Search

ABSTRACT This paper explores the perception and effectiveness of mobile search ads from the perspective of users. The study investigates the attention and interaction of users as well as their subjective estimation of paid listings within Google search results on smartphones. During the tests, each of the 20 users has to accomplish four different search tasks. Data collection methods combine eye-tracking with click-through analysis and interviews. Results indicate that there is no 'ad blindness' on mobile search, but similar to desktop search, users also tend to avoid search advertising on smartphones. For mobile search, ads appear to cause higher usability costs than on desktop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In this poster we describe the Linked Open Data (LOD) for Digital Special Collections project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and describe some of the particular challenges that legacy metadata poses for representation in LOD formats. LOD formats are primarily based on the World Wide Web Consortium's Resource Description Framework standard which demands both that entities be named by opaque universal identifiers whenever possible but also that metadata descriptions for entities be as unambiguous as possible. The challenges for disambiguating those descriptions are illustrated through examples drawn from digital special collections based at four different digital libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Informal communication between scientists is generally believed to contribute to the sharing of knowledge and expertise. We conducted a qualitative research study to explore informal communication behaviors of scientists at the Taiwan Fisheries Research Institute (TFRI). The study examines the two main concepts of Luo's research framework: communication zones and information exchange. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fifteen scientists from different departments at TFRI between February and April, 2016. Each interview took 45 min on average. The interviews were audio-recorded and analyzed thematically, and two key themes were identified. The results reveal the factors affecting information exchange among fishery scientists and reveal that proximity assists informal communication. Fishery scientists tend to prefer face-to-face communication. Availability of support, which is financial, moral, or both, from a supervisor is an important incentive in facilitating communication behaviors. It establishes a basic foundation for scientists' informal communication in the future. Because the sample is small, future research should be expanded to an inter-organization scale in order to understand the informal communication behavior of different organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT With the advancement of the Internet, search has expanded to every aspect of our daily lives including online shopping. Previous research has discovered that the focused, one-time search task model does not apply in many real-life settings and people engage in multitasking sessions. In this poster, we examined the relationships among tasks in multitasking product search through query log analysis. We analyzed 2,910 users' 47,387 queries in 18,102 product search sessions from , the biggest Chinese C2C e-commerce site. Results show that: (1) 35.7% of all search sessions were multi-tasking sessions; (2) users' issued more queries and spent more time in multitasking sessions, but the number of queries per task remained similar for mono-tasking and multitasking sessions; (3) about 80% of the tasks were unrelated in multitasking sessions, while the other 20% were hierarchical and sibling tasks. The results provide exploratory understanding of the relationships among multiple product search tasks, and could be useful for query recommendation and product recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Individuals are often faced with various types of barriers and failures when they look for information. They sometimes fail to locate their desired information after trying or even exhausting all of their known sources. Research has mostly focused on the barriers people face on the Web, but experiences with information seeking failures-particularly those that involve offline channels in real life scenarios-are understudied. In an exploratory qualitative study reported here, 63 survey participants and 10 interview participants contributed a total of 230 examples of information seeking failures and various supportive measures that would/might have prevented those failures. Their narrations not only offer rich pictures of what went wrong in information seeking episodes, but also further our understanding of the types of support that may improve the outcomes of individuals' information seeking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This study aims to identify and examine research trends relating to mothers' health information seeking behaviors from 1994 to August 2015. Eighty-seven articles from multiple disciplines were selected systematically and reviewed in diverse aspects: characteristics of the articles, use of theories, information sources, and seeking strategies. This research topic has been given numerous attention since 1994. In particular, the number of publications skyrocketed since 2013. Twenty-two different theories and models have been utilized in examining mothers' health information seeking behaviors. Furthermore, four seeking strategies of mothers were recognized as asking questions, utilizing multiple sources, borrowing medical literature from libraries, and sharing experiences with friends. Implications for future research in this topic are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This poster elaborates a research technique--that of the guided tour--that has previously been used in qualitative research, including in some studies carried out by information scientists. The guided tour technique hybridizes visual and aural methods; it involves a researcher's relatively shortened, planned entry into a field site, a participant then leading him or her through a personally meaningful location therein while describing and explaining its features, thinking-aloud the ideas, thoughts, and feelings to which it gives rise, and responding to gentle, conversational inquiries (Thomson, 2015). In prior information science work, the technique has offered up-close, in-depth perspectives on information-rich settings, be these home collections, workplace archives, or public spaces like museums. After the technique is introduced, the second portion of this poster is devoted to a comparison of use of