Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Mountain Daylight Time)

This full-day workshop will be presented virtually over two days. Part 1 will be presented on Saturday, October 23, from 8:00 AM-12:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time) and Part 2 will be presented on Sunday, October 24, from 8:00 AM-12:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time). It will provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of research and applications including new theoretical approaches, indicators, and tools among young and established researchers, PhD students, information professionals, and librarians active in the field of informetrics and scientometrics.

This full-day workshop will be presented virtually over two days. Part 1 will be presented on Saturday, October 23, from 8:00 AM-12:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time) and Part 2 will be presented on Sunday, October 24, from 8:00 AM-12:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time). It will provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of research and applications including new theoretical approaches, indicators, and tools among young and established researchers, PhD students, information professionals, and librarians active in the field of informetrics and scientometrics.

The ASIS&T Special Interest Group Social Informatics (SIG-SI) and Information Ethics and Policy (IEP) will present this half-day workshop. The workshop’s theme aligns well with the ASIS&T 2021 Annual Meeting theme and offers an opportunity to focus scholarly attention on the social, cultural, political, and economic shaping of sociotechnical systems and their consequences. We invite a range of scholarly sociotechnical inquiries alongside ethical, practical, and policy perspectives across a range of disciplines and sectors. The workshop will provide a physical and virtual space to share and exchange experiences and ideas or suggest theories and directions for future work among international SI researchers and practitioners. The workshop will broadly appeal to the ASIS&T community, particularly to researchers interested in sociotechnical and ethical information or technology issues. We also welcome professionals from industry, ICT communities, and human rights organizations. Our aims include the following: collaboratively produce short- and long-term research agendas to address pressing critical and diversity concerns around technology; facilitate collaboration; and strategically prioritize research that will support empirically driven policy making, ethical decision-making, and practice for social justice and well-being with pervasive and emerging sociotechnical systems.

This full-day workshop aims to promote discussion and disciplinary convergence on the topic of social media research focusing on issues related to pandemic, election, mis/disinformation, and social bots. Social media has become a mainstream channel of communication where users share and exchange information. The ASIST community is uniquely situated in this landscape as a community of researchers and educators who study different issues using social media data. This workshop aims to: 1) highlight current social media research opportunities and challenges, 2) identify and connect social media researchers, 3) introduce dis/misinformation issues in social media, and 4) provide practical guides to investigators, enhancing their understanding of the grant development process and their abilities to write a successful external grant proposal. This workshop brings together a group of social media researchers and senior faculty who developed successful external proposals to share their research and experiences.

The 21st Annual SIG-USE Research Symposium focuses on the theme of methods for investigating and making real-world impact with human information behavior and practices research. This symposium is an opportunity for researchers, students, faculty, and information professionals who are interested in information behavior and practices to discuss the metatheories, methodological approaches, research methods, and techniques that shape human information behavior and practices research, and that translate to positive differences in the world. The symposium will feature an informative panel presentation, as well as several paper and poster presentations, in order to explore different methodological and methods-related developments and challenges in information behavior and practices research. The symposium will also offer a Q&A session for authors who are interested in submitting their works to the upcoming Library and Information Science Research special issue on information behavior and information practices methods.

This half-day workshop aims to support and advance an ASIS&T AI community by connecting AI research and practice in library and information environments. We invite a broad range of participants who are already engaged in developing AI applications and solutions and are interested in learning about the opportunities and challenges in AI research, by discussing how to integrate empirical research findings into AI development. Through a panel discussion, lightning talks, a brainstorming session, breakout group conversations, and a plenary discussion, the workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to obtain feedback on preliminary and ongoing work, identify pressing challenges and critical questions of AI in library and information environments, and develop new research problems and approaches.

This workshop is dedicated to patron-privacy protections in public libraries welcomes all participants who are public librarians, information technology experts, or academic researchers interested in data privacy. Prof. Masooda Bashir, who was recently awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) /National Leadership Grant (NLG) to study this topic, will lead the workshop. Participants will learn about new research in this field, hear from experts on their approaches to patron privacy, and have an opportunity to discuss possible steps forward for public libraries in the United States. Panelists will share how different libraries, with varying clienteles, deal with patron privacy concerns. Discussions will culminate in a draft for an open-access guide that identifies the specific challenges public libraries face in protecting patron privacy, lists best practices, and establishes a network of collaborators who will develop a shared vision to tackle this problem. The workshop aims to support public libraries’ ongoing efforts to promote equitable access to information and safeguard users’ privacy, particularly for low-income populations and minority communities, who are often both frequent users of public-library digital resources and at risk for violations of their personal privacy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a pivot in people's practice of their daily life and work, in particular a pivot towards virtual living and working. Sponsored by the ASIS&T European Chapter, this panel discusses the diverse ways in which this has affected different communities within Europe, bearing in mind the varying languages, economic and political situations, and library & information structures within different European countries. Following on from presentations giving diverse perspectives from five European countries, we will ask session participants to reflect on the impact of the pivot on living and working in their own context, their coping mechanisms, and likely impact on the future.

What is the thermal conductivity of copper? This straightforward question leads to a fascinating instance of the production of scientific facts through documentation practices. Ho, Powell and Liley’s 1974 The Thermal Conductivity of the Elements: A Comprehensive Review is examined as an artifact of scientific reference data production, and its answer to the initial question is traced to modern-day search engine results. A short history of the Center that produced the book and some initial research into its authors is provided.

Kuhn’s concepts of normal science and normic lexical structures are utilized to clarify the Comprehensive Review’s functioning within the broader scientific fields in which it is utilized. Bowker’s concepts of memory practices and the jussive Archive help identify the forgetting embedded in the production of reference data, producing what Star called global certainty. Far from impugning the internal validity of these scientific facts, this forgetting is shown to be licensed by scientific rigor.

This paper presents a novel historically informed investigation of how documentation practices produce scientific facts, and connect these activities to modern-day knowledge graph information retrieval. The theoretical analyses provided show how scientifically licensed forgetting is a key mechanism of fact production, what Hayles termed constrained constructivism.

Authority and Agency have been central concepts in information science since its beginnings in 19th century documentalism. This paper begins with a brief historical overview of how these concepts have been constructed in the traditional and user-centred paradigms. It will then explore how an information practices perspective affords the possibility of seeing authority and agency not as oppositional but rather as synergistic: two sides of the same theoretical coin. This exploration will be contextualised by examples drawn from the author’s own research over more than two decades across a range of studies. This body of research includes studies of academic, artistic and serious leisure communities.

In order to reflect the interactions, flow-path differences and nonlinear laws among manufacturing enterprises’ innovation units and to reveal relations between information-flowing efficiency and innovation capabilities, the paper divides innovation activities of manufacturing enterprises into three phases, such as information acquisition, information transformation and information value addition based on the theory of innovation value chain, and puts forward a mathematical model of information absorption and transformation to ultimately reveal the mechanisms for information flow across inside and outside units. Further, the paper takes a non-linear function for absorptive capacity based on level of experiential knowledge, continuous R&D intensity, and agent relation strength to quantify the information absorption and transformation process and takes index of innovation information amount and cumulative information amount to calculate innovation abilities and measure information value addition. Finally, the paper uses simulation tool to analyze the influencing factors of information absorption and transformation optimization.

My paper will provide an overview of the main themes and selected key findings of my doctoral dissertation, ‘Creative Connections: the value of digital information objects and their effective management for sustainable contemporary visual art practice’. This study provides a novel analysis of visual art making in the UK.

Based on evidence derived from a series of detailed qualitative case-study interviews, the research clarifies the value of digital information use in contemporary visual art practice in the UK and the current digital object management skills base in the visual art community. A practitioner-focused, qualitative methodology produces deep understanding of how artists spend their time and value particular resources in making their work.

The study findings provide an evidence base for the use of policy makers in the visual arts sector and for providers of education and training in the visual arts, with profound implications for the fit-to-need of current curricula in tertiary and professional art education. This study analyses and clarifies the extent to which the information sciences are reaching this profession, and how the professional art community may benefit from engagement with information science concepts and practices as a tool in the struggle to stay in practice.

Digital humanities (DH) have gradually developed into an interdisciplinary field and a “battleground” between different research methods and conventions. As increasing numbers of scholars entered the DH landscape from various knowledge domains, one central concern was how digital technologies influenced the landscape of DH, which scholars have discussed intensively but without achieving agreement. These theoretical discussions, however, did not provide empirical insight into the actual shape of DH under the technological influence. This dissertation study addresses this broad concern focusing on one specific, emerging DH practice, i.e., the visualization practice. Widely presented in research outputs and applied during research processes, visualization embodies cross-field collaborative practices among DH scholars and functions as an indicator for the field’s evolution. I take a Latourian approach to investigate how digital humanists, defined as any researchers or practitioners engaging in DH work, leverage visualizations as “immutable mobiles” to produce, transfer, and communicate humanities knowledge, both in research outputs and during the research process. I apply a sequential, explanatory mixed-methods design, quantitatively examining the use patterns of visual inscriptions in DH journal articles over the last ten years, then proceeding to the underlying, implicit decision-making processes and practices of visualization among digital humanists of.

North-South scholarly collaboration and academic exchange programs help to address the challenges experienced by developing countries in Africa and elsewhere, and provide unique benefits to scholars in developed countries. Many academics in the global north, however, have limited, or no, information about opportunities to visit academics and institutions in developing countries and those in such countries do not have contacts to whom they can reach out. The intention of the panel is to stimulate future north-south collaborations by increasing awareness of both funded opportunities and low budget initiatives for scholarly exchanges and collaborations, benefits for scholars and their institutions in developed and developing countries, and best practices with respect to north-south collaborations and scholarly exchanges. This panel is sponsored by the Africa Chapter and SIG-III.

