Persistent Misperceptions: Americans’ Misplaced Confidence in Privacy Policies, 2003–2015

This paper examines the persistence of Americans’ misunderstanding of the function of privacy policies. We also identify groups that have misplaced confidence in the privacy policy label and address whether the groups’ patterns of misperception have changed over time. The findings add a new dimension to the argument that the usefulness of privacy policies needs to be reassessed. As a remedy, we call for media literacy programs to address structural features of media systems that lead to broadly held misperceptions such as the one examined here.     

Clinical Medical Librarian Licensure: Pros versus Cons

In hospitals and clinics, anyone who “touches” a patient has a license authorizing them to do so—from the phlebotomist to the cardiologist, from the genetic counselor to the social worker, and so on, except for the clinical medical librarian. This column discusses the intent versus the realities of occupational licensure for clinical medical librarians and provides recommendations for next steps.     

OER evaluation as a means of teaching information literacy in individual and small group settings

ABSTRACT

Open education resources represent a great opportunity to reduce textbook costs, but many of them have not been evaluated for quality. Librarians and former students in an introduction to engineering course collected and evaluated open education resources to supplement the course textbook in future semesters. Both searching for and evaluating these resources created opportunities for the librarians to evaluate information literacy skills of these students and to provide instruction to improve these skills.     

The IR Has Two Faces: Positioning Institutional Repositories for Success

This article describes the ongoing efforts at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries to evolve the role of the institutional repository (IR) and to effectively position it within the context of the Libraries’ collections, research support, and scholarly communication services. A major component of this process is re-examining the fundamental aims of the IR and aligning it to the Libraries and the campus strategic goals. The authors situate UNLV Libraries’ experience within the context of the current literature to provide background and reasoning for our decision to pursue two, at times conflicting, aims for the IR: one for scholarly communication and another for research administration.     

More than Bags of Words: Sentiment Analysis with Word Embeddings

ABSTRACT

Moving beyond the dominant bag-of-words approach to sentiment analysis we introduce an alternative procedure based on distributed word embeddings. The strength of word embeddings is the ability to capture similarities in word meaning. We use word embeddings as part of a supervised machine learning procedure which estimates levels of negativity in parliamentary speeches. The procedure’s accuracy is evaluated with crowdcoded training sentences; its external validity through a study of patterns of negativity in Austrian parliamentary speeches. The results show the potential of the word embeddings approach for sentiment analysis in the social sciences.     

Citizen-Centered Journalism and Contested Boundaries

This article explores the existence of a “citizen-centered journalism” that sees citizens as crucial participants in the construction of news and as co-creators of their own worlds. Through qualitative case studies of three news organizations, the article examines the motivation for using a citizen-centered approach, the news routines that are required to do so, the categories of content produced, and the perceived impact of this approach. The results suggest these news organizations are working in partnership with communities and striving to give a voice to historically marginalized communities. The journalists, however, see citizen participation as complementary to professional journalistic routines that favor verifiable information, rather than assigning inherent value to it for its own sake.     

Expanding opportunities to learn to support inclusive education through drama‐enhanced literacy practices

This study examines how the Early Years Educators at Play (EYEPlay) professional development (PD) programme supported inclusive learning settings for all children, including English language learners and students with disabilities. The EYEPlay PD model is a year‐long programme that integrates drama strategies into literacy practices within real‐classroom contexts. Inclusive education refers to ensuring equal opportunities to access and participation in learning activities for all students. Cultural‐historical activity theory was used to understand and unpack the drama practices. Twelve semi‐structured focus group interviews were conducted with 19 preschool teachers. The data were analysed via constant‐comparative and interpretive methods. The study findings showed that EYEPlay PD practices enhanced inclusive learning settings for diverse groups of students by increasing access and expanding opportunities to learn, and supporting a positive learning environment.