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open access

Controlled Vocabularies in the Digital Age: Are They Still Relevant?

Description: Keyword searching and controlled vocabularies such as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH) proved to work well together in automated technologies and the two systems have been considered complimentary. When the Internet burst onto the information landscape, users embraced the simplicity of keyword searching of this resource while researchers and scholars seemed unable to agree on how best to make use of controlled vocabularies in this huge database. This research looked at a controlled… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Baker, William
open access

Customers' Attitudes toward Mobile Banking Applications in Saudi Arabia

Description: Mobile banking services have changed the design and delivery of financial services and the whole banking sector. Financial service companies employ mobile banking applications as new alternative channels to increase customers' convenience and to reduce costs and maintain profitability. The primary focus of this study was to explore the Saudi bank customers' perceptions about the adoption of mobile banking applications and to test the relationships between the factors that influence mobile banki… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Alshara, Mohammed Ali
open access

From the Outside In: A Multivariate Correlational Analysis of Effectiveness in Communities of Practice

Description: Online communities of practice (CoPs) provide social spaces for people to connect, learn, and engage with one another around shared interests and passions. CoPs are innovatively employed within industry and education for their inherent knowledge management characteristics and as a means of improving professional practice. Measuring the success of a CoP is a challenge researchers are examining through various strategies. Recent literature supports measuring community effectiveness through the … more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Bomar, Shannon Hulbert
open access

Journalist as Information Provider: Examining the One-Voice Model of a Corporate Sports Account

Description: While journalists were once viewed as gatekeepers, dispensing news and information via one-way communication channels, their role as information provider has evolved. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the social networking site Twitter, where information seekers have unprecedented access to information providers. The two-way communication that these information seekers have come to expect can be challenging for organizations such as ESPN who have multiple Twitter accounts and millions of fo… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Norris, Tiffany D.
open access

Understanding the Information Seeking of Pre-Kindergarten Students: An Ethnographic Exploration of Their Seeking Behaviors in a Preschool Setting

Description: Although there has been research conducted in the area of information seeking behavior in children, the research focusing on young children, more specifically on pre-kindergarten students, is almost nonexistent. Children at this age are in the preoperational developmental stage. They tend to display curiosity about the world around them, and use other people as a means to gain the information they are seeking. Due to the insistence from President Obama to implement pre-kindergarten programs … more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Stewart, Sarah Nykole
open access

Conversational Use of Photographic Images on Facebook: Modeling Visual Thinking on Social Media

Description: Modeling the "thick description" of photographs began at the intersection of personal and institutional descriptions. Comparing institutional descriptions of particular photos that were also used in personal online conversations was the initial phase. Analyzing conversations that started with a photographic image from the collection of the Library of Congress (LC) or the collection of the Manchester Historic Association (MHA) provided insights into how cultural heritage institutions could enr… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Albannai, Talal N.
open access

Development of an Instrument to Measure the Level of Acceptability and Tolerability of Cyber Aggression: Mixed-Methods Research on Saudi Arabian Social Media Users

Description: Cyber aggression came about as a result of advances in information communication technology and the aggressive usage of the technology in real life. Cyber aggression can take on many forms and facets. However, the main focus of this study is cyberbullying and cyberstalking through information sharing practices that might constitute digital aggressive acts. Human aggression has been extensively investigated. Studies focusing on understanding the causes and effects that can lead to physical and d… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Albar, Ali Aldroos
open access

Impetuses for First, Second, and Third Year Law Student Information Seeking Behavior, and Perception of Common Knowledge and Citation

Description: This dissertation examined how previous information literacy training, law student gender, age, and previously obtained education affects first, second, and third year law students selection of information sources, their understanding of common knowledge, and their decision of whether or not to give attribution to these sources. To examine these factors, this study implemented a paradigm called the principle of least effort that contended humans in general tended to complete the least amount of… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Helge, Kris
open access

