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Participation

Assignment 1: Event Diary and Analysis

Assignment 2: Evidence Summary

Assignment 3: System/Service Proposal

Assignment 4: Analysis of Scholarly Communication Example

Grading

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Class Participation (20%)

This class is a cooperative venture toward which we are all expected to contribute. This includes preparing for class by completing the readings, and actively participating in class discussions and activities in a way that demonstrates your knowledge of the material. The purpose of class discussions is to help you think critically about research and theory and the implications of research and theory for the practice of the information professions. There are no exams in this course, as students will be asked to demonstrate their knowledge in-class during each session. Full participation in classroom activities will not be possible without the basic common understanding that results from reading the course material. Attendance is mandatory, and absences will affect the participation grade.

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

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

As part of your class participation, you are expected to respond very briefly to discussion board posts in Sakai as assigned.

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

Final Deliverables Due March 5

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

As information professionals, we are concerned with designing systems and services that help our clients. For this assignment, you are the client. You will keep a short diary over a period of hours or days that covers an information-seeking experience with an identifiable beginning and end. It does not have to be a unique event and it may or may not have been resolved. You will analyze your thoughts, feelings, and actions based on readings and class discussions.

Intermediate Deliverables

1. Brief Description of Event (Due February 3): To ensure that you're on the right track with this assignment, you should turn in a one paragraph description of the event you expect to observe. Please describe the event, and explain how/why this event meets the requirements described in "Choosing an Event" below. (Expository/Descriptive/Persuasive Writing)

Final Deliverables:

1. Diary (Due March 5) - Your diary should describe your information seeking event, including behaviors, strategies, thoughts, and motivations. Your diary should capture as much detail about your experience as possible, but does not have to be formal or very structured (it must be comprehensible at some level). The goal of the diary is to provide chronology and context for the analysis. Diary entries should be made as you are going through the information seeking process. (Descriptive Writing)
2. Analysis of Information Seeking Event (Due March 5) - assess which (if any) of the information seeking and use models we have discussed in class apply to your situation - as motivation, as information-seeking process, or as use. Write a brief report (3-4 single-spaced pages) that interprets the experience. Concentrate on analysis and application of the models and theories learned in class, rather than retelling what you have already presented in the diary. The goal here is to demonstrate that you can use the terminology, and apply the concepts learned in class to your own information seeking behavior. (Expository/Analytical Writing)

A few questions you should consider:

• Where did you search/what sources did you consult? Why?
• What barriers or surprises did you experience?
• If you consulted systems or online sources, describe the interaction and why it worked, or did not.
• Why do you think your experience was a successful (or unsuccessful) one?
• If you consulted other people, how you were able to convey your information needs?

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

Choosing an Event

The event can be any kind of problem and need not be something you take to an information system. For example, my home computer died suddenly last November. I needed to buy a new computer as soon as possible, so I did some preliminary shopping (both online and in a Best Buy store) and also consulted with our desktop specialist in SILS IT support. Through an iterative process, in which additional focus was gained with each iteration, I eventually settled on a particular computer and the other peripherals I would need to accompany it. This process occurred over several weeks; for your assignment, you should choose an information need that is occurring during the period in which you're working on the assignment.

In most cases your problem should be more complex than finding a fact, but there are situations when that type of problem is appropriate. For example, "When did Americans first land on the moon?" is a straightforward question that can be answered easily and it doesn't offer much of a challenge for deciding where and how to look. However, "When were the plans and strategy for America's Apollo missions to the moon finalized?" is a more difficult question for most people. It requires some knowledge of NASA's planning and approval process as well as a slightly broader understanding of the space program. For NASA historians and people who follow the space program closely, the second question may be as straightforward as the first one, but for most people, it will require more preparation.