Relevance is a notion whose meaning and purpose have been widely discussed in information retrieval research. The ultimate aim of relevance—what Tefko Saracevic has called the “you know” principle—is to ensure that users have the information necessary to meet their goals. What is often missing from this discussion is a critical assessment of who gets to decide what information is relevant, under what circumstances, and for what purposes—especially in relation to marginalized populations. The limited discussion of social justice in information relevance research is a gap this interactive panel discussion seeks to address. Five emerging, junior, and senior researchers will each identify and outline social justice themes of information relevance (e.g., intersectionality, Black feminist lens, geography, immigration status, and holistic critical relevance) that have been evident in their own scholarship. Audience members will have an opportunity to expand on one of the five themes in concert with a panelist before participants consider together future directions for relevance of information in a social justice context. While each participant may have different definitions of social justice, a broad interpretation of the term will frame the conversation by indicating how information relevance can move society towards a fairer and more equitable future.

Few topics are more often discussed than surveillance, particularly in the context of surveillance technologies that reflect structural inequities. There is space, however, to bring more discussion of surveillance tech into the library literature. At the same time, literature on digital surveillance and associated systems such as Big Data, surveillance capitalism, and platform capitalism often discuss these phenomena as if they are novel rather than iterations of long-standing inequitable circumstances. We propose that a dialogue between surveillance literature and critical library literature will benefit both areas: theories from the surveillance domain can strengthen examinations of structural oppression in libraries while theories from critical library literature can strengthen acknowledgment of surveillance techs’ historical roots. Moreover, overlap exists between concepts used in surveillance and library literature, including concerns about neutrality and classification practices. Therefore, after reviewing surveillance theories and their applicability to libraries, we demonstrate how these scholarly areas may strengthen each other, with three major consequences: (a) moving library literature beyond considerations of the panopticon in favor of the surveillant assemblage; (b) recognizing that surveillance tech is a hyper-visible form of historical oppression; and (c) acknowledging that the library ethos is critical to any fight for justice within information science.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the top of the agenda for education leaders today in educating the next generation across the globe. However, public understanding of AI technologies and how to define AI literacy is under-explored. This vision poses upcoming challenges for our next generation to learn about AI. On this note, an exploratory review was conducted to conceptualize the newly emerging concept “AI literacy”, in search for a sound theoretical foundation to define, teach and evaluate AI literacy. Grounded in literature on 18 existing peer-reviewed articles, this review proposed four aspects (i.e, know and understand, use, evaluate, and ethical issues) for fostering AI literacy based on the adaptation of classic literacies. This study sheds light on the consolidated definition, teaching, and ethical concerns on AI literacy, establishing the groundwork for future research such as competency development and assessment criteria on AI literacy.

AI language models trained on Web data generate prose that reflects human knowledge and public sentiments, but can also contain novel insights and predictions. We asked the world’s best language model, GPT-3, fifteen difficult questions about the nature, value, and future of library and information science (LIS), topics that receive perennial attention from LIS scholars. We present highlights from its 45 different responses, which range from platitudes and caricatures to interesting perspectives and worrisome visions of the future, thus providing an LIS-tailored demonstration of the current performance of AI language models. We also reflect on the viability of using AI to forecast or generate research ideas in this way today. Finally, we have shared the full response log online for readers to consider and evaluate for themselves.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are embedded in institutions that are not diverse, that are inequitable, unjust, and exclusionary. How do we address the interface between AI systems and an unjust world, in service to human flourishing? One mechanism for addressing AI Ethics is AI Ethics Education: training those who will build, use, and/or be subject to AI systems to have clear moral reasoning, make responsible decisions, and take right actions. This paper presents, as part of a larger project, work on what AI Ethics instructors currently do and how they describe their motivating concerns. I find that although AI Ethics content and pedagogy is varied, there are some common motivating concerns particular to this kind of teaching, which may be useful in structuring future guidance for new AI Ethics teachers, evaluating existing pedagogy, guiding research on new pedagogies, and promoting discussion with the AI Ethics community.

Journal and series editors will share their ideas about the future of publishing. They will discuss their work as editors and the challenges and opportunities they see going forward in managing and advocating for excellence.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has affected everyone’s life on a daily basis for more than a year. However, some racial groups have experienced a double pandemic, that of COVID-19 and racist attacks incorrectly tied to the pandemic. Harassment and physical intimidation were the source of many anti-Asian attacks. The number of unarmed black people assaulted and killed by police almost tripled during 2020 when compared 2019. In this panel, we will attempt to analyze recent racial attacks in terms of malinformation, such as misinformation, disinformation, or shallow, historical stereotypes of ethnic minorities as another layer of the pandemic originating with racism or inflamed grievances. The panelists will discuss the proposed topic drawing from each panelist’s expertise and an interactive discussion with the audience will follow after each panelist’s presentation. Members and attendees at ASIS&T who have an interest in the spread of dis- and misinformation via social media and politicizing the pandemic crisis will find our topics useful to their research.

Despite COVID-19’s devastating repercussions on higher education, scholars have yet to address its impact on Library and Information Science pedagogy. This exploratory qualitative case study centers on how archival educators weathered the onslaught of the pandemic. Drawing upon semistructured interviews with 31 archival educators and documentary evidence, this research addresses the sudden shift to online education; the concomitant loss of hands-on work opportunities and the workarounds educators developed; affectivity and an emergent ethics of pedagogical care among students and educators; and educators’ lessons learned from the pandemic and their future projections regarding archival education. This paper illuminates the evolving landscape of pedagogy and its attendant challenges preparing the next generation of archival professionals during an unprecedented period of duress.

Addressing the data skills gap, namely the superabundance of data and the lack of human capital to exploit it, this paper argues that iSchools and Library and Information Science programs are ideal venues for data science education. It unpacks two case studies: the LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform (LEADS-4-NDP) project (2017-2019), and the LIS Education and Data Science-Integrated Network Group (LEADING) project (2020-2023). These IMLS-funded initiatives respond to four national digital platform challenges: LIS faculty prepared to teach data science and mentor the next generation of educators and practitioners, an underdeveloped pedagogical infrastructure, scattered and inconsistent data science education opportunities for students and current information professionals, and an immature data science network. LEADS and LEADING have made appreciable collaborative, interdisciplinary contributions to the data science education community; these projects comprise an essential part of the long-awaited and much-needed national digital platform.

There is an increasing uptake of digital technologies across African countries. Public, private, and government services have adopted digital technologies to improve work processes, create jobs, and better service delivery. This short paper seeks to answer: 1) What is the current state of digital readiness in African countries? 2) Do existing digital readiness assessment tools and metrics help to assess the digital readiness of countries in Africa? Analysis of publicly available data from Cisco index of readiness score and Broadband speed ranking by cable.co.uk, reveal that: 1) African countries' digital readiness score is below the global average of 11.96, on a scale of 0 to 25 (except Tunisia with score of 12.05); and 2) African countries' broadband speed is below the global mean speed of 25Mbps (mean speed of 4.51 and 3.80 Mbps for sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, respectively). Second, analysis of various assessment tools show that the existing metrics can't be used as is to diagnose and evaluate Africa's digital readiness. Instead factors such as infrastructure; last-mile connectivity to homes, schools, etc.; and skill gaps should be considered. This study shows the need for an appropriate assessment tools so countries in Africa prioritize efforts to embrace digital readiness.

This paper is the initial discussion of a larger project Tattoo and Information, exploring tattoos as an information and communication phenomenon from multicultural perspectives and various use purposes. The overall purpose of the project is to provide insight into information seeking and experience in the context of tattoos in order to identify information literacy, visual literacy and cultural literacy skills as well as communications skills necessary for a successful tattoo experience in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this paper, we present findings from the literature review accompanied by preliminary insights from four interviews. The findings reflect thematic areas of research focusing on tattoos and gaps that exist. We used interviews to capture what topics emerge from tattoo narratives and whether they align with topics and gaps identified in the literature review. Based on the findings, we identify areas for future research.

This SIG-ED panel addresses the role of belonging in distance learning in a variety of learning contexts, including typical online courses as well as in independent studies and other mentoring contexts. The panel explores the impact of belonging on student success and considers how instructors’ choices in course design, technology use, mentoring, and other aspects of distance learning can enhance or detract from fostering a sense of belonging.

Trust greatly contributes to human-AI collaboration, however, human’s trust to IPA is hard to establish and lacks exploration. The purpose of this paper is to recognize the factors that affect the trustworthiness of IPA. 358 questionnaires were analyzed by PLS-SEM to construct the model, while thematic analysis was used to discover expectance of IPA. Chi-square tests and T-test were used to distinguish the difference between two user groups. Three factors that capability of system, personality of agent, and availability of interface have a significant impact on the trustworthiness of IPA. The capability of system is the most essential as the threshold with users’ plenty of expectations. Most users pay less attention to the availability of interface and the personality of agent has a great impact on the trustworthiness of IPA. The factors found enrich the trusted AI research and inspire insights of design of IPA.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020, uncertainty surrounding its origins and nature led to widespread conspiracy-related theories (CRT). Use of technological platforms enabled the rapid and exponential spread of COVID-19 CRT. This study applies social contagion theory to examine how Google Autocomplete (GA) perpetuates COVID-19 CRT. An in-house software program, Autocomplete Search Logging Tool (ASLT) captured a snapshot of GA COVID-19 related searches early in the pandemic (from March to May 2020) across 76 randomly-selected countries to gain insight into search behaviors thought to reflect beliefs globally. The authors identified 15 keywords relating to COVID-19 CRT predictions. Findings show that the searches across different countries received varying degrees of GA COVID-19 CRT predictions. This investigation is among the first to apply social contagion theory to autocomplete applications and can be used in future research to explain and perhaps mitigate the spread of CRT.

