You will complete a combination of individual and group assignments for this class. For each assignment, you will find detailed instructions, due dates (for preliminary and final deliverable), and evaluation criteria. Criteria for assessing participation is also described. The grading scale for graduate and undergraduate students is detailed on the syllabus.

During the semester, you will complete several assignments with deliverables and due dates as below:

Submitting assignments: All assignments should be submitted to the Assignments section in Sakai before the class session unless otherwise specified. Please submit all assignments in .pdf format (unless otherwise specified). Be sure to identify yourself and the assignment within the document and in the file name (e.g., crescenzi-diary-description.pdf or crescenzi-diary-final.pdf).

Assignment #1: 6 Mini Assignments (15%)

What is your information science? (2 parts, 2.5% each)

Record and post (to Sakai) two 2-4 minute oral responses to the question “What is does information science mean to/for you?” The first is due Wednesday, August 31 and the second is due Wednesday, November 30.

Your responses should take the form of an audio or video recording. Post a bulleted summary of your response, and a link to your recording. Each recording should contain:

Summarize and reflect (4, 2.5% each)

At four points during the semester, you will be asked to spend 10-15 minutes to prepare written summaries and/or reflections upon the one or more of the articles you read for class. After you submit your reflection (electronically to Sakai or in writing to me), we will discuss in the class session.

These mini-assignments are intended to help you develop and practice your skills in extracting salient information from scholarly publications, make connections between topics, and identify implications for practice. The mini-assignments may take the form of one or more of the following:

The dates of these reflections assignments will be distributed in early September.

Your grade for the summaries and reflections will be based on your written summaries and reflections as well as the quality of your contributions to discussion. For summaries, your grade will be based on the accuracy of the summary as well as your understanding of the findings, limitations, and conclusions. For reflections on implications for practice and connections to other literature, your grade will be primarily based on the quality of the implications or connections you make, although you will also need to summarize the key findings and conclusions from which you draw your implications or connections.

These mini-assignments are based on assignments prepared by Amelia Gibson (What is your information science?) and in collaboration with Amelia Gibson and John Martin (reflections).

Assignment #2: Diary and Analysis of an Information-Seeking Event (20%)

As information professionals, we are concerned with designing systems and services that help our clients. For this assignment, you are the client and 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 describe and analyze up what you thought, felt, and did, and how you understand the experience based upon our readings and discussions in class.

The objective of this assignment is to observe in detail and reflect upon a concrete example of information-seeking and to analyse the information-seeking process through the application of foundational theories of information and library science.

Deliverables

You will submit this assignment in two parts:

  1. Event selection: Brief description (10%, due Wednesday, September 14)
  2. Final deliverable: Diary and Analysis (90%, due Monday, October 17)

Event Selection: Brief Description

For this deliverable, you will submit an overview of the event that you will analyze. The deliverable should be one paragraph and must contain a) a description of the information-seeking event you intend to describe and analyze and b) how/why the event meets the criteria for event selection. Submit to Sakai using the assignment submission guidelines (.pdf, filename and document includes your name and the assignment).

A good event to select for this assignment will:

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.

As an example, consider the hypothetical situation that I am beginning to plan a vacation over the winter break and I want to make my arrangements before the Thanksgiving Break. I have a couple of places in mind, but I need to do some more research about places I can go, things I can do and food I can eat. I search online, read a couple guide books and talk to people. Through an iterative process over several weeks, I gain additional focus and eventually select where to travel and my itinerary.

Diary

The diary should contain a description of your information need and describe your information-seeking event, including behaviors, strategies, thoughts, and motivations. 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. For final deliverable, you will submit a (text-based) diary of your information-seeking event.

Take notes or record your experience in some way. 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 diary does not need to be neat and orderly, but it should provide enough detail so that I can tell what you thought, did, and felt. It's more important that you record what's happening and what you're thinking/feeling as it's happening than that you present it neatly. It only needs to be neat enough so that you can interpret and remember what happened for your later analysis of the event.

Questions to consider as you are writing in your event diary:

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

Analysis

Write a brief report (3-4 single-spaced pages) that analyzes and interprets the information-seeking event. 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. Concentrate on analyzing what happened instead of recounting each step. 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. For example, it is more important to hear your reactions to what you did than to hear what you did.

Questions to consider as you are analyzing your experience:

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

Evaluation criteria for final deliverable

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.

This assignment is based on an assignment prepared by Dr. Verna Pungitore, SLIS, Indiana University, with modifications by Professors Wildemuth, Barreau, Gibson and other SILS instructors.

Assignment #3: System/Service Proposal (25%)

For this assignment, you will use evidence from the literature to gain an understanding of the information needs and behaviors of a client population. You will develop a proposal for a new service or system for this client population using this evidence to support and justify your proposal.

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. (This is not a comprehensive list.)

Deliverables

You will submit this assignment in five parts: four intermediate deliverables for feedback and a final proposal.

