The 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed an estimated 316,000 people, offered many lessons in mass-fatality management (MFM). The dissertation defined MFM in seeking information and in recovery, preservation, identification, and disposition of human remains. Specifically, it examined how mass fatalities were managed in Haiti, how affected individuals sought information about fatalities, and what needs motivated them. Data from 28 in-depth, partially structured interviews, conducted during two field visits ending 21 weeks after the earthquake, were included in a case study. The data analysis revealed the MFM was severely inadequate. One interviewee, a senior UN official, stated, "There was no fatality management." The analysis also indicated a need to learn whereabouts of the deceased motivated individuals to visit spots the deceased were last seen at. It sought to illumine information-seeking practices, as discussed in the works of J. David Johnson and others, by developing a new model of information flow in MFM. In addition, it reaffirmed Donald Case and Thomas Wilson's theoretical proposition – that need guides any seeking of information – in the case of Haiti. Finally, it produced recommendations regarding future directions in MFM for emergency managers and information scientists, including possible use of unidentified body parts in …

This dissertation presents a preliminary grounded theory of community networking based on 63 evaluations of community networking projects funded by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) between 1994 and 2007. The substantive grounded theory developed is that TOP projects differed in their contribution to positive outcomes for intended disadvantaged community beneficiaries based on the extent and manner in which they involved the disadvantaged community during four grant process phases: partnership building, project execution, evaluation, and close-out. Positive outcomes for the community were facilitated by using existing communication channels, such as schools, to connect with intended beneficiaries; local financial institutions to provide infrastructure to support local trade; and training to connect community members to jobs. Theoretical contributions include situating outcomes for disadvantaged communities within the context of the grant process; introducing the “vulnerable community” concept; and identifying other concepts and properties that may be useful in further theoretical explorations. Methodological contributions include demonstrating grounded theory as a viable method for exploring large text-based datasets; paving the way for machine learning approaches to analyzing qualitative data; and illustrating how project evaluations can be used in a similar fashion as interview data. Practical contributions include providing information to guide …

Information politics is a concept widely acknowledged in several disciplines. However, scant empirical evidence exists in the literature that codifies or measures information politics as a construct. This exploratory study developed and tested the Information Politics Assessment Scale (IPAS), a survey instrument that measured individual perceptions of organizational information artifacts as indictors of its information politics. Data collected with the IPAS was examined to investigate the latent structure of the information politics variable, determine information politics models, and explore the relationship between information politics, strategy, and organization effectiveness. A purposive sample of 240 participants from a cross-section of organizations completed the IPAS in an online administration. Exploratory factor analysis generated three factors, labeled Behavioral Flexibility (BF), Environmental Sensitivity (ES), and Structural Autonomy (SA), suggesting three dimensions of the information politics variable. Cluster analysis of aggregate scores on the BF, ES, and SA factors together resulted in determining four distinct information politics models. Crosstab and ANOVA, respectively, enabled explaining the relationship between strategy and information politics, and how it influenced organization effectiveness. This study breaks ground by broadening the theoretical and empirical understanding of information politics in confirming the proposition that an organization’s information artifacts are measureable and reliable indicators of …

As a discipline, information systems (IS) has struggled with the challenge of alignment of product (primarily software and the infrastructure needed to run it) with the needs of the organization it supports. This has been characterized as the pursuit of alignment of information technology (IT) with the business or organization, which begins with the gathering of the requirements of the organization, which then guide the creation of the IS requirements, which in turn guide the creation of the IT solution itself. This research is primarily focused on developing and validating an instrument to operationalize such requirements capabilities. Requirements capabilities at the development of software or the implementation of a specific IT solution are referred to as capabilities for software requirements or more commonly systems analysis and design (SA&D) capabilities. This research describes and validates an instrument for SA&D capabilities for content validity, construct validity, internal consistency, and an exploratory factor analysis. SA&D capabilities were expected to coalesce strongly around a single dimension. Yet in validating the SA&D capabilities instrument, it became apparent that SA&D capabilities are not the unidimensional construct traditionally perceived. Instead it appears that four dimensions underlie SA&D capabilities, and these are associated with alignment maturity (governance, partnership, …