the guided tour technique in two research scenarios. The first of these involves guided tours during an in-person study, following the example laid out by prior researchers. The second involves examining data unobtrusively gathered online as a further guided tour adaptation. From these scenarios, it is possible for researchers to see how the guided tour technique can best be applied, its shortcomings, and ways in which it may accommodate research contingencies. The poster concludes by reiterating the value that guided tours can bring to information science work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People around the world have developed many strategies to thrive with diabetes by harnessing health information about themselves and the health condition in general. This study examines the information management strategies (i.e., what people do with the information they gathered) employed by diabetes patients and how these strategies help them reach their health outcome goals. We conducted semi-structured one-on-one interviews and photo-documentation with 52 people living with type 1 or type 2 diabetes in the US and in China. These participants introduced us to a wide variety of information management strategies that take advantage of space, people and technology. Many of these strategies involve intricate data mining, information visualization, space and technology connectivity management, artwork, and other skills and techniques that are not well supported by existing tools, services and the social contexts. Our findings suggest that the personal information management activities observed in previous studies are not independent of one another. Strategies, or a personalized collection of information management activities and information items, can be just as important as their individual parts. Also, US participants reported performing different strategies at different frequencies compared to their Chinese counterparts, supporting that social contexts can influence how people manage their information. These findings can point to important directions of future developments in technology and health care services, as well as their application in various social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data landscape study at Virginia Tech addresses the changing modes of faculty scholarship increasingly driven by data and supports the development of a user-centric data infrastructure, management, and curation system. The study investigates faculty researchers' current practices in organizing, describing, sharing, reusing, and preserving data and the emerging needs for data services and education. The results determine the different dimensions of data-related activities, challenges, and opportunities and the changing nature of faculty demands regarding data documentation, storage, and archiving. Asking faculty researchers to self-reflect data sharing and reuse from both data producers' and data users' perspectives, the study reveals a significant gap between the rather localized and sporadic data management and sharing activities and the highly perceived reuse values of data that often get lost right after the original work is done. With expertise in data, information, and archive fields, libraries have great values to offer in bridging the gap and building a data-driven, shared-access research enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What interface features of academic digital libraries (DLs) do scholars use when engaging in an exploratory search task? We compare social scientists' and computer scientists' use of interface features in domain-specific DLs to demonstrate what features may lead to useful and unexpected findings of information. Applying a search user interface framework, we found social scientists were more likely than computer scientists to use control features (e.g., filter options) during exploration. Both sets of scholars found useful information during exploration, but social scientists more frequently reported they also found something unexpected. Findings suggest differences may be due to variances in the interface features used by the two groups. We discuss future research including further examination of the experiences that the use of interface features may elicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although methods exist to identify well-defined relations, such as is_a or part_of, existing tools rarely support a user who wants to define new, domain-specific relations. We conducted a situated case study in plant science and introduce four new domain-specific relations that are of interest to domain scientists but have not been explored in information science. Results show that precision varies between relations and ranges from 0.73 to 0.91 for the manufacturer location category, 0.89 and 0.93 for the seed donor-bank relation, 0.29 and 0.67 for the seed origin location, and 0.32 and 0.77 for the field experiment location. The manufacturer location category recall varies from 0.91 to 0.94, the seed bank-donor location recall ranges between 0.93 and 1, the seed origin relation from 0.33 to 0.82 while the field experiment location from 0.67 to 0.83 depending on the classifier and using a combination of lexical and syntactic features in the background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we aim to keep track of how creative ideas in economic sciences have been created and diffused into successive research. Toward that end, we investigate the intellectual landscapes of the Nobel Prize awardees' research and the articles citing the literature. Our study is based on two sets of bibliographic records retrieved from the Web of Science. The "Creation" dataset, obtained through an author search, contains 1,745 original research and review articles of the laureates. The "Diffusion" dataset, consisting of 134,866 records, was collected by citation expansion. We identified bursting keywords and intellectual landscapes of the domain in creation and diffusion perspectives. We found that the dominant research themes that had influenced the laureates' research from 1980 till 1999 were macroeconomic tests and economic analysis in time series. Then, the creative ideas have diverged into a variety of issues such as labor market, economic governance, market design, asset pricing, and economic decision making. We identified that these ideas have been diffused into successive research topics such as intertemporal general equilibrium model, reciprocity in economics, estimating profitable asset pricing, and socioecological economics. Finally, it is argued that economic research around the laureates has become divergent