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

Despite smartphones becoming essential tools for digital engagement, English learning adult immigrants (ELAIs) face significant, yet underexplored, barriers to digital inclusion. This participatory action research study examines the smartphone use of Ethiopian immigrants in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, focusing on the intersections of language, technology design, and digital literacy. Partnering with a trusted Ethiopian community-based organization (pseudonym: “Andinet”), community members collaborated as co-researchers to investigate how Ethiopian ELAIs navigate smartphone use and overcome challenges. Study findings highlight systemic design inequities and propose actionable interventions, such as Amharic speech-to-text tools, guided digital literacy modules, and community-led training workshops. These insights lay the groundwork for future research and the co-development of culturally relevant technology solutions alongside the community, emphasizing the transformative potential of participatory research and design practices to empower underserved immigrant populations.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping various industries, including academic libraries, which are actively engaging with AI. This study examines AI engagement in 120 academic libraries across six regions using scoping review and thematic analysis. It identifies two categories and five subcategories: (1) User-oriented services (AI guidance, AI literacy, and AI tools) and (2) Institution-oriented development (AI research and strategy, AI implementation and innovation). AI literacy serves as the foundational core, AI tools and AI guidance act as key pillars, and AI research and strategy, along with AI implementation and innovation, function as driving engines. Regionally, North America demonstrates advanced AI adoption, Oceania exhibits high engagement, Europe, Asia, and Africa contribute to steady integration, while Latin America shows strong potential in early exploration. Notable AI applications include AI chatbots, AI OneSearch Lite, and Digital Collections AI. These findings offer valuable insights for academic libraries and policymakers.

Information searching plays a critical role in idea generation. However, the connection between search behaviors and creative thinking processes remains underexplored. This study investigates how creativity support search tools guide idea generation during divergent and convergent thinking tasks by comparing a visual-based and a text-based search tool. Based on think-aloud protocols and interviews with 58 participants, we found that the two tools supported different aspects of the creative thinking processes. The visual-based tool fostered iterative engagement, helping users revisit, reorganize, and make idea connections, while the text-based tool encouraged more linear and straightforward strategies such as note-taking. Divergent thinking led to broad, exploratory searching and flexible relevance judgments, whereas convergent thinking prompted early filtering and focused evaluation. These findings reveal the cognitive complexity in transitioning from search to idea generation, and highlight the potential for search systems to better support creativity by scaffolding key stages of the idea generation process.