Morning Session 1: Information Organization

Session Moderator: Dr. Youngok Choi
Great Room C

Controlled Vocabularies in Context of Specialized Indexes by Amy Phillips, Woodstock Theological Library at Georgetown University, and Michael Scott, Hispanic American Periodicals Index at UCLA

This presentation will examine the current trends and developments in controlled vocabularies. We give a brief overview of how controlled vocabularies are used, designed, and implemented, especially in the context of specialized areas like the art, museum, rare materials, and research communities. We will give special attention to growth and use of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and the RBMS controlled vocabularies, which are the most robust controlled vocabularies outside of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). We will also look at how specialized indexes like the ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index (CPLI) and the Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) utilize a range of controlled vocabularies.

Enhancing Catholic Portal Searches with User Terms and LCSH by Ingrid Hsieh-Yee, The Catholic University of America, and Pat Lawton, University of Notre Dame

The Catholic Portal of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) facilitates access to resources related to studies of the Catholic experience and supports CRRA’s mission to provide enduring global access to Catholic research resources. This subject access project contributes to that mission. The project aims to 1) analyze how user terms are related to the knowledge structure of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and 2) investigate how to support thematic exploration of the Catholic Portal through user terms, LC subject headings, and VuFind system suggestion features. User terms were crowdsourced, checked against LC subject authority files, and searched in the Catholic Portal. Findings shed light on the connection between user terms and LCSH; illustrate the benefits of combining user terms, LCSH, and system-suggested terms for information retrieval; and demonstrate the promise of an innovative approach for building a Catholic controlled vocabulary. This project has implications for enhancing subject access to Catholic resources in local catalogs and the Catholic Portal. The methodology has broad implications for studies of user queries and subject retrieval, and the innovative controlled vocabulary approach can be applied to other fields of study.

A Pragmatic View of the Long Tail by Christopher Bruhn and Sue Yeon Syn, The Catholic University of America

This briefing presentation considers the potential for collaborative intelligence, as demonstrated by the use of social tagging to organize information (“folksonomies”) through a lens of American pragmatism.

The philosophy of William James (1842-1910) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is founded on an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of phenomena that constitute the universe we inhabit and the diversity of experiences that shape each individual's perspective on that universe. One person’s way of seeing the world is necessarily different from that of another, because the experiences that have shaped each person’s perceptions are different. Influenced by the new Darwinian information, James and Peirce felt that, despite this multiplicity of perspectives, the slow, general drift of human understanding of the universe was toward uniformity, stability, and absolute truth—yet always, as with Darwin’s theory of evolution, with the unpredictable element of chance thrown in. Moreover, for both James and Peirce, arrival at that truth would be a collaborative process.

We apply these ideas to the demonstration of the power law as manifested in social tagging. Tagging itself is fundamentally open to reflecting the diversity of experience that shapes taggers’ responses to a broad multiplicity of information resources. The literature about tagging is full of examples demonstrating how this diversity is represented in the shape of the power law graph, with its narrow peak and long tail. By proposing a strong philosophical foundation for tagging, we argue for the usefulness of this collaborative activity as a tool that deserves to be taken seriously by librarians. Moreover, pragmatism also provides a platform from which we can consider the potential usefulness of the diversity of opinions accounted for in the long tail.

Morning Session 2: Archives

Session Moderator: Dr. Jane Zhang
Great Room B

Documenting Subcultures: Acquiring New Collections from Nontraditional Partners by Christie Lutz and Tara Maharjan, Rutgers University – Special Collections and University Archives

Documenting historical and cultural movements is an important part of the work of archivists, but as subcultures appear and disappear, the need to preserve that history becomes even more crucial. To create an archive or collection that documents a subculture, archivists must solicit donations from nontraditional partners who may not be thinking about preserving their materials in an archive or other community or institutional repository. These nontraditional users may understand the importance of documenting their subcultures and the inherent research value of their records and output for future generations, but may not understand what an archive is, what archivists do, or how they can join with archivists to form mutually beneficial partnerships. Archivists need to reach out to local communities and nontraditional archives donors and users to build these collections and document these important and often underrepresented subcultures before they are lost.

This presentation will examine how the New Brunswick Music Scene Archive and the New Jersey Craft Beer Collection at Rutgers University document subcultures. The New Brunswick Music Scene Archive aims to preserve the indie rock, punk and hardcore scenes around Rutgers University from the 1980s to the present. The New Jersey Craft Beer Collection documents the growing craft beer industry within the state.

Through close work with donors involved in these subcultures, including gathering and recording background information, stories and recollections of meaningful moments, archivists work toward inclusiveness, gain contextual information in order to understand what the creators and donors see as significant about their donation and the subculture, and make connections to other potential donors and possible future archival advocates.

Ten Years of Cataloging in Two Months: How One Association Library Is Streamlining Workflow to Build a Digital Repository for Its Staff by Megan Smith and Gini Blodgett Birchett, American Physical Therapy Association

The American Physical Therapy Association’s library made its online catalog available to staff in 2010 but very few staff adopted it as a tool to find internal or external sources of information. Among the factors limiting the success of the catalog were the small staff size of the library, the inability of the librarians to keep up with the volume of materials published by the association or about the physical therapy field, and almost no online access to full-text materials. This presentation will discuss how recent upgrades to the library catalog and changes to workflows have allowed the association’s librarians to begin building a digital repository that meets staff’s needs. It will cover how librarians are using existing internal data, publicly available data, and data tools such as web scrapers to catalog internal library collections. It will also highlight how the library is making thousands of full-text documents available to staff by collaborating with other departments in the organization and conducting a large-scale digitization project. Participants will leave with an understanding of how special librarians with a small team and limited resources can make enormous contributions to their organizations.

