This paper reports the results of a study focused on the implementation of the ACRL Framework in community college libraries. The study explores information literacy instruction practices in this context, comparing librarians’ and students’ perspectives. Librarians with instructional responsibilities were surveyed, and students are being interviewed, to explore divergence in their perspectives, as has been reported elsewhere, and to identify opportunities to improve instructional practice.

This paper reports progress of a SSHRC-funded research investigation that studies the factors affecting the success of digital literacy skills training offered by community-led organizations, such as public libraries, across Canada. The goal of the study is to identify best practices. The study also seeks to contribute to the theoretical understanding of digital literacy instruction led by community organizations. This paper reports preliminary results of the analysis of interviews with administrators and instructors from organizations in Canada which offer such training, as well as from interviews and surveys collected from people who took part in these organizations’ training activities.

The evaluation of digital libraries has been a topic of increasing importance in information science research, yet there has been minimal evaluative work focusing on digital cultural heritage. The objective of this paper is to report on a comprehensive review of methodologies, theoretical frameworks and techniques used in the evaluation of cultural heritage digital libraries and archives. Empirical studies are examined to identify evaluation models, frameworks, and methodologies in the literature and to categorize these past evaluative approaches. Through the classification of evaluative types and trends, we aim to develop a set of guidelines and recommendations for the future evaluation of cultural heritage digital libraries and archives.

Different conceptions of cognitive authority in library and information science (LIS) obscure best practice for functions of the profession, such as information literacy instruction, that derive from how authority is understood. Some of these conceptions, such as a normative conception of authority, are prominent but not grounded in theory. Accordingly, this paper examines the work of Wilson (1983) and Kierkegaard (1813-1855) in hopes of reminding the profession of its most rigorously articulated formulations of authority. A more critical understanding of this concept is necessary for practice that speaks to the reality of a context bifurcated by adherence to competing authorities.

It is a well-established fact that the most widely employed research method by librarians is surveys. Given this fact, this ongoing study seeks to identify exactly how likely librarians are to respond to surveys and what, if any, circumstances will increase the likelihood they will respond. Using a quantitative content analysis, relevant literature from three separate LIS databases – Library Literature & Information Science Full Text (EBSCOhost), Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (EBSCOhost), and Library & Information Science Abstracts (ProQuest) – is currently being gathered and evaluated. Preliminary findings indicate trends regarding LIS research purposes, methodology, and subjects.

Fake news and virally-spread misinformation online have been identified as an increasingly pressing concern, one which LIS professionals may have a role in combatting. The insidious nature of this phenomenon is such, however, that correcting wrong information after the fact is insufficient to alter previously held incorrect beliefs. This work uses the Coherence Theory of truth to frame a conceptualization of how fake news creates “truth” for people on the basis of “influential people”. Accepting this theory requires that for LIS professionals to combat this phenomenon, the myth of neutrality must be abandoned and the LIS-approved “truth” amplified.

Information and information technology use shows age-related patterns. This presentation outlines a approach of age-related trajectories of how information and technology use surface as challenges during the life-course of individuals based on trajectories of relative exposure to different types of information technologies and information that unfold as real options in everyday-life.

This paper reports on key findings from a recently completed doctoral study into the transitional information behaviour of Bangladeshi immigrants to Canada. The study uses a mixed method approach including semi-structured interviews (n=60) and surveys (n=205) with Bangladeshi immigrants who arrived in Canada between the years of 1971 and 2017. We discuss the information experience of participants in terms of their personal networks, information sharing fear, and information intelligence.