We investigated user voice switching behavior (VSB) in voice-enabled digital assistants (VDAs), focusing on the importance of and preference for the voice accents, genders, and age to match with those of the users. We incorporated images of ten people with diverse races, ethnicities, age, genders, and religions to embody the voice interfaces (EVIs). In an online survey, we collected demographic, background, and VDA usage data. The sample consisted of 214 participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (http://mturk.com). The participants were selected based on owning a VDA (e.g., Alexa Home) or owning a device (e.g., smartphone, tablet, or computer), and setting the device on English as the default language. The age of the participants ranged from 18-35 years. Findings revealed that, regardless of age, the majority of the participants switched the voice interface and for various reasons. Further, participants placed importance on voice matching with their gender, accent, and age. Participants ranked the young White female, Asian female, and Black female EVIs as the most preferred for voice switching and interactions. We coin the concept, Interface mirroring, which should help designers to create more diverse and inclusive EVIs, ensuring fairness and equality in the design of VDAs.

This study discusses the properties of research data repositories and explores metadata about 2,646 entries in the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) to identify the characteristics attributed to infrastructures they exhibit. The results reveal how research data repositories function as information infrastructure for scientific community members and contribute to the small body of literature that examines data repositories through a socio-technical lens.

Research data is an asset. Researchers may be required to provide access to their data by scientific funders or aca-demic journals and deposit their data in archives. Managers of archives are guided by principles, policies, and the law when curating and providing access to data. Practices around data storage and access, however, are not always cut and dry; research data managers sometimes need to interpret policies. This paper presents findings from qualita-tive interviews with 15 data managers from 8 repositories in the U.S. These repositories were all affiliated with uni-versities but served varied constituents and provided a range of services. Differences revealed opportunities and chal-lenges in managing data repositories regarding, for instance, who can access data and the level of protection data requires. We also found that data-related policy challenges may stem from any stage of the research lifecycle.

Measuring the societal impact of digital repositories is a wicked problem. To capture information about the impacts of digital repositories that become certified as Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs), a taxonomy describing activities cited as evidence of compliance with TDR standards is needed to relate those activities to socially beneficial outcomes. This paper presents a Minimum Viable Prototype (MVP) for a TDR Impacts taxonomy to enable the expression of their activities in a structured way. Our MVP provides a proof-of-concept that by formalizing concepts about TDRs in a taxonomy, we can investigate ways to measure whether the impacts associated with becoming and remaining a certified TDR are also impacts that generate societal value. Implications of the work described include potential strategies to identify, extract, and/or author machine-readable descriptions of measurable facets of TDR activities and the resulting impacts on communities.

For over a year, the pandemic has forced youth to alter their routines and rely almost exclusively on technology to learn, play and connect with family and friends. Although some alterations in youth’s routine seem to be temporary, some adaptations and appropriations resulting from interactions with technology will likely be forever altered. As this scenario develops, we must reflect on how these permanent changes will affect our approaches and inquiries on youth information interaction. This 90-minute panel will convene scholars and members of the ASIS&T community interested in discussing the present and the future of digital youth research. Panelists will mediate focused conversations with participants to generate a collective account of experiences and reflections based on challenges and research plans for after the pandemic. As the implications of a global pandemic are unfolding, youth information interaction research will be critical to inform policies and programs in education and reduce digital divides.

This panel engages conference attendees in the history and foundations of information science and provides an opportunity to reflect upon our field’s current and future identity(s). It enacts the following scenario: At an orientation event for an information science program a spokesperson gives incoming students a brief address on the theme, “Welcome to information science.” Six imaginative but authentic versions of that talk are offered here. To showcase the variety of approaches to information science across the past century, each disquisition is inspired by the work of one luminary, namely: Paul Otlet, S. R. Ranganathan, Jesse H. Shera, Elfreda Chatman, and Marcia J. Bates. In an effort to encourage a more spacious information science, an indigenous perspective on ways of knowing is also included. Attendees to this session will time-travel across almost 100 years of information science history and ultimately rest in the reality of a multi-perspective discipline.

This paper examines clinical notes to identify reported symptoms and investigate patient-provider communication processes in alpha-gal syndrome (AGS). Clinical notes appear to be a credible and stable source of research where the researcher can find information regarding both symptoms and environmental factors of AGS. Compilation of notes could be used for a checklist to aid in diagnosis. This study analyzed clinicians’ notes in patient records retrieved from the Electronic Medical Record Search Engine (EMERSE). The most reported symptoms fell into four general categories: skin (42%), inflammation (17%), gastrointestinal (20%), and anaphylaxis (21%). Environmental triggers were also commonly reported. This in-depth analysis of clinical notes of AGS can serve as a basis for future automation of rare disease analysis; moreover, it provides a basic understanding of the granularity of information that an electronic health record (EHR) may provide for rare disease identification.

COVID-19 vaccination could be the most economical and effective public health intervention to prevent and control novel coronavirus. Beijing is one of the first regions in China to implement the COVID-19 vaccination policy, we conducted semi-structured interview on 20 participants with past vaccination AND/OR COVID-19 vaccination decision-making. This study summarizes the consistency and particularity in the context of decision-making in terms of information sources, information content and information behavior.

Members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, plus (LGBTQ+) community may face discrimination in healthcare, which can subsequently impact information and care-seeking patterns. A tendency to avoid or delay health care is particularly concerning for LGBTQ+ people who faces both physical and mental health disparities. This paper presents a narrative review of literature on healthcare discrimination, LGBTQ+ care-seeking, and associated information behaviors in order to generate a preliminary model of LGBTQ+ decision-making around care and well-being, called the Model of the Pathways to LGBTQ+ Well-Being. This model can be used to investigate links between information behavior and relevant health behaviors and outcomes in a marginalized population.

With rising cases of brutality, gun violence, and racial injustice towards particularly the Black and AAPI (Asians, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders) communities, racism is being recognized and declared as an emergency and public health threat. Diversity, equity, and antiracism are core to the Library and Information Science (LIS) profession as we strive to uphold the principle of “libraries serve humanities” and the motto of “free to all.” During this extended period of ‘racial-injustice as a public crisis,’ what are the roles of LIS professionals in battling racism, violence, and other systems of oppression? This panel session features experienced LIS professionals and educators who specialize in DEI, reporting their activities, stories, and thoughts on antiracism. A breakout room activity is envisioned following panelists’ presentations, with participants discussing and sharing their antiracism initiatives. Participants will also brainstorm the next course of action in the LIS profession’s journey in battling racism.

This paper proposes an indicator for measuring the level of commitment to academic journals. The indicator is demonstrated on a sample of core LIS-journals. By monitoring authorship patterns over a 20-year period, it is shown that some journals have a higher frequency of returning authors than others, consequently showing a larger degree of community commitment. The paper discusses how the indicator may be applied when studying factors influencing researchers’ journal selection decisions.

New terms and theoretical concepts in information literacy have emerged over the last decade, and these have led to revisions in the standards for information literacy. In order to determine whether information literacy research has reflected these trends, we collected SSCI literature for the 2011 to 2020 period related to information literacy in higher education (ILHE) and conducted analysis using bibliographic mapping and content analysis. Our research found that the volume of research on ILHE has increased in the last five years as compared to the five years before that, and that keywords related to literacy (such as “digital literacy” and “multiliteracies”) have been getting a great deal of discussion. After the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (FILHE) was announced, curriculum design research based on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (ILCSHE) continued to outnumber that done based on the Framework.

The number of Open Access (OA) research articles is trending upward. This research aims to understand the correlations between different OA types and the impact of OA research articles evaluated based on the citation numbers. To avoid bias caused by the publication year, we chose to use COVID-19 studies in different fields to take advantage of this topic’s quick turnaround of data. We analyzed the bibliometrics data and citation numbers (excluding self-citations) of around 42,000 English language articles published in 2020 related to COVID-19. We evaluated different types of OA categories such as Gold, Bronze, and Hybrid articles separately. Results show that amongst all OA categories, Hybrid/Green and Bronze/Green OA articles had significant citation advantages. Green OA articles returned more citations than articles with the other OA status. Gold OA articles have no citation advantages compared to non-OA articles. Gold/Green OA articles had the highest self-citation rates, followed by Non-OA articles. The results of the study can be used in understanding different OA categories and the reasons for OA choices. Certain strategies can be made accordingly to improve the awareness of OA in different fields and help OA publishers to improve the OA services.

Scholars typically measure the influence of scientific work using citation counts, but many citations are symbolic and denote little-to-no influence. A common view is that highly cited papers may be especially appealing for “persuasion by name-dropping” and attract many symbolic citations, making their citations denote less influence on average. Here, we rigorously test this view using customized author surveys about the intellectual influence of referenced work on an author’s own papers, collecting data on 17,154 referencing decisions from 9,380 corresponding authors. Results are contrary to persuasion by name-dropping: while most citations (54%) had little influence on their citers, citations to the most highly cited papers were two to three times more likely to denote high influence. To explain this pattern we develop a process model based on status signals, and support it with experimental and associational data. Overall, we find that authors invest more attention into highly cited papers and cite them less symbolically, making these papers influence the research frontier even more than their raw citation counts suggest.

Launched in October 2019, the Research Data Management Librarian Academy (RDMLA) addresses the learning gaps in RDM training. Through a unique partnership among practicing librarians, LIS faculty, and industry, the RDMLA has produced a dynamic open learning experience, highlighting the benefits of collaboration and skill-sharing. This collaboration’s success lies in how the project leveraged each partner’s strengths and experience while centering on the shared purpose, dedication to equitable learning, and mutual respect among the team members. This panel focuses on the collaborative efforts undertaken by the RDMLA leadership and instructors to develop an open-access professional development education program. Five panelists will share their experience working on this large collaborative project from varying perspectives, the lessons learned while developing their content, the challenges they encountered, and their understanding of the benefits of such a collaborative endeavor in producing free, open-access learning to foster a community of practice in RDM.

