documentation, 70(1), 74-92.

7: Literature searching review lab

8: Studying/analyzing information needs

Additional studies of students, scholars, and other professionals:

• Herman, E. (2004). Research in progress. Part 2 - Some preliminary insights into the information needs of the contemporary academic researcher. Aslib Proceedings, 56(2), 118-131. [UNC libraries]
• Ritter, F.E., Freed, A.R., & Haskett, O.L.M. (2005). Discovering user information needs: The case of university department web sites. interactions, 12(5), 19-27. [UNC libraries]
• George, C., Bright, A., Hurlbert, T., Linke, E.C., St. Clair, G., & Stin, J. (2006). Scholarly use of information: Graduate students' information seeking behaviour. Information Research, 11(4), paper 272. http://informationr.net/ir/11-4/paper272.html.
• Kuruppu, P.U., & Gruber, A.M. (2006). Understanding the information needs of academic scholars in agricultural and biological sciences. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(6), 609-623. [UNC libraries]
• Gibbs, D., Boettcher, J., Hollingsworth, J., & Slania, H. (2012). Assessing the research needs of graduate students at Georgetown University. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 38(5), 268-276. [UNC libraries]
• Robinson, M.A. (2010). An empirical analysis of engineers' information behaviors. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 61(4), 640-658. [UNC libraries]
• Lykke, M., Price, S., & Delcambre, L. (2012). How doctors search: A study of query behaviour and the impact on search results. Information Processing & Management, 48(6), 1151-1170. [UNC libraries]
• Schaller, S. (2011).  Information needs of LGBTQ college students. Libri 61(2),100-115. [UNC libraries]

A series of longitudinal studies of scholarly information behaviors:

• Wang, P. (1997). Users' information needs at different stages of a research project: A cognitive view. In Information Seeking in Context: Proceedings of an International Conference on Research in Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts, 14-16 August, 1996, Tampere, Finland. Taylor Graham, 307-318. [SILS Library - Z674.2 .I558 1996; copy in Sakai resources]
• Wang, P., & Soergel, D. (1998). A cognitive model of document use during a research project. Study I. Document selection. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(2), 115-133. [UNC libraries]
• Wang, P., & White, M.D. (1999). A cognitive model of document use during a research project. Study II: Decisions at the reading and citing stages. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(2), 98-114. [UNC libraries]

Studies of other groups or everyday life information seeking:

• Papen, U. (2013). Conceptualising information literacy as social practice: A study of pregnant women's information practices. Information Research, 18(2), Paper 580. http://informationr.net/ir/18-2/paper580.html.
• Agosto, D.E., & Hughes-Hassell, S. (2006). Toward a model of the everyday life information needs of urban teenagers, Part 1: Theoretical model, [and] Part 2: Empirical model. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57(10), 1394-1403, and 57(11), 1418-1426. [UNC libraries: Part 1, Part 2]
• Westbrook, L. (2009). Crisis information concerns: Information needs of domestic violence survivors. Information Processing & Management, 45(1), 98-114. [UNC libraries]
• Savolainen, R. (2009). Small world and information grounds as contexts of information seeking and sharing.  Library & Information Science Research, 31(1),38-45. [UNC libraries]
• Savolainen, R. (2008). Source preferences in the context of seeking problem-specific information. Information Processing & Management, 44(1), 274-293. [UNC libraries]
• McKenzie, P.J. (2003). A model of information practices in accounts of everyday-life information seeking. Journal of Documentation, 59(1), 19-40. [UNC libraries]
• Washington, K.T., Meadows, S.E., Elliott, S.G., & Koopman, R.J. (2011). Information needs of informal caregivers of older adults with chronic health conditions. Patient Education and Counseling, 83(1), 37-44. [UNC libraries]

INFORMATION SEEKING

9: Selection of information sources

• Savolainen, R., & Kari, J. (2004). Placing the Internet in information source horizons: A study of information seeking by Internet users in the context of self-development. Library & Information Science Research, 26, 415-433. [UNC libraries]
  • If you'd like to read an additional study taking the same perspective as the Savolainen study you already read, this would be a good choice.
• Johnson, J.D.E., Case, D.O., Andrews, J., Allard, S.L., & Johnson, N.E. (2006). Fields and pathways: Contrasting or complementary views of information seeking. Information Processing & Management, 42(2), 569-582. [UNC libraries]
  • To explore the concepts of information horizons and pathways further, this will be good background reading.
• Sonnenwald, D. H., Wildemuth, B. M., & Harmon, G. L. (2001). A research method to investigate information seeking using the concept of information horizons: an example from a study of lower socio-economic students’ information seeking behaviour. The New Review of Information Behaviour Research, 2, 65-86. [SILS Library]
  • One final paper on information horizons, with an emphasis on a method for collecting data on people's information horizons. A related paper was published as a SILS technical report, TR-2001-01, and is available on the SILS website.
• Agarwal, N.K., Xu, Y.(C.), & Poo, D.C.C. (2011). A context-based investigation into source use by information seekers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 62(6), 1087-1104. [UNC libraries]
  • The information sources used by 352 working professionals in Singapore were investigated. Source quality and access difficulty affected the use of source types.
• Oblinger, D.G., & Oblinger, J.L. (eds.) (2005). Educating the Net Generation. Educause. http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen.
  • Kvavik, R. Convenience, communications, and control: How students use technology. Chapter 7.
  • Lippincott, J.K. Net generation students and libraries. Chapter 13.
  • Both these chapters deal with the Net Generation, and their characteristics and how those characteristics affect their information behaviors. Focus your attention on the information sources they're likely to use.
• Woudstra, L., van den Hooff, B., & Schouten, A.P. (2012). Dimensions of quality and accessibility: Selection of human information sources from a social capital perspective. Information Processing & Management, 48(4), 618-630. [UNC libraries]
  • This study focuses on how the accessibility and quality of co-workers in organizations affect their use as information source. The authors unpack the concepts of accessibility and quality into their underlying dimensions, based on insights derived from social capital theory.
• Woudstra, L., & van den Hooff, B. (2008). Inside the source selection process: Selection criteria for human information sources. Information Processing & Management, 44, 1267-1278.
  • An earlier study by these two authors, also focusing on the accessibility and quality of information sources. It was intended to discover some of the dimensions of these two criteria in relation to co-workers as information sources.
• Catalano, A.J. (2013). Patterns of graduate students' information seeking behaviour: A meta-synthesis of the literature. Journal of Documentation, 69(2), 243-274. [UNC libraries]
  • Based on a synthesis of 48 studies, published between 1997 and 2012, it was found that graduate students' information seeking was driven by the accessibility of resources in different disciplines and their familiarity with technology.
• Booker, L.D., Detlor, B., & Serenko, A. (2012). Factors affecting the adoption of online library resources by business students. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(12), 2503-2520. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors found that self-efficacy in and anxiety about using online library resources affected the usefulness of information literacy instruction for encouraging business students' adoption/use of online library resources.
• Ankem, K. (2006). Use of information sources by cancer patients: Results of a systematic review of the research literature. Information Research, 11(3), paper 254. http://informationr.net/ir/11-3/paper254.html.
  • Ankem investigated the sources used by a particular group, by synthesizing the results of other studies.
• Yitzhaki, M., & Hammershlag, G. (2004). Accessibility and use of information sources among computer scientists and software engineers in Israel: Academy versus industry. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(9), 832-842. [UNC libraries]
  • Like the Ankem study, this study focused on a particular user group in a particular context. They compared the findings from each of the two settings: academic versus industry.
• Granovetter, M.S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380. [UNC libraries]
  • This classic article in social network theory argues that it's our weak ties in our social networks that are likely to provide us with novel information. Our strong ties tend to know the same things we know, and so are unlikely to bring us new ideas.
    

10: Interactive information retrieval as part of the information seeking process

I've listed here a selection of the many studies of online search behaviors. They've been selected to give you an idea of the range of studies that have been conducted.

• Robinson, L. (2014). Freeways, detours, and dead ends: Search journeys among disadvantaged youth. New Media & Society, 16(2), 234-251. [UNC libraries]
• O'Brien, H.L., & Lebow, M. (2013). Mixed-methods approach to measuring user experience in online news interactions. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 64(8), 1543-1556. [UNC libraries]
• Joseph, P., Debowski, S., & Goldschmidt, P. (2013). Models of information search: A comparative analysis. Information Research, 18(1), Paper 562. http://InformationR.net/ir/18-1/paper562.html.
• Mbabu, L.G., Bertram, A., & Varnum, K. (2013). Patterns of undergraduates' use of scholarly databases in a large research university. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(2), 189-193. [UNC libraries]
• Du, J. T., & Evans, N. (2011). Academic users' information searching on research topics: Characteristics of research tasks and search strategies. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37(4), 299-306. [UNC libraries]
• Albertson, D. (2010). Influences of users' familiarity with visual search topics on interactive video digital libraries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 61(12), 2490-2502. [UNC libraries]
• Xie, I., & Joo, S. (2010). Transitions in search tactics during the Web-based search process. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 61(11), 2188-2205. [UNC libraries]
• Gwizdka, J., & Lopatovska, I. (2009). The role of subjective factors in the information search process. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 60(12), 2452-2464. [UNC libraries]
• Jansen, B.J., Booth, D.L., & Spink, A. (2009). Patterns of query reformulation during Web searching. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 60(7), 1358-1371. [UNC libraries]
• Park, S. (2009). Analysis of characteristics and trends of Web queries submitted to NAVER, a major Korean search engine. Library & Information Science Research, 31(2), 126-133. [UNC libraries]
• Zhang, Y. (2008). The influence of mental models on undergraduate students' searching behavior on the Web. Information Processing & Management, 44(3), 1330-1345. [UNC libraries]
• Kules, B., & Shneiderman, B. (2008). Users can change their Web search tactics: Design guidelines for categorized views. Information Processing & Management, 44(2), 463-484. [UNC libraries]
• Kelly, D., & Fu, X. (2007). Eliciting better information need descriptions from users of information search systems. Information Processing & Management, 43(1), 30-46. [UNC libraries]
• Kelly, D. (2006). Measuring online information seeking context, part 1: Background and method. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 57(13), 1729-1739. [UNC libraries]
• Kelly, D. (2006). Measuring online information seeking context, part 2: Findings and discussion. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 57(14), 1862-1874. [UNC libraries]
• Vakkari, P., & Talja, S. (2006). Searching for electronic journal articles to support academic tasks. A case study of the use of the Finnish National Electronic Library (FinELib). Information Research, 12(1), Paper 285. http://informationr.net/ir/12-1/paper285.html.
• Rieh, S.Y., & Xie, H.(I.) (2006). Analysis of multiple query reformulations on the Web: The interactive information retrieval context. Information Processing & Management, 42(3), 751-768. [UNC libraries]
• Jörgensen, C., & Jörgensen, P. (2005). Image querying by image professionals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 56(12), 1346-1359. [UNC libraries]
• Wildemuth, B. M. (2004).  The effects of domain knowledge on search tactic formulation.  Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(3), 246-258. [UNC libraries]
• Choo, C.W., Detlor, B., and Turnbull, D. (2000). Information seeking on the Web: An integrated model of browsing and searching. First Monday, 5(2). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/729/638.
• Wildemuth, B.M., de Bliek, R., & Friedman, C.P.  (1993).  Measures of searcher performance:  A psychometric evaluation. Information Processing & Management, 29, 533-550. [UNC libraries]

There are also recommendations for design of IR systems. A few selections are listed here.

