College of Information Studies
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item The Effect of an Integrated Knowledge Management Architecture on Organizational Performance and Impact: The Case of the World Bank(2003) Fonseca, Ana Flavia; Soergel, Dagobert; Information Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)Using the World Bank as Case Study, this dissertation investigates the impact of knowledge management programs on the organization performance by using a combination of three methods: Records Analysis, Interviews and Outcome Mapping. The study had two phases: quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The Knowledge Management Program of the World Bank has had a direct and beneficial impact on its operations. The Program changed internal staff behavior, improved the sharing of information and knowledge within the organization, and promoted the design and application of participatory knowledge strategies in the countries. New knowledge products as well as strong country participation and ownership to the projects studied resulted from these changes. However, the study also shows that this impact is far from being sufficiently significant to influence or help make the knowledge management program fully integrated with the organization core processes and products. The gap between the KM Program architecture and other programs and initiatives focusing on making this concept operational within the Bank remains an issue. In spite of the fact that knowledge management principles are being mainstreamed in core services, the difference is still very wide between the overall goals of the Knowledge Bank and their translation into the implementation of knowledge products and services in the countries. The research did confirm previous research in the field of knowledge management and validated the findings from other case studies. The results of the study also allowed for the identification of 10 criteria for mainstreaming knowledge management programs within organizations and identified characteristics of knowledge delivery processes that were effective for knowledge absorption . . The importance of "how to" and "procedural knowledge"; the importance "horizontal knowledge exchanges" and a number of other elements, were confirmed as factors affecting knowledge absorption and positive changes in user behavior.Item Unpacking Social Media’s Role in Resource Provision: Variations across Relational and Communicative Properties(MDPI, 2014-10-23) Vitak, JessicaNew information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge existing beliefs regarding the exchange of social resources within a network. The present study examines individuals’ perceived access to social, emotional, and instrumental resources by analyzing relational and Facebook-specific characteristics of dyadic relationships. Results suggest that the social and technical affordances of the site—including visibility of content and connections, as well as streamlined processes for interacting with a large audience—may augment existing perceptions of resource access for some ties while providing a major (or sole) outlet to interact and exchange resources with others. Specifically, weaker ties appear to benefit more than strong ties from engagement in directed communication and relationship maintenance strategies, while additional variations were observed across relationship category, dyad composition, and geographic proximity. In summary, these findings provide new evidence for how positive relational gains may be derived from site use.Item Environmental Factors Affecting Where People Geocache(MDPI, 2016-04-12) Golbeck, Jennifer; Neustaedter, CarmanOutdoor leisure activities are important for public health as well as family cohesiveness, yet environmental factors may easily affect someone’s ability to participate in such activities. We explored this with a focus on the social web-based treasure hunt game called Geocaching. We collected data on all US and Canadian geocaches from OpenCaching.com and conducted an online survey with twenty geocachers as a follow-up to our data analysis. Data analysis showed that geocaches were more often found in areas that were wealthier, better educated, younger, and more urban, and had higher population density and better weather. Survey results showed similar trends: Most people actively thought about where they would cache and tried to minimize risks, despite cache hiders thinking less about these concerns. These results further emphasize the importance of environmental factors when it comes to participation in outdoor activities and leads to Human–Computer Interaction design implications for location-based online social activities.Item User Perception of Facebook App Data Access: A Comparison of Methods and Privacy Concerns(MDPI, 2016-03-25) Golbeck, Jennifer; Mauriello, Matthew LouisUsers share vast amounts of personal information online, but are they fully aware of what information they are sharing and with whom? In this paper, we focused on Facebook