Library Faculty/Staff Scholarship and Research

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    Understanding the Relationship between Crime and Temperature in the Chicago Region
    (2024-01-24) Hans, Abhimanyu; Benjamin, Alice; Sharma, Ashish; Harp, Ryan; Veiga, Carolina; Budhathoki, Milan; Budhathoki, Milan
    This study investigates the relationship between temperature and crime rates in Chicago over a 20-year period. Crime and temperature data were analyzed at the census tract level to examine spatial and temporal correlations. The study tested the hypothesis that certain crimes increase with warmer temperatures while others rise with colder temperatures, and that higher temperatures predict higher crime overall. Urban climate data from the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) and public crime data were compared to identify census tracts sensitive to seasonal temperature changes. Different crime types were found to correlate with a heat vulnerability index based on socioeconomic and health metrics. The findings aim to help law enforcement, urban planners, and stakeholders locate areas of heat stress and develop interventions to reduce violence and structured racism in highly crime-prone neighborhoods. This novel investigation of the overlooked links between climate, geography, and crime can inform strategies to mitigate urban heat impacts on public safety.
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    Beyond Plagiarism: Scientific Ethics and Its Other Aspects
    (MDPI, 2018-05-08) Baykoucheva, Svetla
    The purpose of science is to advance human knowledge, cure diseases, and make life for people better. Does the current competitive environment in academia allow researchers to pursue such noble goals? The increase we see in the number of articles retracted by even reputable journals is quite alarming, and we need to have an honest discussion about why this is happening. When talking about scientific ethics, we usually focus on plagiarism and scientific fraud. Scientific misconduct may be very subtle (like, not citing peer’s articles), but sometimes it is more obvious (fabricating results). Scientific ethics, though, is much more than plagiarism and fabrication of data. As you will see, the authors of the articles included in this issue have looked at scientific ethics from a broader perspective.
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    Generative Discussions on Generative AI: Preparing Librarians to Teach about Artificial Intelligence
    (2023-11-14) Pierdinock-Weed, Amber; Shaw, Benjamin; Yocco, Daria
    AI is the latest issue in higher education that librarians are finding themselves needing to address in the classroom. With the capabilities of AI changing daily, it has been difficult for librarians to keep abreast of the latest developments. Additionally, AI is an overwhelming concept for many librarians to grasp. The Teaching and Learning Services unit at the University of Maryland created instructional resources and a community of support for UMD librarians to teach and learn about AI. These included an LMS module, a structured workshop series, and a collaborative repository to share lesson plans.
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    Eugene Garfield’s Ideas and Legacy and Their Impact on the Culture of Research
    (MDPI, 2019-06-14) Baykoucheva, Svetla
    Eugene Garfield advanced the theory and practice of information science and envisioned information systems that made the discovery of scientific information much more efficient. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which he founded in Philadelphia in 1960, developed innovative information products that have revolutionized science. ISI provided current scientific information to researchers all over the world by publishing the table of contents of key scientific journals in the journal Current Contents (CC). Garfield introduced the citation as a qualitative measure of academic impact and propelled the concepts of “citation indexing” and “citation linking”, paving the way for today’s search engines. He created the Science Citation Index (SCI), which raised awareness about citations; triggered the development of new disciplines (scientometrics, infometrics, webometrics); and became the foundation for building new important products such as Web of Science. The journal impact factor (IF), originally designed to select journals for the SCI, became the most widely accepted tool for measuring academic impact. Garfield actively promoted English as the international language of science and became a powerful force in the globalization of research. His ideas changed how researchers gather scientific information, communicate their findings, and advance their careers. This article looks at the impact of Garfield’s ideas and legacy on the culture of research.
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    From Individual to Community: Building a Community of Practice Around Teaching
    (Routledge, 2023-04-06) Gammons, Rachel W.; Luckert, Yelena; Inge-Carpenter, Lindsay; Armendariz, Anastasia
    University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries has a large teaching program that serves between 16,000 and 20,000 students per academic year. This chapter documents the transformation of UMD Libraries’ teaching program from an individualistic approach to a strong community of practice based on the mutual affirmation, support, and respect of library teachers, and includes the following sections: (1) history of the UMD Libraries’ teaching program, with special attention to how the program has been shaped by the Libraries’ partnership with the UMD Academic Writing Program (ENGL101); (2) overview of the theoretical framework of Communities of Practice (COP); (3) exploration of COP at UMD Libraries, including analysis of two teacher training programs, the Research and Teaching Fellowship, and Fearless Teaching Institute; and (4) recommendations for practice.
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    Bridging the digital divide: challenges and opportunities in rural broadband access and adoption in Tennessee
    (2021-10-27) Baxter, Isabella; Upendram, Sreedhar; Lerner, Mekayla
    This presentation describes a mobile lending hotspot program and other broadband initiatives that were supported by the University of Tennessee Extension.