In the following paper I look at the information practice of wayfinding - the means by which people orient in and navigate through spaces. In contemporary information conditions of networked mobility, wayfinding is often associated with ‘asking’ Google Maps to locate where something is and how to get there. Google Maps is the most popular application for mobile devices with over 1 billion people putting it to work every month. Despite this frequency, there is little information available on how Google Maps is used. As technology writer Andrew J. Hawkins proclaims (2017), “we just need the directions, the right subway route, or the name of that good sushi place.” What is happening in these moments when one needs directions? And more specifically, to paraphrase Sarah Sharma (2012), whose routes become reified by Google Maps? I argue that the imaginary of the Google Maps ‘user’ is more than simply an archetype but an orientation within a spatialization of information that are made evident …

Information behaviour theory, models, and concepts (IB TMCs) are foundational for effective reference and information services (RIS) and yet they are not widely addressed in basic RIS courses. This study explores how librarianship students are being educated in IB TMCs. Course syllabi and assigned textbooks of RIS courses were analyzed for integration of IB TMCs. This analysis is followed by a survey of instructors of these courses to determine key factors in integration of IB TMCs. Preliminary results indicate that treatment of IB TMCs remain limited and suggest that IB scholars may have an impact on the integration of their work.

“Ordinary” time is commonly defined as time that is neither holidays nor emergencies, which suggests that “ordinary time” events are routine rather than singular. An analysis of how people document events in “ordinary” time, however, shows that the stream of “ordinary” time has multiple forks; that ordinary does not necessarily mean predictable, and that both vacations and emergencies could, in certain circumstances, take on the character of routine rather than singular events.

This project seeks to assess the Canadian library community’s understanding of and readiness for the transition from the MARC format to the BIBFRAME model. Data were collected using a survey distributed in English and French to a stratified random sample of 1,200 Canadian libraries. Results indicate that knowledge of BIBFRAME is low among respondents and that most of the libraries surveyed do not know enough about BIBFRAME to consider planning a transition at this point.

Subject access in Canada, whether through subject headings, classification, thesauri or other structures, is dominated by systems originally created in the United States. Building on a 2019 literature review that identified current subject access systems and developing projects in the Canadian context, this paper will explore the patterns of divergence and convergence between systems and across borders. As subject access systems from the United States do not meet all the needs of Canadian scholarship, next steps include considering how these gaps and distortions impact Canadian scholarship and what institutions in Canada are doing to create systems consistent with their values.

The field of knowledge organization, and cataloguing in particular, has increasingly become concerned with bibliographic relationships. Tillett (2001) developed a taxonomy of bibliographic relationships that is largely shared by Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), with the exception of the “shared characteristic” relationship including such features as shared creator or subject headings. This paper will offer another possible shared characteristic: “memes.” Memes are units of cultural inheritance and include literary tropes, character archetypes, and genre conceits, and can link otherwise unconnected works.

This paper examines the structure and themes of five popular ZW Instagram accounts through the theoretical lens of the Lifestyle Movement Framework. A Thematic Analysis of 2,000 posts revealed that these communities have a strong sense of cohesion and coherence. Members have a strong sense of identity as ZW practitioners, embed ZW activities in their everyday lives, and believe that their individual actions can contribute to social change.

This poster explores the online writing community of Twitter, #writingcommunity, and the ways in which writers seek information in a community of practice. This early work reviews the existing literature and determines appropriate research methods to explore the relationships between writers and the effect a community of practice has on their work.

This paper outlines the theoretical foundations of an ongoing research project examining the presence and force of systemic racism in library and information science scholarship and practice. It examines how uncritical attachment to core values like neutrality, objectivity, colour-blindness and diversity have served to entrench practices that marginalize and exclude racialized groups. Finally, it draws on scholarship in critical diversity and anti-racism studies to theorize new research trajectories for LIS that are attuned to structural dimensions of power and privilege.

Online social environments offer a rich source of data that researchers can harvest to gain insight into a wide range of social issues. This type of research is sometimes considered as observation of public behaviour, and therefore exempt from ethical review. This type of research, however, raises ethical issues with respect to the public/private nature of online spaces, consent, and anonymity in the online environment. This project examines research ethics guidelines for recommendations regarding the use of harvested online data, identifying best practices for researchers who engage in this type of research.

Since the practice of web archiving, or the act of preserving websites as historical, legal, and informational records, become more commonplace in the 2000s, web archives have become valuable sources for historical research. Unfortunately, many archived websites are of low quality and are missing crucial elements. In this paper, we examine the issue of quality and focus on visual correspondence, the similarity in appearance between the original website and its archived counterpart. We examine how the visual correspondence of an archived website can be measured using image similarity measures. Our results indicate that the Structural Similarity Index metric (SSIM) was able to successfully measure visual correspondence. If applied to the Quality Assurance process of an institution, this similarity metric could help web archivists quickly detect quality problems in their web archives, and fix them in order to create high-quality web archives.