over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twelve scholars based at information programs worldwide have recently participated in research that asks: How is the concept of information visualized in my community and beyond? The study employed an arts-informed, visual methodology and the draw-and-write technique to stimulate local and global conversations about the pictorial nature of information in society. The work has generated new insights into information as a visual phenomenon and generated an archive of "iSquare" images to be used for information research, education, and practice. As a contribution to the conference theme of "Impact on Society," this panel introduces the project, describes its technical infrastructure, highlights emerging social scientific and artistic outcomes, and reports cross-cultural discoveries. The multimedia and interactive session will include in-person presentations, short videos from collaborators overseas, an expert discussant, dialogue with the audience, and an art exhibition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members and others attending the 2015 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) conference will be aware of a need to regularly revisit and redefine an information discipline continuously in flux. Constant change likewise demands that we consider new models and approaches to educating professionals equipped with cutting-edge skills in critical thinking and applied best practice responsive to a dynamic information environment. This proposed three-segment interactive panel session will report on action research on, and findings emerging from, a re-visioning of information education. Initial outcomes from pilot projects involving the design and testing of innovative proofs of concept will also be discussed. Attendees will engage in an activity that identifies trends, and debates issues and controversies that are at the core of the dialogue surrounding our information future and how to educate for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The purpose of this panel is to discuss actual developments in the co-creation of public services and the role of information science within it. With the advent of the knowledge society, participation and co-creation of public services have become crucial in smart-city decision-making processes. Transfer of knowledge through face-to-face interaction and the transfer of information through digital networks are spurring the process of innovation. The combination of both dimensions needs particular attention in the field of information science to enable suitable methods of knowledge management at a city level. This panel will bring together best-practice examples and research frameworks. In real-world scenarios, citizens are involved in decision-making in the case of public library development. First, frameworks of smart-city assessment and of knowledge management at the city level are discussed. Finally, the role of information science in open innovation processes will be the focus of this panel. For this purpose, the panel brings together researchers and practitioners from library and information science, as well as from neighboring disciplines, to discuss how information and communication technology (ICT) and open innovation are changing our society, culture, and urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The past decade has seen tremendous progress in the field of preservation, particularly with respect to preservation of digital materials. To date, however, there has been only minimal research activity within North America on the preservation of intangible cultural heritage, and its relationship to the preservation of material expressions of culture. Given the importance of intangible heritage to the cultural and scholarly record, we believe that a more significant research program in this area would be of benefit to the scholarly community. This panel will focus on the nature of intangible heritage and the problems in preserving it in a digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Development of Internet technologies has empowered ordinary users to create, contribute, share and connect with other members of the community. As users learn to exploit the potential of networked communications, they participate in a process, which facilitates a shift from individual to collective contributions and introduces an opportunity for multi-vocal and multi-faceted representation of cultural heritage. Open access to crowdsourced collections requires reconsideration of the traditional authoritative approach of cultural heritage institutions. The arduous nature of the work rendered voluntarily in cultural heritage crowdsourcing initiatives calls for reconsideration of power relationships and giving power to devoted contributors supported by modern 'intelligent' technology to regulate the process of representation and organization. Taking into consideration the fact that crowdsourced data are not without flaws, the question is how to better utilize the collective intelligence to create quality information. In this context, various issues such as power, control, trust, inter-contributor consensus, heterogeneity of opinions will be raised and discussed by the panelists. Each of the panelists comes from a different field of expertise (Computer science, Information science, Economics, Communication studies, cultural heritage) and various cultural backgrounds and geographical locations (United States, Europe and Israel). This diversity will be reflected in the presented perspectives on the crowdsourcing topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT 'And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart' (Gershwin and Gershwin, ). In the lyric, 'tomato tomahto', the marked, or explicitly differentiated term, is tomahto, corresponding more to the English rather than the United States pronunciation. The marked term of a contrast characteristically designates the exception or minor term and the distinctions contained in the unmarked term may be implicitly, and incompletely, understood. Analogously, information science has often been implicitly based in the United States and influenced by American modes of thought, while European, including English, developments have been the occasionally marked and often minor term. This panel explores European perspectives on information science, explicitly and implicitly contrasting them with United States perspectives, from a base in a number of languages and in Europe and beyond. The panel employs diverse and complementary viewpoints and should make for a lively discussion. It concludes, in sympathy with Gershwin, that cooperation