  1. Identify and describe population and setting of interest (10%, due Monday, September 26, orig W 9/21)
  2. Literature search plan (preliminary) (10%, due Monday, October 10)
  3. Client description (preliminary) (10%, due Monday, October 24)
  4. Proposal description (preliminary) (10%, due Monday, October 31)
  5. Final proposal (60%, due Wednesday, November 16) including a memo proposing the service/system and appendices describing the client and the literature review method.

Each step in this process of developing the proposal package is described in more detail below.

Deliverable #1: Identify the population and setting of interest

For the first deliverable, you will write a brief description of the setting, client, and your selection rationale. This should be about 3 paragraphs total: one describing the setting you've selected, one paragraph defining/describing the client group (based on your current knowledge), and one describing why you selected this setting and client group.

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, 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.

Deliverable #2: Literature review plan

You will develop a preliminary plan for identifying the literature to include in your review related to the population and setting of interest. The plan should include the list of databases/sources to be searched, the search strategies to be used, and the inclusion/exclusion criteria to be used to evaluate the literature retrieved.

You will begin by planning the ways in which you will assemble the relevant evidence. You should decide which databases/sources you will search and what search strategy(ies) you will use in each. You should specify inclusion and exclusion criteria for which studies will be included in your summary. You should aim for a comprehensive set of evidence to support your proposal. Start with those articles that are most core to your interests (i.e., directly addressing some aspect of your selected population within a similar setting) and work your way out from there. You may need to adjust the scope of your population as you learn more about them; please discuss such adjustments with me as you go along.

Bates (1989, p. 412) suggests a variety of ways to identify relevant literature; these can serve as a guide for your own literature searching. They of course include subject searches in relevant databases, but they also include footnote chasing and citation searching, author searching, and browsing journal tables of contents and bookshelves that might be particularly fruitful. You are expected to incorporate all or most of these methods in your own searching.

The process of searching the literature will help you to identify possibilities for a new service or system that can be the focus of your proposal. For example, you may have focused on elderly users of public libraries. Studies of their current information use may conclude that they are interested in accessing more information about current politics, but are hampered from reading current materials by decreasing visual abilities. In such a situation, you may propose a program for loaning e-readers to the library's clients, with easy interactions for increasing the font size.

After you've gathered some evidence (i.e., articles or publications), you will need to assess them for their quality, relevance and usefulness for your purposes. Your quality criteria might include such characteristics as the validity of the research design, the quality and size of the sample included in the study, the validity of the analysis conducted, and the credibility of the conclusions as they relate to the underlying data. Your relevance/usefulness criteria might include such characteristics as the match between your population of interest and the study sample, and the similarity of the study context and your own setting of interest. Additional criteria may also apply, as you make decisions about which evidence to weigh most heavily in developing your proposal.

There will be a lot of variability in the number of articles and other materials you might use for this assignment, but here is a bit of guidance on scope/scale: I would expect that you might identify hundreds of potentially useful documents through your literature search; I would expect that you would closely examine the abstracts of over 100 documents; I would expect that you would examine the full text of 30-60 articles; I would expect that you would identify and read 20-30 articles to be cited in your summary of the characteristics of your selected population.

You will summarize your literature review method in an appendix to your final proposal deliverable. It should list each database searched and provide the details of the search terms/strategies used and the number of items retrieved with each strategy for each database/source.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.

Deliverable #3: Client description

In this preliminary deliverable, you will submit a detailed outline, a concept map/matrix, or a similar sketch of what you've learned about the population. A preliminary list of references to the articles you're using as evidence should also be included.

As you identify and assess the relevant evidence about your population of interest, you will be developing your own knowledge about that population and their information interactions within the context of your chosen setting. What do we know about their general characteristics? What do we know about their information needs, their information seeking, their use of information, and the context in which all these information behaviors occur? Begin your summary with a revised version of the original description/definition of the population and setting that you created at the beginning of this assignment, to provide a bit of context. Then provide a summary of what you know about that population. Be sure to provide details about the population that will support your proposal.

You will summarize the current knowledge about your population of interest, particularly in connection with your selected setting and proposal in an appendix to your final proposal deliverable. This appendix should be 4-6 pages, single-spaced. The list of references should be included on separate pages.

Deliverable #4: Proposal description

Revision: This deliverable is optional. If you choose not to submit this deliverable, your final deliverable will be 70% of the grade for this assignment (vs. 60%).

Based on what you've learned about your selected population, you will provide a brief (one paragraph) description of the system or service you will propose that will be useful to your selected population to address an unmet information need. 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.

Your final proposal will be a two-page (single-spaced) memo to the leader of your information organization presenting your proposal and providing evidence to justify its adoption in your final deliverable.

Deliverable #5: Final proposal deliverable:

The final proposal package will consist of:

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.

Assignment 4: Analysis of Scholarly Communication (20%)

In this assignment, you will work in a team of 4 people to conduct a small-scale bibliographic analysis of research one theory, model, framework, or clearly defined concept in information science. Your team will choose a topic from the list provided, create a bibliography of scholarly works on the topic, analyze the scholarly context of four selected articles (1 per team member), and describe the corpus of written work (in and outside of LIS) about the selected topic, based on bibliographic records. This assignment is to be completed in teams of 4 people.