The Information Behavior of Individual Investors in Saudi Arabia

Description: Information plays a significant role in the success of investment strategies. Within a non-advisory context, individual investors elect to build and manage their investment portfolios to avoid the cost of hiring professional advisors. To cope with markets’ uncertainty, individual investors should acquire, understand, and use only relevant information, but that task can be affected by many factors, such as domain knowledge, cognitive and emotional biases, information overload, sources’ credibili… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Elwani, Nabil Mohammed
open access

Information Structures in Notated Music: Statistical Explorations of Composers' Performance Marks in Solo Piano Scores

Description: Written notation has a long history in many musical traditions and has been particularly important in the composition and performance of Western art music. This study adopted the conceptual view that a musical score consists of two coordinated but separate communication channels: the musical text and a collection of composer-selected performance marks that serve as an interpretive gloss on that text. Structurally, these channels are defined by largely disjoint vocabularies of symbols and words.… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Buchanan, J. Paul
open access

Poststructuralist Critical Rhetorical Analysis as a Problem Analysis Tool: A Case Study of Information Impact in Denton’s Hydraulic Fracturing Debate

Description: Energy and the natural environment are central concerns among stakeholders across the globe. Decisions on this scale often require interaction among a myriad of institutions and individuals who navigate a complex variety of challenges. In Denton, Texas in 2014, voters were asked to make such a decision when tasked with a referendum to determine whether the city would continue to allow hydraulic fracturing activity within its borders. For social scientists, this situation requires further analys… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Sykes, Jason
open access

Rated M for Monkey: An Ethnographic Study of Parental Information Behavior when Assessing Video Game Content for their Children

Description: Following the decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), which struck down the state of California’s appeal to restrict the sale of games deemed to have “deviant violence” to those 18 or older and the court’s recommendation that parents use the ESRB Ratings System instead, this ethnographic study sought to better understand what parents thought of laws on video games and how they used the recommended ratings system. A total of 30 i… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Harrelson, Diana
open access

Modeling the Role of Boundary Spanners-in-Practice in the Nondeterministic Model of Engineering Design Activity

Description: Boundary spanners-in-practice are individuals who inhabit more than one social world and bring overlapping place perspectives to bear on the function(s) performed within and across each world. Different from nominated boundary spanners, they are practitioners responsible for the 'translation' of each small world's perspectives thereby increasing collaboration effectiveness to permit the small worlds to work synergistically. The literature on Knowledge Management (KM) has emphasized the organiza… more
Date: December 2015
Creator: Linkins, Kathy L.
open access

Enhancing User Search Experience in Digital Libraries with Rotated Latent Semantic Indexing

Description: This study investigates a semi-automatic method for creation of topical labels representing the topical concepts in information objects. The method is called rotated latent semantic indexing (rLSI). rLSI has found application in text mining but has not been used for topical labels generation in digital libraries (DLs). The present study proposes a theoretical model and an evaluation framework which are based on the LSA theory of meaning and investigates rLSI in a DL environment. The proposed ev… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Polyakov, Serhiy
open access

Readiness of Indonesian Academic Libraries for Open Access and Open Access Repositories Implementation: a Study on Indonesian Open Access Repositories Registered in OpenDOAR

Description: Scholarly and scientific communication has a long history, while the Open Access (OA) movement began to take part in this communication with the emergence of Internet in the late 1960s and the web that emerged in mid-1990s. OA is beneficial for sharing knowledge because the OA movement demands scholarly literature freely available on the internet and it is free of most licensing restriction copyright. OA will close the barrier of access to knowledge. The OA movement in Indonesia may be consider… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Priyanto, Ida F.
open access

Automatic Language Identification for Metadata Records: Measuring the Effectiveness of Various Approaches

Description: Automatic language identification has been applied to short texts such as queries in information retrieval, but it has not yet been applied to metadata records. Applying this technology to metadata records, particularly their title elements, would enable creators of metadata records to obtain a value for the language element, which is often left blank due to a lack of linguistic expertise. It would also enable the addition of the language value to existing metadata records that currently lack a… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Knudson, Ryan Charles
open access