• Garcia-Molina, H., Koutrika, G., & Parameswaran, A. (2011). Information seeking: Convergence of search, recommendations, and advertising. Communications of the ACM, Virtual Extension, 54(11), 121-130. [UNC libraries]

11: Assessment of information quality/value

• Wilson, P. (1983). Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. [SILS Library - BD175 .W55 1983]
  • This is a classic work, defining cognitive authority.
• Amento, B.L., Terveen, L., & Hill, W. (2000). Does "authority" mean quality? Predicting expert quality ratings of web documents. SIGIR 2000 Proceedings, 296-303. [UNC libraries]
  • Amento used expert judgments as a gold standard to evaluate several different algorithms for identifying high quality Web documents.
• Taylor, R.S. (1982). Value-added processes in the information life cycle. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 33(5), 341-346. [UNC libraries]
• Taylor, R.S. (1986). Value-Added Processes in Information Systems. Nowood, NJ: Ablex. [SILS Library - Z699 .T33 1986]
  • The article and book by Taylor are foundational works for considering the value added to information objects by the information professionals in the stream of creating, describing, and making available those objects. Note that the Rieh (2002) article that we read discusses Taylor's definition of information quality.
• Huvila, I. (2013). In Web search we trust? Articulation of the cognitive authorities of Web searching. Information Research, 18(1), Paper 567. http://informationr.net/ir/18-1/paper567.html.
  • Huvila harvested 865 utterances about searching from the web (based on searches on generic phrases), and analyzed the content of the utterances. Three types of cognitive authorities were identified: 1) people, 2) search (as an approach), and 3) search as an activity.
• Kelton, K., Fleishmann, K.R., & Wallace, W.A. (2008). Trust in digital information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59(3), 363-374. [UNC libraries]
  • This article proposes a model of people's trust of information they get from the internet. The model integrates research on trust with research on information quality and human-computer interaction.
• Lim, S. (2013). College students' credibility judgments and heuristics concerning Wikipedia. Information Processing & Management, 49(2), 405-419. [UNC libraries]
  • Read this one in combination with the next one listed. 138 undergraduate students responded to a survey about the ways that they judge the quality of content in Wikipedia. Peripheral cues and their own knowledge most strongly affected students' credibility judgments.
• Lucassen, T., Muilwijk, R., Noordzij, M.L., & Schraagen, J.M. (2013). Topic familiarity and information skills in online credibility evaluation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 64(2), 254-264. [UNC libraries]
  • Read this one in combination with the Lim (2013) article above, since they both investigate the same question. These authors found that both domain knowledge and information skills affects participants' trust in Wikipedia content.
• Lucassen, T., & Schraagen, J.M. (2012). Propensity to trust and the influence of source and medium cues in credibility evaluation. Journal of Information Science, 38(6), 566-577. [UNC libraries]
  • In this study, the authors propose a layered model of trust (general propensity to trust influences trust in the medium, which influences source trust, which influences trust in specific content). In a quasi-experiment, they found that participants were likely to have too little trust in Wikipedia, rather than too much.
• Metzger, M.J. (2007). Making sense of credibility on the Web: Models for evaluating online information and recommendations for future research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(13), 2078-2091. [UNC libraries]
  • This article reviews and integrates what we know about people's ability to assess the credibility of information they discover online.
• Fritch, J.W., & Cromwell, R.L. (2001). Evaluating internet resources: Identity, affiliation, and cognitive authority in a networked world. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 52(6), 499-507. [UNC libraries]
  • These authors propose a formal model and evaluative criteria that can be used to ascribe cogntive authority to Web documents.
• Flanagin, A.J., & Metzger, M.J. (2011). From Encyclopaedia Britannica to Wikipedia. Information, Communication & Society, 14(3), 355-374. [UNC libraries]
  • This study compares the credibility of two encyclopedias, and examines the question of why people trust Wikipedia as a source.
• Francke, H., & Sundin, O. (2012). Negotiating the role of sources: Educators' concepts of credibility in participatory media. Library & Information Science Research, 34(3), 169-175. [UNC libraries]
  • This discussion is concerned with the credibility of participatory media, such as Wikipedia, within an educational context. It suggests several ways that educators (and librarians) can discuss credibility of sources with their students.
• Walraven, A., Brand-Gruwel, S., & Boshuizen, H.P.A. (2009). How students evaluate information and sources when searching the World Wide Web for information. Computers & Education, 52(1), 234-246. [UNC libraries]
  • Sadly, this study found that high school students to not include the quality or credibility of the sources as criteria when evaluating informaiton found on the Web.
• Stvilia, B., Twidale, M.B., Smith, L.C., & Gasser, L. (2008). Information quality work organization in Wikipedia. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59(6), 983-1001. [UNC libraries]
  • Information quality is an enduring issue in ILS. This study focuses specifically on the quality assurance procedures in place for producing Wikipedia.
• Arazy, O., & Kopak, R. (2011). On the measurability of information quality. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 62(1), 89-99. [UNC libraries]
  • Taking the perspective of the information producer, Arazy and Kopak investigated the extent to which several dimensions of information quality (accuracy, completeness, objectivity, representation) could be reliably measured.

12: Relevance judgments

These readings on relevance are arranged in chronological order, in case you want to track through the main themes in that way. They include mostly foundational/conceptual articles, plus a few empirical studies (especially among the more recent articles).

• Saracevic, T. (1975). Relevance: A review of and a framework for the thinking on the notion in information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 26(6), 321-343. [UNC libraries]
• Wilson, P. (1973). Situational relevance. Information Storage & Retrieval, 9(8), 457-471. [UNC libraries]
• Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [1986 and 1995 editions in Davis Library - BF637 .C45 S655]
• Swanson, D.R. (1986). Subjective versus objective relevance in bibliographic retrieval systems. Library Quarterly, 56(4), 389-398. [UNC libraries]
• Schamber, L., Eisenberg, M.B., & Nilan, M.S. (1990). A re-examination of relevance: Toward a dynamic, situational definition. Information Processing & Management, 26(6), 755-776. [UNC libraries]
• Janes, J.W., & McKinney, R. (1992). Relevance judgments of actual users and secondary judges: A comparative study. Library Quarterly, 62(2), 150-168. [UNC libraries]
• Harter, S.P. (1992). Psychological relevance and information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43(9), 602-615. [UNC libraries]
• Park, T.K. (1993). The nature of relevance in information retrieval: An empirical study. Library Quarterly, 63(3), 318-351. [UNC libraries]
• Barry, C.L. (1994). User-defined relevance criteria: An exploratory study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45(3), 149-159. [UNC libraries]
• Gluck, M. (1996). Exploring the relationship between user satisfaction and relevance in information systems. Information Processing & Management, 32(1), 89-104. [UNC libraries]
• Mizzaro, S. (1997). Relevance: The whole history. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(9), 810-832. [UNC libraries]
• Spink, A., Greisdorf, H., & Bateman, J. (1998). From highly relevant to not relevant: Examining different regions of relevance. Information Processing & Management, 34(5), 599-622. [UNC libraries]
• Mizzaro, S. (1998). How many relevances in information retrieval? Interacting with Computers, 10(3), 303-320. [UNC libraries]
• Barry, C.L. (1998). Document representations and clues to document relevance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(14), 1293-1303. [UNC libraries]
• Cosijn, E., & Ingwersen, P. (2000). Dimensions of relevance. Information Processing & Management, 36(4), 533-550. [UNC libraries]
• Kelly, D., & Belkin, N.J. (2001). Reading time, scrolling and interaction: exploring implicit sources of user preferences for relevance feedback. Proceedings of SIGIR 2001,408-409. [UNC libraries]
• Maglaughlin, K.L., & Sonnenwald, D.H. (2002). User perspectives on relevance criteria: A comparison among relevant, partially relevant, and non-relevant judgments. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 53(5), 327-342. [UNC libraries]
• Borlund, P. (2003). The concept of relevance in IR. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 54(10), 913-925. [UNC libraries]
• Toms, E.G., O'Brien, H.L., Kopak, R., & Freund, L. (2005). Searching for relevance in relevance of search. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3507, 59-78. [UNC libraries]
• Xu, Y. (2007). Relevance judgment in epistemic and hedonic information searches. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(2), 179-189. [UNC libraries]
• Hjorland, B. (2010). The foundation of the concept of relevance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 61(2), 217-237. [UNC libraries]
• Ju, B., & Gluck, M. (2011). Calibrating information users' views on relevance: A social representations approach. Journal of Information Science, 37(4), 429-438. [UNC libraries]
• Hariri, N. (2011). Relevance ranking on Google: Are top ranked results really considered more relevant by the users? Online Information Review, 35(4), 598-610. [UNC libraries]
• Sedghi, S., Sanderson, M., & Clough, P. (2012). How do health care professionals select medical images they need? Aslib Proceedings, 64(4), 437-456. [UNC libraries]
• Van der Veer Martens, B., & Van Fleet, C. (2012). Opening the black box of "relevance work": A domain analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(5), 936-947. [UNC libraries]
• Bilal, D. (2012). Ranking, relevance judgment, and precision of information retrieval on children's queries: Evaluation of Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Yahoo! Kids, and Ask Kids. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(9), 1879-1896. [UNC libraries]
• Taylor, A. (2013). Examination of work task and criteria choices for the relevance judgment process. Journal of Documentation, 69(4), 523-544. [UNC libraries]

INFORMATION USE

13: Ways of using information

• Spink, A., & Cole, C. (2006). Human information behavior: Integrating diverse approaches and information use. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57(1), 25-35. [UNC libraries]
  • This article provides an overview of three different disciplinary approaches to understanding human information behaviors, including information use.
• Citroen, C.L. (2011). The role of information in strategic decision-making. International Journal of Information Management, 31(6), 493-501. [UNC libraries]
  • Citroen focused on the ways in which executives use information as they are making strategic decisions.
• Huvila, I. (2013). 'Library users come to a library to find books': The structuration of the library as a soft information system. Journal of Documentation, 69(5), 715-735. [UNC libraries]
  • Here, the focus is on the use of libraries (rather than the information in them). It is an in-depth study of the practices of librarians.
• Morgan, E.L. (2012). Use and understand: The inclusion of services against texts in library catalogs and "discovery systems". Library Hi Tech, 30(1), 35-59. [UNC libraries]
  • Morgan focuses on how people use and understand the texts retrieved in a library catalog.
• Volentine, R., & Tenopir, C. (2013). Value of academic reading and value of the library in academics' own words. Aslib Proceedings, 65(4), 425-440. [UNC libraries]
  • A survey of 2,000 academics in the UK demonstrated the importance of article reading to all their work activities, particularly research. They also emphasized the value of libraries' e-journal collections.
• Jaidka, K., Khoo, C.S.G., & Na, J.-C. (2013). Literature review writing: How information is selected and transformed. Aslib Proceedings, 65(3), 303-325. [UNC libraries]
  • This study investigated researchers' preferences as they select information from a cited paper to include in their literature review. In other words, scholars are using the cited papers by analyzing them and presenting information from them in their own work.
• Wang, P., & Soergel, D. (1998). A cognitive model of document use during a research project. Study I. Document selection. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(2), 115-133. [UNC libraries]
• Wang, P., & White, M.D. (1999). A cognitive model of document use during a research project. Study II: Decisions at the reading and citing stages. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(2), 98-114. [UNC libraries]
  • In Study I, the study participants are making their initial relevance decisions. In Study II, we find out which of those "relevant" documents were read and cited.
• Guthrie, J.T. (1988). Locating information in documents: Examination of a cognitive model. Reading Research Quarterly, 23(2), 178-199. [UNC libraries]
  • Guthrie takes a cognitive approach to examining the process of interacting with texts to find information contained within those texts.
• Zhang, L. (2012). Grasping the structure of journal articles: Utilizing the functions of information units. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(3), 469-480. [UNC libraries]
  • This study focuses on the ways in which people use journal articles and sections of articles.
• Woelfer, J.P., & Hendry, D.G. (2009). Stabilizing homeless young people with information and place. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 60(11), 2300-2312. [UNC libraries]
  • Information organization and presentation can interact with physical space/location to create a particular "place" that serves the needs of homeless young people. Woelfer and Hendry used a participatory design approach to discuss these issues.
• Jones, W., Dumais, S., & Bruce, H. (2002). Once found, what then? A study of "keeping" behaviors in the personal use of web information. ASIST Proceedings, 39, 391-402. [UNC libraries]
  • This study investigated the methods that people use to organize web information for re-use. These methods include printing web pages, saving them to a hard drive, emailing url's to onself, and copying the url into a saved document, among others.
• Moen, A., & Brennan, P.F. (2005). Health@Home: The work of health information management in the household (HIMH): Implications for consumer health informatics (CHI) innovations. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 12(6), 648-656. [UNC libraries]
  • Using in-person interviews and visits to 49 homes, the authors studied the processes of health information management in the household, with a focus on how people stored health information at home. They identified four storage strategies: just-in-time, just-because, just-in-case, and just-at-hand.