Energy and the natural environment are central concerns among stakeholders across the globe. Decisions on this scale often require interaction among a myriad of institutions and individuals who navigate a complex variety of challenges. In Denton, Texas in 2014, voters were asked to make such a decision when tasked with a referendum to determine whether the city would continue to allow hydraulic fracturing activity within its borders. For social scientists, this situation requires further analysis in an effort to better understand how and why individuals make the decisions they do. One possible approach for exploring this process is a method of poststructuralist critical rhetorical analysis, which is concerned with how individuals’ identities change through interaction with institutions. This study reflects upon the texts themselves through a poststructuralist critical rhetorical analysis of images employed by those in favor of and those against Denton’s ban on hydraulic fracturing in an attempt to identify images that alter the grid of intelligibility for the audience. The paper includes deliberation about the relative merits, subsequent disadvantages, and possible questions for further study as they relate to the theoretical implications of critical rhetorical analysis as information science. Ultimately, the study identifies poststructuralist critical rhetorical analysis as …

Information plays a significant role in the success of investment strategies. Within a non-advisory context, individual investors elect to build and manage their investment portfolios to avoid the cost of hiring professional advisors. To cope with markets’ uncertainty, individual investors should acquire, understand, and use only relevant information, but that task can be affected by many factors, such as domain knowledge, cognitive and emotional biases, information overload, sources’ credibility, communication channels’ accuracy, and economic costs. Despite an increased interest in examining the financial performance of individual investors in Saudi Arabia, there has been no empirical research of the information behavior of individual investors, or the behavioral biases affecting the investment decision making process in the Saudi stock market (SSM). The purpose of this study was to examine this information behavior within a non-advisory contextualization of their investment decision-making process through the use of an online questionnaire instrument using close-ended questions. The significant intervening variables identified in this study influence the individual investors’ information behavior across many stages of the decision making process. While controlling for gender, education, and income, the optimal information behavior of individual investors in the SSM showed that the Experience factor had the greatest negative effect on …

Modeling the "thick description" of photographs began at the intersection of personal and institutional descriptions. Comparing institutional descriptions of particular photos that were also used in personal online conversations was the initial phase. Analyzing conversations that started with a photographic image from the collection of the Library of Congress (LC) or the collection of the Manchester Historic Association (MHA) provided insights into how cultural heritage institutions could enrich the description of photographs by using informal descriptions such as those applied by Facebook users. Taking photos of family members, friends, places, and interesting objects is something people do often in their daily lives. Some photographic images are stored, and some are shared with others in gatherings, occasions, and holidays. Face-to-face conversations about remembering some of the details of photographs and the event they record are themselves rarely recorded. Digital cameras make it easy to share personal photos in Web conversations and to duplicate old photos and share them on the Internet. The World Wide Web even makes it simple to insert images from cultural heritage institutions in order to enhance conversations. Images have been used as tokens within conversations along with the sharing of information and background knowledge about them. The …

Written notation has a long history in many musical traditions and has been particularly important in the composition and performance of Western art music. This study adopted the conceptual view that a musical score consists of two coordinated but separate communication channels: the musical text and a collection of composer-selected performance marks that serve as an interpretive gloss on that text. Structurally, these channels are defined by largely disjoint vocabularies of symbols and words. While the sound structures represented by musical texts are well studied in music theory and analysis, the stylistic patterns of performance marks and how they acquire contextual meaning in performance is an area with fewer theoretical foundations. This quantitative research explored the possibility that composers exhibit recurring patterns in their use of performance marks. Seventeen solo piano sonatas written between 1798 and 1913 by five major composers were analyzed from modern editions by tokenizing and tabulating the types and usage frequencies of their individual performance marks without regard to the associated musical texts. Using analytic methods common in information science, the results demonstrated persistent statistical similarities among the works of each composer and differences among the work groups of different composers. Although based on a small …

