Preliminary Conference Agenda

Capstone programs, whether they be in the form of final projects, research or thesis, offer culminating experiences for iSchool students to demonstrate their learning in a real-world project where the students attempt to tackle a significant information problem, address a social issue, or explore a market opportunity. The session intends to bring together the iSchools community with interest and experience in Capstone programs to discuss their potential, practices and opportunities for expanded students' experiential learning, faculty engagement and industry partnerships.

About 19.3 million people are newly diagnosed with cancer each year, but only a small percentage of all diagnoses refer to young adults (18 - 39 years). Therefore, they are often not focused on within the healthcare infrastructure, although they have age-specific information, care and service needs. This results in difficulties that will be examined in this article concerning the information journey of the target group. Based on fourteen semi-structured qualitative interviews, this article describes the use of information sources during the cancer patient journeys of young adults. Furthermore, it describes problems the target group experiences. The data indicate that young adults, regardless of whether they actively seek information or rarely seek information at all, often have to rely on serendipity to obtain helpful information. Furthermore, problems regarding the reliability of information sources have been identified and information relating to non-medical needs must be sought autonomously, which results in overload and uncertainty. For the circumvention of these difficulties, improvements are needed in the provision of information for young adults. The knowledge about validated information sources would support the information journeys during their cancer patient journeys.

This paper reports early results from an ongoing study exploring the personal information management of nonbinary people in Ireland. Cushing [1, 2] and other PIM scholars have found that personal information is maintained because it represents an individual’s identity to them-selves and others. In the context of inequality, Cushing and Kerrigan [3] found that PIM can be perceived as a burden. This study furthers our PIM-B work through exploring the lived experiences of nonbinary individuals that have to maintain personal information that does not represent their identity in order to engage in society. Nonbinary people often find themselves in the position of maintaining personal information that does not represent their gender identity as a result of the traditional binarised structure of society more broadly. How does the requirement to maintain this information that is not representative of gender diversity mediate PIM? Using reflexive thematic analysis, our early analysis of 3 interviews suggests that nonbinary people in Ireland perceive both the information use and the exertion of control over distribution of personal information as a burden. This finding can be used to refine the concept of a PIM-B, while also using PIM-B as an indicator of the inequalities gender minorities face.

Research shows that music helps people regulate and process emotions to positively impact their mental health, but there is limited research on how to build music systems or services to support this. We investigated how engagement with music can help the listener support their mental health through a case study of the BTS ARMY fandom. We conducted a survey with 1,190 BTS fans asking about the impact BTS’ music has on their mental health and wellbeing. Participants reported that certain songs are appropriate for specific types of mood regulations, attributed largely to lyrics. Reflection, connection, and comfort were the top three experiences listeners shared during and after listening to BTS’ music. External factors like knowledge about the context of a song’s creation or other fans’ reactions to a song also influenced people’s feelings toward the music. Our research suggests an expanded view of music’s impact on mental health beyond a single-modal experience to a dynamic, multi-factored experience that evolves over time within the interconnected ecosystem of the fandom. We present the Dynamic Music Engagement Model which represents the complex, multifaceted, context-dependent nature of how music influences people’s mental health, followed by design suggestions for music information systems and services.

Addressing equity, diversity, inclusion, and equal information access (EDIA) are acknowledged priorities. Challenges with hearing impairment are researched at various stages of development and academic levels. The potential isolation of people with a hearing impairment from scholarly information sharing and discourse can be addressed from multiple perspectives (information ethics, information behaviour). Hearing impairment manifests on a spectrum from mild to profound. Although written publications are the dominant means of scholarly information sharing, the value of meeting participation and oral communication (e.g., conference presentations, YouTube videos) are acknowledged in addition to debates on the importance of in-presence versus virtual meetings. Assistive technologies (e.g., accessible telephones/videophones) and sign language offer solutions. The use of these in scholarly information sharing is not apparent. This panel will discuss how and with what consequences, people with hearing impairment are excluded from scholarly information sharing (excluding written communication) and how challenges can be addressed.