14: Re-using and re-finding information

• Capra, R.G., III. (2003). Mobile information re-finding as a continuing dialogue. Human Facotrs in Computing Systems, CHI '03, Extended Abstracts.
• Capra, R.G., & Pérez-Quiñones, M.A. (2003). Re-finding found things: An exploratory study of how users re-find information. Computer Science Dept., Virginia Tech.
• Mackay, B., Kellar, M., & Watters, C. (2005). An evaluation of landmarks for re-finding information on the Web. Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '05, Extended Abstracts.
• Kawase, R., Papadakis, G., Herder, E., & Nejdl, W. (2010). The impact of bookmarks and annotations on refinding information. Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia.
• Al-Omar, M., & Cox, A. (2013). Finders, keepers, losers, seekers: A study of academics' research-related personal information collections. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Human Information and the Management of Information: Information and Interaction Design.
• Aula, A., Jhaveri, N., & Käki, M. (2005). Information search and re-access strategies of experienced Web users. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the World Wide Web.
• Jones, W. (2007). Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. [SILS Library - HD30.2 .J664 2008]
• Teevan, J. (2004). How people re-find information when the Web changes. AI Memo 2004-012. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. http://www.csail.mit.edu/~teevan/work/publications/papers/aim04.pdf.

This set of papers is a selection of studies of re-finding behaviors.

• Tauscher, L., & Greenberg, S. (1997). How people revisit web pages: empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47, 97-137. [UNC libraries]
• Bruce, H., Jones, W., & Dumais, S. (2004). Information behaviour that keeps found things found. Information Research, 10(1), Article 207. http://informationr.net/ir/10-1/paper207.html.
• Jones, W., Bruce, H., & Dumais, S. (2001). Keeping found things found on the web. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '01), 119-126. [UNC libraries]
• Bruce, H., Jones, W., & Dumais, S. (2004). Keeping and re-finding information on the Web: What do people do and what do they need? Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 41, 129-137. [UNC libraries]

15: Information poverty and information overload

Additional studies by Chatman:

• Chatman, E.A. (1987). Opinion leadership, poverty, and information sharing. RQ, 26, 341-353.
• Chatman, E.A. (1990). Alienation theory: Application of a conceptual framework to a study of information among janitors. RQ, 29, 355-368.
• Chatman, E.A. (1991). Life in a small world: Application of gratification theory to information-seeking behavior. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(6), 438-449. [UNC libraries]
• Chatman, E.A. (1992). The Information World of Retired Women. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. [SILS Library, Davis - HQ1064.U5 C433 1992]
• Pendleton, V.E.M., & Chatman, E.A. (1998). Small world lives: Implications for the public library. Information Trends, 46(4), 732-752. [UNC libraries or SILS Library]
• Chatman, E.A. (1999). A theory of life in the round. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 50(3), 207-217. [UNC libraries]

Additional readings related to information poverty:

• Lingel, J., & boyd, d. (2013). "Keep it secret, keep it safe": Information poverty, information norms, and stigma. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 64(5), 981-991. [UNC libraries]
  • The concept of information poverty was used to investigate the information practices of a particular community: the extremem body modification community.
• Haider, J., & Bawden, D. (2007). Conceptions of "information poverty" in LIS: A discourse analysis. Journal of Documentation, 63(4), 534-557. [UNC libraries]
  • An analysis of LIS discourse on information poverty identified four themes: economic determinism, technological determinism and the information society, historicizing the information poor, and the library profession's moral obligation and responsibility.
• Yu, L. (2006). Understanding information inequality: Making sense of the literature of the information and digital divides. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 38(4), 229-252. [UNC libraries]
  • An analysis of research on the information and digital divides reveals that these two concepts are quite differently conceptualized. As might be expected, both definitions are influenced by political and economic interests.

Additional readings related to information overload:

• Jackson, T.W., & Farzaneh, P. (2012). Theory-based model of factors affecting information overload. International Journal of Information Management, 32(6), 523-532. [UNC libraries]
  • When does information flow become information overload? Jackson and Farzaneh propose a model addressing this question; in it, overload is influenced by personal factors, task/process parameters, and information quality, as well as information quantity.
• Hargittai, E., Neuman, W.R., & Curry, O. (2012). Taming the information tide: Perceptions of information overload in the American home. The Information Society, 28(3), 161-173. [UNC libraries]
  • Focus groups were conducted with a cross-section of new media adopters. Most were enthusiastic, and did not feel overloaded.
• Thorngate, W. (1990). The economy of attention and the development of psychology. Canadian Psychology, 31, 262-271. [UNC libraries]
  • People's limited capacity for attention undergirds many discussions of information overload. This article provides an overview of the economics of attention.
• Goulding, A. (2001). Information poverty or overload? Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 33(3), 109-111. [UNC libraries]
  • In this editorial, Goulding argues that efforts to overcome information poverty have resulted in information overload. Both the information poor and those overloaded with information are unable to take action, either because they do not have the available information or because they cannot create order from all the information washing over them.

THE IMPACT OF CONTEXT ON INFORMATION SEEKING AND USE

16-17:Domain, disciplinary, and organizational context

This first set of articles provide general discussions of the effect of context on information behaviors.

• Yu, L. (2012). Towards a reconceptualizatin of 'the information worlds of individuals'. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 44(1), 3-18. [UNC libraries]
  • While this article focuses on a wider array of types of context than just disciplinary context, the author also directly compares this analysis with that of Taylor's information use environments, as well as Chatman's 'small world' conceptualization.
• Courtright, C. (2007). Context in information behavior research. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology (ARIST), 41, 273-306. [UNC Libraries]
  • This review summarizes much of the literature examining the context of information behaviors and the effects of context on those information behaviors. You can quickly skim the first three pages because we've covered them in class; begin reading on page 276.
• Kari, J. & Savolainen, R. (2007).  Relationships between information seeking and context: a qualitative study of internet searching and the goals of personal development.  Library & Information Science Research, 29(1), 47-69. [UNC libraries]
  • In this study, context was defined as "all those things which are not an inherent part of information phenomena, but which nevertheless bear some relation to these." The goal of the study was to develop a typology of associations between context and information behaviors.
• Talja, S., Keso, H., & Pietilainen, T. (1999). The production of "context" in information seeking research: a metatheoretical view. Information Processing & Management, 35(6), 751-764. [UNC libraries]
  • This paper discusses the differences between objectified and interpretative approaches to understanding context. The first approach sees information needs and seeking as patterns of behaviors; the second sees them as phenomena mediated by social and cultural meanings.
• Kelly, D. (2006). Measuring online information seeking context, Part 1: Background and method. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57(13), 1729-1739. [UNC libraries]
  • Focus your attention on pages 1729-1734; they review the literature on context.

This next set of readings focuses on disciplinary and/or domain differences and their effects on information behaviors.

• Palmer, C.L., Teffeau, L.C., & Pirmann, C.M. (2009, Jan.). Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development. Urbana-Champaign, IL: Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Center for Informatics Research in Science & Scholarship, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2009/2009-02.pdf.
  • This extensive literature review examines a number of facets of scholarly information behaviors, including searching, collecting materials, reading, writine, collaborating, and several other information use practices.
• Tenopir, C. King, D.W., Spencer, J., & Wu, L. (2009). Variations in article seeking and reading patterns of academics: What makes a difference? Library & Information Science Research, 31(3), 139-148. [UNC libraries]
  • A survey of faculty in 7 universities in the US and Australia found that academic discipline affects their amount of reading, format of reading, and time spent reading (across medical/helath, engineering/technology, sciences, social sciences, and humanities disciplines). Work responsibilities, age, productivity of the reader, and purpose for reading also affected reading behaviors.
• Reddy, M.C. & Jansen, B.J. (2008). A model for understanding collaborative information behavior in context: A study of two healthcare teams. Information Processing & Management, 44(1), 256-273. [UNC libraries]
  • This study focuses on collaborative information behaviors, and takes into account specific aspects of the context of the two healthcare teams studied: urban vs. rural hospital, teaching vs. non-teaching hospital, intensive care unit vs. emergency department).
• Sahu, H.K., & Singh, S.N. (2013). Information seeking behaviour of astronomy/astrophysics scientists. Aslib Proceedings, 65(2), 109-142. [UNC libraries]
  • The findings indicate that, not only are there disciplinary differences in information seeking, there are also differences across sub-disciplines of astronomy/astrophysics.

This third set of articles focuses on the effects of organizational context on information behaviors.

• Choo, C.W. (2007). Information seeking in organizations: Epistemic contexts and contests. Information Research, 12(2). http://informationr.net/ir/12-2/paper298.html.
  • By comparing information behaviors in several different types of organizations (a government agency, a venture capital firm, a bank, and an office products company), Choo identifies aspects of those organizational cultures that affect the information behaviors of workers.
• Lamb, R., King, J.L., & Kling, R. (2003). Informational environments: Organizational contexts of online information use. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 54(2), 97-114. [UNC libraries]
  • This study works with organizations as the unit of analysis, and examines their environments (i.e., contexts) and how aspects of those environments affect their use of online information services. Firms in three industries are studied: law, real estate, and biotech/pharmaceuticals.
• Baldwin, N.S., & Rice, R.E. (1997). Information-seeking behavior of securities analysts: Individual and institutional influences, information sources and channels, and outcomes. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(8), 674-693. [UNC libraries]
  • The focus here is on the context provided by individual characteristics and institutional resources. They were found to influence the information sources and communication channels used by securities analysts, and those sources/channels were found to influence the outcomes of their work.

This final set of articles considers a variety of other types of contextual influences on information behaviors.