Convenience to the Cataloger or Convenience to the User?: An Exploratory Study of Catalogers’ Judgment

Description: This mixed-method study explored cataloger’s judgment through the presence of text as entered by catalogers for the 11 electronic resource items during the National Libraries test for Resource Description and Access (RDA). Although the literature discusses cataloger’s judgment and suggests that cataloging practice based on new cataloging code RDA will more heavily rely on cataloger’s judgment, the topic of cataloger’s judgment in RDA cataloging was not formally studied. The purpose of this stud… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Hasenyager, Richard Lee, Jr.
open access

Executive Information Seeking and the Corporate Library

Description: This study began with an interest in corporate libraries and a genuine curiosity in the information preferences and resources valued by executive leaders at JET Aircraft Co. Executive information preferences and the downward trend in special libraries initiated the investigation of information seeking among executive leaders and yielded the inquiry: What resources do JET Aircraft Co. executives value when they need information? Employing an ethnographic approach, this study investigated what JE… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Washburn, Adrianne J.
open access

Patient Family and Hospital Staff Information Needs at a Pediatric Hospital: an Analysis of Information Requests Received by the Family Resource Libraries

Description: This research explored the information needs of patient families and hospital staff at a pediatric hospital system in Dallas, Texas. Library statistics recorded in four hospital libraries from 2011 - 2013 were used to analyze the information requests from patient families and hospital staff. Crosstabulations revealed the extent to which patient families and hospital staff used the libraries to satisfy their information needs. The data showed that patient families used the libraries very differe… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Rutledge, M. Hannah
open access

Assessing Terrorist Cyber Threats: Engineering a Functional Construct

Description: Terrorist organizations and individuals make use of the Internet for supportive activities such as communication, recruiting, financing, training, and planning operations. However, little is known about the level of computer-based (“cyber”) threat such terrorist organizations and individuals pose. One step in facilitating the examination and assessment of the level of cyber threat posed by terrorist organizations and individuals is development of an assessment tool or methodology. This tool w… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Morgan, Deanne
open access

Exploring Factors That Lead to Perceived Instructional Immediacy in Online Learning Environments

Description: Instructional communication research clearly indicates that instructor immediacy contributes significantly to effective instruction. However, the majority of immediacy studies have been conducted in traditional (face-to-face) classroom environments. More recently, instructional communication research has focused on assessing the impact of immediacy in online classroom environments. Again, immediacy appears to significantly contribute to effective instruction. The challenge is that most recent i… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Spiker, Chance W.
open access

Exploring Naming Behavior in Personal Digital Image Collections: the Iconology and Language Games of Pinterest

Description: As non-institutional digital image collections expand into social media, independent non-professional image curators are emerging, actively constructing alternative naming conventions to suit their needs in a social collecting environment. This project considers how independent user-curators are developing particular sense-making behaviors as they actively contribute names to large, unstructured social image collections. In order to capture and explore this evolving language adaptation, Pintere… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Sutcliffe, Tami
open access

Faculty Attitudes Towards Institutional Repositories

Description: The purpose of the study was to explore faculty attitudes towards institutional repositories in order to better understand their research habits and preferences. A better understanding of faculty needs and attitudes will enable academic libraries to improve institutional repository services and policies. A phenomenological approach was used to interview fourteen participants and conduct eight observations to determine how tenure-track faculty want to disseminate their research as well as their … more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Hall, Nathan F.
open access

The Denial of Relevance: Biography of a Quest(ion) Amidst the Min(d)fields—Groping and Stumbling

Description: Early research on just why it might be the case that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” suggested that denial of relevance was a significant factor. Asking why denial of relevance would be significant and how it might be resolved began to raise issues of the very nature of questions. Pursuing the nature of questions, in light of denial of relevance and Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” provoked a journey of modeling questions and constructing a biography of the initial question of th… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: VanBebber, Marion Turner
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