Evaluation criteria

Grades will be based upon the quality and depth of your analysis of the experience. A description of the need and what motivated it, any obstacles you experienced, sources used, tasks performed, and results obtained along with your evaluation of those results should be included in the paper. Your ability to apply multiple concepts, models and theories, and use the terminology learned in class to describe your information behavior will determine a large portion of your grade. Please remember that the diary will be used as a description of your search process, so large amounts of time/space within the analysis should not be spent on retelling. While this paper is relatively informal in style, it should be formatted using APA style and should include citations to the literature as appropriate.

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Evidence Summary (15%)

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

Selecting an article

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

• It must be an empirical study, broadly defined; to meet this criterion, the authors must have systematically collected data related to their research question and must have reported their findings. If you have questions about whether a particular article meets this criterion, please check with me prior to beginning the assignment.
• The article should be on a topic/question within the scope of this course, i.e., it should focus on human information interactions of some type.
• It can be an article from our "additional readings" list, but does not have to be; it may NOT be one of our required readings.
• An evidence summary of your selected article should NOT have already been published in EBLIP. You can check this by going to the journal and using the Journal Content search box at the right of the page; search by the name of the author of the article you've selected.

Writing the evidence summary

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

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

Sharing the evidence summary with the class

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

On the same day as the oral presentation, you will post a message to the class discussion forum (in Sakai). It should briefly summarize the article, and should also be influenced by your presentation, in terms of incorporating any questions/issues raised by your classmates. The posting should be 300-500 words. The full evidence summary should be attached to the posting to provide more detail, and you can also attach a copy of the full article.

In addition to summarizing and commenting on the article, your posting should aim to promote further discussion of the article among your classmates. To achieve this goal, your posting should conclude with one or two specific questions that you expect will stimulate discussion. Some ideas for formulating effective discussion questions are available at:

• Designing effective discussion questions. Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning, [2002].
• Classroom activities for promoting active learning. UNC Center for Faculty Excellence, 2009. (See the section on "Questioning techniques".)
• Kelly, R. Questioning styles for more effective discussion boards. Faculty Focus, 2009. (See the section on "Types of questions".)
• Cashin, W.E. Answering and asking questions. Kansas State University Center for Faculty Evaluation & Development, 1995. (See Section III. Asking questions.)
• Saxe, A. Tapping into higher-level thinking in online courses. Faculty Focus, 2010. (See the section on "Establishing guidelins for online discussions".)
• Discussions. Carnegie Mellon University, Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, n.d. (See the section, "Ask good questions".)

You are also responsible for monitoring the discussion of your article over the next week after your summary is presented/posted. Continue to ask follow-up questions or post responses to messages from your classmates. In other words, actively moderate the online discussion.

Evaluation criteria

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

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

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System/Service Proposal (25%)

In this assignment, you will develop a proposal for a new service for a particular client population of a particular information organization. Some examples might include the development of a public library instruction program for retirees in the community, new ways to track IT support questions related to a litigation support system in a law firm, or a new institutional repository intended to handle the multimedia materials created by performing arts faculty on a university campus. (These examples are intended to be suggestive, not comprehensive or restrictive.)

Intermediate Deliverables

1. Setting/Target Audience Description (Due 2/10) : This brief description will outline your intended setting, the organization to which you will be writing your memo/proposal, and the target population or client group. You will submit three paragraphs:
   1. One paragraph describing the setting you've selected, including the name (real or fictional) of the organization to which you will be proposing your sytem/service (Descriptive/Expository Writing).
   2. One paragraph defining/describing the client group (based on your current knowledge) (Descriptive/Expository Writing).
   3. One paragraph about why you selected this setting and client group (Persuasive Writing).
2. Preliminary Searching Plan (Due 2/17): This portion of the project is intended to encourage you to think systematically about your search process. Provide a bulleted list of the following:
   1. Databases/Other sources you intend to search with brief explanations as to why
   2. Search Terms(including inclusion/exclusion criteria such as dates)
   3. What elements/factors you intend to use to judge the relevance/quality of infomration you find (1-3 sentences each - no more than 1 page)
3. Preliminary Population Data (Due3/19 ): Provide a detailed outline, a concept map/matrix, or a similar sketch of what you've learned about the population. Include the preliminary list of references to the articles you're using as evidence.
4. Proposed system or service (Due 3/26): 1-paragraph summary of proposed system or service