• Savolainen, R. (2012). Conceptualizing information need in context. Information Research, 17(4), Paper 534. http://InformationR.net/ir/17-4/paper534.html.
  • Based on a literature review, Savolainen identifies three ways in which context is understood in relation to information needs: situations of action as context, task performance as context, and dialogue as context.
• Veinot, T.C. (2013). Regional HIV/AIDS information environments and information acquisition success. The Information Society, 29(2), 88-112. [UNC libraries]\
  • This study examines the effects of variations in three regional HIV/AIDS service agencies in Canada. They varied in their service models, resource munificence and technology use, and levels of interpersonal interaction, among other characteristics.
• Agarwal, N.K., Xu, Y.(C.), & Poo, D.C.C. (2011). A context-based investigation into source use by information seekers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 62(6), 1087-1104. [UNC libraries]
  • This study takes into account aspects of the task motivating the search (importance, complexity, urgency), characteristics of the searcher (task self-efficacy, learning orientation) and the environment (learning environment), and aspects of the information source being used (quality, access difficulty, and communication difficulty). The effects of these context variables on source use were studied among working professionals in Singapore.
• Noh, Y. (2013). A study on next-generation digital library using context-awareness technology. Library Hi Tech, 31(2), 236-253. [UNC libraries]
  • This paper imagines a future in which a physical or digital library might be designed to provide context-aware services, based on recognizing each user as he/she enters.

18: Everyday life information seeking

These first items are more conceptual - additional explanations of this idea.

• Savolainen, R. (2008). Everyday Information Practices: A Social Phenomenological Perspective. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. [SILS Library - ZA3075 .S38 2008]
  • A book-length explication of a research initiative in everyday life information seeking (ELIS).

This list includes some examples of studies of everyday life information seeking in a variety of contexts.

• Given, L.M. (2002). The academic and the everyday: Investigating the overlap in mature undergraduates' information-seeking behaviors. Library & Information Science Research, 24(1), 17-29. [UNC libraries]
  • Givens used Savolainen's model of everyday life information seeking to investigate the interactions between everyday and academic contexts and their influences on undergraduate students' information seeking behaviors.
• Sin, S.-C. J., and Kim, K.-S. (2013). Inernational students' everyday life information seeking: The informational value of social networking sites. Library & Information Science Research, 35(2), 107-116. [UNC libraries]
  • This study found that international students use social networking sites to address many of their everyday life information needs. Younger students, undergraduates, and extroverts were more likely to use SNS for ELIS.
• Fisher, K.E., Durrance, J.C., & Hinton, M.B. (2004). Information grounds and the use of need-based services by immigrants in Queens, New York: A context-based, outcome evaluation approach. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(8), 754-766. [UNC libraries]
  • This study is one of the first in which Fisher and her colleagues are developing the concept of information grounds.
• Counts, S. et al. (2010). Mobile social networking as information ground: a case study.  Library & Information Science Research, 32(2), 98-115. [UNC libraries]
  • Originally conceptualized as a physical space in which people share information, the definition of an information ground is tested in online/virtual spaces in this study.
• Agosto, D.E., & Hughes-Hassell, S. (2005). People, places, and questions: An investigation of the everyday life information-seeking behaviors of urban young adults. Library & Information Science Research, 27(2), 141-163. [UNC libraries]
  • Twenty-seven urban teens kept activity logs and participated in group interviews. From these data, Agosto and Hughes-Hassell developed a typology of their information needs and were able to draw some conclusions about their information seeking behaviors.
• O'Connor, L.G. (2013). The information seeking and use behaviors of retired investors. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 45(1), 3-22. [UNC libraries]
  • The information preferences and use of 44 retired or near-retirement investors are examined from everyday life information seeking and serious leisure perspectives.
• Veinot, T.C., & Williams, K. (2012). Following the "community" thread from sociology to information behavior and informatics: Uncovering theoretical continuities and research opportunities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(5), 847-864. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors review five paradigms from the discipline of community sociology (functionalism, evolution, conflict, interactionism, and exchange) to assess their potential utility for understanding everyday life information behavior and technology use.
• Westbrook, L. (2009). Crisis information concerns: Information needs of domestic violence survivors. Information Processing & Management, 45(1), 98-114. [UNC libraries]
  • This study illustrates the application of the ELIS model to a very specific population: intimate partner violence survivors. In addition to the survivors, interviews were conducted with shelter staff and directors and police officers.
• Cox, A.M., Cough, P.D., & Marlow, J. (2008). Flickr: a first look at user behaviour in the context of photography as serious leisure. Information Research, 13(1), Paper 336. http://informationr.net/ir/13-1/paper336.html.
  • This study examined the use of Flickr by amateur photographers who considered their hobby as a 'serious leisure' pursuit. It can be argued that information needs associated with serious leisure activities are different from both more casual everyday information nees and work-related information needs. This is an area of growing research interest.
• Dill, E., & Janke, K. (2013). "New shit has come to light": Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski. Journal of Popular Culture, 46(4), 772-788.
  • Dill and Janke analyze the film, The Big Lebowski, in much the same way you're being asked to analyze an information seeking episode from your own experience. They use a variet of the models we discuss in class to analyze the information seeking and sense making of four of the film's characters.

19: Incidental information acquisition; Browsing and serendipity

• Erdelez, S. (1997). Information encountering: A conceptual framework for accidental information discovery. In Vakkari, P., Savolainen, R., & Dervin, B. (eds.), Information Seeking in Context. Proceedings of an International Conference on Research in Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts. London: Taylor Graham, 412-421. [SILS Library - Z674.2 .I558 1996]
  • This is the original description of the concept of information encountering. Erdelez' model takes into account the individual who encounters information, the environment, the information encountered, and the information need addressed.
• Erdelez, S., & Rioux, K. (2000). Sharing information encountered for others on the Web. New Review of Information Behaviour Research, 1, 219-233. [SILS Library]
  • In addition to encountering information on the Web, the participants in this study described why and how they shared the information that was encountered.
• Heinström, J. (2006). Psychological factors behind incidental information acquisition. Library & Information Science Research, 28(4),579-594. [UNC libraries]
  • This study examines the relationships between aspects of the searcher's personality and the likelihood of incidental information acquisition. You might be interested in exploring whether your own experiences match her results. There is more detail on these ideas in Heinstrom's recent book: From Fear to Flow: Personality and Information Interaction. Chandos. [SILS Library - ZA3075 .H46 2010]
• Teevan, J., Alvarado, C., Ackerman, M.S., & Karger, D.R. (2004). The perfect search engine is not enough: A study of orienteering behavior in directed search. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIGCHI '04), 415-422. [UNC libraries]
  • This paper presents a modified diary study that investigated how people performed personally motivated searches in their email, in their files, and on the Web. Instead of jumping directly to their information target using keywords, the participants navigated to their target with small, local steps using their contextual knowledge as a guide, even when they knew exactly what they were looking for in advance.
• Ross, C.S. (1999). Finding without seeking: The information encounter in the context of reading for pleasure. Information Processing & Management, 35(6), 783-799. [UNC libraries]
  • Through interviews with avid readers, Ross investigated several aspects of reading for pleasure, including how avid readers identify/select the books they read.
• Nutefall, J.E., & Ryder, P.M. (2010). The serendipitous research process. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 36(3), 228-234. [UNC libraries]
  • Faculty in the first-year writing program and instruction librarians were asked about their research process, focusing specifically on their experiences of serendipity.
• Williamson, K. (1998). Discovered by chance: The role of incidental informaiton acquisition in an ecological model of information use. Library & Information Science Research, 20(1), 23-40. [UNC libraries]
  • This study focused on incidental information acquisition by older adults in Australia. an unusual aspect of the study is the finding that telephones play a key role in these adults' information seeking behaviors.

20: Collaborative search and delegated/imposed queries

This first set of papers focuses on academic settings where an information need is delegated or imposed by someone other than the information seeker.

• Gross, M. (1999). Imposed versus self-generated questions: Implications for reference practice. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 39(1), 53-61. [UNC libraries]
  • This article applies Gross's ideas about imposed queries to the process of responding to reference questions; she provides explicit advice for reference librarians.
• Bennett, D.B., Cenzer, P.S., & Kirk, P. (2004). A class assignment requiring chat-based reference. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 44(2), 149-163. [UNC libraries]
  • Students were assigned to use a chat-based reference service. The librarians responding to these queries noticed several differences between responding to these quesitons and responding to self-generated chat queries, particularly in the assistance that they were expected to provide to the students in selecting their paper topics.

This second set of papers are similar, but the delegation occurred in a non-academic setting.

• Katopol, P. (2012). 'My boss sent me': Imposed queries in the workplace. Information Outlook, 16(4), 19-21. [SILS Library]

This third set of papers is a selection of the many studies that have been conducted on health information seeking, where the caregiver plays an important role in acquiring information on behalf of the patient.

• Fox, S. (2011, Feb. 1). Health topics: 80% of Internet users look for health information online. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/HealthTopics.aspx.
• Abrahamson, J.A., Fisher, K.E., Turner, A.G., Durrance, J.C., & Turner, T.C. (2008). Lay information mediary behavior uncovered: Exploring how nonprofessionals seek health information for themselves and others online. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 96(4), 310-323. [UNC libraries]
• Kernisan, L.P., Sudore, R.L., & Knight, S.J. (2010). Information-seeking at a caregiving website: A qualitative analysis. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 12(3), e31. http://www.jmir.org/2010/3/e31/.
• James, N., Daniels, H., Rahman, R., McConkey, C., Derry, J., & Young, A. (2007). A study of information seeking by cancer patients and their carers. Clinical Oncology (Royal College of Radiologists), 19(5), 356–362. [UNC libraries]
• Bundorf, M.K., Wagner, T.H., Singer, S.J., & Baker, L.C. (2006). Who searches the Internet for health information. Health Services Research, 41(3 pt 1), 819–836. [UNC libraries]
• Bar-Tal, Y., Barnoy, S., & Zisser, B. (2005). Whose informational needs are considered? A comparison between cancer patients and their spouses' perceptions of their own and their partners' knowledge and informational needs. Social Science & Medicine, 60(7), 1459–1465. [UNC libraries]
• Hepworth, M. (2004). A framework for understanding user requirements for an information service: defining the needs of informal carers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(8), 695–708. [UNC libraries]
• Echlin, K.N., & Rees, C.E. (2002). Information needs and information-seeking behaviors of men with prostate cancer and their partners: A review of the literature. Cancer Nursing, 25(1), 35–41. [UNC libraries; will need to search for it]
• Ferguson, T. (2000). Online patient-helpers and physicians working together: A new partnership for high quality health care. BMJ, 321(7269), 1129–1132. [UNC libraries]
• Meissner, H.I., Anderson, D.M., & Odenkirchen, J.C. (1990). Meeting information needs of significant others: Use of the cancer information service. Patient Education and Counseling, 15(2), 171–179. [UNC libraries]

This fourth set of papers focuses on collaborative search and collaborative information seeking.

