Assessing the Accessibility of Library Tools & Services When You Aren’t an Accessibility Expert: Part 2

Abstract

There are a few studies in library literature that explore accessibility issues from the perspective of students who use assistive technologies for accessibility. As we shared in part one of this two-part series in our column, librarians have extensively explored through usability studies with WAVE and other audit tools how accessible library websites and databases are when using assistive technologies like JAWS. In this column, we asked our blind student worker to journal his experiences navigating our library’s databases. We found this student navigated the databases better than we anticipated. While his experiences regarding the accessibility of the libraries’ electronic services varied, common issues he experienced included navigational issues from menus with expanding capabilities, documents that were not scanned with OCR, and images without alternative text.     

EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE ISSUES OF TRADITION,TRANSFER‐CREDIT,AND CREDIBILITY

This article discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of international credit transfer among higher education institutions. Credit transfer is skewed by varying definitions of what education actually is and even more so by the overwhelming power of one of the Anglo‐Saxon players, the United States of America, the cultural and educational traditions of which are so difficult to resist as to be a form of cultural imperialism. Thus, the overwhelming use of English as the principal international language of education presents a threat to the educational diversity of Europe as does the adoption of such measures of credit transfer as the European Community Course Credit Transfer Scheme (ECTS), a surface Americanization that fails to appreciate the realities of European, specifically Austrian, course programmes. The author would prefer a qualification recognition system based on a refinement of the concepts underlying the so‐called diploma supplement that would give essential information about what the given credential means and what was required to earn it.     

Students’ perceptions of family influences on their academic motivation: A qualitative analysis

Research examining family influences on student motivation and achievement in school has generally focused on parental influences and has often been limited to one or two variables (e.g., parental expectations or aspirations, parental involvement in schoolwork). In the present study we interviewed high school seniors to examine whether and how family members affected their academic motivation and achievement. Interviews were coded holistically for the strength, affective tone, source, and types of familial influence. Emergent themes from the interview analyses revealed that students perceived a broad range of types and sources of familial influence on motivation. Interviews were divided into five prototypical patterns: Family Obligation, Family Pleasing, Family Support, Aversive Influence, and No Influence. The types of familial influence differed by cultural characteristics (generational status, native country) and by achievement level. Associations between the five patterns of family influence and existing theories of family influence are discussed.     

Students' perceptions of their information literacy skills: the confidence gap between male and female international graduate students

In the 2015 Summer Session I, the information literacy team combined two instruments, the Information Literacy Assessment (ILA) and the Students' Perceptions of Their Information Literacy Skills Questionnaire (SPIL-Q), into one survey and distributed it to the college's international graduate students through a Google Form. It was distributed to 932 international graduate students, and 172 valid respondents completed the survey. The purpose of this research was to compare the confidence gap in information literacy skills between men and women, particularly in international graduate students. Data collected illustrated that female international business students (n = 70) tended to be slightly more confident than their male counterparts (n = 102) regarding their perceived information literacy skills as evidenced by their SPIL-Q average score across all six IL topics, 3.78, vs. male student's average score of 3.58.     

Group identification in early adolescence: its relation with peer adjustment and its moderator effect on peer influence

This study was conducted to test whether group identification (importance of the group to the individual) covaried with individual-group similarity on problem behavior; and whether group identification moderated peer group influence on the individual's development of delinquent behavior across a 1-year period. The level of reciprocated nominations within the individual's self-nominated group was controlled for in all analyses. Participants were 190 sixth and seventh graders (during the first year of the study) from the north of Italy. Level of reciprocated nominations within the group, but not identification, was found to covary with individual-group behavioral similarity (group behavior interacted with reciprocity of group nominations in predicting individual behavior). Group identification, but not reciprocated nominations, was found to moderate peer group influence on the individual's change in delinquent behavior, across 1 year. The individual's peer status within the classroom, level of reciprocated nominations, and gender all were related to the individual's level of group identification. Results are discussed in terms of understanding peer group influence on the individual.     

But is My Resource Included? How to Manage,Develop, and Think about the Content in Your Discovery Tool

Implementing discovery tools and getting them to work with existing library services often leaves very little time for their promotion and for the thoughtful, ongoing evaluation and curation of their content. However, the expectations and experiences that users have about discovery tools are often directly related to the content and the way that content is described. In our efforts to work with vendors to resolve the underlying business issues that prevent us from having all of the metadata for our resources included in our discovery tools, we may have lost sight of our role in curating and evaluating the usefulness of the content that is already included in them.