Online open-source knowledge repository such as Wikipedia has become an increasingly important source for users to access knowledge. However, due to its large volume, it is challenging to evaluate Wikipedia article quality manually. To fill this gap, we propose a novel approach named “feature fusion-based stack learning” to assess the quality of Wikipedia articles. Pre-trained language models including BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and ELMo (Embeddings from Language Models) are applied to extract semantic information in Wikipedia content. The feature fusion framework consisting of semantic and statistical features is built and fed into an out-of-sample (OOS) stacking model, which includes both machine learning and deep learning models. We compare the performance of proposed model with some existing models with different metrics extensively, and conduct ablation studies to prove the effectiveness of our framework and OOS stacking. Generally, the experiment shows that our method is much better than state-of-the-art models.

Much of the literature in knowledge discovery from data (KDD) focuses on algorithms that are faster and more accurate at capturing patterns in a given data set. However, answering a research question is fundamentally connected with how well the data is aligned with the questions being asked. Thus, data selection is one of the most important steps to ensure that models produced from the KDD process are useful in practice. A lack of documentation about the data selection rationale and the transformations needed to semantically align the data streams prevents others from reproducing the research and obfuscates development of best practices in data integration. Our goal in this paper is to provide KDD practitioners with a framework that brings together theories in provenance, information quality, and contextual reasoning, to enable researchers to achieve a semantically aligned dataset with data selection, description, and documentation based on an application-focused assessment.

Scientific literature is one of the most significant resources for sharing knowledge. Researchers turn to scientific literature as a first step in designing an experiment. Given the extensive and growing volume of literature, the common approach of reading and manually extracting knowledge is too time consuming, creating a bottleneck in the research cycle. This challenge spans nearly every scientific domain. For the materials science, experimental data distributed across millions of publications are extremely helpful for predicting materials properties and the design of novel materials. However, only recently researchers have explored computational approaches for knowledge extraction primarily for inorganic materials. This study aims to explore knowledge extraction for organic materials. We built a research dataset composed of 855 annotated and 708,376 unannotated sentences drawn from 92,667 abstracts. We used named-entity-recognition (NER) with BiLSTM-CNN-CRF deep learning model to automatically extract key knowledge from literature. Early-phase results show a high potential for automated knowledge extraction. The paper presents our findings and a framework for supervised knowledge extraction that can be adapted to other scientific domains.

Spiteri and Pecoskie (2018) proposed a taxonomy of terms to describe emotion and tone in novels. We tested those terms against 5144 full-text book reviews from the New York Times Book Review to discover whether the proposed terms were used in published reviews to describe books, and of those terms used, which were most used. Findings demonstrate that the terms chosen by Spiteri and Pecoskie are used in professional book reviews, though some may be used in multiple ways, rather than only related to emotional content. Results of this work contribute to a larger scale project of testing machine models of identifying emotional content in books and ultimately being able to create automated media recommendation systems that include emotion as an identifier.

Most of the knowledge in the library and information science (LIS) discipline is created and published by researchers in developed countries. Two roundtable sessions of ASIS&T SIG-III with the ASIS&T Africa Chapter and ASIS&T South Asia Chapter, in early 2021, confirmed “the lack of a conducive research environment” as the primary reason for this inequality in the discipline and called for systematic efforts, like this panel, to (a) create awareness about this inequality and (b) start building a global support system for LIS researchers in developing countries. In the first 30 minutes of this panel, six LIS scholars with cultural roots, academic training, and research experience in developing countries will illustrate common challenges to conducting and publishing research in developing countries. In the next 30 minutes, attendees will be divided into groups, with each group facilitated by a panelist, to brainstorm solutions for addressing the challenges related to academic training for conducting and publishing research, accessing resources, institutional support, opportunities for research collaboration and funding, fieldwork, analyzing data, composing manuscripts, and finding mentors, among others. In the last 30 minutes, each group will present its findings.

As use of arts-involved and data visualization methods increases in information science, it is important to reflect on strengths and weaknesses of various methods. In this 90-minute panel, an international lineup of information researchers will share their experiences using the participatory, visual elicitation technique information world mapping (IWM) in their work. Panelists will discuss ways to adapt the technique to different contexts, share their thoughts on what is next for IWM, and raise questions regarding challenges and new uses of IWM in information research. Presentations will be followed by an interactive discussion among panelists and Q&A period with the audience.

Privacy protections for human subject data are often focused on reducing individual harms that result from improper disclosure of personally identifiable information. However, in a networked environment where information infrastructures enable rapid sharing and linking of different datasets there exist numerous harms which abstract to group or collective levels. In this paper we discuss how privacy protections aimed at individual harms, as opposed to collective or group harms, results in an incompatible notion of privacy protections for social science research that synthesizes multiple data sources. Using the framework of Contextual Integrity, we present empirical scenarios drawn from 17 in-depth interviews with researchers conducting synthetic research using one or more privacy sensitive data sources. We use these scenarios to identify ways that digital infrastructure providers can help social scientists manage collective harms over time through specific, targeted privacy engineering of supporting research infrastructures and data curation.

This paper reports on the development of a metadata application profile (AP), MetaFAIR, designed to support research data management (RDM) to make research data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The development of MetaFAIR followed a three-step process that included learning about the characteristics of datasets from researchers to establish their context and requirements, as well as iterative design and testing with researchers’ feedback. Guided by the FAIR principles, MetaFAIR focuses on accommodating description needs particular to computational social science datasets while seeking to provide general enough elements to describe data collections across many different domains. In this paper, MetaFAIR is placed in the context of historical and recent developments in the areas of RDM and application profile creation; following this contextualization, the paper describes the central considerations and challenges of the MetaFAIR development process and discusses its significance for future work in RDM.

Achieving the potential of widespread sharing of open research data requires that sharing data is straightforward, supported, and well-understood; and that data is discoverable by researchers. Our literature review and environment scan suggest that while substantial effort is dedicated to structured descriptions of research data, unstructured fields are commonly available (title, description) yet poorly understood. There is no clear description of what information should be included, in what level of detail, and in what order. These human-readable fields, routinely used in indexing and search features and reliably federated, are essential to the research data user experience. We propose a set of high-level best practices for unstructured description of datasets, to serve as the essential starting point for more granular, discipline-specific guidance. We based these practices on extensive review of literature on research article abstracts; archival practice; experience in supporting research data management; and grey literature on data documentation. They were iteratively refined based on comments received in a webinar series with researchers, data curators, data repository managers, and librarians in Canada. We demonstrate the need for information research to more closely examine these unstructured fields and provide a foundation for a more detailed conversation.

Embodiment and affect are understudied in information science work to date. Literature that engages with embodied information interactions typically focuses on physical bodies, while work on affect largely centers people’s emotional experiences in formal knowledge institutions like libraries. Room therefore exists to grow in our understanding of embodiment and affect, particularly in terms of theorizing how bodies and feelings factor into a wide range of information experiences from non-dominant standpoints. This panel centers queer experiences and queer theory in order to expand conceptions of and connections between embodied and affective dimensions of information interactions. Panelists will present a range of research that examines queer people’s practices and experiences with information in historical, archival, creative, and health-related domains. Bodies and emotions are essential components of critical queer theoretical perspectives, meaning that scholarship which centers queerness and its intersections with constructs like race has great potential to expand many branches of information science further beyond their normative bents. In concert, topics discussed should spark conversation among attendees about the theoretical and practical benefits of deeply studying embodiment and affect and further utilizing critical theory in multiple domains within the information science discipline.

This study examines how rational factors and trust modify health behaviors and various stages of trust mediate the rational factors in behavior changing through four stages of it. By integrating factors of TPB and various stages of trust, a health behavior change framework was proposed. Quantitative data on TPB, trust and behavior change were collected from Chinese youths through online survey. SEM was applied to analyze the data from 448 valid questionnaires to verify it. The findings show: Both TPB and trust constructs have significant impacts on modifying health behavior change; Trust mediates the effect of perceived behavioral control on health behavior change, while the stages of site content evaluation and longer-term engagement of trust act as partial mediators; Relationships existed between TPB factors and trust stages. This study advances the understanding of health behavior change with regards to rational factors and trust stages and provides implications for stakeholders.

This study investigates surrogates’ health information sharing behavior through information sources and information evaluation. A lab-based experiment was conducted. Twenty-five participants read five scenarios, each with three preselected webpages from a government, a commercial, and an online forum source. Participants had to decide whether to share the information with an imaginary friend of theirs and provide rationales (an indication of information evaluation). Content analysis and mixed effects logistic regression models were performed. Government websites were recommended for sharing the most, followed by commercial and online forum sources. Criteria predicting participants’ intention to share information were different for each information source. The content’s usefulness and trustworthiness were two criteria predicting participants’ intention to share commercial websites. Source’s trustworthiness and individual relevant criterion were two significant predictors for government sources. Source’s trustworthiness had negative effects on sharing information from online forums. 13.3% of the information evaluation involved using both positive and negative criteria.

Cancer patients seek information about their health and illness using many different approaches. Some prefer to seek intensively whereas other avoid seeking information. Over the course of the cancer continuum an individual may meet their needs using several different approaches. In this paper, we explore how avoidance can be an approach used as part of information seeking activities and not just as an alternative approach. Interviews with six current and former cancer patients were conducted and analyzed. We identify the different patterns of information seeking among the interviewees ranging from seeking intensively to avoiding information. Furthermore, we find that exposing yourself selectively to information as well as avoiding some information can be strategies to protect the information seeker from information the individual is not able to cope with. This study indicates that the information seeking approaches are overlapping.

