Walking in Your Users’ Shoes: An Introduction to User Experience Research as a Tool for Developing User-Centered Libraries

In the past decade, User Experience research and design has gained significant traction in the business world. It also has much to offer to academic libraries. In this framework, the center of attention is always the users and their experience with an organization at all physical and digital touchpoints. User Experience research can be used to discover how patrons interact with the library as well as any potential trouble spots, where patrons become frustrated or even choose not to use the library at all. This research can then be used to inform user-centered design. User Experience research is an iterative process, and the work of discovering how patrons experience the library is never done.     

Do researchers collaborate in a similar way to publish and to develop projects?

The aim of this paper is to establish the similarities and differences between the way of collaboration and the production of researchers when dealing with publications or with the development of projects and whether the collaboration patterns change across disciplines.We have studied the networks of researchers formed through the collaborations in papers or in projects in a research institution (the University of Zaragoza) and we have analyzed a series of individual and global magnitudes. As a general result, we have observed that the laws governing the individual productivity are similar for the cases of publications and projects but, however, the behavior is different when analyzing more complex magnitudes such as the collaborations or other structural variables. We consider also the subnetworks defined by the researchers of the different disciplines and characterize their topologies and compare the corresponding collaboration patterns.Because of the general approach, we expect most of the conclusions to be applicable to other universities or research centers.     

Do You See What I See?: Third-Person Effects on Public Communication Through Self-Esteem,Social Stigma,and Product Use

In this experiment I examined the effect of self-esteem, negative stigma of product in a message, and product use as a form of ego-involvement on the third-person effect in an effort to understand the variables underlying the third-person effect. The findings broaden 1 belief about the third-person effect in relation to public communication and call into question 2 others. This has ramifications in the area of public opinion regarding socially stigmatized messages, particularly in the realm of tobacco and alcohol advertising, suggesting the perception that a publicly communicated message containing a social stigma can influence the level of the third-person effect, indirectly affecting public communication and opinion formation.     

What's So Funny About a Poke in the Eye? The Prevalence of Violence in Comedy Films and Its Relation to Social and Economic Threat in the United States, 1951-2000

We examined the violent content of the top-grossing comedy films from 1951 to 2000. Comedic violence increased sharply around 1970 and has been relatively consistent since then. Aggressors were depicted in somewhat more positive terms than targets, but in general, the message of comedic violence was not one of good triumphing over evil. Top-grossing comedy films featured more violence when unemployment, suicide, homicide, divorce, and the consumer price index were higher.     

How Do They Research? An Ethnographic Study of Final Year Undergraduate Research Behavior in an Irish University

The objectives of this study were to identify how, when, and where students research; the impact of learning environments on research productivity, and to recommend improved supports to facilitate research. An ethnographic approach that entailed following five students in the final six weeks of their program enabled deep level analysis. The study examined the practice of undergraduate research inside and outside the library walls and found that the research process can be influenced by a number of factors including age, experience, work commitments, family, peer, academic, and library support. Mobile research is continuing to grow among undergraduate students, particularly those juggling family and work commitments. The research suggests a correlation between intercultural issues such as ethnicity and language with library anxiety. Until they had immersed themselves in the research process, most of the students in this study believed that research was a linear process.     

Case Studies in Electronic Serials Cataloging,or What Am I Supposed to Do with This?

SUMMARY

Shadle examined the CONSER recommended aggregator-neutral record, providing background on its development, as well as examples and discussion of records demonstrating the changes that are underway. He also included a brief discussion on electronic serials and integrating resources, with examples that served to clarify their differences. Lastly, there was discussion on title changes and buried title changes as they might appear in electronic serials, with suggestions on ways to most effectively handle them.     

Giving the “Viewser” a Voice? Situating the Individual in Relation to Personalization,Narrowcasting, and Public Service Broadcasting

This article undertakes a critical comparison of contemporary personalization practices on Web platforms such as YouTube and Facebook with long-established practices of narrowcasting. Though such platforms appear to adhere to goals of universality similarly adhered to by public service broadcasting (PSB), the implementation of personalization on these platforms proves problematic to their discursive positioning as free “public” services. Furthermore, though public service broadcasters have embraced personalization in the name of pluralism, critics suggest that the narrowcasting inherent in personalization exists in tension to PSB's enduring commitments. Finally, the article argues that system-initiated personalization negates the “consumer sovereignty” that narrowcasting has traditionally mobilized.     