apps and set out to understand how concerned users are about privacy and how well-informed they are about what personal data apps can access. We found that initially, subjects were generally under-informed about what data apps could access from their profiles. After viewing additional information about these permissions, subjects’ concern about privacy on Facebook increased. Subjects’ understanding of what data apps were able to access increased, although even after receiving explicit information on the topic, many subjects still did not fully understand the extent to which apps could access their data.Item DRAS-TIC Linked Data: Evenly Distributing the Past(MDPI, 2019-07-04) Jansen, Gregory; Coburn, Aaron; Soroka, Adam; Thomas, Will; Marciano, RichardMemory institutions must be able to grow a fully-functional repository incrementally as collections grow, without expensive enterprise storage, massive data migrations, and the performance limits that stem from the vertical storage strategies. The Digital Repository at Scale that Invites Computation (DRAS-TIC) Fedora research project, funded by a two-year National Digital Platform grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), is producing open-source software, tested cluster configurations, documentation, and best-practice guides that enable institutions to manage linked data repositories with petabyte-scale collections reliably. DRAS-TIC is a research initiative at the University of Maryland (UMD). The first DRAS-TIC repository system, named Indigo, was developed in 2015 and 2016 through a collaboration between U.K.-based storage company, Archive Analytics Ltd., and the UMD iSchool Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC), through funding from an NSF DIBBs (Data Infrastructure Building Blocks) grant (NCSA “Brown Dog”). DRAS-TIC Indigo leverages industry standard distributed database technology, in the form of Apache Cassandra, to provide open-ended scaling of repository storage without performance degradation. With the DRAS-TIC Fedora initiative, we make use of the Trellis Linked Data Platform (LDP), developed by Aaron Coburn at Amherst College, to add the LDP API over similar Apache Cassandra storage. This paper will explain our partner use cases, explore the system components, and showcase our performance-oriented approach, with the most emphasis given to performance measures available through the analytical dashboard on our testbed website.Item Curious Revolutionaries: The Peales Give Their Encore at Philosophical Hall’s Museum(American Philosophical Society News, 2017-07) Marsh, Diana; Mason, Merrill; Ellison, AmyTHE EXHIBITION NOW ON VIEW at the APS Museum is Curious Revolutionaries: The Peales of Philadelphia. This exhibition displays the work of the Peales, an early American family of patriots, soldiers, artists, politicians, inventors, explorers, naturalists, entrepreneurs, and world-class, ever-busy tinkerers. Their boundless curiosity led them to pursue a wide variety of interests, which ranged from excavating mastodon fossils in upstate New York, to collaborating on inventions like the polygraph, to painting the pantheon of American leaders, to collecting and cataloging thousands of species from all over the world. As his portrait gallery grew and attracted a supportive audience, Charles Willson’s idea for developing a public museum began to take shape. By educating the American public and increasing their understanding of the natural world, Peale believed his museum could help cultivate a more enlightened citizenry and advance America’s prestige around the world. In 1786 (the year he was elected a Member of the APS), he founded the Philadelphia Museum at his home on Third and Lombard Streets, establishing what would become the first successful public museum and a model for future democratic museums. The Peale-Sellers Family Collection (of 19 linear feet, comprising some 38 boxes and 147 volumes) and the Society’s related collections include letters and diaries, as well as sketchbooks, painting palettes, hand-cut silhouettes, and watercolors. Highlights from the APS Museum collections include admission tokens from Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum (which was located in Philosophical Hall from 1794 to 1810), miniature fireplace patent models designed by Charles Willson Peale and his son Raphaelle, and several paintings. Together, these important collections reveal the Peales’ influence on early American popular culture through innovations in art, science, and technology. The exhibition is divided into three thematic sections: The Peales and the New Nation, Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, and The Legacy of the Peales. Each section offered us the opportunity to explore lesser- known aspects of the Peale family and experiment with new curatorial approaches.Item Gathering Voices: Thomas Jefferson and Native America(American Philosophical Society News, 2016-07) Mason, Merrill; Marsh, Diana E.This spring, the American philosophical society opened its third