and integration, corresponding to increasing globalization, is the way forward. The combination of European and beyond and United States perspectives on information science is especially appropriate for the first ASIS&T Annual Meeting outside North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This is a special panel to introduce the editors of prestigious international journals in library and information science, who will discuss the aim and the scope of the journals and elaborate on the expectations from potential contributors to help young academics understand and appreciate the process of academic publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Qualitative methods can be used to understand and interpret human behaviors in a variety of contexts, including people's health information behaviors. This panel will discuss current applications of qualitative methods in this context, with emphasis on three examples: visual elicitation techniques, qualitative content analysis, and grounded theory approaches. The audience will be encouraged to discuss additional qualitative approaches and mixed methods, and how they might be applied to studies of health information behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Information behavior research has typically explored individual-level practices, even within studies of groups and group activities. Although collaborative information seeking has emerged in recent years to explore how people search for and share information, much of this research also focuses on individual-level experiences. Collectivist approaches to information behavior have been conducted in only a few studies in the discipline; however, collectivism offers a unique, holistic way to study information practices at within-group levels. Collectivism also accounts for the social, professional, and other contextual elements that shape group members' information practices when pursuing common shared goals. This exploratory qualitative study used focus groups situated in a constructivist grounded theory methodology to investigate wine industry members' experiences while engaging in peer mentoring circles. Designed as a professional development activity, the mentoring circles provided a platform for the development of long-term relationships among group members to foster information sharing and knowledge creation relevant to their work environments. The emergent results make a significant contribution to the field as they outline key conditions under which collectivist groups support members' information needs. Findings point to the importance of group cohesion developed through shared (industry-based) language and knowledge and development of kin-like relationships to generate unique knowledge communities. Interdependency and reciprocity are shown to play key roles in motivating individual group members to share information with their peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Despite the rapid shift in media distribution from physical to digital formats, few studies explore what this means to users with regards to perceived values, limitations, and experience with media. We investigate this problem, specifically within the context of video games, aiming to understand which formats game players prefer and for what reasons, and the implications for game content providers and digital libraries. The findings from a survey of 1,257 game players showed that more respondents preferred digital formats over physical formats. Advocates of digital games typically valued accessibility and convenience, longevity of games free of physical damage, less need for storage, and reduced cost. Advocates of physical games generally valued the ability to easily retrieve, share, and resell games, ownership and longevity of access to games, the paraphernalia and collectibles that came with physical games, and the aesthetic and tangible qualities of the physical object. We discuss the implications of these findings for content providers and libraries, with an emphasis on game preservation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT (U)nderstanding plagiarism, learning about (P)araphrasing and related skills, generating proper (C)itations with an online citation tool and doing originality (C)heck with an online tool (UPCC) is a pedagogy developed by Chu and his colleagues (, ) to help students avoid plagiarism. The UPCC pedagogy incorporates teaching the ethical use of information, an important facet of information literacy, into inquiry project-based learning (PjBL), a pedagogical approach that demands students to demonstrate high order information literacy. This study, adopting a mixed-methods design, evaluates the effectiveness of UPCC by comparing the plagiarism behavior of two cohorts of junior secondary students in their PjBL projects with and without the implementation of the pedagogy. In addition, upon the completion of their projects, the 2015 cohort completed a survey that evaluates their knowledge of plagiarism, and assesses the extent to which they endorse the helpfulness of the UPCC in domains including instructional support; understanding plagiarism; paraphrasing, synthesizing and summarizing; generating appropriate citations; and originality self-check. Students and teachers also participated in focus group interviews to further elaborate on their perceptions on the UPCC pedagogy. A trend in reduced plagiarism behavior was observed after the implementation of UPCC, and students expressed a generally positive perception on UPCC as an effective anti-plagiarism pedagogy. Quantitative and qualitative data showed that students who had better knowledge of plagiarism held a significantly more positive perception on the effectiveness of UPCC than those who showed poorer understanding of plagiarism. This may indicate that further refinement of UPCC is needed to cater for learner diversity and enhance students' motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Internet technologies have made mass surveillance prevalent and much easier to carry out, while at the same time making personal privacy more difficult to protect. The ubiquity of personal data processing has raised public awareness about the infringement of information privacy. To protect users' information privacy, several initiatives have been developed to provide Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). One of the most well-known PETs is the Onion Router (Tor) network, which provides users with online anonymity. The Tor network is supported by a group of volunteers who contribute their resources to sustain the availability and quality of the service. However, Tor Volunteers may