Major new developments in the history and heritage of ASIS&T and of information science generally are presented. First, the progress of the ASIS&T Curator’s Working Group’s strategic plan for ASIST’s knowledge management and for stewardship of its heritage resources will be presented by Deanna Hall, the ASIS&T Curator. Second, the ambitious program of the ASIS&T History Committee to encourage attention to historical work by promoting open access to past publications and the creation of guides to resources will be reported by the Committee chair, Michael Buckland. Third, the emergence of extensive humanities research on information history, newly summarized in new encyclopedic collection Information: a historical companion (2021), will be introduced and characterized by Paul Duguid, a contributor and co-editor.

Historically, information professionals have advocated for intellectual freedom, specifically the rights to free speech and expression. The unrestricted flow of information has been foundational to library and information science practice. Yet, free speech at times is protected to the detriment of vulnerable communities. In this panel discussion, four library and information science researchers discuss the scholarly and pragmatic tensions surrounding LIS ethics and anti-hegemony. Using Chatman’s (1996) concept of information poverty and Gibson and Martin’s (2019) theory of information marginalization as discursive guides, the panelists will describe how they negotiate ethical principles, information justice, LIS professionalization, and social inclusion.

This paper is among the first to investigate information work concepts in the archival context. A qualitative case study, it relies on two rounds of semi-structured interviews with information professionals at medical history collections in Philadelphia. These interviews bracketed the six months before and after COVID-19’s onset. We analyze three lines of information work that evolved as these archivists shifted the work context to their home environments: affective effort, information management, and hybrid onsite-remote work performance. Findings suggest that tasks such as processing, digitizing, and curating resources (invisible pre-pandemic) and reference services (visible pre-pandemic) overlap in archivists’ hybrid onsite-remote work performance during the pandemic. In recognizing the links between archivists’ information work and work performance as a holistic approach to studies of the information-intensive archival context, this research has implications for the centrality of work context, purpose, and value in the archival context.

To understand the roles of fiction reading in mitigating readers’ stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study explores readers’ motivations, preferences, and reading behaviors. Through an open-ended online survey posted on social media platforms and an online reading community, the researchers collected 76 responses from adult fiction readers. Through qualitative coding, three prominent themes were identified: escapism, re-reading behavior, and access and format. Readers actively escape into fictional worlds, often through re-reading books, to cope with the pandemic. Also, cost and available channels of access shape readers' selection of fiction book format. These themes highlight elements of fiction reading that are pertinent to emotionally-strained individuals, which can provide insight for reference and recommendation services. By advancing researchers’ understanding of pleasure reading behaviors and the important selection criteria for fiction readers during stressful times, this study contributes to the body of knowledge in Readers Advisory (RA) and information behavior.

The emotional connotation in ancient poetry is a valuable human spiritual culture, adopting the key semantic technique to parse the emotional word in poetry under different themes is beneficial to discover the relationship between poetry theme and emotion. In a “cold environment” (without learning corpus) of Tang poetry, this work presents, for the first time, the automatic recognition and analysis of large-scale humanistic emotional words within ancient Chinese poetry from different themes. A “cold start” automatic citation method for character sequences is proposed to obtain the learning corpus. The best F1 and F1_distinct of trained BERT-BiLSTM-CRFs model respectively reach 96.27% and 86.04%. Deep learning expanded imagery words that convey emotion to realize knowledge discovery. The relationships between theme and emotion word show that Chinese poetry is good at using natural objects to express various sentiments to people, with each theme of poetry owns distinguished emotion feature.

Leisure is seen as important in the settlement and acculturation experiences of immigrant and refugee populations as well as helping them in maintaining their cultural identity and ties to their homeland. The study covered by this paper looks at a virtual small world, converging around a leisure activity of fanfiction reading and writing from a gender and diaspora perspective, with an aim to understanding what is experienced as information within that context. Adopting a theoretical lens drawing on information and document experience literature, information was found to be experienced as everyday, as social ties, as awareness and as memories leading to a broad conceptualization of information as meaningful experience. The study also highlighted the important role played by the social context in these experiences of information, while underscoring the usefulness in adopting an experience approach, going beyond what has been the norm in the form of information seeking and problematic situations.

The proposed panel will address the issues of the discovery and reuse of publicly available data on the web in the context of data service practices from a global perspective. Thousands of data discovery services have appeared around the world since the promotion of ‘open science’, reproducible research, and the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data principles in the research sector. However, there is also increasing demand for transparency of search algorithms, and in the design, development, evaluation, and deployment of current data search services; this requires a better understanding of how users approach data discovery and interact with data in search settings. From a global perspective, we will identify and discuss the specific system design issues in data discovery and reuse, drawing on our organization of the NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research) project of Data Search track, the design and evaluation of the data discovery service of the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), and studies examining researchers’ practices of data discovery and reuse.

This panel invites industry leaders to discuss how they apply their research skills and experiences to industry work to address practical problems. Panelists will review and highlight their own observations on best practice approaches to doing practical research and identify how research shapes and informs their work. They will also discuss trends, challenges, and opportunities for collaboration between industry and academia.

This panel, sponsored by the ASIS&T Standards Committee, has two purposes. First, the panel reports the most recent activities of the national and international standards in the field of information science and technologies in which the ASIS&T Standards Committee and members have been involved. Second, the panel will focus on a number of significant standardization efforts, their important roles, and the challenges in dealing with semantic conflicts while addressing inclusion and relevance to ensure non-bias in information representation and the FAIRness of data. Those efforts have led to the globally adopted standard systems, vocabularies, and schemas, which will be introduced by this panel.

The ubiquitous search box promised to democratize knowledge access by making information universally accessible. But while many search engines cater well for certain user groups, information tasks and content types, they cater poorly for others. Poorly-served users include those with certain types of impairment (e.g. dyslexia), and weakly-supported tasks include highly exploratory goals, where it can be difficult to express information needed as a query. Furthermore, the overdominance of search functionality in many information environments has restricted support for other important forms of information acquisition, such as serendipitous information encountering and creative ‘inspiration hunting.’ Search results and recommendations can also promote certain types of content due to algorithmic bias. Rather than act as a great leveler by making information acquisition effective, efficient and enjoyable for all, search engines often unfairly favor some types of user, task or content over others. In short, search is not always equitable. This panel discussion will elucidate the inequity of search as an information acquisition paradigm from multiple perspectives and propose design principles to ensure more equitable information acquisition.

On March 16, 2021, six Asian women were killed in Atlanta, US, possibly out of racist motivations. This tragic event, now known as the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings, precipitated a massive increase in the volume of counter-anti-Asian declarations and discussion on social media platforms such as Twitter. In a pilot study to chronicle and profile public opinions, social movements and patterns in the global Twitter discourse we scraped the Twitter API using the query term “StopAsianHate”, obtaining more than 5.5 million tweets and their metadata. By using social movement analytical frameworks to analyze traffic peaks and the use of hashtags, we identified a set of more than 300 frequently used hashtags that can serve as specific query words in future archival ingest activities, as well as the dimensions of and current problems with this social movement. This suggests the utility of this approach for both archiving applications and social-political analyses of emerging topics and concerns.

Social media platforms have been hailed as “politically disruptive communication technologies'' (Hong & Nadler, 2012). Individuals express opinions and engage with politicians, the press, and each other on social media, sometimes using offensive language (Rossini et al., 2020). Content moderation has been adopted by many social media platforms to screen and evaluate offensive speech. In the present study we trained offensive speech classifiers to analyze offensive speech examples by integrating three archival datasets. We then used the trained classifier to examine a large body of comments about YouTube videos posted during the 2018 midterm election cycle. This provided information on the prevalence of various kinds of offensive comments and the pattern of content moderation used by YouTube. We also examined comment negativity using data from offensive speech lexicons. Our results showed systematic variance in the prevalence of speech topics depending upon the political orientation of the content. Language use was significantly different between left and right-leaning videos for comments related to sexism.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, racists remarks accompanied by racist hashtags were disseminated via social media. Particularly, Asian Americans in the U.S. have been suffered from racism and xenophobia resulting in physical violence and mental harassment in many cases. Despite the major function of the social media as an open access platform for unedited and free speech for people with diverse background, the global episodes of the soaring racism and xenophobia occurred in online public arenas reaffirmed that the platforms could be used for a nurturing ground of racism and xenophobia. This study examined the top influencers in the racist hashtag Twitter network and top shared neighboring hashtags with #Chinavirus or #Chinesevirus. We extracted topics from the racist hashtag Twitter network applying the state-of-the-art BERTopic modeling technique and conducted a geo-locational analysis of the participants of the network globally and by U.S. states. Trump was identified as the most influential actor in the #Chinavirus and #Chinesevirus Twitter network. This study confirmed previous literature that political elite’s public communication strategy to deviate the attention of the public suffered from the new disease and went through hardships under the epidemic crisis.

The visual records police body-worn cameras (BWCs) produce are frequently characterized as presenting more complete, comprehensive, and objective evidence of police-public encounters than other forms of evidence. Despite a growing body of research on the social impacts of BWCs, we still lack a rich understanding of what information these technologies provide viewers. This ongoing exploratory project examines how people interpret what they see in BWC footage and what judgments they make about the appropriateness of depicted police conduct. Drawing from interviews with twelve students and twelve sworn police officers, I present initial exploratory findings. Participants viewed BWC video of a police-public contact in which an officer stops a man on a sidewalk to question him, resulting in a foot chase and, ultimately, an arrest. When asked whether the officer’s behavior was justified, police officer participants were more likely to focus on things like police training, procedure, and legality to justify the officer’s action, while student participants were more likely to focus on the officer’s demeanor, reporting that he should have been calmer and may have escalated the situation by not explaining clearly why he had initiated the stop.