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    Digital Literacy Initiative in Tennessee: A Case Study
    (2021-10-27) Baxter, Isabella; Upendram, Sreedhar; Lerner, Mekayla
    This presentation describes a collaboration with the University of Tennessee Libraries and Extension units, which sought to establish a digital literacy curriculum and training program. This initiative connected Extension agents, K-12 educators, public librarians, and other community services in counties across the state of Tennessee.
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    Broadband Impact on Education and Workforce during the COVID-19 Pandemic
    (2022-11-21) Baxter, Isabella; Upendram, Sreedhar
    The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the importance of broadband equity across the United States. K-12 schools and higher-education institutions, health services, and many industries moved much of their operations online to conform with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines. Broadband access became integral for students to keep up with their learning and for adults to remain productive at work, as well as for keeping connections to the world. Unequal access to broadband resources (the “digital divide”) was illuminated by this increased dependence on the Internet. At the request of local leaders in 2021, the University of Tennessee Extension partnered with libraries in eight rural counties to expand a mobile hotspot lending program that had been piloted in three counties in 2018. Library patrons were allowed to check out mobile internet hotspots to use at home for a few days. When they returned the hotspots, they were asked to fill out a survey. This presentation discusses survey responses from 2018 and 2021 that were compared to understand changes, if any, to broadband equity challenges for rural residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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    Developing Support for Critical Citation Requirements for Civil and Environmental Engineering Graduate Research
    (2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2023) Sarah Weiss
    The 2020-2021 school year saw the implementation of the coordinated efforts of several academic librarians from the University of Maryland, College Park in beginning a program of citation justice practices education in departments across campus. Citation justice recognizes that citations are a form of power in the current state of academia and focuses on actively citing authors with historically marginalized identities in an effort to center and uplift their voices. Equitable citation practices involve auditing citation lists, but also making sure that meaningful engagement with works from authors with diverse identities is present in the research. This paper documents the efforts that have been put in place so far around implementing citation justice education at UMD libraries including developing instruction modules and research guides. In particular, focusing on the librarians’ instigation of a close partnership with the faculty and graduate students of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department (CEE) who were particularly receptive to expanding their scholarly communication practices to include aspects of citation justice. Additionally, it explores the potential to develop further support for tools including code, templates, and author associations and lists that can be used to implement diverse citations. Future steps include developing library support that would allow graduate students in the department of CEE to meet a requirement for diversity in their citation practices that will serve as concrete and practical applications of citation justice that will be applicable in their post-academia careers.
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    Revamping STEM LibGuides for Current Student Needs
    (Connecticut Academic Libraries Conference, 2023-06-09) DiCiesare, Leah
    LibGuides are a staple for libraries to guide students in navigating the world of information resources. What happens, though, when they are left to sit for too long? They quickly become outdated and unhelpful to our students. STEM fields are constantly evolving and it is especially important that our guides are up-to-date to meet the needs of our students. This session will discuss the early stages of the process of updating STEM LibGuides. The session will provide practical insights into the process of revamping LibGuides, including techniques for identifying relevant resources and ideal formatting methods. Readers will gain an understanding of how LibGuides can be updated to ensure that they remain an effective resource for supporting education and research. This project is both in-progress and iterative, as we seek to enhance the library’s ability to provide students with easy access to the most useful information resources available to them.
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    After Fedora: Linked Data and Ethical Design in the Digital Library
    (Library Juice Press, 2023-07) Dohe, Kate
    One of the most common applications of linked data technology within the library community are for digital library projects, many of which are deep into their second decade. For nearly as long, practitioners have raised implementation concerns about linked data in digital projects: that transforming and maintaining linked data requires expensive programming expertise, that the application stack is complex and fragile with many interdependencies, and that the maintenance communities are often made up of only a handful of qualified volunteers. Such technical issues present very real ethical dilemmas for digital library practitioners - is the cost of implementing linked data systems so high as to be inaccessible to all but the wealthiest organizations? Is the meticulous nature of designing around linked data worth the inevitable slowdowns in making digital content accessible? Is the level of effort of large-scale migration to linked data and maintenance over time actually sustainable in cash-strapped academic libraries? On balance, do these applications meet the needs of users as they evolve over time? These questions took on new urgency in the digital library community in 2015, when the newly-released Fedora 4 repository application implemented the Linked Data Platform specification and initiated a sea change in the digital library application landscape. Any conversations about the practical applications of linked data are inevitably shaped by the design, features, and functionality of the systems that store and serve that data to end users. Systems and application design is itself an expression of values by the people and organizations who build and maintain these products, and consequently, the choices and practices of those communities directly influence the creators and consumers of linked data. This chapter explores the landscape of linked data applications in digital libraries, with particular focus on the Fedora Commons community and related projects after the move to linked data. Furthermore, the chapter will examine the values and priorities of the communities that support these systems, and propose frameworks for future design of digital library projects that close the gaps between end users, implementers, and engineers. By drawing upon the author’s experience managing linked data digital initiatives at a major research university, and emerging practices in design justice and inclusive design principles, the chapter will link practical experience with critical theory to advocate for concrete actions in the digital library application communities.