Deliverables

This group assignment consists of 3 group deliverables to be completed by the group and submitted by one member of the group and a peer evaluation to be completed (individually) and submitted by each member of the group.

  1. Team and topic selection (due Wednesday, October 12, orig 9/28)
  2. Search plan and preliminary bibliography (10%, due Monday, November 14)
  3. Peer evaluation (5%, due due Saturday, December 10 4pm)
  4. Final deliverable (85%, due Saturday, December 10 4pm) which includes a final bibliography, bibliographic analysis, in-depth article analysis and a final search plan

Each deliverable is described in more detail.

Deliverable #1: Team and topic selection

We will form project teams in class. One person from the group will need to submit to Sakai a document with a list of the group members and the topic you have selected as a group. Potential topics include:

If your group wishes to select a different topic, please schedule a time to meet with me to discuss before the assignment is due.

Deliverable #2: Search plan and preliminary bibliography

One person from the group will need to submit to Sakai a document that includes:

As you conduct your analysis, you will encounter other authors (these are given as a starting point), but you should be careful about establishing boundaries for your topic area. Be very intentional about how you determine that a topic does or does not fit within the parameters of your search, and describe this in detail.

Deliverable #3: Peer Evaluation (individual)

Each group member will complete an evaluation of the performance of the group and each member (including themselves).The team evaluations will not be shared with team members. I will grade you based on the thoughtfulness and quality of your assessment.

The peer evaluation for each member of the group should briefly describe how well and in what ways they contributed to the success of the project. Questions to answer include:

  1. In what ways did this person contribute to the success of the group?
  2. Did this group member do what s/he said s/he was going to do (e.g., complete assigned tasks)?
  3. How would you rate the quality of this person’s work? (exceptional, good, fair, poor) Why?
  4. How would you rate the timeliness of the completion of the work? (exceptional, good, fair, poor) Why?
  5. Overall, how were this person's contributions to the group compared to other group members (more than other group members, about the same, less than other group members) Why?
  6. Would you want to work with this person again?

Deliverable #4: Final deliverable

One group member should submit the final group deliverables via Sakai. Be sure to include the names of all group members in the submission box and on the final document. Each group member should also submit peer evaluations individually via Sakai.

Final bibliography: The final bibliography of research on your given topic should be as expansive as you can make it (suggested minimum of 30 items), and should, ideally, contain research from inside and outside of the field of Information & Library science. Bibliography should use APA (6th edition) format.

Bibliographic analysis: The bibliographic analysis of the literature should examine your entire bibliography for trends (geographic, chronological, bibliographic, and conceptual). Suggested approaches/questions: What does the corpus of literature on this topic “look like?” What fields/subfields does it cover? Where is research on this topic published (what journals/institutions)? What conference proceedings include the topic? What are the most popular journals? Where (geographically) are the journals and authors located? Who is citing this work? What do these citations tell you about the importance (or lack of importance) of this topic? What do the titles suggest about the conceptual/theoretical development of the topic? What related topics exist in the literature? Note: This section should be approximately 4 pages. If your final bibliography is too expansive, you may need to examine a subset of the literature. Please see me to discuss.

In-depth analysis of each article: Your in-depth article analysis should contain an analysis of four articles and their scholarly context (1 analysis per group member. 10 pages max total, single-spaced, excluding references). The four articles selected must be included in the final bibliography and represent the work of more than one author.

For each article in the final set, the brief analysis (~1 page) should reflect your 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. 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 (but concise) about how they failed and offer suggestions for improvement.

Your analysis of the scholarly context of each article (~1-1.5 pages) will include an analysis of its references and the citations to the article. Begin by examining the reference list in your selected paper. Suggested approaches/questions: How old are the citations? Who wrote the work that the author(s) 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?

In your analysis of the citations to the paper, you should 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. 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?

Final search sources, strategies and criteria: Your will also need to include the final list of sources, search terms and your final criteria for inclusion and exclusion of articles. Describe in detail how you established boundaries for your topic area and how you determined that a topic did or did not fit within the parameters of your search.

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, adherence to page limits is important. Excess of 1 page above the upper page limits will result in a reduction of points. Your writing style for this paper should be relatively formal/academic, in comparison with other assignments in this course.

Class Participation (20%)

This class is a cooperative venture toward which you are encouraged and expected to contribute in a way that demonstrates your understanding of the material. I expect you to have read the required articles and be prepared for discussion. The purpose of the discussions is to help you to think critically about research and theory and the implications of research and theory for the practice of the information professions.

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

Evaluation criteria

Class participation will be evaluated on the quantity and quality of your comments, both in class and online.

Revision history

Any changes to assignment due dates will be listed here and on the course schedule as well as announced in class and in Sakai. Changes to assignment due dates will also be noted on the assignments page.