Current researches paid less attention to the image position and layout of tweets containing multiple images. Inspired by the research on user cognition, this study explored the impact of image position and layout on user engagement. The XGBoost model trained on single-image tweet data was used to predict the "user engagement potential" of a single image in multi-image tweets. Then, the influence of image position and layout on user engagement was analyzed through correlation analysis and OLS regression. It was found that the right position was more important in tweets with less than or equal to 4 images, and the position effects became symmetric with image adding. Layouts with 6 and 4 images had positive effects on user engagement, while layouts with 7 and 9 or more images had negative effects. This study provides insights into user engagement with social media images and may help improve interaction.

Systematic reviews are widely used in evidence-based medicine. Conducting a systematic review requires intensive mental efforts, especially during the study screening process. This challenge has motivated the development of intelligent software. This study examined and compared the performance, workload, and user experience of two systematic review tools – Colandr with AI features and Covidence without AI features by conducting a mixed-method usability study. The results showed that, compared with Covidence, Colandr helped reviewers with higher precision in citation screening. However, the user experience with Colandr was not optimal due to problems in its user interface design. Therefore, we suggest that the design and development of AI-enabled SR software emphasize the usability of the interface and apply user-centered design principles.

A museum’s digital archive system gathers information about cultural heritage and makes it accessible to the public. In this study we clarify the extent to which search behaviors reflect task outcome and foster users’ knowledge of painting and calligraphy. Ten users participated in this evaluation of the Digital Archives of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Search System (DA-PCSS) of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. Participants’ search activities and interactions with the DA-PCSS were recorded in two simulated tasks. The results show that participants who received high scores for their essays on the tasks formulated precise queries: instead of general terms they used precise expressions describing features in paintings and calligraphy. In addition, they were able to seek out sources to explore the topics. For such participants, a meaning-making process seems to have occurred during the search process. Our results suggest that the criteria for learning at various stages of search suggested by Vakkari (2016) seem to validly reflect the quality of the search outcomes. In all, the results elucidate how the evaluated system supports users as they search for target items, as well as how learning occurs during the search process and in turn influences task outcomes.

Publishing in top journals is crucial for academic careers, but not all authors are equally successful in getting their papers accepted. Here, we examine ethnic disparities in publishing success using the peer review data of 31,779 manuscripts submitted between 2013-2018 to two biology journals, one field-leading (Journal A) and one middle-tier (Journal B). The data include accepted and rejected submissions, their peer reviews and citation trajectories, and author ethnicities determined via a name-based classifier. We find that overall, authors with minority-ethnicity names had significantly lower acceptance rates at both journals than those with British-origin names. However, for most ethnicities, these disparities are reduced or disappear when accounting for post-publication citation impact. Nevertheless, at Journal A, for a given level of future impact and other paper characteristics, editors were (i) less likely to send East Asian-authored papers out for peer review, and after receiving reviews, for a given level of peer reviewer enthusiasm (ii) less likely to ultimately accept them. In contrast to editors, Journal A’s peer reviewers gave recommendations that were similar across all ethnic groups. As submissions to top journals increasingly come from all over the globe, these findings signal the need to better understand editors’ decision-making.

As community-oriented programs move from intervention to infrastructure, questions of just and equitable access to that infrastructure both arise and become more consequential to those served. However, extant tools are general in scope, often undertested, and inconsistently linked with positive outcomes for served communities and service providers. We explore the dynamics and implications of a key tool within this infrastructure intended to enable portable collaboration across organizations serving those who are experiencing homelessness: the VI-SPDAT (Vulnerability Index - Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool). This tool, while providing a means of coordinated assessment, must itself be negotiated according to the values, data concerns, and goals of the agencies and service providers who make use of it. This paper reports findings from 29 interviews with individuals working in nonprofits, charities, and government agencies that provide services or resources to people experiencing homelessness within the City of Austin’s Continuum of Care. The life-and-death stakes of the VI-SPDAT, which is designed to prioritize access to services based in part on a prediction of potential for premature mortality, drive home the need for equitable and just infrastructure.

The rapid deployment of emergency remote teaching in the pandemic presents sweeping societal-level information systems phenomena worthy of scholarly inquiry. This paper reports findings from teacher interviews conducted with K-12 public school teachers, exploring how digital access and use gaps in communities reflect social inequalities as schools become swept up into e-learning technology expansion trends propelled by district and state imperatives. Results show persistence of home and school level digital affordance gaps as hindrances to pandemic pedagogy. We build upon crisis and critical informatics literature considering how theories in socio-technical systems research can inform these understandings, providing insights into the mutually reflecting and reinforcing role of digital inequality and social inequality, via the educative processes expected of public education in democratic societies, if current trends hold. Our work demonstrates some of the ways in which digital inequality gaps may play a further magnifying role of societal division through expanding edtech deployment in K-12 grades.

The foundations of information science define our field and, thereby, our professional identity. It follows that if our our professional identity is to be equitable, diverse, inclusive, and relevant, then the foundations of our field should also be. Three diverse contributions to the foundations of information science will illustrate diverse approaches to making information science more inclusive will be illustrated by experienced panelists with different backgrounds: Recuperating neglected work; exploring alternative methods; and drawing attention to undocumented work. Marcia Bates will revisit early work on information seeking. Michael Buckland and Wayne de Fremery will demonstrate an alternative approach to the problematic concept of “context.” Lin Wang will introduce aspects of the early history of information science in China.

This panel argues a paradigm shift is needed in library and information science (LIS) to move the field toward information equity, inclusion, relevance, diversity, and justice. LIS has undermined knowledge systems falling outside of Western traditions. While the foundations of LIS are based on epistemological concerns, the field has neglected to treat people as epistemic agents who are embedded in cultures, social relations and identities, and knowledge systems that inform and shape their interactions with data, information, and knowledge as well as our perceptions of each other as knowers. To achieve this shift we examine epistemicide --the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system, epistemic injustice and a critique of the user-centered paradigm. We present alternative epistemologies for LIS: critical consciousness, Black feminism, and design epistemology and discuss these in practice: community generated knowledges as sites of resistance and Indigenous data sovereignty and the “right to know”.

This is a SIG-KM sponsored panel presented by members of the SIG-KM officer team. First, the panel will overview their experience in knowledge management (KM) as scholars and scholar-practitioners. They will briefly discuss their career development successes and hurdles as a roadmap for others to follow. Second, the panel will discuss career pathways for KM scholars and scholar-practitioners in a global knowledge economy. Finally, they will hold an open discussion with audience members to share their experiences, expectations and hopes for the KM and the broader field of information science.

Older adults may be excluded from using digital health technologies due to limited eHealth literacy. Research is much needed to decrease disparities in eHealth literacy and increase the inclusiveness of such technologies. Integrating the preferences and expertise of older adults is key to age-appropriate design of eHealth tutorials. This study explores how participatory design (PD) techniques can be adapted to include older adults in the design of an eHealth tutorial. We worked with 9 older adults (aged 64 and 82) as co-designers and conducted PD sessions over 11 weeks in a senior center’s computer lab. Using thematic analysis, we identified 7 themes around the design of eHealth tutorials for older adults. We also identified successes and challenges in PD with older adults, along with benefits of partnering with senior centers. Our findings have implications for both the design of eHealth tutorials for older adults and for PD with older adults.

The paper examines the concept of participation in co-design practices with children and youth. Rooted in Participatory Design and Participatory Action Research frameworks, the paper draws from multi-disciplinary literature to survey existing definitions of the relationships, roles, and types of human interactions in participatory co-design. The paper advocates for the active role of children and youth in the co-design process and presents models of youth participation. The paper highlights the importance of understanding and clearly communicating various degrees of participation, with the ultimate goal of empowering youth and involving them in brainstorming, planning, decision-making, and interpretation stages of the design process. We introduce the concept of conscious co-design and the need to reflect on the design process at a meta level in Participatory Design and Participatory Action Research.

When quantifying the level of interdisciplinarity for scientific research, most established indicators employ a three-element diversity framework, namely variety, balance, and disparity, each of which captures a distinct but insufficient element. Among three, disparity, i.e. how different (dissimilar) the categories within a system are, is the most challenging one due to its calculation cost and conceptual ambiguity. The discriminative power for disparity is found to be weakened in more fine-grained science classification schemes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new method for quantifying disparity by applying Node2vec on the discipline citation network and retrieving distance between disciplines using embeddings vectors. Compared to cosine-based dissimilarity for disparity, our proposed method exhibited broader distribution and less skewness for disparity values, which could potentially lead to higher discriminative power of interdisciplinarity. A case study for Linguistics is also conducted to show the capability of detecting variations in disparity of the proposed method.

As an important pattern of scientific research, interdisciplinary collaboration is universally encouraged by science and technology policy makers. However, it remains a question whether interdisciplinary collaboration research is more disruptive than monodisciplinary research. To address this research question in this study, interdisciplinary collaboration is measured as whether the authors of a paper are from at least two disciplines, and the degree of "disruptive" is measured by the Disruption index proposed by Funk & Owen-Smith (2017). By using articles published in six journals from 1978 to 2019 in the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) database, we constructed an OLS regression model with journal fixed effect and time fixed effect to analyze the influence of interdisciplinary collaboration on the Disruption values with different citation windows. The findings show that interdisciplinary collaboration research is less disruptive than monodisciplinary research.