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    When is an Author Not an Author? Non-human and Fictional Creators under LRM, RDA, and Other Cataloging Standards
    (2023-06-27) Hovde, Sarah
    Generative processes have captured the public attention in recent years, from the fever dream images of early neural nets to the more recent proliferation of chatbots and language models. In the world of cataloging, a 2021 post on the PCCLIST cataloging listserv about a book "co-authored" by a transformer language model led to an almost week-long discussion over whether the AI was truly an author or just a tool. But generative texts are not new, and catalogers are no strangers to determining who counts as an author: the question of whether non-humans, including animals and fictional characters, can author a work of literature has been a topic of intense deliberation as the cataloging world moves toward the implementation of the Official RDA Toolkit, a cataloging standard based on the Library Reference Model (LRM). The LRM holds that fictional characters, and non-human entities more broadly, cannot be Persons or Agents (and for good measure, that fictional places cannot be Places); however, catalogers are still faced with books written by mouse detectives, starship captains, ghosts, Muppets, and presidential pets. How does a cataloger balance faithfully describing an item as it represents itself with following the rules? Who counts as an author? This presentation will examine the ways that non-human creators are credited in catalog records, looking at the connections between fictional and animal authorship, automatic writing, computer-generated texts, and more. What is a tool, what is a process, and what is an author - at least, according to modern cataloging standards?
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    It’s 10pm, do you know what’s happening in the library? An Exploration of Hourly Library Usage Data
    (2023-06) Thompson, Hilary; Spring, James
    The COVID-19 pandemic and rising minimum wage prompted access services managers to delve deeper into data we were already collecting in order to better understand when and how the main library at the University of Maryland is used. This exploratory project involved gathering, reconciling, and identifying trends in hourly usage data from different systems, with the goal of maximizing what the library can offer with its current resources and to advocate for more funding, if needed. We will share our experience undertaking this work, discuss how we have and will apply this data, and offer suggestions for others interested in doing something similar at their library. The poster will feature data visualizations and summarize highlights, which the presenters will expand upon when presenting in person based on the audience’s particular needs/interests. We hope this poster presentation will both aid and inspire other library managers to undertake similar work related to optimizing library hours, employee scheduling, and front-line staffing levels.
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    International Librarians Networking Program: Recomendations & Analysis
    (2023-06-01) Dodd, Alexander; Flamm, Lucy; Jarrell, Beth; Symes, Matthew
    The current cohort of the Emerging Leaders program of the American Library Association partnered with the International Relations Round Table (IRRT) to identify where the International Librarians Networking Program is successful and opportunities for further improvement.
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    International Librarians Networking Project: Recommendations for the Future
    (2023-06-01) Dodd, Alexander; Flamm, Lucy; Jarrell, Elizabeth; Symes, Matthew
    The current cohort of the Emerging Leaders program of the American Library Association partnered with the International Relations Round Table (IRRT) to identify where the International Librarians Networking Program is successful and opportunities for further improvement.
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    International Librarians Networking Program: Program Feedback and Recommendations
    (2023-06-01) Dodd, Alexander; Flamm, Lucy; Jarrell, Beth; Symes, Matthew
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    Using Google Jamboard as an Interactive Group-work Platform
    (2022-03-22) Jenkins, Kana
    One of the biggest challenges in conducting a library literacy session via zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic was to create a platform where the students could work in a group. While a majority of the students quickly became accustomed to working in a breakout room setting, it was still difficult for them to fully engage with their classmates. It was also challenging for instructors to measure the students’ engagement level while everyone was working online. In this presentation, I will discuss how I used Google Jamboard for a higher-level Japanese Studies undergraduate class in the Spring 2021 semester. I assigned a Google Jamboard for each student, and they constructed an online “research concept map” where they listed possible keywords in English and Japanese for their capstone project. All Jamboards were shared among the students, so each student was also asked to add keywords in their classmates’ Jamboards. As a bonus of using an online board, some students inserted images, which resulted in a more dynamic and visual board and offered opportunities for the students to start a vivid conversation. The use of Google Jamboard also helped the faculty member and me to monitor the students' progress.
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    Encountering Alice in Occupied Japan: Magazines with pictures or conversations
    (2023-04-26) Jenkins, Kana
    "Encountering Alice in Japan" was a conference held at the University of Southern California in April 26-27, 2023. The author was invited as one of the panelists to present the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland related materials held in the Gordon W. Prange Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries. This is a power point presentation slides that were shared at the panel.
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    “Technically” Anyone Can Use This Documentation: How the Average Archivist Can Make Use of the ArchivesSpace Technical Documentation
    (2023-04-05) Caringola, Liz
    The ArchivesSpace Technical Documentation isn’t just for developers. Members of the Technical Documentation team will present some examples of how archivists with any level of technical comfort might find this documentation useful for themselves or when communicating with their hosting provider, developer, or IT staff. Presented at the 2023 ArchivesSpace Virtual Member Forum as part of the session "ArchivesSpace Documentation Discussion."