• Shah, C. (2014). Collaborative information seeking [Advances in Information Science]. Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 65(2), 215-236. [UNC libraries]
• Shah, C. (2013). Effects of awareness on coordination in collaborative information seeking. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 64(6), 1122-1143. [UNC libraries]
• Evans, B.M., Kairam, S., & Pirolli, P. (2010). Do your friends make you smarter? An analysis of social strategies in online information seeking. Information Processing & Management, 46(6), 679-692. [UNC libraries]
• Reddy, M.C., & Spence, P.R. (2008). Collaborative information seeking: A field study of a multidisciplinary patient care team. Information Processing & Management, 44(1), 242-255. [UNC libraries]
• Foster, J. (2006). Collaborative information seeking and retrieval. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, 40, 329-356. [SILS Reference - Z699.A1 A65]

INTERMEDIATION AND DIS-INTERMEDIATION IN INFORMATION SEEKING

21: Human intermediaries: Reference and help desk services

• These first three studies focus on help provided for use of technologies.
• Halverson, C.A., Erickson, T. and Ackerman, M.S. (2004). Behind the help desk: Evolution of a knowledge management system in a large organization. CSCW '04, 304-313. [UNC libraries]
  • Reports on a 2-year ethnographic study of the development of a knowledge management system supporting a help desk, from a simple "common problems" database to its current intranet-based form.
• Poole, E.S., Chetty, M., Morgan, T., Grinter, R.E., & Edwards, W.K. (2009). Computer help at home: Methods and motivations for informal technical support.CHI '09: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 739-748. [UNC libraries]
  • What influences whether and how a "helper" will provide help to their family and friends? Factors include maintenance of one's personal identity as a computer expert and accountability to one's social network.
• Kiesler, S., Zdaniuk, B., Lundmark, V., & Kraut, R. (2000). Troubles with the internet: The dynamics of help at home. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(4), 323-351. [UNC libraries]
  • Even though most people need help with their home computers, they tend to delegate the seeking of technical assistance to the most technically-competent family member (who plays the role of the family guru). The key benefits from this role are discussed.

• These two papers examine the possibilities for automated intermediation (dis-intermediation) in a library.
• Ahmed, T.T., Willard, C., & Zorn, M. (2006). Automated customer service at the National Library of Medicine. First Monday, 11(11). [Online]
  • The National Library of Medicine (NLM) launched a virtual customer service representative (vRep) named “Cosmo” in February 2003. This paper describes the lessons learned during Cosmo’s development.
• Kwanya, T., Stilwell, C., & Underwood, P.G. (2012). Library 2.0 versus other library service models: A critical analysis. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 44(3), 145-162. [UNC libraries]

• A number of studies have examined library reference services. These were selected because they directly examine the interaction between the user and the librarian.
• Ross, C.S., & Dewdney, P. (1994). Best practices: An analysis of the best (and worst) in fifty-two library reference transactions. Public Libraries, 33, 261-266. [SILS Library]
• This classic study of reference services was conducted through the efforts of library science students in Canada. They visited a library of their choosing and asked a question at the reference desk. They provided detailed reports on librarians' responses, yielding a dozen types of "unhelpful behaviors".
• Shenton, A. (2010). How comparable are the actions of a school-based intermediary responding to inquiries and the information-seeking behavior of young people? Reference Librarian, 51(4), 276-289. [UNC libraries]
  • Compares intermediary and end-user searching, with a focus on exploitation of the end user's knowledge, use of readily accessible resources, the way in which materials are used, approaches to other people, and the circumstances of stopping the search.
• Radford, M.L. (2006). Encountering virtual users: A qualitative investigation of interpersonal communication in chat reference. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57(8), 1046-1059. [UNC libraries]
  • This study applies communication theory to the relational (socioemotional) aspects of virtual reference services. Radford found that interpersonal skills important to F2F reference services were also important to virtual references serivces (although modified).
• Walter, V.A., & Mediavilla, C. (2005). Teens are from Neptune, librarians are from Pluto: An analysis of online reference transactions. Library Trends, 54(2), 209-227. [UNC libraries]
  • This study examined online reference transactions between teens and the virtual reference librarians in California who connect students to Live Homework Help tutors.
• Lippincott, J.K. (2005). Net generation students and libraries. In Oblinger, D.G., & Oblinger, J.L. (eds.), Educating the Net Generation. Educause, Chapter 13. http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen.
  • Lippincott provides a general overview of student use of college libraries and suggestions for providing library services to the net generation. Focus your attention on the section on "Access to and use of information resources" (p2-5).
• Janes, J. (2008). An informal history (and possible future) of digital reference. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 34(2). http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Dec-07/janes.html.
  • In addition to sketching a history of digital reference, Janes outlines several issues that arise in the offering of digital reference services (e.g., staffing issues, librarian attitudes, and need for marketing).
• Janes, J. (2002). Digital reference: Reference libarian's experiences and attitudes. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 53(7), 549-566. [UNC libraries]
  • Academic and public librarians were surveyed about their attitudes toward digital reference services.
• Buckland, M.K. (2008). Reference library service in the digital environment. Library & Information Science Research, 30(2), 81-85. [UNC libraries]
  • Buckland argues that reference services have not yet made a successful transition into the digital library environment, and that more emphasis should be placed on empowering library users.

22: Information retrieval systems as intermediaries

• Gronflaten, O. (2009). Predicting travelers' choice of information sources and information channels. Journal of Travel Research, 48(2), 230-244. [UNC libraries]
  • This choice for our reading may seem far-fetched, but the issue of disintermediation has come up in a variety of industries, including the travel industry. This study explores travel-related information seeking as a choice between two information sources (travel agents vs. service providers) and as a choice between two information channels (face to face vs. the internet).
• Jansen, B.J. (2006). Using temporal patterns of interactions to design effective automated searching assistance. Communications of the ACM, 49(4), 72-74. [UNC libraries]
  • Jansen designed a middleware application that would provide automated assistance at the points in the search interaction when the user was most likely to be receptive to such an intervention. The application and the results from using it are briefly described in this article. A more detailed description is reported in the December 2005 issue of JASIST.
• Xie, I., & Cool, C. (2009). Understanding help seeking within the context of searching digital libraries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 60(3), 477-494. [UNC libraries]
  • People often need help when searching a digital collection (and sometimes even seek help). This study identified 15 different types of help-seeking situations that searchers of a digital library reported.

23: Social intermediation: Recommender systems, social Q&A, etc.

• Belkin, N.J. (2000). Helping people find what they don't know. Communications of the ACM, 43(8), 59-61. [UNC libraries]
  • After a quick review of the ways that information retrieval systems have tried to help their users in the past, Belkin discusses the ways in which other people's search terms can be used to generate query suggestions for current users.
• Schafer, J.B., Frankowski, D., Herlocker, J., & Sen, S. (2007). Collaborative filtering recommender systems. In Brusilovsky, P., Kobsa, A., & Nejdl, W. (eds.), The Adaptive Web: Methods and Strategies of Web Personalization. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4321, 291-324. [UNC libraries]
  • If you want to understand the technology underlying recommender systems, then you'll want to read this chapter.
• Agarwal, D., Chen, B.-C., Elango, P., & Ramakrishnan, R. (2013). Content recommendation on Web portals. Communications of the ACM, 56(6), 92-101. [UNC libraries]
  • This article summarizes the many approaches used for recommending content on a number of different types of Web portals.
• Harper, F.M., Raban, D., Rafaeli, S., & Konstan, J.A. (2008). Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites. Proceedings of the 26th annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08), 865-874. [UNC libraries]
  • This study compared answer quality on five different Q&A sites: digital reference services (from the INternet Public Library), Google Answers (now out of business), AllExperts, Yahoo! Answers (the most visited community Q&A site), and Live QnA (from Microsoft).
• Shachaf, P. (2010). Social reference: Toward a unifying theory. Library & Information Science Research, 32(1), 66-76. [UNC libraries]
  • Social reference services refers to online question answering services (Q&A sites). The services provided at these sites are different than the traditional, dyadic library reference interaction; this article provides a sociotechnical framework for understanding these interactions.
• Adamic, L.A., Zhang, J., Bakshy, E., & Ackerman, M.S. (2008). Knowledge sharing and Yahoo! Answers: Everyone knows something. Proceedings of the 17th Inernational Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW '08), 665-674. [UNC libraries]
  • The forum categories in Yahoo! Answers were analyzed in terms of their content characteristics and interactions among the users. The analysis includes some ways to predict which answer will be selected as best.
• Shah, C., Oh, S., & Oh, J.S. (2009). Research agenda for social Q&A. Library & Information Science Research, 31(4), 205-209. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors argue that social media may be affecting information behaviors in important ways, and that we need to conduct additional research in order to understand social information seeking behaviors.
• Preece, J. (2001). Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success.  Behaviour & Information Technology, 20(5), 347-356. [UNC libraries]
  • In this article, Preece focuses on the ways in which we can evaluate the success of online communities. It's a more general approach to social websites - not specific to intermediation of information seeking processes.
• Máté, T., & Audunson, R.A. (2012). Websites for booklovers as meeting places. Library Hi Tech, 30(4), EarlyCite pre-publication. [UNC libraries]

SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

24: Scholarly work and the role of scholarly communication

• Palmer, C.L., Teffeau, L.C., & Pirmann, C.M. (2009). Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development. Urbana-Champaign, IL: Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Center for Informatics Research in Science & Scholarship, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2009/2009-02.pdf.
  • This tech report provides a very detailed and thorough analysis of scholarly work, including searching, collecting, reading, writing, and collaborating.
• Davies, S. (2011). Still building the Memex. Communications of the ACM, 54(2), 80-88. [UNC libraries]
  • The title references Vannevar Bush's work. This article discusses the continuing importance of personal knowledge bases for scientific work.
• Leggett, J.J., & Shipman, F.M., III (2004). Directions for hypertext research: Exploring the design space for interactive scholarly communication. Hypertext '04: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, August 9-13, 2004, Santa Cruz, CA. [UNC libraries]
  • Leggett and Shipman argue that we should use the capabilities of current technologies to transform scholarly communication in the direction of Vannevar Bush's original suggestions.
• Grudin, J. (2013). Journal-conference interaction and the competitive exclusion principle. interactions, 20(1), 68-73. [UNC libraries]
  • Grudin argues for two essential niches in any scholarly community: producing well-respected work and maintaining a professional community. He discusses the respective roles of journals and conferences in addressing the needs of each niche.
• Hurd, J.M. (2000). The transformation of scientific communication: A model for 2020. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), 1279-1283. [UNC libraries]
  • This article doesn't do a great job of predicting what the scholarly communication system will look like in 2020, but it provides a really great description of what it was like in 2000. Much of that still holds true today, with a few tweaks. We'll look at her Figure 1 in class, and try to adapt it to today.
• Tagler, J. From the Executive Director's desk. Professional/Scholarly Publishing Bulletin, 10(1 & 2), 1-2, 4-8. http://www.pspcentral.org/documents/PSPWinter-Spring2011.pdf.
  • Most of the readings listed here focus on the authors' and/or readers' view of the process of creating and disseminating new knowledge. This survey of professional and scholarly journal publishers provides more of a publisher view of the state of the scholarly communication system.
• Kaspar, W.A., & van Duinkerken, W. (2013). Demystifying the life of an article: From submission to publication in Journal of Academic Librarianship. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(2), 113-114. [UNC libraries]
  • This brief editorial opens up the black box of the processes that occur from journal article submission to publication, for JAL.
• Gould, T.H.P. (2013). Do We Still Need Peer Review? An Argument for Change. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. [Davis Library - LB2333 .G58 2013]
  • Given scholars' recently-acquired ability to self-publish (on the Web), Gould is concerned that, if we don't reform and improve the peer review system now, it might cease to exist. This book provides a historical overview of peer review, and makes suggestions for reform.
• Mulligan, A., Hall, L., & Raphael, E. (2013). Peer review in a changing world: An international study measuring the attitudes of researchers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 64(1), 132-161. [UNC libraries]
  • A survey of 4000 researchers found that the peer review process is highly regarded by the vast majority and considered to be essential to the communication of scholarly research.
• Lee, C.J., Sugimoto, C.R., Zhang, G., & Cronin, B. (2013). Bias in peer review. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 64(1), 2-17. [UNC libraries]
  • These authors provide a brief description of the function, history, and scope of peer review, and critique the existing research on bias in the peer review process.
• Renear, A.H., & Palmer, C.L. (2009, Aug. 14). Strategic reading, ontologies, and the future of scientific publishing. Science, 325, 828-832. [UNC libraries]
  • This article provides a high-level overview of shifts in scientists' reading behaviors, and suggests some technologies that might support "strategic reading".
• Research Information Network. (2009, Sep.). Communicating Knowledge; How and Why UK Researchers Publish and Disseminate their Findings. Research Information Network, in conjunction with JISC. http://rinarchive.jisc-collections.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/communicating-knowledge-how-and-why-researchers-pu. (Read the "briefing" only; available from link at bottom of page.)
  • This report is an excellent overview of researchers' views on the scholarly communication process in the UK. The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) implemented there makes the context somewhat different than in the US.
• Cronin, B. (2004). Bowling alone together: Academic writing as distributed cognition. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(6), 557-560. [UNC libraries]
  • In this brief research note, Cronin discusses scholarly writing as an example of distributed cognition.
• Wuchty, S., Jones, B., & Uzzi, B. (2007, May 18). The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science, 316(5827), 1036-1039. [UNC libraries]
  • This extensive analysis of journal articles and patents concluded that "research is increasingly done in teams across nearly all fields" (p1036).
• Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T.N., & Bordons, M. (2012). Referencing patterns of individual researchers: Do top scientists rely on more extensive information sources? Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(12), 2433-2450. [UNC libraries]
  • Top-performing scientists included a higher number of references in their papers, most likely because they publish in journals with stricter reference and reviewing requirements.
• Campanario, J.M., & Acedo, E. (2007). Rejecting highly cited papers: The views of scientists who encounter resistance to their discoveries from other scientists. Journal of American Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(5), 734-743. [UNC libraries]
  • Over 800 highly-cited authors were surveyed; 132 responded. They were asked about their experiences of resistance to their work during the peer review process, and about problems with the peer review process.
• Bornmann, L. (2011). Scientific peer review. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, 45, 199-245. [SILS Library Reference - Z699.A1 A65; also in Sakai Resources]
  • This review chapter provides a very nice overview of the process of peer review. In particular, see pages 199-204.
• Harley, D., & Acord, S.K. (2011, Mar. 4). Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future. Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California Berkeley. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xv148c8#page-1.
  • This report documents the discussion at a meeting held to discuss peer review. The sessions focused on the current system of peer review, new models of peer review, the role of information institutions (societies, presses, libraris, etc.) in these new models, and the impact of open access publication on these models.
• Bohannon, J. (2013, Oct. 4). Who's afraid of peer review? Science, 342(6154), 60-65. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.summary.
  • The author conducted a "sting" operation to see how many open access journals would accept a spoof research article.
• Nespor, J. (2012). The afterlife of "Teachers' beliefs": Qualitative methodology and the textline. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(5), 449-460. [UNC libraries]
  • Naspor, a scholar in cultural studies, takes a longitudinal look at the later use and citation of one particular study, arguing that authors assemble textlines that shape the afterlife of textual objects.