This panel focuses on an emerging theme in information research: data literacy. As the growth of big data transforms many aspects of daily life, not every citizen is ready to understand the value of the openly available data and read, work with, and utilize it. This raises the question: How can organizations and individuals innovate to address digital exclusion and enable individuals to use the resources that are available to participate in a connected information environment? This interactive panel aims to describe and discuss creative and experimental approaches to address data literacy practices in different contexts, theoretical models, and philosophical arguments. We address this from a variety of perspectives, including community college students’ data literacy needs, research data management in libraries, data literacy for Hispanic students in high schools, and inclusive data literacy curriculum design.

While heuristics are useful resources for designing the web’s information architecture (IA) from scratch today, IA practitioners occasionally receive requests to redesign established products, and guidelines are also needed to address such “redesign” requests. Past studies on IA design tend to focus on prototyping and how iterations contribute to final products, but such iterations have more to do with how users interact with the prototype than with its IA per se. This commentary paper reports a workflow for re-designing and optimizing two websites’ information architecture (IA). Based on two case studies, we explored a redesigned workflow of IA, which contains five stages: 1) screening, 2) synergizing, 3) synchronizing, 4) IA development 5) evaluation & execution. Compared to designing an IA from scratch, a team who redesigns an IA may communicate with more stakeholders and consider internal politics’ impact. Our proposed IA redesign workflow helps web designers allocate their resources and prioritize their work when given rede-sign tasks.

The fourth dimension of the Records Continuum Model, pluralize, is often characterized as the link to understanding records’ function in the societal and collective memory. Recently, Frings-Hessami (2021) presented the con-cept of societal embeddedness as an enhanced understanding of the fourth dimension. The concept is proposed to be used as a tool to interpret and ana-lyse pluralization processes, and Frings-Hessami argues that pluralization does not just involve sharing in the future—but also societal expectations in both records and recordkeeping. The purpose of this paper is, from a user perspective, to test the concept of societal embeddedness as an analytical tool in a specific recordkeeping story, and to reflect on the societal contexts of records to enhance sustainable recordkeeping of digital information. The paper is based on a research project in the context of the Swedish private sec-tor and digital recordkeeping of company bankruptcies. The results strongly suggest that the concept of societal embeddedness can contribute to an en-hanced understanding to why records are created, used, and consequently, understanding user need. Overall, analyses show that the fourth dimension affects all other dimensions and societal embeddedness can be used as a tool to understand the actions taking place in them.

Journal classification systems use a variety of (partially) overlapping and non-exhaustive subject categories which results in many journals being classified into more than a single subject category. Given a subject category, respective journals are often ranked based on a common metric such as the Journal Impact Factor or SCImago Journal Rank. However, given a specific journal, it might be ranked very differently across its associated subject categories.

In this study, we set to explore the possible association between the number of categories a journal is classified to and its associated rankings using the two most widely used indexing systems - Web Of Science and Scopus.

Using known distance measures, our results show that a higher number of classified categories per journal is associated with an increased range and variance of the associated rankings within them. Findings and possible implications are discussed.

Provenance is the story of objects: how they have come to be, what they could have been, what they will be. This paper explores the temporal complexity of provenance and suggests the need for the concept of subjunctive provenance. Using the example of building an IKEA LACK table, the authors explore the established concepts of retrospective and prospective provenance to highlight gaps and the potential for subjunctive provenance.

Metadata education is evolving in the Arabian Gulf region. To ensure the effective instruction and skill-building, empirical data is needed on the outcomes of these early metadata instruction efforts. This paper is the first one to address this need and provide such data from one of the countries in the region. It reports results of the examination of metadata records for Arabic-language eBooks. The records were created by novice metadata creators as part of the undergraduate coursework at a Kuwaiti university in one of the classroom assignments over three semesters. Analysis focused on two important criteria of metadata quality: accuracy and completeness. The results are presented in-context, after introducing the metadata teaching practices at this undergraduate program, and the major Dublin Core skill-building assignment. Discussion of results is followed by discussion of future research.

This exploratory study is the first one that examined student-created metadata for physical non-text resources. We applied in-depth qualitative and quantitative content analysis to the Dublin Core (DCTERMS) metadata created by the graduate students in two sections of an introductory digital library metadata course. The analysis of bibliographic records that represent paintings identified record fields in which novice metadata creators tend to make mistakes. Examples of the most common kinds of metadata errors for each quality criterion (accuracy, complete-ness, and consistency) are discussed and compared with results of previous relevant research. Finding of comparative analysis for the asynchronous course section and the section with synchronous class meetings are also presented. Implications are discussed, along with future directions for research.