Final Deliverables (Due 4/7):

The final proposal package will consist of three parts:

1. Memo: A 2-page (single-spaced) memo to the leader of your information organization, presenting your proposal and providing arguments supporting its adoption. This memo should describe your system or service, and briefly make an argument for its adoption.
2. Client Population Analysis: A brief description (4-6 pages, single-spaced) of the client population and an analysis of its information needs, based on your knowledge of its behaviors. This analysis should be evidence-based, i.e., it should rely on prior studies and/or descriptions of the client population and their information behaviors as reported in the literature. To support your analysis, you will be expected to assemble and asses the relevant literature. This appendix will serve as your support documentation (the strength of this document, and the depth of your analysis will determine the bulk of your grade).
3. Search Strategies: A listing of the databases/resources you used to learning about the client population, and the specific search strategies/terms used in each. You should also describe your inclusion/exclusion criteria (e.g., range of years or other limits you placed on your searches) and the criteria you used to make judgments about the relevance or usefulness of the items you selected. This appendix should be a bulleted list or outline format, rather than narrative. There's no limit on its length, but it is likely to be 1-3 pages, single-spaced.

Identifying a population and setting

As an information professional, you will regularly be expected to develop a new service or system to support a particular set of clients to perform a particular information-related task. You'll get some practice with that professional responsibility while completing this assignment.

For the purposes of the assignment, you will need to choose a setting and client group of particular interest to you. The setting might be a library in a particular institutional setting (e.g., a public library in a mid-sized town in NC or a library in an elementary school serving kindergarten through third grade), a system development team (e.g., the unit responsible for a pharmaceutical company's knowledge management activities or the unit responsible for a financial services company's human resources system), or some other setting in which information professionals are employed.

You will also choose a particular client group relevant to that setting. In the examples of organizations just provided, corresponding client groups might be the teenagers that could potentially use the public library, second-grade teachers, members of the pharmaceutical company's marketing division, and hiring managers/supervisors distributed throughout the financial services company. So that this assignment will be most useful to you, I would encourage you to select a setting and client group that you anticipate/hope will be part of your professional future.

Because your memo will be addressed to the leader of an organization, you should choose (or invent) an organization that fits your setting and population.

 

Proposing the development of a new system or service

The purpose of the investigations you've done for this assignment is to understand the population of interest well enough to design and develop a new system or service that will be useful to them in addressing some of their information needs. Based on what you've learned about your selected population, you will propose such a system or service. It does not have to be the first of its type in the world, but it should be plausible that it has not yet been implemented within your chosen setting.

As Koufogiannakis (2013) points out, information work occurs within organizational settings, so an initial proposal is not the same as agreement to implement that proposal. Thus, your proposal will need to "sell" your idea to your colleagues (or at least your supervisor, to carry forward). You must describe the system or service you're proposing, but you also must persuasively argue that it will serve an important purpose in the lives of the population of interest and that it will be feasible for your institution to implement it. The first of those sets of arguments will be based on logical connections back to the summary of the characteristics of the population; don't repeat all the details in your proposal, but do clearly connect the proposal to the findings in your summary of the population's characteristics. The second set of arguments will be based on the practical considerations within your imagined setting; be realistic but not pessimistic.

The proposal will be written in the form of a memo, from you to the leader of your information organization. It should be no longer than 2 single-spaced pages.

Evaluation criteria

The final memo will be evaluated based on the thoroughness and rigor of the literature review methods, the quality of the synthesis of the literature included in the summary of your population's characteristics, the logic connecting those findings to your proposal, the usefulness, originality and feasibility of your proposal, and the clarity of expression of the final product.