This dissertation examined how previous information literacy training, law student gender, age, and previously obtained education affects first, second, and third year law students selection of information sources, their understanding of common knowledge, and their decision of whether or not to give attribution to these sources. To examine these factors, this study implemented a paradigm called the principle of least effort that contended humans in general tended to complete the least amount of work possible to complete presented tasks. This study sought to discover whether law students follow this same path of completing the least amount of work possible to finish presented tasks, and whether this behavior affects information source selection, citation, and understanding of common knowledge. I performed six focus groups and crafted and disseminated an online survey to examine these factors. Via this data collection, it was discovered that law students do exhibit some differences in understanding of citation and citation behavior based on age and their year in law school. They also exhibited some differences regarding common knowledge based on their year in law school, where they received their information literacy training, and where they attend law school. Yet, no statistically significant differences were discovered regarding where …

Following the decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), which struck down the state of California’s appeal to restrict the sale of games deemed to have “deviant violence” to those 18 or older and the court’s recommendation that parents use the ESRB Ratings System instead, this ethnographic study sought to better understand what parents thought of laws on video games and how they used the recommended ratings system. A total of 30 interviews using semi-structured open-ended questions were conducted and analyzed to reveal what parents thought of laws on video games, how they used the ESRB Ratings System to assess video game content, and what other methods they used for video game content assessment in addition to the ratings system. This research utilized Dervin and Nilan’s (1986) sense-making methodology as a way to learn how parents bridged their knowledge gap when it came to learning about video game content and how they made sense of the knowledge gained to determine the content appropriateness for their children. Analyses of the collected data provided the foundation for a model on the effects of the parent-child relationship on parental information behavior.

Cyber aggression came about as a result of advances in information communication technology and the aggressive usage of the technology in real life. Cyber aggression can take on many forms and facets. However, the main focus of this study is cyberbullying and cyberstalking through information sharing practices that might constitute digital aggressive acts. Human aggression has been extensively investigated. Studies focusing on understanding the causes and effects that can lead to physical and digital aggression have shown the prevalence of cyber aggression in different settings. Moreover, these studies have shown strong relationship between cyber aggression and the physiological and physical trauma on both perpetrators and their victims. Nevertheless, the literature shows a lack of studies that could measure the level of acceptance and tolerance of these dangerous digital acts. This study is divided into two main stages; Stage one is a qualitative pilot study carried out to explore the concept of cyber aggression and its existence in Saudi Arabia. In-depth interviews were conducted with 14 Saudi social media users to collect understanding and meanings of cyber aggression. The researcher followed the Colaizzi’s methods to analyze the descriptive data. A proposed model was generated to describe cyber aggression in social media …

This mixed-method study explored cataloger’s judgment through the presence of text as entered by catalogers for the 11 electronic resource items during the National Libraries test for Resource Description and Access (RDA). Although the literature discusses cataloger’s judgment and suggests that cataloging practice based on new cataloging code RDA will more heavily rely on cataloger’s judgment, the topic of cataloger’s judgment in RDA cataloging was not formally studied. The purpose of this study was to study the differences and similarities in the MARC records created as a part of the RDA National Test and to determine if the theory of bounded rationality could explain cataloger’s judgment based on the constructs of cognitive and temporal limits. This goal was addressed through a content analysis of the MARC records and various statistical tests (Pearson’s Chi-square, Fisher’s Exact, and Cramer’s V). Analysis of 217 MARC records was performed on seven elements of the bibliographic record. This study found that there were both similarities and differences among the various groups of participants, and there are indications that both support and refute the assertion that catalogers make decisions based on the constructs of time and cognitive ability. Future research is needed to be able to …

Automatic language identification has been applied to short texts such as queries in information retrieval, but it has not yet been applied to metadata records. Applying this technology to metadata records, particularly their title elements, would enable creators of metadata records to obtain a value for the language element, which is often left blank due to a lack of linguistic expertise. It would also enable the addition of the language value to existing metadata records that currently lack a language value. Titles lend themselves to the problem of language identification mainly due to their shortness, a factor which increases the difficulty of accurately identifying a language. This study implemented four proven approaches to language identification as well as one open-source approach on a collection of multilingual titles of books and movies. Of the five approaches considered, a reduced N-gram frequency profile and distance measure approach outperformed all others, accurately identifying over 83% of all titles in the collection. Future plans are to offer this technology to curators of digital collections for use.

