Temple University Libraries: Recent submissions
Now showing items 1-20 of 132
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Building In Her Own Right: White Paper for National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (Grant #PW-264121-19)The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) Implementation grant to digitize thirty linear feet of materials from thirty-one collections in twelve of its member institutions and two additional repositories documenting the history of women’s civil rights and expose that and additional content on the web. The two-year grant, beginning in May 2019, was designed to ensure that a significant portion of the material would be online in the months surrounding the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth amendment: August 18, 2020. Additionally, collection-level records for any material not digitized by that time served as signposts for researchers seeking more timely access. That project built on the successes of a one-year NEH Foundations grant (July 2016-June 2017), designed to identify and disseminate information about collections in Philadelphia-area archives documenting women working for their own and other’s rights, 1820-1920. The content, provided on a pilot website (http://inherownright.org/), served as a resource for students and teachers as the nation began to look to the 100th anniversary of woman suffrage in 2020. PACSCL requested additional NEH funding to digitize more content from its member institutions and other institutions as well as to support outreach to find, digitize, and describe additional collections, particularly those documenting underrepresented populations. In Her Own Right also expanded its user audiences from high school students and undergraduates to include graduate students and scholars, by enhancing the website to include additional tools and resources supporting research use. This enabled the team to realize more fully an original core concept of the project: to provide both “retail” access (mediated content with contextualizing supporting materials) and “wholesale” access (unmediated raw material—both digitized content and metadata–for a range of future research and digital scholarship projects). The core of project work was digitizing and describing manuscript and some printed materials, held in area institutions, irrespective of the geographic focus of the collection itself. The digitized material is served up through a robust web presence that provides access to well-described digital items; the capacity to download and manipulate the descriptive data to generate new scholarly products; and other resources that will serve students and scholars studying not only women’s work leading up to the 1920 vote for woman suffrage, but countless other topics as well. The long narrative of women making incremental progress toward equality and opportunity continues to be relevant. To extend project work to document the conversations across race and class that the team began to reflect on during the Foundations grant, the Implementation proposal also budgeted time and staff to find, digitize, and describe additional collections documenting underrepresented populations. Initial research identified a number of potentially rich collections for inclusion that illuminated a broad range of activism among many groups of women. These included some groups that are underrepresented in the traditional historical narrative of women’s campaign for voting and other civil rights, but the project team also hoped to find even more collections relating to these underrepresented populations and recognized that doing so would require significant outreach beyond PACSCL members. Using PACSCL’s tested methodology from two Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Hidden Collections grants1 and PACSCL institution staff members trained in its process, the project team worked with small repositories in the area that lacked access tools or staff to identify “hidden voices.” This white paper, while highlighting the NEH Implementation phase of the project, also looks across 2016 to 2021, and outlines successes, challenges, learnings, and opportunities for continued project growth.
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Generating the Pitch: AI Literacy Instruction for Business and EntrepreneurshipLibrary patrons working in the areas of business and entrepreneurship often have special information needs (Stonebreaker et al., 2017). As librarians at a research university with a large business school, we recognized the importance of including a business and entrepreneurship focus within our AI literacy curriculum. Over the past year, we designed new instructional materials on generative AI for academic and professional purposes, with significant components for business students, instructors, and entrepreneurs. Our curriculum also caters to non-business schools on our campus, which increasingly focus on entrepreneurship. This poster describes our development of instructional materials about AI literacy in business research and practice and the use of AI tools to enhance business research techniques. Taking inspiration from Landrum et al. (2019), we employ storytelling to engage learners, centering a narrative around a protagonist using AI tools to launch a small business. We developed materials appropriate for student instruction, faculty development, or workshops for entrepreneurs. While reinforcing concepts from our library’s broader curriculum, we address AI for business inquiries such as analyzing market and consumer information, finding industry intelligence, exploring financial data, simulating investor feedback, and drafting key business documents. Our instructional program critically examines the limitations of AI tools in business research and demonstrates how to combine them with other library resources. This poster will provide practical insights and sample materials that librarians may adapt to incorporate AI literacy into their business and entrepreneurship instruction. Our work is relevant to both public and academic libraries, including those without a dedicated business school. Librarians have an opportunity to educate learners on AI’s potential to advance their academic work and prepare them for a variety of professional activities. We hope to encourage ALA 2024 attendees to consider how to integrate AI literacy and AI tools into their own business and entrepreneurship instruction.
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A Conversation with the Organizers of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine this February, a global community of volunteers has endeavored to help preserve Ukraine’s online cultural heritage. While this community comprises over 1300 volunteers, many of them work as librarians or in cultural preservation, including two of the leaders of this group, Quinn Dombrowski and Anna Kijas. Dombrowski and Kijas, along with Sebastian Majstorovic, have been instrumental in coordinating this community of experts across time zones together and also spearheading what the Washington Post described as “a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine.” To capture both their experiences, as well as how librarianship has informed SUCHO, we convened a roundtable with the organizers, as well as two of the most active volunteers Dena Strong and Erica Peaslee, who also work in GLAM.