find themselves in a tough spot at times because Tor network is often monitored by law enforcement, which makes this PET community different from any other open-source initiatives. To explore this volunteer community's motivation for providing their services despite the risks, we conducted an online survey. Our study results reveal that one of the main motivations for these volunteers is to advocate and provide privacy for online users. In addition, Tor-relay operators report on their views about anonymous networks, the challenges they face, and how their belief in providing an opportunity for everyone to access information without interference or censorship is a key component of their volunteer participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Art images are characterized by affective properties that are rarely captured by current classification practices. We conducted a study to test three methods for developing affect descriptors for art images. The first method relied on affect tags derived from analysis of an image's subject matter and colors. The second method involved affect tags derived from analysis of a viewer's facial expressions of emotions associated with each image. The third method relied on affect tags assigned to an image by viewers. The strengths, limitations, and potential of each affect tagging method for art images are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT We present a quantitative web analytics approach tailored towards academic libraries. We introduce the construct of pixel efficiency analysis and the metrics of pixel efficiency value and conversion efficiency value for quantitatively evaluating website changes. Pixel efficiency analysis is the practice of relating screen real estate measured in pixels to the achievement of organizational goals and key performance indicators as indicated by quantifiable user behavioral interactions on a webpage. The concepts and measures are employed through a case study at a major academic library focusing on four major webpages. The first level of analysis incorporates pixel efficiency analysis within an overarching web analytics investigation to identify key areas of improvement on the selected pages. The second level of analysis improves the identified weaknesses through A/B testing and highlights the usefulness of pixel efficiency analysis. Lastly, the third level of analysis employs the usage of the pixel efficiency value to elicit the added worth that potential website changes possess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In the contexts of the data deluge and open data, scientists studying biodiversity benefit from online access to global datasets of existing vouchered biological and paleontological collections. Using biocollections collected over time across the world allows for the advancement of scientific knowledge concerning evolution in process as well as species poleward migrations, an indicator of climate change. This study's purpose was to validate and expand the Data Curation Profiles (DCP) to digital biocollections and inform a DCP framework for worldwide biota. Ten biocollection producers, curating various types of specimens affiliated with the project building the United States' national biodiversity infrastructure, were interviewed using the DCP questionnaire. Results indicate there is extreme diversity in the curation of biocollections and additional DCP questions should be added to reflect the complicated approaches to biological data curation. Although discipline specific metadata creation tools, standards, and practices enable long-term sustainability of the U.S. digitization effort, some scientists would benefit from further clarification and guidance on the information needs of consumers beyond designated communities of expert users, and the long-term preservation of biocollections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT We report on a study investigating the relationships among query reformulations and different search intentions during an information seeking session. Twenty-four participants were each asked to search for information useful for two (of four) different journalism tasks; after completing each search, the search was replayed, and participants were asked to specify what they intended to accomplish in each query segment of the search session, and whether those intentions were satisfied. Logs of the searches were analyzed to extract the queries at the start and finish of each query segment, and query reformulations were classified. Results show that: participants regularly indicated a variety of different search intentions during the course of an information seeking session; there are some differences in reformulation types following different search intentions; there are some differences in reformulation types which follow satisfied and unsatisfied intentions; and, there are differences in the frequency of intentions following reformulations which themselves follow satisfied and unsatisfied intentions. Implications for system design are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This study reports the results of a 2016 online survey on perceptions and uses of ASIS&T publications. The 190 survey respondents represented 26 countries and 5 continents, with 77% of participants coming from academia rather than practitioners. Among the emerging themes were calls for a wider scope of research from information science to be reflected in the publications (including JASIS&T and the ASIS&T Proceedings), and ongoing challenges in the role of the Bulletin as a bridge between research and practice. The study provides insights into the scholarly publishing practices of the ASIS&T community and highlights key issues for the future direction of ASIS&T's scholarly communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Drawing upon principles and lessons of technology law and policy, value-centered design, anticipatory design ethics, and information policy literatures this research seeks to contribute to understandings of the ways in which platform design, practice, and policymaking intersect on the social media site Reddit. This research explores how Reddit's users, moderators, and administrators surface values (like free speech, privacy, dignity, and autonomy), hint at ethical principles (what content, speech, behavior ought to be restricted and under what conditions), through a continuous process of (re)negotiating expectations and norms around values, ethics, and power on the site. Central to this research are questions such as: Who or what influences and/or determines social practice on Reddit? Who participates in decision-making and using