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

In this assignment, you will work with your team to review and reflect on an example of scholarly communication. Specifically, your team will choose and analyze a set of related scholarly articles, including references and citations from, to, and among them. To be completed in teams of 2-4 people.

Intermediate Deliverables

1. Team selection (April 2): 2-4 People per group (keep in mind that each group will be responsible for a minimum of 3 articles). You may want to seek out group members prior to this class session.
2. Article Selection (due April 9): Choose a small set of articles (at least one for each member of your team, with a minimum of 3 articles for the team) from a concept area or research area of particular interest to the team. Articles must:
   1. Fall within the scope of topics taught within this course
   2. Have been published sometime between 1960-2012;
   3. One of the articles must be "significant" (must have been cited by more than 20 other publications)
   4. It is also required that each article in the set be directly linked to at least one other article in the set, i.e., it must cite or be cited by at least one other article in the set.
   5. Include the work of more than one author (you many not choose several articles by the same author).

Final Deliverables (Due 4/28):

1. Article Analyses (4 pages, single-spaced, excluding references): See "Analysis of the Article" below
2. Scholarly context analysis (6-8 pages, single-spaced, excluding references): See Analysis of the Scholarly Context of the Article" below.

Analysis of the article

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

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

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

Analysis of the scholarly context of the article

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

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

Your next step is to discover who has cited the papers you selected. You may check the following online citation indexes: ISI Web of Science (available online through the UNC Library e-research tools), Scopus (available online through the UNC Library e-research tools), Google Scholar, CiteSeer X (from Penn State University), the ACM Digital Library (for some technical papers), and/or other online databases that might include your paper and that include citation data. At a minimum, conduct citation searches in (1) the ISI Web of Science database or Scopus and (2) at least one of the other citation databases. Be sure to keep track of which citations were discovered in which database.

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

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

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

Writing up your analysis

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

Evaluation criteria

Grades will be based on evidence of your understanding of the selected papers, the depth and thoroughness of your analysis of the set of papers and their scholarly context, evidence of your understanding of scholarly communication and scholars' use of information, and clarity of expression. Because this is the final paper, adherance to page limits is important. Excess of 1 page above the upper page limits will result in a reduction of points.

 

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Grading

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

Grading scale for INLS 500 (graduate students)

Letter grade	Numeric range	Description of grade
H	95-100	High Pass: Above and beyond expectations for the course.
P	80-94	Pass: Entirely satisfactory; fully meets expectations for the course.
L	70-79	Low Pass: Minimally acceptable; clear weaknesses in performance.
F	Below 70	Fail: Unacceptable performance.
IN	NA	Work incomplete.

Grading scale for INLS 500 (undergraduate students)

Letter grade	Numeric range	Description of grade
A	95-100	Mastery of course content at the highest level of attainment that can reasonably be expected of students at a given stage of development.
A-	90-94
B+	88-89
B	86-87	Strong performance demonstrating a high level of attainment for a student at a given stage of development.
B-	84-85
C+	82-83
C	80-81	A totally acceptable performance demonstrating an adequate level of attainment for a student at a given stage of development.
C-	78-79
D+	74-77
D	70-73	A marginal performance in the required exercises demonstrating a minimal passing level of attainment.
F	Below 70	For whatever reason, an unacceptable performance. The F grade indicates that the student's performance in the required exercises has revealed almost no understanding of the course content.
IN	NA	Work incomplete.

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
School of Information and Library Science

This INLS 500 website, UNC-CH, 2014, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, and benefitted from the earlier or co-development of this course by Barbara Wildemuth, Deborah Barreau, Laura Sheble, Ruth Palmquist, Kaitlin Costello, and Earl Bailey. Address all comments and questions to Amelia N. Gibson at angibson@unc.edu. This page was last modified on January 9, 2015, by Amelia N. Gibson.