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We’re all about openness: Except when it comes to our workspacesWhen it comes to information access, academic librarians are advocates for openness. They demonstrate a strong commitment to creating cultures of openness at their institutions, leading the way for others to grasp the power and benefits of open access publishing, open education practices, open data sharing, and more. Breaking down information barriers while establishing pathways to unfettered and free access is a core professional value. It’s probably safe to say that academic librarians have yet to encounter an open concept they refuse to embrace. Well, there might be one exception.
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Toxic metals and pediatric clinical immune dysfunction: A systematic review of the epidemiological evidenceBackground: Children are at high risk for exposure to toxic metals and are vulnerable to their effects. Significant research has been conducted evaluating the role of these metals on immune dysfunction, characterized by biologic and clinical outcomes. However, there are inconsistencies in these studies. The objective of the present review is to critically evaluate the existing literature on the association between toxic metals (lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium) and pediatric immune dysfunction. Methods: Seven databases (PubMed (NLM), Embase (Elsevier), CINAHL (Ebsco), Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics), ProQuest Public Health Database, and ProQuest Environmental Science Collection) were searched following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines in February 2024. Rayaan software identified duplicates and screened by title and abstract in a blinded and independent review process. The remaining full texts were reviewed for content and summarized. Exclusions during the title, abstract, and full-text reviews included: 1) not original research, 2) not epidemiology, 3) did not include toxic metals, 4) did not examine an immune health outcome, or 5) not pediatric (>18 years). This systematic review protocol followed the PRISMA guidelines. Rayaan was used to screen records using title and abstract by two blinded and independent reviewers. This process was repeated for full-text article screening selection. Results: The search criteria produced 7906 search results; 2456 duplicate articles were removed across search engines. In the final review, 79 studies were included which evaluated the association between toxic metals and outcomes indicative of pediatric immune dysregulation. Conclusions: The existing literature suggests an association between toxic metals and pediatric immune dysregulation. Given the imminent threat of infectious diseases demonstrated by the recent COVID-19 epidemic in addition to increases in allergic disease, understanding how ubiquitous exposure to these metals in early life can impact immune response, infection risk, and vaccine response is imperative.
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Transforming the Knowledge Commons: Faculty-Librarian Collaborations that Advance Open Educational Practices, Student Agency, and EquityOpen educational practices (OEP) focus on open teaching and open content, offering students opportunities to do purposeful work that is available to a public beyond the classroom. Students can “contribute to the knowledge commons, not just consume it, in meaningful and lasting ways…shap[ing] the world as they encounter it” (DeRosa and Jhangiani, 2017). As active agents in their own learning, students need a community with which to explore their information privilege, test and contest ideas, and create meaning. Wikipedia provides students an authentic public community with which to participate. It also provides an outlet for publishing information on topics that are underrepresented or misrepresented in traditional publishing and by mainstream media, allowing students to see scholarship creation as part of an ongoing conversation rather than an end product. Wikipedia-editing permits diverse stories, histories, and contributors to become visible while promoting creative expression, connection, and collaboration among students. This poster is informed by a faculty-librarian collaboration that entailed developing scaffolded, renewable assignments involving Wikipedia across five years and two undergraduate Media Studies classes. Foundational knowledge of what OEP are, the characteristics of renewable assignments, and the infrastructure of Wikipedia’s platform will be covered. Data gathered from WikiEdu class dashboards and library edit-a-thons, as well as questions and student feedback from debriefing sessions, will be included in the poster. Finally, strategies for designing effective assignments involving Wikipedia-editing will also be offered as well as ideas for how librarians can best support faculty and students engaged in these activities.
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Visualizing global collaborations: Democratizing access to persistent identifier metadata and analysisThis poster investigates the opportunities and current challenges involved in using persistent identifier (PID) metadata to understand organizational research activity. A 2022 project led by the ORCID US Community (administered by Lyrasis) in partnership with the Drexel University LIS Education And Data Science Integrated Network Group (LEADING) program resulted in a suite of open tools that reduce the barrier to accessing and using ORCID data in meaningful ways. The LEADING fellows created an R script that can be used to retrieve information about publishing collaborations between researchers at a home organization and other organizations across the globe based on metadata from researchers’ ORCID profiles and publication DOI metadata. The resulting dataset can be imported into a Tableau Public dashboard template, resulting in data visualizations that may be shared with stakeholders to demonstrate researcher activity and start a conversation about impact. Despite gaps in the ORCID and DOI metadata, such as authors with no ORCID profile or an incomplete ORCID profile, the data and visualization tools can be used to advance research connections in several ways. The tools allow viewers to explore an organization’s collaborative reach and show opportunities for improving global partnerships. The suite also allows individuals to filter to their own data and could provide support for highly and widely collaborative researchers’ tenure and promotion. This democratized access to aggregated PID data can help individuals and under-resourced organizations without in-house technical staff to retrieve ORCID API data and create custom visualizations. This poster will give viewers ideas on how they can visualize PID and collaboration data for their own organizations to better understand their global footprint and to show opportunities for expanding and diversifying their research partnerships.
