Information Studies Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2780

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End date: 2009Subject: search.filters.subject.Library Science

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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    The Impact of Group Interaction on Shared Cognition: An Analysis of Small Group Communication
    (2009) Matteson, Miriam; White, Marilyn D.; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This research investigated how small group communication influences the development of shared mental models in a committee of public librarians addressing a problem-solving task. A qualitative study, it examines the influence of communication themes, functions, roles, channels, and rules on the group¹s development of shared mental models about the task and about team interaction. Over a year, data were collected from group meetings, email messages, group documents, and participant interviews. The data were analyzed using existing coding schemes and qualitative coding techniques. The findings indicate that within the group there was a strong superficial convergence around the task mental model and the team interaction mental model but a weaker convergence at a deeper level. Analysis of the group communication data shows that the group focused discussion on understanding the problem and identifying tasks. They enacted group communication roles and rules that facilitated sharing information, and the functions of their messages were focused on task communication. The findings suggest that, in this group, communication themes most heavily influenced the development of a shared mental model about the task, while communication roles, rules, and functions were found to be more influential toward the development of a shared mental model about team interaction. Implications for practice include adopting intentional tactics for surfacing mental models at various points in the group life and anchoring the emerging model within the collective cognition of the group through devices such as narratives, objects, or documentary materials.
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    Digital Libraries in Schools: The Best Practices of National Board Certified Library Media Specialists
    (2009) Massey, Sheri Anita; Druin, Allison; Weeks, Ann C.; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study investigated the digital library integration behaviors of school library media specialists (SLMSs) who have achieved certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). A qualitative interview study design was chosen to convert tacit knowledge related to digital library use into explicit knowledge that can be shared with others. The goal of this research was to identify behaviors and techniques that exemplary SLMSs share when using digital libraries to support the curriculum in K-12 schools. The researcher interviewed and collected artifacts from 10 local National Board certified SLMSs and analyzed the resulting transcripts and materials using thematic analysis. A preliminary coding scheme was derived from the NBPTS Library Media technology innovation standard, which requires candidates to demonstrate expertise in providing technology access, teaching effective technology use, engaging learners with technology, and using technology to enhance the curriculum. Themes related to these four areas emerged from the data, as did sub-themes in the form of barriers the SLMSs encountered and strategies they developed to meet the standard. The barriers are discussed using Ertmer's (1999) first- and second-order classifications. The strategies are the SLMSs' best practices. To provide digital library access the SLMSs made themselves and their assistants available to learners; demonstrated mental and resource flexibility when they encountered obstacles; and, implemented creative funding strategies. To teach digital library use they used the research process to help students bridge knowledge learned in various contexts; provided training; remained abreast of digital library innovations; and, offered suggestions to product developers. To maintain engagement with digital libraries they used proven teaching techniques that build on strong instructional design principles. Finally, they relied on collaborative relationships when integrating digital libraries. They increased collaboration by building trust among colleagues; extending their reach beyond the SLMC in person and virtually, diversifying their role within the school, and gathering curriculum information to incorporate information literacy skills into lessons. Key implications: encourage SLMS-teacher collaboration, build a knowledge management system that captures expertise and supports SLMS communication, reconsider blocking social networking tools in schools to bridge the disconnect between students' home and school information-related behaviors.
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    Advanced Content In State E-Government: Criteria for Evaluation
    (2008-05-02) Zammarelli, Christopher Mark; Jaeger, Paul T; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study analyzes the use of five types of advanced content in state e-government: audio and video content, RSS feeds, podcasts, blogs, and participative services. State government portals and governors' websites were reviewed to determine if and how they implemented any of the five evaluation criteria. Points were assigned for the presence of these criteria, with additional points being granted for examples of advanced content that were deemed to be of quality based on defined measures. The study found many state e-government sites have implemented features that set standards for the use of advanced content in an e-government setting.