25: Metrics of scholarly productivity

• Yan, E., & Ding, Y. (2012). Scholarly network similarities: How bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, cocitation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and coword networks relate to each other. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(7), 1313-1326. [UNC libraries]
  • The title pretty much says it all. They found two dimensions on which the different types of networks varied: citation-based versus noncitation-based, and social versus cognitive.
• Meho, L.I., & Sugimoto, C. (2009). Assessing the scholarly impact of information studies: A tale of two citation databases -- Scopus and Web of Science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 60(12), 2499-2508. [UNC libraries]
  • The two citation databases were compared, in terms of their ability to assess the scholarly impact of researchers in the information studies field.
• Meho, L.J., & Yang, K. (2007). Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of Science versus Sopus and Google Scholar. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(13), 2105-2125. [UNC libraries]
  • Using citations to the work of 25 ILS faculty members as a case study, the authors examine the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by Web of Science. This is a fairly long article; focus your attention on pages 2107-2108, skim the methods section, study the results and discussion in more detail.
• Eyre-Walker, A., & Stoletzki, N. (2013). The assessment of science: The relative merits of post-publication review, the impact factor, and the number of citations. PLoS Biology, 11(10), e1001675 (8 pages). http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001675.
  • Three methods of assessing the merit of a scientific paper were compared: subjective post-publication peer review, the number of citations to the paper, and the impact factor of the paper in which the article was published.
• Bollen, J., Van de Sompel, H., Smith, J.A., & Luce, R. (2005). Toward alternative metrics of journal impact: A comparison of download and citation data. Information Processing & Management, 41(6), 1419-1440. [UNC libraries]
  • The weaknesses of the "impact factor" of a journal are often discussed. This article describes the use of social network centrality metrics as an alternative measure of scholarly impact.
• Ding, Y., & Cronin, B. (2011). Popular and/or prestigious? Measures of scholarly esteem. Information Processing & Management, 47(1), 80-96. [UNC libraries]
  • Popularity is defined as the number of times an author is cited and prestige is defined as the number of times an author is cited by highly cited papers. Using information retrieval as a test field, 40 reseachers were compared in terms of their popularity and prestige over time.
• Sugimoto, C.R., & Thelwall, M. (2013). Scholars on soap boxes: Science communication and dissemination in TED videos. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 64(4), 663-674. [UNC libraries]
  • Both bibliometric and Webometric data indicate that TED Talks impact primarily the public sphere. There were disciplinary differences in patterns of influence.
• Egghe, L., Guns, R., & Rousseau, R. (2011). Thoughts on uncitedness: Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists as case studies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 62(8), 1637-1644. [UNC libraries]
  • An examination of citations to the work of 75 award-winning researchers indicates that they have a rather large fraction (10% or more) of uncited publications, i.e., at least 10% of their publications have never been cited.
• Smith, A.G. (2004). Web links as analogues of citations. Information Research, 9(4). http://informationr.net/ir/9-4/paper188.html.
  • Web links were classified in terms of the reasons for linking. Approximately 20% of the links could be regarded as research links analogous to citations.
• Vaughan, L., & Shaw, D. (2003). Bibliographic and Web citations: What is the difference? Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 54(14), 1313-1324. [UNC libraries]
  • The character and source of Web links to journal articles in information and library science were analyzed. They correlated with bibliographic citations and tended to represent intellectual impact, and came from papers posted on the Web (30%) or from class reading lists (12%).
• Eysenbach, G. (2011). Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(4), e123. http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/.
  • Tweets citing JMIR articles were analyzed, and then compared with citations to those articles 17-29 months later. There was a high correlation between "tweetations" and citations, so the author concludes that "tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication."
• Thelwall, M., & Harries, G. (2004). Do the web sites of higher rated scholars have significantly more online impact? Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(2), 149-159. [UNC libraries]
  • This study examines the impact of scholars' websites, rather than their individual publications. "The findings suggest that universities with higher rated scholars produce significantly more Web content but with a similar average online impact."
• Bornmann, L., Mutz, R., & Daniel, H.-D. (2008). Are there better indices for evaluation purposes than the h index? A comparison of nine different variants of the h index using data from biomedicine. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59(5), 830-837. [UNC libraries]
  • "A scientist has index h if h of his or her N papers have at least h citations each and the other (N - h) papers have fewer than h citations each." Thus, the h index is based on both the number of publications and the number of citations to them. This article examines the validity of the h index, in terms of its relationship to peer assessments.
• Blessinger, K., & Hrycaj, P. (2010). Highly cited articles in library and information science: An analysis of content and authorship trends. Library & Information Science Research, 32(2), 156-162. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors analyzed 34 articles in information and library science that were highly cited between 1994 and 2004. They examined authorship, number of references, and topics of the articles.

26: The future of scholarly communication

• Nielsen, M. (2012). Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [SILS - Q180.55 .M4 N54 2012]
  • Nielsen describes the ways in which networked computing and social collaboration are reshaping the scholarly enterprise. Of particular interest, for our purposes, are chapters 1, 8, and 9.
• Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., Russell, B., Canty, N., & Watkinson, A. (2011). Social media use in the research workflow. Learned Publishing, 24(3), 183-195. [UNC libraries]
  • A survey of 2000 researchers indicates that social media (such as Twitter and Skype) are used by scholars at all points of the research lifecycle. Social media tools are used for collaborative authoring, conferencing, and scheduling meetings.
• Tenopir, C., Volentine, R., & King, D.W. (2013). Social media and scholarly reading. Online INformation Review, 37(2), 193-216. [UNC libraries]
  • A survey of 2,000 academics in the UK found the most use one or more forms of social media for work-related purposes, but frequency of use and authorship are not high.
• MediaCommons & NYU Press. (2012). Open Review: A Study of Contexts and Processes. Media Commons. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/open-review/.
  • This report not only discusses open review, it is an example of an open review process. At a minimum, read the Executive Summary and the first two Contextualizing Questions, along with comments on those sections. Feel free to read and/or comment on additional sections, also.
• Acord, S.K., & Harley, D. (2013). Credit, time, and personality: The human challenges to sharing scholarly work using Web 2.0, New Media & Society, 15(3), 379-397. [UNC libraries]
  • Scholars were interviewed about how they share their work-in-progress and the disciplinary values that influence their practices. Issues of credit, time, and personaly were common themes.
• Harley, D., Acord, S.K., Earl-Novell, S., Lawrence, S., & King, C.J. (2010, Jan.). Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines. Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California Berkeley. http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc.
  • The executive summary of this report provides an overview of the issues, including those issues specific to particular disciplines. Of particular interest are the findings related to scholarly communication that go outside of the traditional model.
• Priem, J., & Hemminger, B.M. (2012). Decoupling the scholarly journal. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 6, Article 19 (13 pages). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2012.00019.
  • The authors argue that scholarly publishing should be unbundled, i.e., writing, peer reviewing, editing, disseminating, indexing, and marketing should be performed by entities specializing in each, allowing the system of journal publishing to be more innovative.
• Nicholas, D., & Rowlands, I. (2011). Social media use in the research workflow. Information Services & Use, 31, 61-83. [UNC libraries]
  • A longer report of the survey reported in Rowlands, Nicholas, Russell, Canty, & Watkinson (2011).
• Letierce, J., Passant, A., Breslin, J., & Decker, S. (2010). Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages. Presented at the Web Science Conference 2010, Raleigh, NC. http://journal.webscience.org/314/.
  • A survey of Semantic Web researchers, related to their use of Twitter, was conducted; and tweets containing the official hashtags of three conferences were analyzed in terms of content and dissemination. The authors were able to observe topic trends based on the Twitter data.
• Groth, P., & Gurney, T. (2010). Studying scientific discourse on the Web using bibliometrics: A chemistry blogging case study. Presented at the Web Science Conference 2010, Raleigh, NC. http://journal.webscience.org/308/.
  • This study analyzes 295 chemistry blog posts about peer-reviewed research. The authors conclude that scientific discourse on the Web is more immediate, contextually relevant and has a larger non-technical focus than the academic literature.
• Veletsianos, G., & Kimmons, R. (2012). Networked participatory scholarship: Emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks. Computers & Education, 58(2), 766-774. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors describe the emergence of "networked participatory scholarship" and describe how it has evolved from more traditional modes of scholarship.
• Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). Signs of epistemic disruption: Transformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal. First Monday, 14(4). http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2309/2163.
  • The authors see three "breaking points" in the current scholarly publishing system: its business model, its system of peer review, and its system of post-publication evaluation (i.e., citations as impact). They suggest various ways in which the system might be transformed.
• Schwartz, L.M., Woloshin, S., & Baczek, L. (2002).  Media coverage of scientific meetings: Too much too soon? Journal of the American Medical Association, 287(21): 2859-2863. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/287/21/2859
  • This study examined the phenomenon of news coverage of results reported at scientific meetings. Because those reports are based on brief presentations and abstracts only, the underlying scholarly work has not undergone rigorous peer review, undermining the traditional processes of scholarly publication.
• Kousha, K., Thelwall, M., & Abdoli, M. (2012). The role of online videos in research communication: A content analysis of YouTube videos cited in academic publications. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(9), 1710-1727. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors analyzed 1808 citations to YouTube videos within scholarly publications from 2006 to 2011. There were disciplinary differences; for example, videos cited in science articles had scientific-related content, videos cited in the arts and humanities had art, culture, or history themes, and videos cited in the social sciences tended to be related to news, politics, advertisements, and documentaries.
• Barjak, F. (2006). The role of the internet in informal scholarly communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57(10), 1350-1367. [UNC libraries]
  • A large-scale study of scientists in a variety of disciplines investigated their use of the internet for informal communication. The variables investigated included the scholar's time in career, sex, rank, research productivity, and participation in collaborative research.
• Priem, J., & Costello, K.L. (2010). How and why scholars cite on Twitter. ASIST Proceedings, 47, 1-4. [UNC libraries; self-archived]
  • An analysis of 46,515 tweets from a sample of 28 scholars found that they do cite scholarly works on Twitter. The authors argue that these citations are an alternative indicator of scholarly impact.
• McCain, K.W. (2000). Sharing digitized research-related information on the World Wide Web. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), 1321-1327. [UNC libraries]
  • McCain examined 527 references to web pages, indexed in Web of Science and published between 1988 and 1998. These references were to data compilations (194), software (153), websites (73), electronic documents (49), and digitized images (17). Thus, this study examines early examples of electronic publishing of scholarly works.
• Wang, M. (2013). Supporting the research process through expanded library data services. Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems, 47(3), 282-303. [UNC libraries]
  • Based on her experience in the John Cotton Dana LIbrary at Rutgers, Wang makes several suggestions for the ways in which libraries can provide data services to academic researchers.
• Walsh, J.P., Kucker, S., Maloney, N.G., & Gabbay, S. (2000). Connecting minds: Computer-mediated communication and scientific work. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 51(14), 1295-1305. [UNC libraries]
  • This survey of 333 scientists in four disciplines indicated that computer-mediated communication is central to both professional and research-related aspects of scientific work.