Transpacific Initiatives of Creating Digital Access: Partnership of University of Maryland Libraries and the National Diet Library of Japan by Yukako Tatsumi, University of Maryland Libraries

This paper reports transpacific institutional efforts to create digital access to general books housed in the Gordon W. Prange Collection of the University of Maryland Libraries. The Prange Collection archives all of the Japanese print publications issued in the first four years of the Allied Occupation of Japan, 1945-1949. UMD and the National Diet Library of Japan pursue collaborative efforts to preserve and create access to these invaluable materials by reformatting them to microforms since 1991 and then digital images since 2005. UMD and NDL have created the Prange Digital Collection respectively, which keeps growing as the bilateral reformatting project continues. Due to institutional concerns about their respective nation's copyright laws, full access to the digital contents is restricted to only onsite at both institutions. Nonetheless, each institution's distinctive model of search tools complements and enhances user support services across the Pacific. NDL’s search tools provide full access to bibliographical data, which facilitates patrons to identify the titles both digitally accessible and inaccessible by referring to the Prange Collection’s inventory of the entire book collection. This process helps patrons in Japan decide the necessity of their visit to the Prange Collection for the sake of physical access to in-print materials.

Additionally, collaborative partnership facilitates both institutions to provide not only digital access to the Prange materials but also holistic reference services on scholarship on the Allied Occupation of Japan. NDL expands its digital collections related to the Allied Occupation of Japan by collecting and digitizing relevant U.S. archival documents. Their growing digital collections contextualize the Prange materials historically and expand a scope of resources relevant to this historical period, which extensively remains unattended by U.S. historical scholarship. By pursuing transpacific partnership, UMD and NDL are dedicated to advancing collective research support systems transcending national boundaries.

Morning Session 3: Information Literacy

Session Moderator: Professor David Shumaker
Room 321/323

Significant Learning: Why Flipped Library Classrooms Work by Tolonda Henderson and Dorinne Banks, George Washington University

A survey of the literature reveals that librarians are becoming more and more interested in the concept of the flipped classroom as a way to maximize time with students (e.g. Allen, 2014; Loo et al, 2016; Rivera, 2015). Traditionally, librarians have used in-class time to deliver content that the students have then used in their research after the library session. The flipped model reverses this relationship; the content of the lesson is conveyed—usually in a video—in advance, and class time is spent using the newly acquired knowledge to solve problems with the librarian present to help. Much of the literature on the flipped classroom in information literacy instruction, however, either gives case studies of the concept (Arnold-Garza, 2014; Madden & Martinez, 2015) or assesses student learning in this pedagogical framework (Brooks, 2014; Goates, Nelson, & Frost, 2016). What is missing from the conversation is a vocabulary for talking about why flipped classrooms work. We argue that such a vocabulary can be found in the work of L. Dee Fink (2013), who states that six different types of learning (foundational knowledge, integration, application, caring, a human dimension, and learning how to learn) weave together to create significant learning experiences. All of the aspects of significant learning are equally important, but foundational learning must come first because the other types of learning can only happen when the learner has a basic grasp of the material. Librarians should, therefore, design “pre-assignments” to help students develop foundational knowledge before coming to class. The flipped classroom works because it pulls foundational knowledge out of the classroom and leaves class time for developing application, integration, and affective aspects of learning.

Bourdieu’s First Year: First-Generation Students, Habitus, and Retention by Jordan Sly, University of Maryland

This presentation will investigate the use of theory, in particular Pierre Bourdieu’s Habitus, in researching library populations and developing a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of an important library community. By utilizing the framework of Habitus, we seek to investigate Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis of Habitus, which is to say, a social theory of determinism that centralizes behavior without essentializing groups. The aim of the project is to study first-generation students and the issue of retention. Habitus, in many respects, speaks to an unwritten language, sense, or code (le sens practique) in which certain members of a group are naturally and unconsciously conversant and which other members must constantly use cognitive energy to work within. The hope is to investigate some aspects of this language by studying both college-normative students (i.e., those for whom college was a foregone conclusion) and first-generation students to understand, perhaps, an aspect of the difference in experience and to use some of the findings to propose some sort of library intervention.

Of interest to attendees: application of theory to a practice, new methods of analysis of library populations, sharing of research methods, and possibly issuing a call for papers for an edited monograph on this topic.

A Rhizomatic Approach to Understanding the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education by Raymond Maxwell, American University

There has been a lot of discussion about the new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, especially since the old standards for information literacy were rescinded. People have blogged about the frames, and articles and books have been written about the frames and the framework in general. This discussion does not purport to add to that discussion about content. I want to talk, instead, about how we perceive the framework and how that perception might influence the way we use the framework to raise the awareness and IL competency level of its users. I begin with the discussion, from other fields, about the difference between framework and standards. I highlight the current presentation of the frames, normally alphabetically, but always linearly and hierarchically. Next I introduce the rhizomatic approach, first developed by European philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, focusing on its characteristics of connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, and cartography, as a way of approaching the frames in the framework, how each might relate to any others, how information literacy develops and transforms as it passes through various frames, and how the interplay of the frames, rhizomatically and dynamically, captures information literacy as a process more akin to the emergence of intelligence and efficient knowledge management. I demonstrate various mappings of the frames, and conclude with remarks about what can happen to the new framework if we are not careful and mindful about how we perceive and understand it.