This research explored the information needs of patient families and hospital staff at a pediatric hospital system in Dallas, Texas. Library statistics recorded in four hospital libraries from 2011 - 2013 were used to analyze the information requests from patient families and hospital staff. Crosstabulations revealed the extent to which patient families and hospital staff used the libraries to satisfy their information needs. The data showed that patient families used the libraries very differently than hospital staff. Chi-square tests for independence were performed to identify the relationships between the Classification (Patient Family, Hospital Staff) and two descriptors of information needs (Request Type, Resources Used). There were a total of 1,406 information requests analyzed. The data showed that patient families and hospital staff information requests differed greatly in the number of information requests, the type of information requested, the resources used and the time the library staff spent on the requests. Chi-square analyses revealed relationships statistically significant at the p < .05 level; however, the strength of the relationships varied.

This study began with an interest in corporate libraries and a genuine curiosity in the information preferences and resources valued by executive leaders at JET Aircraft Co. Executive information preferences and the downward trend in special libraries initiated the investigation of information seeking among executive leaders and yielded the inquiry: What resources do JET Aircraft Co. executives value when they need information? Employing an ethnographic approach, this study investigated what JET Aircraft Co. executives know about information resources, what they believe about information resources, and how they act when they require information. While JET Aircraft Co. maintained a special corporate library called the Company Research Library (CRL), the purpose of this study was to determine what resources were of value to executives at JET Aircraft Co., understanding that the CRL may or may not be a resource executives’ value. As a byproduct, this study also sought to establish executive information preferences and perceptions of the CRL. Information seeking at the executive level, studied through an ethnographic lens, provided insight into how executives at JET Aircraft Co. work and what they prefer, and it established a baseline for the Company Research Library’s position among the resources valued by executives.

Information privacy is a major concern for consumers adopting emerging technologies dependent on location-based services. This study sought to determine whether a relationship exists among factors of personalization, locatability, perceived playfulness, privacy concern and behavioral intention to disclose personal information for individuals using location-based, geosocial networking applications. Questionnaire responses from undergraduate students at a 4-year university provide insight into these relationships. Multiple regression results indicated that there was a statistically significant relationship between the four significant predictor variables and the dependent variable. Analysis of beta weights, structure coefficients, and commonality analysis shed light on the variance attributable to the predictor variables of the study. Findings provide understanding of the specific factors examined in the study and have implications for consumers, businesses, application designers, and policymakers. The results from this study contribute to an understanding of technology acceptance theory and offer insight into competing beliefs that may affect an individual’s behavioral intention to disclose personal information. Knowledge gained form the study may be useful for overcoming challenges related to consumer adoption of location-based services that require disclosure of personal information.

The user perspective of image search remains poorly understood. the purpose of this study is to identify and investigate the key issues relevant to a user’s interaction with images and the user’s approach to image search. a deeper understanding of these issues will serve to inform the design of image retrieval systems and in turn better serve the user. Previous research explores areas of information seeking behavior, representation in information science, query formulation, and image retrieval. the theoretical framework for this study includes an articulation of image search scenarios as adapted from Yoon and O’Connor’s taxonomy of image query types, Copeland’s Engineering Design Approach for rigorous qualitative research, and Anderson’s Functional Ontology Construction Model for building robust models of human behavior. a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with expert-level image users. Interviewees discussed their motivations for image search, types of image searches they pursue, and varied approaches to image search, as well as how they decide that an information need has been met and which factors influence their experience of search. a content analysis revealed themes repeated across responses, including a collection of 23 emergent concepts and 6 emergent categories. a functional analysis revealed further insight into these themes. …

