Media Literacy Messages and Hostile Media Perceptions: Processing of Nonpartisan Versus Partisan Political Information

Partisans are poor judges of news content, rating neutral content as biased against their views (the hostile media perception) and forgiving biased content when it favors their side. This study tests whether a short news media literacy public service announcement (PSA) appearing before political programming can influence credibility and hostility ratings of the program and program host. Our findings suggest that a media literacy PSA can be effective, but its impact depends on the position of the news program and on the political ideology of the viewers. In this case, the media literacy PSA only influenced conservatives’ evaluations of the political program, improving perceptions of a neutral or congruent (conservative) host while further depressing ratings of an incongruent (liberal) host. Liberals’ evaluations of the program were unaffected by the PSA. Implications for media literacy messaging and information processing are discussed.     

Fake News,Special Libraries and What It Means to Be American

This column is written by column editor Ilana Stonebraker and guest columnist Emily Johnson. Ilana Stonebraker is Business Information Specialist and Assistant Professor at Purdue University. Emily Johnson is the Middle School Librarian and Library Coordinator at Daystar Academy in Beijing, China. They both received an MSI from the University of Michigan. This column focuses on the “fake news” phenomenon and how it affects special libraries.     

Evaluating Continuing Resources: Perspectives and Methods from Science Librarians

Five science librarians share their experiences with the evaluation of continuing resources at an academic university and discuss implications caused by the evaluation process. Four of the authors were new to collection evaluations at the time of the Serial Evaluation Project. These new librarians faced many challenges, both personally and professionally, in dealing with the cancellation process. Although the differences in approaches to collection analysis are discussed somewhat, they are not a focus of the article.     

Text reference service: Teens' perception and use

Focus group interviews were conducted to investigate how teen library users perceive and use text reference service. Findings indicate that teens have a mixed attitude toward the service, and they anticipate using it primarily for imposed queries. Teens' perception of three aspects of the service is also discussed: response time, librarians' use of texting abbreviations, and the impact of texting constraints. Strategies are provided to increase awareness, motivate use, and meet expectations. Findings will help inform libraries' text reference practice, providing them with a clear understanding of how teens can benefit from the service, and how their information needs can be fulfilled to their satisfaction. Such an understanding will then lead libraries to develop more effective strategies to promote and deliver library services to teens, strengthen the role libraries play in teens' information-seeking process, and establish a positive and sustaining relationship between teens and libraries.     

The Relationship Between Trait Affect and Job Attitudes in Library Employees

This research explores the relationship between employees’ disposition and several important job attitudes. Dispositional affect is a personality trait that describes people's emotional responses to situations. This study explored how affective disposition influences the job attitudes of work engagement, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. Data were collected from a sample of librarians, and the results show that affective disposition strongly predicted the three job attitudes in the expected directions. The findings contribute to knowledge of the role of personality in the workplace and provide guidance for library managers on how best to facilitate positive job attitudes.     

Urban Youth's Perspectives on Flash Mobs

Flash mobs are new, emerging, and evolving social phenomena that have recently been associated with youth violence in the US cities. The current study explores how youth understand flash mobs through focus groups conducted in Kansas City, Missouri (a site of violent youth flash mobs). Results indicate that youth have varying familiarity with flash mobs and define them in different ways; that youth perceive youth boredom to be the most frequent cause of problems with flash mobs; that youth connect ongoing social disorder with the violence associated with flash mobs; and that while social media are facilitators of flash mobs, flash mobs have their roots in youth activities that have been going on for generations (e.g., hanging out in groups and cruising). Results illustrate the importance of conducting formative research with youth, particularly about emergent phenomena, when developing interventions and communication campaigns aimed at reducing youth violence.     

Implementing Twitter in a Health Sciences Library

The NYU Health Sciences Libraries created an account on Twitter, a microblogging service, as a new outreach tool marketed to students, faculty, and staff. The team used Twitter to promote resources, events, and news. Twitter is a part of a pipeline of information that also includes the library's Web site and Facebook. Although it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of a social networking tool, the overhead of using Twitter is so low that it merits consideration.     

SciVal Experts: A Collaborative Tool

SciVal Experts is a resource for finding experts and fostering collaboration. The tool creates researcher profiles with automatically updated publication and grant information and faculty-inputted curriculum vitae, more fully capturing a researcher's body of work. SciVal Experts indexes campus-based “experts” by research topic, allowing faculty to find potential research partners and mentors, furthering translational research opportunities and dissemination of knowledge.