what processes and mechanisms? Where do controversies arise and how are they resolved? Generating findings from a particular controversy surrounding the subreddit /r/jailbait, the author illustrates the complexities inherent in these questions and suggests that a participatory policymaking approach might contribute to future research and practice in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Crowdsourcing of mobile content has become a major way of populating information-rich online environments. One approach to motivate participation is via games. That is, a crowdsourcing game is built upon the desire of individuals to be entertained while generating useful outputs as byproducts of gameplay. A gap in current research is that actual usage patterns of crowdsourcing games have not been investigated adequately. We address this gap by comparing content creation patterns in a game for crowdsourcing mobile content against a non-game version. Our analysis of 3024 contributions in both apps reveal 10 categories, divided into: (1) those that conform more to the notion of mobile content utilized to learn about a specific place or for navigational purposes; and (2) those that were about the content creator himself/herself, or in relation to other users or other non-playing individuals, with the location as a backdrop, similar to status updates in social media platforms like Twitter. We argue that both categories are potentially useful in that they meet different needs, and together could serve to recruit and sustain participation in the longer term. Further, the distribution of categories varied across the apps, indicating that the features afforded by games shape behavior differently from non-game-based approaches to crowdsourcing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Learners have a wealth of online resources to help them teach themselves new knowledge. However, not all resources are of equal quality or appropriateness for a learner, given the particular set of prior knowledge they bring to the learning task. Without a teacher, finding appropriate sources that shed light on a topic, collectively or individually, is critical. We present DocMatrix, an interface for viewing multiple documents in parallel, with three key features: a grid of document viewers, a common term sidebar, and enhanced tables of contents. It is designed to let an interested learner view, filter, highlight, and search many documents on a topic simultaneously. We implemented the DocMatrix interface for Google Books, and ran a user study of the prototype. The results of this study indicate DocMatrix allowed users to find, read, and synthesize more information than a traditional single-book interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT International medical graduates (IMGs) are medical professionals who have immigrated to the United States (US) or Canada (Ca) in hopes of integrating into the labor market. IMGs can be a very helpful resource supplying a diverse background and expertise to the medical system in the host country [Chen et al., ]. However, immigration and integration into a new country can be difficult processes due to differences in cultural norms, information sources, and information dissemination. In this study, we investigate the nature of information in the lived experiences of IMGs as they make a new life for themselves and their families in either the US or Canada. By so doing, we contribute to the limited body of research on this population by providing an informational perspective. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 IMGs residing in the US or Canada. Our findings indicate that IMGs spend an inordinate amount of time searching for occupational and employment-related information, which includes information about retraining and residency programs, along with varied strategies to make sense of the new information landscapes. IMGs use various strategies to identify signposts and become conversant in the new landscape. Despite the limited sample, it becomes clear that one's ability to become literate in these new information environments leads to more positive outcomes (i.e., integrating the labor market, overall well-being, belonging). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The problems organizations face have varying degrees of complexity. What is not often understood, however, is that the knowledge needed to solve these problems also varies in complexity, and should match the complexity of the problem itself. The current study provides grounded theory for how leaders in churches should approach problems relating to Intellectual Capital (IC) assets. These intangible assets are crucial to the ability of churches to create value that enriches the lives of individuals in their communities. In two, 90-minute focus groups, the leadership team of a United Methodist Church in South Carolina, USA was asked about their IC and their past, present, and future solutions to increasing IC value. Qualitative coding of these transcripts found that leadership often provided knowledge-based solutions that did not match the assumed complexity of the IC problem. This caused numerous failures in the maintenance of IC. It is suggested that church leadership view all problems as knowledge problems to uncover these hidden assumptions of complexity, and use these assumptions to seek out knowledge-based solutions that match that complexity. These findings can be extended to non-religious contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Recent practical initiatives and academic research have signaled optimism for the use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as an alternative model for education in the developing world. At the same time, anecdotal evidence and observation have pointed to a lack of courses offered in languages other than English as one potential challenge for global use of MOOCs. We present a first empirical attempt to characterize the linguistic diversity of MOOCs and understand the resulting implications for the use of MOOCs in international development. We find significant differences in quantities and types of MOOCs available in English and non-English languages. This finding indicates that MOOCs do not yet provide a broad array of educational opportunities for people without adequate English-language proficiency and therefore, MOOCs may have limited potential for use in international development outside English-speaking populations at present. In recognition of efforts to increase linguistic diversity of MOOC offerings, we review and describe two types of initiatives, those to translate existing MOOCs and those to create new MOOCs