Private Lives in Public Places–Oral Histories of Performing Artists: How Much Do You Really Want to Know?

ABSTRACT

This article is an exploration of oral history practice within the context of a performing arts archive. It addresses the deceptively simple question of what oral historians should actually ask their respondents and, ultimately, how much do we, as researchers, really want to know. The use of oral history material is discussed from a historical point of view in relation to archival collecting and the needs of scholars and researchers. The notion that oral history practice must both respond to and transcend this history is set forward. The article concludes by advocating an expansive approach to oral history as a means to more fully understand and preserve our pasts.     

Do Article Influence scores overestimate the citation impact of social science journals in subfields that are related to higher-impact natural science disciplines?

Unlike Impact Factors (IF), Article Influence (AI) scores assign greater weight to citations that appear in highly cited journals. The natural sciences tend to have higher citation rates than the social sciences. We might therefore expect that relative to IF, AI overestimates the citation impact of social science journals in subfields that are related to (and presumably cited in) higher-impact natural science disciplines. This study evaluates that assertion through a set of simple and multiple regressions covering seven social science disciplines: anthropology, communication, economics, education, library and information science, psychology, and sociology. Contrary to expectations, AI underestimates 5IF (five-year Impact Factor) for journals in science-related subfields such as scientific communication, science education, scientometrics, biopsychology, and medical sociology. Journals in these subfields have low AI scores relative to their 5IF values. Moreover, the effect of science-related status is considerable—typically 0.60 5IF units or 0.50 SD. This effect is independent of the more general finding that AI scores underestimate 5IF for higher-impact journals. It is also independent of the very modest curvilinearity in the relationship between AI and 5IF.     

Validating the Hornik & Woolf approach to choosing media campaign themes: Do promising beliefs predict behavior change in a longitudinal study?

Hornik and Woolf (1999) proposed using cross-sectional survey data to prioritize beliefs to address with communication campaign messages. The empirical component of the approach combines evidence of (1) association of beliefs with intentions and (2) current level of beliefs to calculate a “percentage to gain” as the potential promise of a belief. However, the method relies on cross-sectional data; its conclusions are open to challenge. Here, a panel study assesses whether the calculated promise of a belief actually predicts future behavior change. A nationally representative sample of 3,204 U.S. youth and young adults were interviewed twice, six months apart. Sixteen beliefs about the benefits and costs of smoking cigarettes are compared with regard to their percentage to gain (calculated from cross-sectional data) and their ability to account for subsequent cigarette use. A belief’s cross-sectional percentage to gain is substantially associated with its ability to predict subsequent behavior change (r = .53, p < .05).     

Do altmetrics assess societal impact in a comparable way to case studies? An empirical test of the convergent validity of altmetrics based on data from the UK research excellence framework (REF)

Altmetrics have been proposed as a way to assess the societal impact of research. Although altmetrics are already in use as impact or attention metrics in different contexts, it is still not clear whether they really capture or reflect societal impact. This study is based on altmetrics, citation counts, research output and case study data from the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), and peers’ REF assessments of research output and societal impact. We investigated the convergent validity of altmetrics by using two REF datasets: publications submitted as research output (PRO) to the REF and publications referenced in case studies (PCS). Case studies, which are intended to demonstrate societal impact, should cite the most relevant research papers. We used the MHq’ indicator for assessing impact – an indicator which has been introduced for count data with many zeros. The results of the first part of the analysis show that news media as well as mentions on Facebook, in blogs, in Wikipedia, and in policy-related documents have higher MHq’ values for PCS than for PRO. Thus, the altmetric indicators seem to have convergent validity for these data. In the second part of the analysis, altmetrics have been correlated with REF reviewers’ average scores on PCS. The negative or close to zero correlations question the convergent validity of altmetrics in that context. We suggest that they may capture a different aspect of societal impact (which can be called unknown attention) to that seen by reviewers (who are interested in the causal link between research and action in society).     

Acquisition of multilingual materials; Through a central resource agency or by individual libraries?: Contribution to the panel on finding,selecting, and purchasing materials for multilingual libraries in the 80s,New York, 30 June 1986

Different ways are explored of organizing acquisitions work for multilingual public library collections, on the local, national and international scale. The respective technical pros and cons of three methods—decentralized acquisitions, centralized acquisitions to rotating deposit collections, centralized cooperative acquisitions—are set forth. Mention is also made of some external demographic and social factors which influence the library's choice of an acquisitions method. Flexibility and responsiveness to reader needs are stressed.