This paper examines how Canadian Library Associations (CLAs) provide support to the public libraries and librarians they empower in the areas of disaster preparation and mitigation. Utilizing qualitative content analysis, this study compared the resources and supports offered by 18 CLAs. The information, websites, and internal documents provided by the CLAs were assessed and coded using constant comparative methodology according to a) the type of resource and b) the type(s) of information contained in each resource. In total 8 categories of resources and 16 categories of information were established. Additionally, three concerning trends regarding the information currently being provided by the CLAs were discovered.

The study investigated the structural qualities of the dominant virtual Twitter communities enduring in the aftermath of a natural disaster and how they influence the flow of information among social actors in the network. By employing a combination of textual and social network analyses on tweets associated with Hurricane Dorian, the study reinforces the findings of previous studies that information propagation is determined by nature of interactional communities built in the different stages of an emergency event and that sentiments and choice of user message keywords follow along the lines of geographical proximity to the affected zines. Engagements among social actors led to formation of virtual communities that were found to be dominated by hierarchical, polarized and insulated structural features which characteristically determine their information propagation patterns. These information community clusters demonstrate highly defined boundaries with sparse overlaps. Also, …

Nollywood, the second largest movie industry in the world after America’s Hollywood, is Nigeria’s movie industry. This ongoing study investigates how sexual messages and scenes are communicated to viewers and if there is correlation between the pattern of Nollywood movies exposure and sexual behaviour of in-school adolescents in the southwestern part of Nigeria. Data will be collected from the participants through questionnaire while content of popular Nollywood movies among the participants will be content analyzed. It is expected that this study will provide information about the frequency of sexual scenes and how risky sexual behaviours are portrayed in Nollywood movies. Secondly, it is expected that this study will show the types of relationship between movie exposure behaviour and sexual behaviour in the study population.

This study investigated if there is a difference in the number of articles, datasets and computer codes that foreign and Nigerian authors of scientific publications on natural language processing (NLP) of Nigerian languages deposited in online digital archives. Relevant articles were systematically retrieved from Google, Web of Science and Scopus. Authorship type and data archiving information was extracted from the full text of the relevant publications. Result shows that papers with foreign authorship (80.4%) published their articles in non-commercial repositories, more than papers with Nigerian authorship (55.3%). Similarly, few papers with foreign authorship deposited research data (19.1%) and computer codes (10.4%), while none of the papers with Nigerian authorship did. It was recommended that librarians in Nigeria should create awareness on the benefits of digital archiving and open science.

This paper is about a certain type of contested documents (the secret police files known as “informative notes”). It employs a neo-documentalist framework and thematic analysis to examine informative notes on four major intellectuals in communist Romania. The paper focuses on three emerging themes: the power effects that the materiality of informative notes has had, after 1989, on Romanian society; the reasons informers interpreted the writing conventions of this textual genre in radically different ways; and the epistemic aspects of this type of document. I emphasize that, despite their nature as historic documents, secret police files have uncanny relevance for understanding the present-day societies of mass surveillance.

The lack of consistent training for scholarly authors, peer reviewers, and editors is a problem across disciplines, but it is one that affects academic librarians in a unique variety of ways. Like instructional faculty, academic librarians are generally required to engage in scholarly activity, but they are also increasingly in the position of providing guidance on and advocating for emerging trends in scholarly communication. This presentation will describe how the creation of a student-run journal and an associated scholarly communication course in Western University’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) are helping to meet this need.

This paper reports the results of a small-scale study of the information practices of contract academic staff in the United Kingdom, which is being used as the basis for a broader study in the Canadian context. Neoliberal approaches to the management of higher education across the globe, including Canada, are contributing to a highly challenging environment for contract academic staff, who face marginalization, insecurity, and significant stress. The study seeks to give voice to this growing complement of contract academic staff, to identify practical responses to these challenges.