in non-English languages, initiatives we identify as scaling-up or scaling-down MOOCs respectively. To situate our findings in development discourse, we turn to Sen's capability approach () to consider implications for the use of MOOCs in socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This research examined the information behavior of parents (including legal guardians) during an emergent health situation with a child. Although many studies examine health-related information behaviors, very few explore health consumers' information practices during moments of health crisis. This study explored parents' information needs, source use, and source preferences during a visit to the emergency department. An online questionnaire was administered using iPads given to 897 parents with children at one of 32 participating general emergency departments (ED) across Canada. Before taking their child to the ED, only 38.8% (n=348) of parents looked for information; those who did search looked most frequently for information about specific symptoms or severity of illness. Prior to visiting the ED the sources most frequently accessed were the internet and direct contact with healthcare professionals. At the emergency department, parents' information needs centred on immediate concerns, including explanations of their child's illness, treatments, and care instructions. Household income, education level, and parents' age were factors that affected information seeking in emergent health situations. Overwhelmingly, speaking to a healthcare professional in person is the typical and preferred way to obtain health information when facing a health crisis involving a child. The results have implications for how and when healthcare information is shared; the findings add to the limited research on parents' information behavior, particularly their roles as information proxies for their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Over the century that has transpired since the first public broadcasts aired in the US, radio programming has become a staunchly commercial enterprise. The earliest radio broadcasts, by contrast, were seen as public goods to be protected in the interest of neutrality of the information being conveyed. In the late 1920s and early 1930s a range of colorful individuals contracted with stations in order to broadcast news and information that involved the sale of personal and medical consultations to individual listeners. Astrology, in particular, became a significant factor in Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license renewal hearings due to two main perceptions: (1) because such broadcasts constituted point-to-point transmission of information, and (2) because such programs were usually related to the marketing of some product or involved the solicitation of funds, therefore, they were deemed to be contrary the interests of the public at large. While the mandate of the FRC and FCC did not involve oversight of content or outright censorship, these hearings nonetheless effectually resulted in the development of guidelines that banned certain types of broadcasts and sometimes shuttered local stations entirely. For a brief time during these decades, educational and cultural institutions benefitted from the utopian ethos of these federal regulatory efforts. During this time science journalism emerged and scientists themselves experimented with the new medium as a means of public edification. Discussion of the early history of radio broadcasting in the US is relevant to the core concerns of information science and technology research given that its development gave shape to the social practices and legal principles surrounding public use of and access to the ICTs (information and communications technologies) that emerged in its wake-from television programming to the provision of Internet service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This poster presents an exploratory method used to analyze the geography of Twitter use. A shift has taken place in political speech from local to diffuse online environments, which necessitates the use of new tools and methods to analyze discourse. As such, this study presents a geo-spatial analysis of tweets to members of the U.S. Congress in 2012 to aid researchers carrying out comparable research in the future. This poster also presents summarized findings about the sometimes localized, often national distribution of geo-located tweets to Congress members. This poster concludes by calling for discussion about spatial analysis and social media tools, while highlighting methodological problems encountered in this study and offering directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT With the increasing number of multilingual webpages on the Internet, cross-language information retrieval has become an important research issue. In cultures where people speak both Chinese and English, using mixed language in oral speaking and web searching is a common phenomenon. This study employs semi-structured interviews and query log analysis to examine the query reformulation strategies and patterns regarding Chinese-English mixed language queries, and to determine why search engine users utilize certain reformulation strategies. The results can inform information scientists and IR system designers to enhance cross-language controlled vocabularies and develop discovery platforms for multilingual content, and improve search engines to provide users with more relevant results. The findings could also be expanded to other language combinations that would improve search engine designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Community Question and Answering (CQA) is a well-known platform for knowledge sharing and social learning. CQA services have expanded into the education sector, where school students are the main users. Here, CQA functions as a non-traditional learning environment in which students use their own knowledge to construct the knowledge base. However, there have been cases where some questions are not answered within such a Q&A system. This failure may occur if a question is unclear, complex, inappropriate, or unrelated to the subject in which it is contextualized. While experts do not answer posted questions, co-users moderate responses and help maintain answer quality. However, due to the presence of users from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, many questions remain unanswered. The current study analyzes and explores the failed questions collected from Brainly, a social learning Q&A platform for school students. The quality of 1,000 questions extracted from this service is analyzed