Finding the lineage of a research topic is crucial for understanding the prior state of the art and advancing scientific displacement. The deluge of scholarly articles makes it difficult to locate the most relevant prior work and causes researchers to spend a considerable amount of time building up their literature list. Citations play a significant role in discovering relevant literature. However, not all citations are created equal. A majority of the citations that a paper receives are for providing contextual, and background information to the citing papers and are not central to the theme of those papers. However, some papers are pivotal to the citing paper and inspire or stem up the research in the citing paper. Hence the nature of citation the former receives from the later is significant. In this work in progress paper, we discuss our preliminary idea towards establishing a lineage for a given research via identifying significant citations. We hypothesize that such an automated system can facilitate relevant literature discovery and help identify knowledge flow for at least a certain category of papers. The distal goal of this work is to identify the real impact of research work or a facility beyond direct citation counts.

Peer review is essential for advancing scientific research, but there are long-standing concerns that reviewers are biased by authors' prestige or other characteristics. Double-blind peer review has been proposed as a way to reduce reviewer bias, but the evidence for its effectiveness is limited and mixed. Here, we examine the effects of double-blind peer review by analyzing the peer review files of 5027 papers submitted to a top computer science conference that changed its reviewing format from single- to double-blind in 2018. We find that after switching to double-blind review, the scores given to the most prestigious authors significantly decreased. However, because many of these papers were above the threshold for acceptance, the change did not affect paper acceptance significantly. The inter-reviewer disagreement increased significantly in the double-blind format. Papers rejected in the single-blind format are cited more than those rejected under double-blind, suggesting that double-blind review better excludes poorer quality papers. Lastly, an apparently unrelated change in the rating scale from 10 to 4 points likely reduced prestige bias significantly such that papers’ acceptance was affected. These results support the effectiveness of double-blind review in reducing biases, while opening new research directions on the impact of peer review formats.

The goal of this panel is to define foundational social “boundaries” that libraries typically consider when defining their constituents. Who do librarians, archivists and information specialists serve? In the last decade we have witnessed a general pivot in nomenclature, from the “user” to “community.” What is behind the evolution in this terminology? Is this a simple change in the words we use, or does this reflect a new conceptualization of clientele or “the public?” The goal of this panel is to define foundational social and epistemic “boundaries” that libraries and information institutions typically consider when defining their constituents of interest. As a HFIS-sponsored panel, the idea is to define foundational segments of the 'public sphere' that are of particular note in contemporary social, cultural, political, and geographic spaces and circumstances.

The iSchools Organization encompasses 121 information and library science schools around the globe, and is rapidly expanding. Officially begun in the early 2000s as a way to bolster a sense of field-wide purpose and identity relevant to the twenty-first century, among other objectives, iSchools are positioned as those sharing an interest in information, people, and technology. Early questions about endurance of the iSchools movement are now largely overshadowed by, and joined with, questions about coherence of the iSchools movement. This 90-minute virtual panel will present international findings about issues that are currently, as of 2020-2021, top-of-mind for iSchool leaders, pertaining to: 1.) views on and of the field of information; 2.) faculty and institutional relationships; and 3.) extra-unit alliances and alignments, including with and within the iSchools Organization itself. It draws mainly upon interview data from the funded project i4G: Shaping the iSchools’ Identity and Interaction in a Globalized World.

Youth information interaction (YII) research has focused on challenges youth encounter when interacting with information across different contexts. Although these studies have been fundamental to outline youth information behaviour, the absence of YII theoretical frameworks might limit our approach to contemporary issues, such as the increased use of apps and mobile devices for information searching. This paper presents a conceptual analysis of studies conducted between 1997-2020 to explore predominant epistemological stances and cognitive frameworks in YII. The conceptual analysis generated five typologies operationalizing YII studies in seven categories: epistemological stance, knowledge assumption, cognitive framework, study type, study design, theoretical framework, study outcomes, and applications. The findings suggest that YII research have converged to empiricist and rationalist stances supporting exploratory approaches. These findings elicit the urgency for the development of theoretical frameworks that support the validity of YII phenomena with the purpose of developing a new agenda for YII research.

As the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to be a global pandemic and challenge, there has been numerous efforts and actions from both government and private organizations towards keeping their community members healthy and safe. One of the approaches is to use mobile apps to trace contacts and update status of the infected individuals in an efficient and convenient way so that the spread of the virus can be minimized and contained. While these apps could offer many advantages, it also raises serious privacy concerns for many users and hence possibly refusing to adopt it. In this study, we aim to understand the privacy protections users’ want and the provisions under which they are willing to use COVID-19 apps. We believe our study results can provide guidance for policy makers and app developers on the design, deployment, and acceptability of the COVID-19 apps that can be widely adopted.

Improving file management interfaces and optimising system performance requires current data about users’ digital collections and particularly about the file size distributions of such collections. However, prior works have examined only the sizes of system files and users’ work files in varied contexts, and there has been no such study since 2013; it therefore remains unclear how today’s file sizes are distributed, particularly personal files, and further if distributions differ among the major operating systems or common occupations. Here we examine such differences among 49 million files in 348 user collections. We find that the average file size has grown more than ten-fold since the mid-2000s, though most files are still under 8 MB, and that there are demographic and technological influences in the size distributions. We discuss the implications for user interfaces, system optimisation, and PIM research.

Publishing research data is widely expected to increase its reuse and to inspire new research. In the social sciences, data from surveys, interviews, polls, and statistics are primary resources for research. There is a long tradition to collect and offer research data in data archives and online repositories. Researchers use these systems to identify data relevant to their research. However, especially in data search, users’ complex information needs seem to collide with the capabilities of data search systems. The search capabilities, in turn, depend to a high degree upon the metadata schemes used to describe the data. In this research, we conducted an online survey with 72 social science researchers who expressed their individual information needs for research data like they would do when asking a colleague for help. We analyzed these information needs and attributed their different components to the categories: topic, metadata, and intention. We compared these categories and their content to existing metadata models of research data and the search and filter opportunities offered in existing data search systems. We found a mismatch between what users have as a requirement for their data and what is offered on metadata level and search system possibilities.

Most voice-based personal assistants are suitable for simple tasks which are not conversational but single-turn question-answering. To address this limitation, we investigate the dialogue capabilities of commercial conversational systems and compare them to the standards expected by the users. We designed a set of moderately complex search tasks and used two popular personal assistants to evaluate the user-system interaction. A laboratory-based user study was conducted with twenty-five users and seventy-five search sessions to collect user-system conversational dialogues (for three search tasks). Next, we show that using a set of simple rules, which could be implemented in the immediate future, it is possible to improve the users’ interaction experience and make the system more anthropomorphic. Using a conceptual prototype where a human (Wizard) played the role of the system (unknowing to the users), we demonstrate the efficacy of the guidelines and provide design recommendations for future conversational search systems.

In a search process, searchers review documents to gather information relevant to their information need (IN). During this process, searchers may experience the satisfaction of their IN, indicating they have gathered adequate relevant information to answer their need. This complex concept of satisfaction is the ultimate goal of search systems. Most studies in Information Retrieval have been attempted to understand how searchers’ needs are satisfied based on behavioural observation. However, the psychophysiological manifestation during the moment of satisfaction still remains unclear. Here, we use functional Magnetic Resonance (fMRI) to investigate which brain regions are involved during the moment of satisfaction. Twenty-six participants participated in the experiment, designed to represent a search process while being scanned. Our result shows the human brain regions involved during the moment of satisfaction. These findings provide an important step in unravelling the concept of satisfaction in a search process.

The iFederation is a joint initiative between ASIS&T, ALISE, and the iSchools to mutually cooperate and promote information science and related disciplines. During this panel session, each of the three partner organizations within the iFederation will describe their own association’s strategic directions and their views on how they envision themselves mutually cooperating and promoting information science with the other two iFederation associations. The panel will start with a quick overview of the current Memorandum of Understanding signed between the three founding iFederation associations, followed by a short overview of each association’s strategic plans and ideas for iFederation collaborations. This will be followed by a lengthy discussion with audience attendees in regards to their perspectives on how best to move the iFederation forward in a way that is mutually beneficial to all.

In recent years, the amount of open data from governments and academic communities have increased rapidly. Open data are expected to promote the transparency and accountability of governments and academic communities, enable public participation, and facilitate digital innovation. However, open data are still facing problems such as unsatisfactory quality, insufficient data governance, increasing preservation cost and ineffective data reuse at present. This panel will invite experts in related fields to discuss the quality, reuse, and governance of open data, and propose feasible solutions from an international perspective. We will verify and promote the action plan in practice, and have more academic discussion with ASIS&T and relevant academic communities.

Living independently of mainstream institutions, digital community archives and digital humanities collections confront systemic barriers to medium- and long-term viability. Their sustainability tends to be undermined by shifts in technologies, resources, and communities over time. Because these collections contain irreplaceable and invaluable evidence of communities and histories that are underrepresented in cultural institutions, their fragility compromises the completeness and equity of our collective digital heritage. Partnerships between institutions and community-based collections often founder over a lack of shared understanding: of the expertise each partner brings to the table, of the scope and extent of mutual commitments, and of what sustainability even entails for a given project. This paper reports preliminary outcomes of a case study of the Lakeland Digital Archive, exploring how Lakeland’s community understands sustainability in the context of their digital archive, as part of a broader study of community-centered sustainability strategies for digital collections.