in a series of exhi- bitions on Thomas Jefferson. Gathering Voices: Thomas Jefferson and Native America explores Jefferson’s effort to collect native languages and its legacy at the APS.There are a num- ber of “firsts”in Gathering Voices. it marks the first time the Aps Museum has displayed one of the Library’s largest collections—the papers, photographs, and audio recordings from some 270 native American and indigenous cultures. it is also the first time the Museum invited two native advisors— Margaret Bruchac (Abenaki) and richard hill, sr. (Tuscarora)—to work with our museum team.Thanks to the newly founded Center for native American and indigenous research (CNAIR), the exhibition piloted a consultative process with native communities whose materials are featured in Gathering Voices. The show also includes some of the Museum’s most extensive multimedia features, including an animated map projection, two interactive touch-screen stations, and audio recordings. The resulting exhibition reflects the close partnerships among the Aps Museum and Library and native American communities.Item Charles Whitney Gilmore – The Forgotten “Dinosaur Hunter”(Digging the Fossil Record: Paleobiology at Smithsonian, 2013-06) Marsh, Diana; Sues, Hans DieterCharles Whitney Gilmore (1874-1945), affectionately known as “Charlie” to his colleagues, was one of the last major figures of America’s “Golden Age” of dinosaur hunting. It is largely due to his efforts that the Department of Paleobiology is now home to one of the premier collections of dinosaurs and other fossil reptiles in the United States. Early in his career Gilmore commenced scientific studies of dinosaurs and many other groups of extinct reptiles, starting with the rich material from the Marsh Collection. His monographs on the skeletal structure of the armored Stegosaurus (1914), the predatory dinosaurs Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus (1920), and the sauropod Apatosaurus (1936) remain essential references for any serious student of dinosaurs. Working at a time when there were few professional vertebrate paleontologists, Gilmore also received invitations from other institutions, including the Carnegie Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, to study and publish on important specimens of dinosaurs and other fossil reptiles from their respective collections. Many important papers, including the first monograph on early Late Cretaceous dinosaurs from Inner Mongolia (China), resulted from these “extramural” research efforts. The collections of fossil reptiles in the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology offer eloquent testimony of Gilmore’s devotion and efforts and will continue to be an unparalleled resource for research and exhibition.Item Mary Jane Peale: The Forgotten Peale Painter(American Philosophical Society Blog, 2017-07-17) Marsh, DianaPeale children were encouraged to pursue art at a time when professional female artists were rare. Mary Jane Peale, Charles Willson’s granddaughter, is the least known of Peale family artists. The APS is fortunate to have her diaries, letters, and notes in its collections. Despite proposals of marriage, Mary Jane remained single, and led a rich life as an unmarried artist. In the 1860s, she traveled Europe—to Paris, Geneva, and Luxembourg, among other places—to see its museums and painting collections. In the 1870s, she mingled with the nation’s intellectual elite in Washington—the Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry and Spencer Baird, as well as biologist Louis Agassiz and geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. When she died at age 72, her obituary proclaimed that this “well-known portrait painter” was the “last of family of famous portrait painters.” Today, her work is held at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Sheldon Museum of Art, and the Westmoreland Museum of Art.Item Linkages between information overload and acculturative stress: The case of Black diasporic immigrants in the US(SAGE Publications, 2019-07-07) Ndumu, AnaThis study examines the information behavior of Black immigrants in the United States and specifically investigates possible linkages between information overload and acculturative stress. Focus groups were conducted with African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latinx immigrants in Florida. When analyzed according to Jaeger and Burnett’s theory of information worlds (Burnett and Jaeger, 2011; Jaeger and Burnett, 2010), the data supports that participants experience information overload as a result of the voluminous and dispersed nature of information in the US; perceptions of belonging and transnationality; and undertaking high-stakes tasks such as immigration procedures, finding employment, and understanding cultural norms. Participants felt that the large, stratified, and complex US information landscape can prompt stress. Since information overload poses a barrier to immigrant social inclusion, it can be interpreted as acculturative stress.