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships between types of health information tasks and the Internet information search processes of Chinese graduate students at the University of North Texas. the participants' Internet information search processes were examined by looking at the source used to start the search, language selection, use of online translation tools, and time spent. in a computer classroom, 45 Chinese graduate students searched the Internet and completed three health information search tasks: factual task, interpretative task, and exploratory task. Data of the Chinese graduate students’ health information search processes were gathered from Web browser history files, answer sheets, and questionnaires. Parametric and non-parametric statistical analyses were conducted to test the relationships between the types of tasks and variables identified in the search process. Results showed that task types only had a statistically significant impact on the time spent. for the three tasks, the majority of Chinese graduate students used search engines as major sources for the search starting point, utilized English as the primary language, and did not use online translation tools. the participants also reported difficulties in locating relevant answers and recommended ways to be assisted in the future when searching the Internet …

The purpose of this study was to identify the professional and personal competencies that entry-level academic health sciences librarians should possess from the perspectives of academic health sciences library directors, library and information sciences (LIS) educators who specialize in educating health sciences librarians, and individuals who serve as both LIS adjunct faculty and practitioners in the field of health sciences librarianship. the first six research questions focused on the identification of professional and personal competencies, and the last two research questions focused on comparing and contrasting the three perspectives on the professional and personal competencies. the eight research questions were addressed through four rounds of the Delphi method. Three panels of experts, initially composed of 13 academic health sciences library directors, 8 LIS educators, and 8 LIS adjunct faculty adjunct faculty/health sciences librarianship practitioners, participated in the study, and most participants were female, white, in the age range of 45-64, had less than 20 years of experience in their respective careers, and were members of the Medical Library Association. the data collected from the rounds of the Delphi method were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including measures of central tendency, and non-parametric statistics, including the Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests. Two …

The concept of the invisible college is a key focus of scientific communication research with many studies on this topic in the literature. However, while such studies have contributed to an understanding of the invisible college, they have not adequately explained the interaction of social and structural processes in this phenomenon. As a consequence, past research has described the invisible college differently based on researchers’ perspectives, resulting in misinterpretations or inconsistent definitions of the relevant social and structural processes. Information science and related disciplines have focused on the structural processes that lead to scholarly products or works while placing less emphasis on the social processes. To advance understanding of the invisible college and its dimensions (including both social processes and structural processes), a proposed model (Modern Invisible College Model, MICM) has been built based on the history of the invisible college and Lievrouw’s (1989) distinction between social and structural processes. The present study focuses on the social processes of informal communication between scholars via social media, rather than on the structural processes that lead to scholarly products or works. A developed survey and an employed quantitative research method were applied for data collection. The research population involved 77 scholars from …

This exploratory research examined an information policy formation process for the adoption of open source software (OSS) in Uganda. Grounded in a pragmatist tradition, this theoretical and empirical study pursued a qualitative research approach with a triangulation of theoretical concepts, data collection, and analysis techniques in an iterative and interactive process. The design provided a powerful context to develop and conduct field activities in Kampala with a purposeful sample of 22 participants, 20 in interviews and 5 in a focus group discussion. The research design enhanced consistency in the evidence from the data, increased robustness in the results, and confidence in the findings. The results highlighted a vibrant ICT sector in Uganda, underlined the multiple stakeholders and their competing interests in the policy, revealed a lack of consensus between the government and OSS promoters on the meaning of OSS, and illuminated the benefits in the OSS model over proprietary software. The stakeholders' conflicting perceptions appear to be too far apart to allow meaningful progress and are derailing the policy. Unless their conflicting perceptions are resolved, the OSS policy will continue stagnating. The study fills critical information gaps in Uganda’s policy formation processes, provides timely and relevant information to holistically understand …

The author explores the current state of information exchange and access in the procurement process for mobility assistive equipment. While the idealized model is of a linear process starting with a need and ending with the purchase, in practice the procedures for acquiring a device such as a wheelchair or electric scooter can be a time consuming task that involves client, family, medical care specialists, vendors, manufacturers, insurance companies and possibly alternate sources of funding. This study utilized Participatory Action Research (PAR) to collect both qualitative and quantitative data about information sources such as the Internet, the medical community, and vendors. The findings of this study suggest that in spite of the presence of the Internet, overall primary sources are similar to the traditional model and that for most there is no one source that could be easily accessed for information. A brief examination is made of the “Information landscape” utilized in the process and a brief discussion of two relatively unmentioned information sources: expos and the wheelchair sports community.