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    Classifying Attitude by Topic Aspect for English and Chinese Document Collections
    (2008-04-25) Wu, Yejun; Oard, Douglas W.; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The goal of this dissertation is to explore the design of tools to help users make sense of subjective information in English and Chinese by comparing attitudes on aspects of a topic in English and Chinese document collections. This involves two coupled challenges: topic aspect focus and attitude characterization. The topic aspect focus is specified by using information retrieval techniques to obtain documents on a topic that are of interest to a user and then allowing the user to designate a few segments of those documents to serve as examples for aspects that she wishes to see characterized. A novel feature of this work is that the examples can be drawn from documents in two languages (English and Chinese). A bilingual aspect classifier which applies monolingual and cross-language classification techniques is used to assemble automatically a large set of document segments on those same aspects. A test collection was designed for aspect classification by annotating consecutive sentences in documents from the Topic Detection and Tracking collections as aspect instances. Experiments show that classification effectiveness can often be increased by using training examples from both languages. Attitude characterization is achieved by classifiers which determine the subjectivity and polarity of document segments. Sentence attitude classification is the focus of the experiments in the dissertation because the best presently available test collection for Chinese attitude classification (the NTCIR-6 Chinese Opinion Analysis Pilot Task) is focused on sentence-level classification. A large Chinese sentiment lexicon was constructed by leveraging existing Chinese and English lexical resources, and an existing character-based approach for estimating the semantic orientation of other Chinese words was extended. A shallow linguistic analysis approach was adopted to classify the subjectivity and polarity of a sentence. Using the large sentiment lexicon with appropriate handling of negation, and leveraging sentence subjectivity density, sentence positivity and negativity, the resulting sentence attitude classifier was more effective than the best previously reported systems.
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    Government Websites for Special Populations: Toward Content-Based Evaluation
    (2007-12-10) Hoffman, Kelly Michele; Jaeger, Paul T; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    E-Government research has traditionally focused on cost-effectiveness and efficiency, operations, accessibility, usability, and information policy. Less attention has been paid to what audiences are meant to use the sites and what topics are being presented to them. This paper proposes an assessment framework that looks at the topics and formats of the information presented on government websites, and compares differences between sites of different structures, for different audiences, and from different countries.
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    The Effect of Users' Work Tasks on Librarians' Database Selection
    (2007-08-06) Kim, Soojung; White, Marilyn Domas; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A recent trend in information searching research is task-based information searching, which views a user's task as a central factor for understanding information-seeking behaviors and designing information retrieval systems. To investigate empirically the role of tasks in information searching, particularly in the business domain, this study analyzes the database selection process used by librarians from the perspective of users' tasks. The first part of the study focused on identifying and characterizing business tasks and the associated questions needed to complete the tasks. An inventory of 30 business tasks and 144 associated business questions was developed through content analysis of Harvard Business School cases and other published materials. The second part of the study explored the influence of tasks on database selection by conducting a survey among business librarians in academic institutions. Nine sets of survey questionnaires were created based on the identified business tasks and questions and each questionnaire, containing a total of five business questions for two to three tasks, was disseminated through a Web-based survey tool. Out of 52 sampled librarians, 29 (56 percent response rate) participated in the study. The survey questionnaires focused on participants' use of tasks and related business questions to determine information types likely to answer the questions, to choose databases, and to determine the criteria used to select the databases. The characteristics of business tasks and questions were analyzed and linked to other elements - information types, database selection criteria, and selected databases - to understand the interplay among all elements in the database selection process. The analysis noted the participants' reliance on users' tasks in various aspects of an information searching process. A database selection process was further modeled to describe how five task or context-related criteria - company size, company type, industry sector, geographical setting, and business stage - influence database selection. The inventory of business tasks and questions, along with the patterns among the elements, set the stage for a task-based database selection system.