CFLA-FCAB’s Truth and Reconciliation Report and Recommendations (2017) has galvanized Canadian libraries and library associations to undertake initiatives to decolonize libraries. Similar efforts are happening internationally as libraries work toward reconciliation. This paper presents findings of an analysis of library association websites from Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, demonstrating how library associations endorse action toward decolonization through publicly shared content. Library associations use their websites to engage with decolonization in various ways, whether through sharing resource lists and blog posts (common in US and Canada), or through publishing standards and protocols (common in Australia and New Zealand).

Following a new trajectory in the field of Knowledge Organization, I explore how indexes are part of the structure of our everyday lives. Drawing on extensive archival research, I look at documents created and used by the United Church of Canada as part of its reconciliation work with Indigenous peoples. I conclude that these documents index the narrative the church tells about itself—and therefore its identity—as part of the development and maintenance of the UCC’s evolving collective memory. My findings reinforce Knowledge Organization’s new line of inquiry while also complicating its message concerning the nature of infrastructure.

The Inuvialuit Voices Project is a collaboration between the Inuvialuit Cultural Centre, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, and communities within the Inuvialuit Settlement Region to enhance the Inuvialuit Digital Library (https://inuvialuitdigitallibrary.ca/) with real-time digital storytelling functionality. In this presentation, the authors will describe the community-based methodology being used to co-develop the system, report on a recent elder storytelling gathering that was held to better understand storytelling in-context to inform the design and functionality of the system, and discuss next steps in the development process.

This paper reports preliminary results of a survey of 458 public library staff members regarding their perceptions of drag queen storytimes (DQS) and the ways in which these storytimes influence child development. The majority of respondents from libraries that have hosted at least one DQS agreed that DQS support healthy child development and positively influence children’s understanding of gender and/or sexuality, while respondents from libraries that have not hosted DQS were more likely to disagree or report being undecided. Specific ways in which respondents perceive DQS to influence child development are also analyzed.

We used survey responses and statements of library organizations to create a corpus of items describing the value of public libraries. A sample of public library users and staff from the province of Ontario individually sorted these statements into groups and labelled the groups, and rated each statement with respect to its general importance, its centrality to the mission of the public library, and its uniqueness to the public library. We used GroupWisdom™ software to analyze individual responses into an overall concept map and to identify differences in patterns across different participant groups.

Reading fiction is an important information behavior, but systematic study in our field about fiction has been sparse. This paper is part of continuing research about how fiction is informative. It reviews work about the ontological status of literary characters and how they can affect and inform us, especially in creating and contesting social boundaries, based in part on a small empirical study (n=8) of adult readers’ reading as adolescents. Such work helps us to understand important elements of people’s information behavior too often ignored.

Research can take many forms, especially in a field as diverse as library studies. This panel will bring together several emerging scholars as they navigate current Library and Information Science issues through the medium of role-playing games. It is our hope that this panel will illustrate how alternative scholarship can be used to teach and explore emerging issues in the field of LIS.

Library and information studies has yet to see a committed theoretical analysis of the social, relational, and political workings of love, as a force that both explicitly and implicitly underpins practices and rhetoric within our discipline. Understanding the “force” that is love requires analysis of social, or collective, relations. As such, love provides a distinctive lens onto structures and power dynamics that can illuminate and address divergent challenges within LIS and the world at large. This paper draws on selected literature in order to present such an analysis for the first time.

From commercial advertising to political messaging, internet memes have proven to be among the most prevalent and pervasive forms of communication online. The so-called “wholesome meme” is a subversive genre of meme that arose in early 2016 as a reaction to increasing geopolitical turbulence and cultural polarization. Wholesome memes are defined by their bold positivity and feature loving friendships, cute animals, and heartwarming stories. As an early attempt to theorize this emerging phenomenon, this paper argues that wholesome memes can be considered part of the larger post-postmodernist literary movement, The New Sincerity. Synthesizing expressions of irony and sincerity, these memes may signal a shift in the character and attitude of internet culture from anti- to pro-social and speak to the desire of people to seek meaning and fulfillment.