27: The invisible college: discovery and representation; Diffusion theory and how it applies to the diffusion of information and information technologies

• Crane, D. (1972). Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Davis Library, Undergrad Library - Q175.5 .C7]
  • The seminal work on the invisible colleges that represent the social network among scientists.
• Björneborn, L., & Ingwersen, P. (2004). Toward a basic framework for webometrics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(14), 1216-1227. [UNC libraries]
  • Basic concepts in webometrics are defined and illustrated.
• Small, H. (2010). Maps of science as interdisciplinary discourse: Co-citation contexts and the role of analogy. Scientometrics, 83, 835-849. [UNC libraries]
  • Starting with co-citation analysis to map multiple discplines, Small then goes on to analyze those results in terms of the frequently-used words in the nodes of the network. Five specific linkages are discused.
• Klavans, R., & Boyack, K.W. (2011). Using global mapping to create more accurate document-level maps of research fields. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 62(1), 1-18. [UNC libraries]
  • Methods for creating both local and global maps of a particular discipline are illustrated and discussed, using information science as an example. The mapping is based on cocitation analysis.
• Sugimoto, C.R., Pratt, J.A., & Hauser, K. (2008). Using field cocitation analysis to assess reciprocal and shared impact of LIS/MIS fields. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59(9), 1441-1453. [UNC libraries]
  • This study used bibliometric data to analyze the relationships between library and information science and management information systems, in terms of knowledge imported/exported between the fields, the joint influence of the fields, and the overlap of the two fields.
• Jamali, H.R. (2013). Citation relations of theories of human information behaviour. Webology, 10(1). http://www.webology.org/2013/v10n1/a106.html.
  • This study used over 50 theories of human information behavior (many of those we've studied this semester) and examined their relationships through citation analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis.
• Borgman, C.L., & Rice, R.E. (1992). The convergence of information science and communication: A bibliometric analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43(6), 397-411. [UNC libraries]
  • Borgman and Rice used bibliometric techniques to address the question of whether the disciplines of information science and communication were converging. While they found some cross-disciplinary citing behavior, it was concentrated in just a few journals.
• White, H.D., & McCain, K.W. (1998). Visualizing a discipline: An author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972-1995. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 49(4), 327-355. [UNC libraries]
  • This is a detailed analysis of information science, in terms of its key authors. Shifts in relationships among authors over three 8-year periods are illustrated.
• Small, H. (1999). Visualizing science by citation mapping. Journal of American Society for Information Science, 50(9), 799-813. [UNC libraries]
  • A researcher at the Institute for Scientific Information (now Thomson ISI, publishers of the Web of Science) describes a number of ways that citation data can be used in visualizations of a scientific field. This use of citation data is an alternative to its use to evaluate scholarly productivity.
• Leydesdorff, L. (2007). Visualization of the citation impact environments of scientific journals: An online mapping exercise. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(1), 25-38. [UNC libraries]
  • Focusing on the field of nano-technology as an example, this article describes a method for analyzing and visualizing the citation environment in terms of links and graphs.
• Sula, C.A. (2012). Visualizing social connections in the humanities: Beyond bibliometrics. Bulletin of ASIST, 38(4), 31-34. [Online]
  • Sula argues that, in the humanities where co-authorship is uncommon, bibliometric techniques do not adequately capture the structure of disciplines. Instead, other types of social connections should be taken into account, such as student-teacher relationships, collegial relationships, and relationships formed through professional associations.
• Tague-Sutcliffe, J. (1992). An introduction to informetrics. Information Processing & Management, 28(1), 1-3. [UNC libraries]
  • This very brief article provides a quick introduction to the basic concepts in informetrics and bibliometrics.

• The citations below focus on social network theory and analysis methods, rather than on bibliometrics and its variations.
• Granovetter, M.J. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380. [UNC libraries]
  • Unlike those above, this article is related to social network analysis. Granovetter originated the examination of tie strength in social networks. This concept has been exploited in studies of information exchange, because it is more likel that weak ties will be the source of novel information.
• Mitchell, J.C. (1969). The concept and use of social networks. In Mitchell, J.C. (ed.), Social Networks in Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns. Manchester University Press, for the Institute for African Studies, University of Zambia, 1-50. [Davis Library - HN800 .Z32 S6]
  • A seminal article on social network theory.
• Ortega, J.L., & Aguillo, I.F. (2012). Science is all in the eye of the beholder: Keyword maps in Google Scholar Citations. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(12), 2370-2377. [UNC libraries]
  • A list of 26,682 registered users of the Google Scholar Citations database yielded 6,660 labels, which were classified according to the Scopus Subject Area classes, and a network graph of their relationships was created.
• White, H.D., Wellman, B., & Nazer, N. (2004). Does citation reflect social structure? Longitudinal evidence from the "Globenet" interdisciplinary research group. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(2), 111-126. [UNC libraries]
  • This article brings together an information science scholar and a sociologist, and also brings together bibliometric methods and social network theory.
• Haythornthwaite, C. (2007). Social networks and online community. In Joinson, A.N., McKenna, K.Y.A., Postmes, T., & Reips, U.-D. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology. Oxford University Press, 121-138. [Davis Library - HM1017 .O94 2007]
• Neubauer, N., & Obermayer, K. (2011). Tripartite community structure in social bookmarking data. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 17(3), 267-294. [UNC libraries]

• The citations in this list are to studies that have used diffusion theory to frame the research question.
• Chatman, E.A. (1986). Diffusion theory: A review and test of a conceptual model in information diffusion. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 37(6), 377-386. [UNC libraries]
• Wildemuth, B. M. (1992). An empirically grounded model of the adoption of intellectual technologies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43(3), 210-224. [UNC libraries]
• Marshall, J.G. (1990). Diffusion of innovation theory and end-user searching. Library & Information Science Research, 12(1), 55-69. [SILS Library]
  • These three studies all are intended to see if diffusion theory applied to a particular adoption phenomenon. All were conducted by people who were on the SILS faculty sometime after the study was completed.
• Cho, Y., Hwang, J., & Lee, D. (2012). Identification of effective opinion leaders in the diffusion of technological innovation: A social network approach. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 79(1), 97-106. [UNC libraries]
  • Using simulation methods, the authors found that opinion leaders with high sociality are the best for fast diffusion, while those with high distance centrality are best for the maximum cumulative number of adopters.
• Chakravorti, B. (2004). The role of adoption networks in the success of innovations: a strategic perspective. Technology in Society, 26(2-3), 469-482. [UNC libraries]
  • This study focuses on the adoption network and its role in an innovation's ultimate success. Two case studies are drawn from health IT and short messaging systems (SMS).
• Jantz, R.C. (2012). Innovation in academic libraries: An analysis of university librarians' perspectives. Library & Information Science Research, 34(1), 3-12. [UNC libraries]
  • Librarians in six universities were interviewed about their perspectives on innovation in academic libraries. They saw leadership as a critical factor in organizational innovation and were committed to innovation in their libraries.
• Rutherford, L.L. (2008). Implementing social software in public libraries: An exploration of the issues confronting public library adopters of social software. Library Hi Tech, 26(2), 184-200. [UNC libraries]
  • Using diffusion theory as a framework, this study found that blogs were the most popular social software tool being used in public libraries and that library staff acceptance of social software was the most crucial success factor in its adoption.
• Blackburn, H. (2011). Millennials and the adoption of new technologies in libraries through the diffusion of innovations process. Library Hi Tech, 29(4), 663-677. [UNC libraries]
  • This review suggests that millennials act as change agents in libraries' adoption of new technologies.
• White, M.D. (2001). Diffusion of an innovation: Digital references service in Carnegie Foundation Master's (Comprehensive) academic institution libraries. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 27(3), 173-187. [UNC libraries]
  • White uses diffusion theory to understand the extent and rate of diffusion of digital references servces, the characteristics of the adopting libraries, and the re-invention of this innovation during implementation.
• Hahn, K.L., & Schoch, N.A. (1997). Applying diffusion theory to electronic publishing: A conceptual framework for examining issues and outcomes. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, 34, 5-13. [SILS Library]
  • Electronic publishing is viewed as a cluster of related innovations which can be incorporated in various combinations. The effects of adopter perceptions of relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, visibility, and trialability of these clusters are examined here.
• Xia, J. (2012). Diffusionism and open access. Journal of Documentation, 68(1), 72-99. [UNC libraries]
  • This study applies a temporal-spatial analysis to examine the diffusion movement of open access practices from the West to the entire world during the past several decades.
• Spinellis, D., & Giannikas, V. (2012). Organizational adoption of open source software. Journal of Systems and Software, 85(3), 666-682. [UNC libraries]
  • Factors and behaviors associated with the adoption of open source software in Fortune-1000 companies were examined.
• Levin, S.G., Stephan, P.E., & Winkler, A.E. (2012). Innovation in academe: The diffusion of information technologies. Applied Economics, 44(14), 1765-1782. [Author website]
  • This study investigated the diffusion of BITNET and the Domain Name System (DNS), and found several organizational characteristics that affected adoption rate.
• Toole, J.L., Cha, M., & Gonzalez, M.C. (2012, Jan. 19). Modeling the adoption of innovations in the presence of geographic and media influences. PLOS ONE, 7(1), article 329528. [Online]
  • This study demonstrates that geography and mass media influences must be taken into account when modeling social contagion and technology adoption at a city-to-city scale. They illustrate their findings with data on Twitter adoption.
• Doer, B., Fouz, M., & Friedrich, T. (2012). Why rumors spread so quickly in social networks. Communications of the ACM, 55(6), 70-75. [UNC libraries]
  • This article reports an algorithmic analysis of social networks, and how rumors can diffuse so rapidly within social networks.
• Susarla, A., Oh, J.-H., & Tan, Y. (2012). Social networks and the diffusion of user-generated content: Evidence from YouTube. Information Systems Research, 23(1), 23-41. [UNC libraries]
  • This study found that social interactions are influential not only in determining which YouTube videos become successful but also on the magnitude of that impact. This paper was one of the five winners of the AIS Best Publication of the Year Award, 2012.
• Day, J.C., Janus, A., & Davis, J. (2005). Current Population Reports, Special Studies: Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2003. Report P23-208. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p23-208.pdf.
  • This report provides population statistics on computer and internet use in American households.