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    "Children Selecting Books in a Library": Extending Models of Information Behavior to a Recreational Setting
    (2007-06-05) Reuter, Kara Anne; Neuman, Delia; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Literacy researchers suggest that book-selection strategies are part of successful literacy development, and in several research studies children reported that finding books they like is the biggest barrier they face to reading. Despite much attention to particular aspects of children's reading habits, few studies have examined the processes children use to select books. Against this backdrop, this study undertook a qualitative investigation of primary-school children's selection of books for recreational reading in a public library over the summer. Book selection was examined from the perspective of library and information science (LIS) models of information behavior and relevance assessment. To expand LIS research into the recreational realm, the study also drew upon reader-response theory in education and uses-and-gratifications theory in communications. Using a multiple-case study design, the study collected questionnaire, interview, and observation data from 20 7- to 9-year-old children and their parents during several sessions at their homes and at the public library. The data were analyzed with a grounded-theory approach. During the study, the children spoke in general of the gratifications--cognitive, emotional, and social--that reading provides. When embarking on book selection at the library, however, they did not mention specific needs they sought to fill. When browsing the library, the children exhibited successively more involvement with books, examining them externally and internally and focusing on a variety of elements. The central aspects influencing children's selection of books were contents and reading experience. Several differences emerged among the children: older children were more purposeful in their behaviors than younger children; girls were more independent than boys; some children had strong preferences that influenced their book-selection practices; and children exhibited distinct book-selection strategies. Finally, children rarely acknowledged receiving formal instruction in book selection and faced a number of obstacles related to library terminology and concepts. Within the LIS field, this research contributes to an expanded understanding of information behavior. The findings have implications for strategies to encourage effective book selection through library instruction and parental involvement as well as for approaches to improve library services and systems, such as readers' advisory, shelf arrangement, and digital libraries.
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    Relevance judgments and query reformulation by users interacting with a speech retrieval system
    (2006-04-27) Kim, Jinmook; Soergel, Dagobert; Oard, Douglas W.; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation presents a framework for searcher behavior that can be used as a basis for designing future speech retrieval systems. It reports on an exploratory study that examines: the criteria searchers of oral history interviews use when judging the relevance of a recording or a passage; the attributes on which those judgments are based; the moves searchers adopt for information need refinements (INR); and the types of query reformulation by which those moves are realized. Eight participants that include faculty, Holocaust scholars, a film producer, and a high school teacher searched the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation's collection that consists of 116,000 hours of 52,000 testimonies in 32 different languages from the survivors, liberators, rescuers and witnesses of the Holocaust. Each participant performed a series of searches based on his/her own interests over a period of three to nine days. Data were collected through observation and screen capture, think aloud, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions; coded; and analyzed by looking for patterns. The cognitive process of relevance judgment and query reformulation occurred interactively during a search. As a result, some relevance criteria (topicality, comprehensibility, novelty of content, and acquaintance) and INR moves (clarification alone, specialization, restriction, and note for later) were observed during both processes. Some criteria, such as richness and emotion, were medium (i.e., speech) and domain (i.e., oral history) specific. The findings identified four different types of attributes of a recording or a passage that included spoken-content attributes (person, place, event/experience, organization/group, ), audio and/or visual attributes (facial expression, voice, gesture, displayed artifact, ), non-content attributes (cache, digitization, language, ), and biographical attributes (name of interviewee, date of birth, gender, occupation, ). Searchers used different query reformulation types, such as adding a condition, narrowing a condition, new term, broadening a condition, removing a condition, and modifying a condition, in order to achieve different INR moves. Some important implications for indexing and metadata assignment, support for search and browsing, and task-oriented system and interface design are drawn from the findings. It then concludes with discussions on limitations and ideas for future work.
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    Matching Meaning for Cross-Language Information Retrieval
    (2005-12-06) Wang, Jianqiang; Oard, Douglas W; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Cross-language information retrieval concerns the problem of finding information in one language in response to search requests expressed in another language. The explosive growth of the World Wide Web, with access to information in many languages, has provided a substantial impetus for research on this important problem. In recent years, significant advances in cross-language retrieval effectiveness have resulted from the application of statistical techniques to estimate accurate translation probabilities for individual terms from automated analysis of human-prepared translations. With few exceptions, however, those results have been obtained by applying evidence about the meaning of terms to translation in one direction at a time (e.g., by translating the queries into the document language). This dissertation introduces a more general framework for the use of translation probability in cross-language information retrieval based on the notion that information retrieval is dependent fundamentally upon matching what the searcher means with what the document author meant. The perspective yields a simple computational formulation that provides a natural way of combining what have been known traditionally as query and document translation. When combined with the use of synonym sets as a computational model of meaning, cross-language search results are obtained using English queries that approximate a strong monolingual baseline for both French and Chinese documents. Two well-known techniques (structured queries and probabilistic structured queries) are also shown to be a special case of this model under restrictive assumptions.