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Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion through Purchasing Award-Winning BooksThe presenters’ institution wanted to be deliberate about collecting materials written by and about marginalized groups. Creating a list of awards whose winners we planned to purchase annually allowed us to involve selectors from all disciplines at the outset while enabling future purchasing to happen in a way that does not take up their time. In addition, the plan ensured that collecting materials about diverse groups of people would be ongoing and not a one-time effort. Our process of evaluating awards was distinctive and collaborative and should be of interest to other libraries. Audience members will learn some of the considerations in curating a list of DEI awards and strategies for promoting such an initiative. Though we began with an existing guide to DEI-related awards, selectors at our institution did not feel all the awards on it would be appropriate for our approval plan, as there are cases when neither the author of the book nor the committee selecting the winner have a close relationship with the group described in the book. There is a risk that the award-granting organization could choose a book that presents a particular community in a way that the community finds problematic. In response to this concern, we devised a scheme for categorizing awards by organization type and authorship criteria, which allowed us to be selective about awards. Subject specialists were also given the opportunity to comment on the awards list, whether to add or remove awards from the list. Another concern was that some populations such as Black/African American and LGBT had more awards than others, such as people with disabilities, Native Americans, or Arabs/Arab Americans. To remedy this, we also calculated how many books we expect to receive for each population group, and for populations with especially few awards we plan to request finalists as well as winners. Our promotion efforts involve multiple departments within the Libraries, including acquisitions, cataloging and outreach. The books we receive via the awards plan will become part of a named collection that is searchable through the catalog. We plan to create a QR code linking to a canned catalog search for the awards collection. Catalogers will review and enhance the records to ensure that relevant aspects of either the author’s identity or the subject matter are identified. Outreach plans include sharing photos of new books on social media, putting signs around the new books shelf containing the QR code, emails from liaisons, and a write-up in the library’s email newsletter. We hope to repeat these activities yearly, so that the university community is aware that we continue to think about diversity, equity, & inclusion in our collection development.
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Impact of a Green Roof on Student Study Space Preferences: Does Biophilic Design Matter?This poster presents research on the impact of a biophilic design element of the Charles Library, specifically the green roof views, on student preferences for a study space in the building. The results of a student survey indicate that three factors, quiet, outlets, and favorite location, are higher in importance than "view of library green roof". Based on the survey results and student comments, a case can be made that biophilic design elements in library buildings promote student health and wellness.
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Get Help Finding a Digital Copy: A pandemic response becomes the new normalOur large, urban research university serves a sizeable, diverse community and is open to all. Library building closures in the early stages of the pandemic challenged us to maintain a comparable degree of openness and access virtually. We saw an opportunity to enhance our virtual reference services and keep the library "open" even when our buildings were closed. Since access to our physical collections was suddenly cut off, we established a new Get Help Finding a Digital Copy service that connected patrons to librarians working from home who could help them find digital copies of inaccessible physical items. Our crisis response became part of our permanent virtual reference services and ultimately improved the user experience of our library catalog. This poster will describe the service and present data illustrating how we meet patron needs and keep staff-patron relationships engaged during times of potential disconnection and disengagement. Learning Outcomes: Participants will learn how to enhance traditional email reference services by adding a focus on finding digital copies of inaccessible or inconveniently accessible physical materials. Participants will identify ways of deploying virtual reference technologies already in use at many libraries to facilitate access to their resources, even when buildings are closed, or patrons and staff are at a distance. Participants will learn techniques for helping virtual reference staff adapt to increased request volume and remote work conditions.
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North American Institutional Repositories with University Press ContentTo get a better understanding of the type of North American university press content currently available in institutional repositories, the authors conducted an environmental scan of 50 different institutions with institutional repositories and university presses in the United States and Canada. The data collected only includes institutional repositories that contain university press content, which encompasses a total of 39 institutions. The authors performed a search for press content in each respective public-facing repository and specific content types were recorded based on the item records and any collection descriptions the authors found.