28: Scholarly publishing as an industry: Traditional and open access models; Intellectual property issues

• This first set of articles includes overviews of open access publishing and the associated issues.
• Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. (2010, Jan.). Report and Recommendations from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=10044.
  • This report outlines a set of recommendations intended to move us toward an open access model of scholarly publishing. It was developed by a group convened by the US House of Representatives and the White HOuse Office of Science and Technology Policy.
• Laakso, M., & Björk, B.-C. (2012). Anatomy of open access publishing: A study of longitudinal development and internal structure. BMC Medicine, 10(124), 1-9. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124.
  • Based on a random sample from the Directory of Open Access Journals, the authors estimate that 340,000 articles were published by 6,713 full immediate OA journals during 2011.
• Björk, B.-C., Laakso, M., Welling, P., & Paetau, P. (2014). Anatomy of green open access. Journal of the Association of Information Science & Technology, 65(2), 237-250. [UNC libraries]
  • Data from previous studies were integrated to assess green OA coverage of published journal articles. Coverage was found to be approximately 12%, with sustantial disicplinary variation.
• Stewart, J., Procter, R., Williams, R., & Poschen, M. (2013). The role of academic publishers in shaping the development of Web 2.0 services for scholarly communication. New Media & Society, 15(3), 413-432. [UNC libraries]
  • By comparing the practices of the Nature Publishing Group (a subsidiary of Macmillan Group) and the Public Library of Science, the role of publishers in responding to the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 was investigated.
• Williams, P., Nicholas, D., & Rowlands, I. (2010). E-journal usage and impact in scholarly research: A review of the literature. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 16(2), 192-207. [UNC libraries]
  • This literature review concludes that "it is now unthinkable for researchers to work without the convenience and comprehensiveness that e-journals provide them" (p192).
• Kling, R. (2004). The internet and unrefereed scholarly publishing. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, 38, 591-632. [UNC libraries]
  • In this review, Kling examines the impact of the internet on scholarly publishing and discusses early trends in open access publishing.
• Knoth, P., & Zdrahal, Z. (2012). CORE: Three access levels to underpin open access. D-Lib Magazine, 18(11/12). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november12/knoth/11knoth.html.
  • The authors describe their CORE (COnnecting REpositories) system, which is intended to (a) make it easy for users to discover and obtain open access materials at the level of individual items, (b) explore and analyze these materials at the collections level and (c) provide infrastructure and access to raw data in order to lower the barriers to the research and development of systems and services on top of these resources.
• Pochoda, P. (2013). The big one: The epistemic system break in scholarly monograph publishing. New Media & Society, 15(3), 359-378. [UNC libraries]
  • A system of scholarly monograph publishing coalesced only 50 years ago, and is already being displaced by a digital scholarly publishing system that is in flux along several dimensions.

• This second set of articles focuses on pricing and economic issues.
• King, D.W., & Tenopir, C. (2011). Some economic aspects of the scholarly journal system. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, 45, 295-366. [SILS Library Reference - Z699.A1 A65]
  • This review chapter takes an economics view of the scholarly publishing system. Of particular interest for the next class session is the section on the economics of open access publishing, pages 337-350.
• McCabe, M.J., Snyder, C.M., & Fagin, A. (2013). Open access versus traditional journal pricing: Using a simple "platform market" model to understand which will win (and which should). Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(1), 11-19. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors apply a particular economic theory in order to undersand the conditions under which a journal would prefer open access to traditional pricing.
• Solomon, D.J., & Björk, B.-C. (2012). Publication fees in open access publishing: Sources of funding and factors influencing choice of journal. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(1), 98-107. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors surveyed 429 authors who recently published articles in OA journals with article processing charges (APCs). Fit, quality, and speed of publication were the most important factors in the authors' selection of a journal, but the fact that it was open access also played a role in that decision. There were differences in the sources of funding for APCs by discipline.
• Solomon, D.J., & Björk, B.-C. (2012). A study of open access journals using article processing charges. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(8), 1485-1495. [UNC libraries]
  • The authors investigated article processing charges in 1370 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The average charge was $906, and ranged from $8 to $3900. Almost 60% of the journals using such charges were in biomedicine.
• Björk, B.-C. (2012). The hybrid model for open access publication of scholarly articles: A failed experiment? Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63(8), 1496-1504. [UNC libraries]
  • In this article, Björk uses a portion of the same data set to examine authors' adoption of hybrid OA. Of traditional journals that offer authors the option to free their individual articles from access barriers by paying an article processing fee, only 1-2% have used that option, even though there are twice as many journals offering the option now, compared to a few years ago.
• Crow, R. (2009, Sep.). Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice. Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/incomemodels_v1.pdf.
  • This report describes and discusses a variety of income models and demand-side models for the sustainability of open access publishing of scholarly works.

• This third set of articles focuses specifically on studies of author attitudes toward open access publishing.
• Nicholas, D., Jamali M., H.R., Huntington, P., & Rowlands, I. (2005). In their very own words: Authors and scholarly journal publishing. Learned Publishing, 18(3), 212-220. [UNC libraries]
  • Over 4000 UK scholars responded to a survey about scholarly publishing. This paper reports on their responses to some of the open-ended questions (the full report of the results is a required reading for this session). Concerns they raised include: the peer-review system, copyright, journal prices, alternative business models for journal publishing, big deals, Elsevier, electronic publishing and digital journals.
• Mann, F., von Walter, B., Hess, T., & Wigand, R.T. (2009). Open access publishing in science. Communications of the ACM, Virtual Extension, 52(3), 135-139. [UNC libraries]
  • Over 1400 scholars from 49 countries responded to a Web survey asking about their opinions of open access publishing, its impact on their job gains, and the degree to which they already use it. All of these attitudes were found to affect the likelihood that a scientist would publish in an open access journal.
• Spezi, V., Fry, J., Creaser, C., Probets, S., & White, S. (2013). Researchers' green open access practice: A cross-disciplinary analysis. Journal of Documentation, 69(3), 334-359. [UNC libraries]
  • The study found that EU researchers' use of open access repositories versus published open access articles was influence by whether they were acting as an author or a reader and by their disciplinary norms.
• Xia, J. (2010). A longitudinal study of scholars attitudes and behaviors toward open-access journal publishing. Journal of American Society for Information Science & Technology, 61(3), 615-624. [UNC libraries]
  • Xia analyzed the results from several studies of authors' attitudes toward open access publishing, in order to get a longitudinal view.

• This fourth set of articles examines impact of articles published in open access versus traditional journals.
• McDonald, J.D. (2007). Understanding journal usage: A statistical analysis of citation and use. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(1), 39-50. [UNC libraries]
  • McDonald compares local citations to journals in relation to whether the journal is available in print or online, and in relation to whether an OpenURL Resolver is available to help locate the journal.
• Antelman, K. (2004). Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries, 65(5), 372-382. [UNC libraries]
  • Based on a sample of articles in four disciplines (philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering, and mathematics), feely available articles are cited more often (based on Web of Science data).

• This final set of articles focuses on the intellectual property issues associated with scholarly publishing.
• Lethem, J. (2007, Feb.) The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism. Harper's Magazine. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387.
  • Lethem discusses the value of re-use, particularly for artistic purposes.
• Hirtle, P.B. (2003). Digital preservation and copyright. Stanford University, Libraries & Academic Information Resources. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/commentary_and_analysis/2003_11_hirtle.html.
  • Hirtle discusses the application of copyright law in situations where the goal is preservation of a copyrighted work.

COURSE WRAP-UP

29: Course wrap-up and summary

• Borgman, C.L. (2007). Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [SILS Library - ZA195 .B67 2007; limited preview available via Google Book Search]
  • In this book, Borgman describes the current work of scholarship, in which scholars and scientists have access to a huge amount of data collected unobtrusively through digital devices embedded in the environment. Thus, the data collected (as well as the amount of literature published) can also lead to information overload.
• Nielsen, M.A. (2012). Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [SILS Library - Q180.55.M4 N54 2012; limited preview available via Google Book Search]
  • Nielsen reviews the many ways in which network technologies can improve the effectiveness of scholarly work.
• Levy, D.M. (2007). No time to think. Ethics & Information Technology, 9(4), 237-249. [UNC libraries]
  • In this version of Levy's argument, he does not specifically discuss digital libraries (or other specific tools), but does go into more depth on other ideas raised in the 2005 JCDL paper.
• Anderson, T.D. (2010). Kickstarting creativity: Supporting the productive faces of uncertainty in information practice. Information Research, 15(4), paper colis721. http://informationr.net/ir/15-4/colis721.html.
  • Building on Levy's argument that scholars need more time to think and reflect, Anderson argues that working through uncertainty and ambiguity is conducive to scholarly creativity. Information system designers should focus on minimizing the time needed to manage information so that more time is available for creative activity.
• Hopkins, R.L. (1995). Countering information overload: The role of the librarian. The Reference Librarian, 23(49-50), 305-333. [UNC libraries]
  • In the past, librarians have become adept at helping their patrons to find large numbers of publications; in the future, they'll need to help their patrons focus their searches on the most essential documents. This article examines a number of approaches to helping users cope with information overload.
• Himma, K.E. (2007). The concept of information overload: A preliminary step in understanding the nature of a harmful information-related condition. Ethics & Information Technology, 9(4), 259-272. [UNC libraries]
  • This article provides a conceptual/philosophical analysis of information overload, going beyond the basic idea that it is having access to more information than is good for us.
• Eppler, M.J., & Mengis, J. (2004). The concept of information overload: A review of literature from organization science, accounting, marketing, MIS, and related disciplines. The Information Society, 20(5), 325-344. [UNC libraries]
  • This review presents an overview of the main definitions, situations, causes, effects, and countermeasures for information overload from the literature of the past 30 years, consolidating them into a conceptual framework.

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This syllabus and website originated with the work of Professors Barbara Wildemuth and Deborah Barreau and has benefitted from the revisions and input of Laura Sheble, Earl Bailey, Ruth Palmquist, Kaitlin Costello, Kathy Brennan and others. Address all comments and questions to Anita Crescenzi at amcc@email.unc.edu.

This page was last modified on August 18, 2015.