As primary sources, archival records are a unique information source at the very heart of humanities research. However, how humanities researchers move from information to knowledge creation by making meaning from archival records has not been the focus of previous empirical research. This is surprising, as creating new knowledge through (re)interpretation of records is a core motivation and outcome of humanities research; as representations of historical and social occurrences, archival records rely on researchers’ interpretation of content, context, and structure to establish an ‘archival’ meaning of the record, before applying this meaning within their own work. Therefore, constructing knowledge from archival materials necessitates a dual process of knowledge creation to create novel insights from a hybrid interpretation of archival meaning and the researcher’s own interests. This paper presents findings from a naturalistic empirical observation of 11 humanities researchers engaging in research at a national archive, centring on key information activities that facilitate knowledge creation from archival records: Scanning, Relating, Capturing and Organising. Through these activities, scholars integrate their research aims and objectives with archival meaning to generate new insights. Deeper understanding of the nature of knowledge creation in archives can benefit archivists, archive users and systems designers alike.

This paper examines differences in the user feedback of scholars with varied experience with digital tools. As part of a usability study of a historical digital collection, our team conducted semi-structured interviews with scholars with varying backgrounds. We categorized the sample into two groups, one with significant experience and one with little experience in using digital technology. Qualitative analysis of the interview data showed that users generally provided similar feedback. However, there were instances in which those with significant experience provided more design suggestions, and those with less experience expressed confusion and provided more feedback on website content. Drawing upon our findings, we provide recommendations for the usability evaluation of historical digital collections.

Visualization in digital humanities (DH) has developed into a charged topic as increasing numbers of humanities researchers begin to work with machine-readable data. The current research literature on DH visualization has primarily approached the subject from a theoretical perspective, arguing the humanistic visualization should fundamentally differ from scientific visualization to represent the distinct nature of humanities data and inquiries. However, few studies have tried to empirically understand what it means to be a good visualization for humanities researchers and practitioners. This study aims to bridge this research gap by offering an exploratory investigation into researchers’ perceptions on visualization, particularly how they evaluate a visualization in humanities research. Through 10 semi-structured interviews with humanities scholars engaging in digital work, our study demonstrates that perceptions of a quality visualization among the humanities researchers are closely related to researchers’ purposes of using visualization and their self-confidence in visualization knowledge and skills. This study serves as a baseline for future empirical research on DH visualization and potentially informs the best practices for humanistic visualizations.

Libraries and library consortia are adopting controlled digital lending (CDL) as a strategy, accelerated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, to facilitate equitable access to print collections. While advocates of CDL contend that digitize-and-lend practices reflect an incremental, technology-assisted adjustment to traditional library circulation, lending, and resource-sharing practices, opponents of CDL in the United States and Canada argue that the practice contravenes well-established copyright protections. This paper discusses current controversies surrounding CDL, its potential promise and perils, and concludes that a reasonable, equitable, and forward-looking application of copyright laws ought to insulate libraries and library consortia from exposure to liability for engaging in CDL.

This paper is based on the Web of Science database and takes advantage of CiteSpace, a scientometric software, to conduct visualization analyses. It is found that privacy issues in data ethics have reached the research peak in the past two years. The current global research in this field is characterized by three different periods and multidisciplinary perspectives. The hotspots of this field are relatively concentrated and gradually deepened. Besides, the research in this field has moved from the theoretical stage to the practical application stage. This paper attempts to present the scientific knowledge structure, patterns and distribution of privacy issues in data ethics, exploring the global frontier hotspots, providing inspiration and experience for Chinese academic research and industry practice in data ethics.

Three punctuations of US information policy in the 21st century, caused by 9/11, Trump, and COVID-19, have wrought such change that the domain is currently ecstatic and entropic. This paper introduces the three punctuations, discusses how punctuations affect policy-making in complex adaptive systems, and reviews what it means for policy and policy-making processes to be ecstatic and entropic. The paper than examines manifestations of these characteristics of contemporary information policy in theories, principles, issue areas, regulatory subjects, and policy-making processes.

Our exploratory quantitative research show that users consider Facebook as a personal archive even if they perceive the platform to be only moderately useful or stable. In this personal archive, users are likely to revisit old posts but are unlikely to repost them. They are likely to hide old posts but are unlikely to edit them. Unlike previous studies that assert gender differences on social media activities, we found that there are no statistically significant differences between users who self-identify as female and those who self-identify as male when it comes to revisiting, reposting, editing, or deleting old posts. Self-identifying females, however, were more likely to hide posts than males. Our study points to extending how we think of and practice archiving in personal ways on social media platforms, acknowledging that a new generation of users may possibly conceive of archiving differently given the sociotechnical systems they engage with and the nature of recordmaking practices they employ.

Given the limited understanding of the attractiveness among online celebrities, this study explores the perceived attractiveness of “Knowledge Wanghong,” an emerging class of online celebrities who sell knowledge products in China. Drawing on the self-branding perspective, which argues that individuals may construct and manage their distinctive online image deliberately through various information practices, as the theoretical lens, we attempt to answer two questions: (1) What are the antecedents of the perceived attractiveness of Knowledge Wanghong? (2) How do Knowledge Wanghong make themselves attractive to users? From semi-structured interviews with 28 Knowledge Wanghong, we derive two findings. First, the antecedents of the perceived attractiveness include perceived professionalism, perceived familiarity, and perceived intimacy. Second, Knowledge Wanghong make themselves appealing to users in two ways: (1) they disclose personal and professional information to users; (2) they employ multiple approaches to interacting with users. This study sheds light on the perceived attractiveness of Knowledge Wanghong in terms of the antecedents and how it is achieved. Also, it provides a novel reference point for discussing the information practices of online celebrities in a global context.

This research examines civic engagement from both online and offline perspectives using 371 samples collected from two universities in China. We aimed to explore the effects of college students’ social connections on their online and offline civic engagement using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). We found that weak ties in college students’ civic discussion networks play a significant role in affecting both online and offline civic engagement. Additionally, students’ characteristics, such as academic year, leadership role, and party membership, are associated with offline civic engagement, but not with online civic engagement. Political efficacy was also found to be a significant factor affecting both online and offline civic engagement. This study examines the weak tie theory in the context of online and offline civic engagement, sheds light on underlying principles for engaging young adults in civic life in the digital era, and advocates the importance of developing a blended approach for engaging college students in civic engagement in both online and offline settings.

Processes and practices are pertinent elements of the information landscape. This panel presents research on documentation and description of processes and practices in the information field addressing: 1) how different conceptualizations of processes and practices influence how they emerge as describable entities; 2) what different approaches to document and describe processes and practices exist and have been proposed in information science and technology research; 3) what aspects of processes and practices different documentation approaches capture, make visible and invisible; and 4) what novel insights from the current state-of-the-art research can be drawn to support practitioners in different areas of the information field, including knowledge organization, information management, information literacy instruction, and development of information systems and services.

Research trend detection is an important topic for scientific researchers. Future work sentences (FWS) , as direct descriptions of future research, aren’t fully utilized in research trend detection. Therefore, this article uses FWS to investigate research trends of different tasks in a particular domain. Taking the conference papers in the natural language processing (NLP) field as our research objects, we obtain the FWS in each paper to build the corpus and classified them into 6 main types. After that, the task of each paper is annotated, and a task system with 29 categories is constructed to compare the FWS in different tasks. The results show that the proportion of method mentioned in FWS is the highest, and different tasks focus on different FWS types: emerging tasks need more resources, while mature tasks prefer method and application. This study provides researchers a reference to understand the research trend of specific tasks and is helpful to compare different tasks.

This paper describes a method for improved access to publisher references in linked data RDF editors using data mining techniques and a large corpus of library metadata encoded in the MARC21 standard. The corpus is comprised of clustered sets of publishers and publisher locations from the library MARC21 records found in the Platform for Open Data (POD). POD is a data aggregation project involving member institutions of the IvyPlus Library Confederation and contains seventy million MARC21 records, forty million of which are unique. The discovery of publisher entity sets described forms the basis for the streamlined description of BIBFRAME Instance entities. The result of this work includes a database of association rules and RDF editor improvements. The association rules are the basis of a prototype autosuggestion feature of BIBFRAME Instance entity description properties designed specifically to support the auto-population of publisher entities in linked data RDF editors.

Representing archival metadata as linked data can increase the findability and usability of items, and linked data sources such as Wikidata can be used to further enrich existing collection metadata. However, a central challenge to this process is the named entity disambiguation or entity linking that is required to ensure that the named entities in a collection are being properly matched to Wikidata entities so that any additional metadata is applied correctly. This paper details our experimentation with one entity linking system called OpenTapioca, which was chosen for its use of Wikidata and its accessibility to librarians and archivists with minimal technical intervention. We discuss the results of using OpenTapioca for named entity disambiguation on the Belfer Cylinders Collection from the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University, highlighting the successes and limitations of the system and of using Wikidata as a knowledge base.

Study reported in this paper analyzed over 20 thousand of machine-readable library metadata records in MARC 21 bibliographic format that are based on Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard. The focus of this analysis is on change in subject metadata – data elements designed for representing the aboutness of information objects – over a 6-year period between 2014 and 2020. The analyzed dataset is the entire population of the records representing English-language video recordings in DVD format in WorldCat database as of one year after official transition to RDA data content standard in library metadata creation. Analysis of metadata representing audiovisual materials is needed as audiovisual metadata practices tend to differ from those for other materials due to high occurrence of unique resources. The study includes quantitative and qualitative analyses into the change in the application of data elements (fields and subfields) over time and categorizes the observed change.

This paper introduces a mixed-methods approach for forensically reconstructing the propagation of visual media via networked digital devices. The authors present case studies drawn from political misinformation around the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol. Using interpretive analysis, the authors identify traces of user interfaces that remain in images being shared about the riots. Using computational analysis, the authors evaluate compression levels in digital photographs of the events in question, thus identifying which instances of the image are closer to the source (as well as which images appear to be identical). By combining these two approaches, the authors argue that SMOC BRISQUEt refines our understanding of misinformation’s memetic spread.