based on human-based ratings and extracted textual features. The findings show that a relationship can be drawn between the non-textual assessment results and the objective textually extracted features. This further encourages the study of why a question might be of poor quality. The findings also show which subjects contain the highest number of unanswered questions. These results will further help us to understand how questions should be restructured to obtain answers from their askers' peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Theses and dissertations (ETDs) represent a wealth of scholarly and artistic content created by graduate students in masters and doctoral programs in the degree-seeking process. Considering the multi-disciplinarity and interdiciplinarity characteristics of ETDs, often several subjects and indexing terms need to be supplied to adequately represent ETDs for efficient access. This study analyzes the quality and effectiveness of indexing terms - both authorized terms from controlled vocabularies and free-text keywords - used to succinctly describe the content of the electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Based on the comparisons of the search terms entered by users to discover and access the ETDs, the authors also discuss the subjectivity and objectivity of the process and the need to distinguish functional representation from mere descriptions of a topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is two-fold: (1) to explore the communication barriers and challenges that interdisciplinary researchers might encounter when collaborating with their counterparts from other disciplines, and (2) to survey how the researchers mitigate the hurdles in the collaboration processes. Eight interdisciplinary researchers from a research institute were recruited to participate in the study. They were individually interviewed with a semi-structured protocol. The interview transcripts were then analyzed using a grounded theory approach that consists of open coding, axial coding, and selective coding in sequence. The preliminary results show that the major communication hindrances include: domain disparity; discrepancies of individual researchers in terms of their perspectives, preferences, and behaviors; varied interpretations on the meanings of shared artifacts used by the interdisciplinary research groups; and divergence of personal motivation and engagement levels toward interdisciplinary collaboration. The participants considered active and constant learning to be the most useful strategy to cope with these communication obstacles. These findings yield some novel insights into the interdisciplinary collaboration effort and provide new empirical evidence to substantiate what previous studies have found. In addition, this study generates a deeper understanding about communication difficulties that interdisciplinary researchers might face, which can in turn be translated into practical implications for administrators and policy makers who are responsible for managing interdisciplinary collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Libraries are uniquely positioned to support the quickly shifting landscape of modern research practice. The NCSU Libraries has paired user research approaches with iterative design practice to determine contextually relevant services to support researchers. This poster will showcase two case studies as examples of successful avenues of support through library services, the user research and application of frameworks that supported the development of these services, and the project management methodology that applied research to practice. Each case study will outline strategies used to develop services that support modern research practice through the investigation of a complex problem space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Among the many information literacy games that have been developed, evaluations have mostly relied on anecdotal quotations, or procedures which were neither systematic nor rigorous. This study adopted the heuristic evaluation method with end-users to evaluate an information literacy game for tertiary students. Participants identified problems with the game according to the Heuristic Evaluation of Playability framework. We proposed to extend the HEP framework by including two more categories on characters/graphics and pedagogical effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This poster presents preliminary findings of a quasi-experiment think-aloud study where scientists were presented four canned results of information regarding earth science data in a counter-balanced design. Scientists were asked to think-aloud regarding what information about the data assisted them in their ability to determine reusability of that dataset. Sixteen scientists from various earth science fields participated in the study. Each scientist responded to four canned results, a post-result usefulness survey, a post-search rank-order survey, and a post-search survey. Participants stated that concise data descriptions, attribute and unit lists, as well as research methods steps were particularly important in their ability to determine reusability of data. Participants preferred more robust results over less robust results, and stated that they would rather have too much information than to request the data to find out it actually did not serve their needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Social Q&A (SQA) sites that allow users to exchange knowledge by asking and answering questions in natural language have become increasingly popular due to their ability to leverage the wisdom of crowds and provide personalized answers. Considerable research efforts have been devoted to studying users' information and knowledge sharing within SQA sites. Past research, however, has neglected users' information sharing behavior from SQA to other social media platforms (e.g., microblogs). In this study, we utilized Zhihu, one of the most popular Chinese SQA sites, as a lens to explore users' information sharing from SQA to third parties, as this has become a widespread behavior among Chinese Web users. A survey that gathered 591 valid responses yielded interesting findings. Overall, respondents who had higher educational levels and who spent more daily time on the Internet via mobile devices were more likely to share SQA posts to other virtual spaces. Their experiences with Zhihu, their content preferences, and their friends' sharing behavior also significantly influenced their sharing behavior. Our findings generate quite a few directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]