This article introduces a conceptual framework and approach for studying the information and decision-making practices of academic librarians involved in big deal cancellation projects—a type of collection malmanagement projects that are today prevalent across academic libraries in North America. We describe the nature and dynamics of big deal cancellation projects and conceptualize the quantitative and qualitative evaluations they entail. Predicated on this account, we present a theoretical and methodological agenda for empirical research. This conceptual paper goal, thus, is to describe and conceptualize big deal cancellation projects as an object of empirical research and to offer a perspective on how they can be studied as a type of information practice.

Over the past two decades, the cost of electronic journals has continually grown to the point that many academic libraries today find it financially unsustainable. This has made it necessary for librarians to begin cancelling major journal subscription packages, known colloquially as big deal packages. The cancellation of big deal packages is complex, and at present, poorly understood practice revolving around the analysis of a range of quantitative and qualitative data. Moreover, it also has a distinct micro-political dimension as it involves reconciling the, at times, conflicting interests of faculty, students, librarians, and publishers. This panel seeks to initiate a dialogue between a diverse group of stakeholders with interests in this issue. It is expected that this dialogue will increase awareness of the complexity involved in managing the size, scope, and cost of big deal subscription packages and will give voice to multiple perspectives on the issue. As such, it is hoped that …

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 2015 Calls to Action and the CFLA-FCAB Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s 2017 Report and Recommendations provide libraries with information for furthering reconciliation and decolonization efforts. Public libraries in Canada have responded to these documents by undertaking various initiatives, which are communicated by libraries, for example, through websites. This paper analyzes content from five public library websites and the findings suggest that libraries have taken various initiatives in different areas including online and physical spaces, collection, and programs. Interestingly, decolonization and reconciliation related work also features in some public libraries’ strategic plans.

This panel convenes six emerging scholars in the area of health information science, to trace some of the multiple pathways taken by this pluralistic discipline in research, practice and policy areas. How is HIS developing as an academic discipline? In describing the conceptual and methodological concerns of their work, presenters will raise some of the live questions shaping a health information science lens, including:

- What practice and policy sectors contain pressing HIS questions right now?
- What methodologies are most saliently informing research production in HIS?
- What theoretical approaches have been tried in current and ongoing HIS research?
- How is knowledge translation effected in HIS?

Information Governance is an emerging cross-disciplinary framework to ensure the proper management of information within organizations. This paper presents a five-step methodology to implement Information Governance comprising 1) Information Management Need and Capacity Analysis; 2) Functional Analysis; 3) Process Analysis; 4) Information Architecture Development; and 5) Natural Language Processing Requirement Specifications and Iteration. Within this methodology, principles and techniques borrowed from the disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Business Analysis and Information Architecture converge to tackle various digital recordkeeping challenges.

As artificial intelligence systems (AIS) become widely adopted around the world, potential misuses of AIS pose increased risks of social, political, and economic harms. To mitigate those risks and maximize the benefits of AIS adoption, many governments, private sector firms, and multistakeholder groups have created principles, strategies, and frameworks for governing the design, development, deployment, and use of AIS. At the level of nation-states, nationwide governance of AIS is often practiced through a variety of institutional arrangements, including strategic planning initiatives, policy and regulatory instruments, innovation funding mechanisms, global talent recruitment, and cross-sectoral partnerships. These institutional arrangements extend the macro-institutional scope of national AI strategies such as the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy or China’s New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan into more granular practices of public administration, assembling a versatile …

Artificially Intelligent (AI) systems are pervasive, but poorly understood by their users and, at times, developers. It is often unclear how and why certain algorithms make choices, predictions, or conclusions. What does AI transparency mean? What explanations do AI system users desire? This panel discusses AI opaqueness with examples in applied context such as natural language processing, people categorization, judicial decision explanations, and system recommendations. We offer insights from interviews with AI system users about their perceptions and developers’ lessons learned. What steps should be taken towards AI transparency and accountability for its decisions?

This paper describes the process and tools used to facilitate a collaborative student co-authored paper that was recently published as a short communication in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science (JELIS). This paper is written by the instructor of the course and provides direction to other LIS instructors on how to successfully facilitate publishable quality student co-authored papers as an in-class activity using online collaborative teaching tools. It is especially relevant to courses or projects that include social justice topics.