Understanding the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) of Data Professionals in United States Academic Libraries (open access)

Understanding the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) of Data Professionals in United States Academic Libraries

This study applies the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) framework for eScience professionals to data service positions in academic libraries. Understanding the KSAs needed to provide data services is of crucial concern. The current study looks at KSAs of data professionals working in the United States academic libraries. An exploratory sequential mixed method design was adopted to discover the KSAs. The study was divided into two phases, a qualitative content analysis of 260 job advertisements for data professionals for Phase 1, and distribution of a self-administered online survey to data professionals working in academic libraries research data services (RDS) for Phase 2. The discovery of the KSAs from the content analysis of 260 job ads and the survey results from 167 data professionals were analyzed separately, and then Spearman rank order correlation was conducted in order to triangulate the data and compare results. The results from the study provide evidence on what hiring managers seek through job advertisements in terms of KSAs and which KSAs data professionals find to be important for working in RDS. The Spearman rank order correlation found strong agreement between job advertisement KSAs and data professionals perceptions of the KSAs.
Date: December 2021
Creator: Khan, Hammad Rauf
System: The UNT Digital Library
Take the Trouble to Compile a Whole New World: The Role of Event-Based Participatory Projects in Institutional Archives (open access)

Take the Trouble to Compile a Whole New World: The Role of Event-Based Participatory Projects in Institutional Archives

Event-based mediated participatory archives, in which communities of ordinary people contribute their records to archives during collection day events represent a paradigm shift within the archival field. Applying a qualitative approach, this study investigates event-based mediated participatory archives using Bastian's communities of records and memory as a guiding framework. Using the Mass. Memories Road Show as a case study, data collection and analysis took place over three phases. In Phase I, archive supporting documents were collected and analyzed using "against the grain" historical analysis methods. In Phase II, data from the Mass. Memories Road Show digital collections were collected and analyzed using grounded theory analysis methods. In Phase III, ethnographic research data, including a direct observation and semi-structured interviews, was collected and analyzed using ethnographic analysis methods. The results of this study suggest that community participants' motivations to contribute to participatory archives are rooted in self-fulfillment while institutional archives personnel members' intentions are based in inclusive community-building. Furthermore, the contribution of records to the archives allows community participants to share personal stories that serve as evidence of their historical legacies and as affirmation of their roles in their communities. Throughout the findings, moments of connection which enable the sharing of …
Date: December 2021
Creator: Roeschley, Ana Knezevic
System: The UNT Digital Library
An Information Theoretic Analysis of Multimodal Readability (open access)

An Information Theoretic Analysis of Multimodal Readability

Educators often inquire about the readability of books and other documents used in the classroom, with the idea that readability supports students' reading comprehension and growth. Documents used in classrooms tend to be language-based, so readability metrics have long focused on the complexity of language. However, such metrics are unsuitable for multimodal documents because these types of documents also use non-language modes of communication. This is problematic because multimodal reading is increasingly recognized as a 21st-century skill. One information theoretic solution is transinformation analysis, an approach that measures readability as the difference between the objective entropy of a document and the subjective entropy of its reader. Higher transinformation indicates more information complexity. This study explored the viability of transinformation analysis as a measure of multimodal readability. Think aloud screen recordings from 15 eighth grade "advanced readers" of Episode 2 of the born-digital novel, Inanimate Alice served as the dataset. Findings showed that 14 of the readers attended to less than half the information in the story. Mean readability was .57, indicating a complex reading experience. Readers attended to and recalled information primarily from the linguistic mode, which may have been a strategy for reducing cognitive load, or it may have …
Date: December 2021
Creator: Hovious, Amanda S.
System: The UNT Digital Library
PubMed Commons: What Happened on the Way to the Forum? Retrospective Explanatory Case Study Research and Lessons Learned from the U.S. National Library of Medicine's Online Forum for Open Science (open access)

PubMed Commons: What Happened on the Way to the Forum? Retrospective Explanatory Case Study Research and Lessons Learned from the U.S. National Library of Medicine's Online Forum for Open Science

The U.S. National Library of Medicine brought the intensifying interest in open science to national attention when it joined enthusiastic scientists to introduce and host an Amazon-like rating forum on PubMed—the world's largest database of indexed biomedical and life sciences literature. The result was PubMed Commons. In June 2013, the commenting forum was introduced for open discussion about published scientific literature as part of a three-pronged approach to improve research rigor, reproducibility, and transparency. In Feb. 2018, the forum was unexpectedly discontinued. This retrospective explanatory case study research asked the question, "What happened on the way to the forum?" Answers came from a variety of resources using multiple methodologies for data collection and analysis. Historical data from PubMed Commons' 7,629 comments and 1,551 commenters; key informant interviews with PubMed Commons editors; and a systematized search for published articles, gray literature; and social media content about PubMed Commons were analyzed using computer-mediated discourse analysis and a social network analysis. Results from the quantitative content analysis described a forum with little participation, and the qualitative content analysis demonstrated that active forum members were focused primarily on providing links to other information resources and discussing aspects of post-publication peer review. The social network …
Date: December 2021
Creator: Farabough, Michelle Claire
System: The UNT Digital Library
Modeling Email Phishing Attacks (open access)

Modeling Email Phishing Attacks

Cheating, beguiling, and misleading information exist all around us; understanding deception and its consequences is crucial in our information environment. This study investigates deception in phishing emails that successfully bypassed Microsoft 365 filtering system. We devised a model that explains why some people are deceived and how targeted individuals and organizations can prevent or counter attacks. The theoretical framework used in this study is Anderson's functional ontology construction (FOC). The methodology involves quantitative and qualitative descriptive design, where the data source is the set of phishing emails archived from a Tier 1 University. We looked for term frequency-inverse document frequency (Tf-idf) and the distribution of words over documents (topic modeling) and found the subjects of phishing emails that targeted educational organizations are related to finances, jobs, and technologies. Also, our analysis shows the phishing emails in the dataset come under six categories; reward, urgency, curiosity, fear, job, and entertainment. Results indicate that staff and students were primarily targeted, and a list of the most used verbs for deception was compiled. We uncovered the stimuli being used by scammers and types of reinforcements used to misinform the target to ensure successful trapping via phishing emails. We identified how scammers pick their …
Date: December 2021
Creator: Almoqbil, Abdullah
System: The UNT Digital Library