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Future Proofing Civic Data: Exploring the Challenges of Preserving Open Civic Data for the Long TermTemple University Libraries received a Knight Foundation Grant, “Knight News Challenge on Libraries” to lead an exploratory research project, Future Proofing Civic Data, investigating the challenges of long-term preservation for open civic datasets. The project team interviewed over a dozen stakeholders about their use cases and needs and looked at several open civic data initiatives in Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and the Pittsburgh area, to compare practices and examine real-life examples. We found that there is still much to do in the community to develop systematic best practices in regard to the long-term preservation of datasets. In this white paper we explore 10 important factors that need to be taken into consideration to tackle this challenge successfully. We also look at how libraries could take the lead, or at least participate in the process. First, awareness of existing digital preservation frameworks is key when putting in place a data curation and preservation plan and developing relevant workflows and budget. The library community has developed strong “best practices” in that realm, and models such as OAIS (Open Archival Information System), TRAC (“Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification”), and LOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) provide robust guidelines that apply to all types of digital materials. We then looked at the selection process for deciding what datasets should be archived. Selection decisions are made based on various criteria, such as the known or expected users of datasets and their needs, what datasets can be archived and made available more easily, and what datasets represent a city or state’s activities more comprehensively. Among other things, single file objects such as CSV or KML files are much easier to archive than more complex formats or API-mediated content. Next we considered concerns related to the description of datasets, examining current metadata practices from a number of open civic data initiatives, and gave suggestions on possible improvements. We then turned our attention to the notion of dataset reliability and authenticity, that is, how do users know that an archived dataset has the same content as the original and can be trusted? We found that datasets require careful stewardship at several levels to remain complete and reliable over time. The loss of reliability or authenticity could be due to a multitude of unintentional causes, or derive from a more intentional temptation to “rewrite history” by one of the parties involved. Versioning is another important factor, as datasets may evolve over time and several versions might be generated for a single dataset, either through regularly scheduled harvests or occasional data restructuring. Versioning may require the development of policies and procedures to ensure that the collection of successive versions is done in an orderly and systematic manner, and that change requests and deletions are handled uniformly. To enable the successful discovery of archived datasets, we need to answer two questions: (1) how will users searching for open civic data know that preserved historical copies of the data exist?, and (2) how can they distinguish between the current active copy of a dataset and the archived versions? The software interface must facilitate a seamless navigation between active copy and archived versions. We looked at intellectual property rights and other legal issues, and the potential need to develop agreements between data creating agencies and archiving agencies in order to clarify the rights to preserve and provide long-term access to a dataset. The organizational model and governance structure chosen for the overall civic data initiative also have consequences for the ability to ensure successful long-term preservation functions. In particular, involving a multiplicity of partners and stakeholders is the best way to ensure that diverse voices are heard and that the project is run with a maximal level of transparency. Furthermore, open communication flows are also essential to ensure that preservation-related policies are applied optimally. This includes communication among the archiving agencies, the civic data creators, and the civic data portal managers. One more important notion when looking at digital preservation endeavors is that technology is only a small part of successful long-term digital preservation, and thinking proactively about organizational commitment and economic sustainability is essential. Finally, we described two prototypes that we developed to explore concrete technical solutions to archive datasets, using OpenDataPhilly as a testbed. Archive-It, or Prototype 1, uses the Internet Archive’s web crawling platform, which takes scheduled virtual captures of websites over time. Dat, or Prototype 2, is a secure and distributed package manager that does versioning of datasets locally, or shares and syncs dataset versions through a peer-to-peer network. Each prototype has pros and cons. We believe that there are clear and advantageous opportunities for libraries, both academic and public, to take a role in supporting the long-term preservation of open civic data, especially given libraries' pre-existing expertise and collection practices. It comports with libraries’ commitments to serve its users, provide research resources, and provide access to information. Furthermore, libraries can also get involved meaningfully in open civic data initiatives in other capacities, such as helping with outreach and community engagement, developing metadata standards and providing search optimization techniques for discovery.
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Moving to Mobile: Space as a Service in the Academic LibraryIn an academic environment that is shifting to hybrid learning modes, librarians must reimagine their space as a service delivered to students. Where do desktop computer labs fit into this vision for libraries that prioritize mobile-first strategies? This article provides a case study of an academic library transitioning to a post-desktop space with recommendations for a successful project.
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Usability as a Method for Assessing DiscoveryThe University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries engaged in three projects that helped identify areas of its website that had inhibited discovery of services and resources. These projects also helped generate staff interest in the Usability Working Group, which led these endeavors. The first project studied student responses to the site. The second focused on a usability test with the Libraries’ peer research coaches and resulted in a presentation of those findings to the Libraries staff. The final project involved a specialized test, the results of which also were presented to staff. All three of these projects led to improvements to the website and will inform a larger redesign.
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3D Printed Arteries: Making Cardiovascular Anatomy Tangible & AccessibleWith accessible 3D printed models of a patient’s coronary arteries, makerspace librarians assisted cardiovascular fellows in understanding coronary fluoroscopic anatomy and improved accessibility to such teaching aids.
