Context of "visual culture" plz.

Immediate Q: how many students actually watch them?

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If I multiply these out, the average of all 34 participants is 69. 69/100 CORRECT, not 69 incorrect. So, if this study is based on a math error (correct to incorrect), then actually scores got better with confidence. Otherwise, the actual average of the results was 30/100. An actual dismal score, not a D. I really need to see the data, dammit.

You didn't want a "minimal" relationship, you wanted a strong inverse relationship.

This doesn't really seem notable because there's almost no way to evaluate the comparative "levels" of the two tests relative to each other.

YOU DIDN'T PRESENT A CROSS-SECTION OF FINDINGS BY ACADEMIC YEAR WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THAT

As noted where? By instructors marking assignments? Or in your own third-party analysis?

I just want someone, somewhere, to say "This is a fundamental fact about information literacy." Just once.

Now what are these numbers?! Total wrong answers, across 34 tests? WHY?! 198 / 34 = 5.8, and students did NOT get an average of 5.8 questions wrong if the mean was 69. I am so confused.

OH NO so mean scores WERE 60 & 69, which means that it's totally impossible for the means by group to be 45, 35, and 20. So I want a look at the data.

(Also, 69 is a C+ in Canada. So this gave me heart palpitations for a second. This is a Canadian journal, dammit!)

I'm really confused by this. How can mean scores for the GK test be ~70 if the three group means were 45, 35, and 20? Unless you mean that the mean INCORRECT scores for the tests were 60 and 69.71. Which is not what the Results section starts with.

Curious as to why you would do this on a participant scale instead of on individual questions.

Confused as to why "visiting the library" is part of this - do not formal library instruction sessions happen outside the library? That should be made clear.

AUGH no. There has to be a third influence here: not all confident students are right, not all confident students are wrong; sometimes confidence is overconfidence, and THAT is predicted by ___.

I feel like you would need a control group at a higher level, who had been exposed to academic research methods for longer, or something.

Anxiety + disinterest? Sounds like two symptoms of an underlying cause: some kind of misapprehension of the scholarly endeavour as a whole. Feels like the study can't stop here ....

what about non-academic

What high percentage? This needs a citation.

This is definitely something paralleled in similar studies about internal and external locuses on control, etc., things like happiness and satisfaction studies rather than academic success.

I feel like this is backwards. I need to think of this as: overconfident students are more likely to be low performers; students who had a better grasp of their own skill level were higher performers.

Decreased overconfidence but didn't improve achievement?

I don't understand what this "setting" specifically is. If you're measuring overconfidence in academic subjects, aren't you measuring it with research and use of library materials de facto? Whether it's measured by/on a test or earlier in the research process?

I would argue a significant portion of information-seeking research is about overconfidence in some way or another.

This has been a huge eye opener since I started working in a College Library.

This isn't very surprising, especially now that this current generation is considered to be tech savy and think that they understand how research works since they have access to Google.

Glad to see this makes some inroads into "manipulative aesthetics" but I'm not sure we can account for the wide diversity of manipulative access in archives/museums/etc.

That sounds like "Emotional : Physical :: Intellectual : Digital". I don't know how I feel about that dichotomy.

The recurring emphasis on size seems significant to me: for digital objects, size seems temporary since you can (usually) easily zoom in and out on something. (I've heard similar observations used as objections to digital facsimiles.) Why does size matter to us, especially in matters of affect?

Could the discrepancy stem from a tendency by the digital user to see the artifact itself as textual and that it therefore merges intellectually with the documentation that surrounds it?

I'm not really surprised: doesn't that indicate simply that people spend more time on artifacts the first time they encounter them (whether physically or digitally)?

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Or, you can take the shortcut: produce 'alternative facts.'

Was definitely hoping for some more work in imagining how these things play out in practice. This conclusion seems a bit redundant at this point.

Well here's what I'm talking about.

+1

Purely in the realm of collection development and procurement, these arguments fall far short of what I'd have hoped to read: about the act of presentation of materials to users, the context that a library creates (authority? popularity? wholesomeness?) and whether libraries can temper those associations through other means. Maybe a selection process can never be neutral, but more important is how users perceive those selections - how much they understand about how their library sausage gets made.

+1

Okay, here's the partisanship stuff.Does Berninghausen give examples of how this looks in practice, or get to the point of discussing how decisions get made based on opinions anyways?

Again, I'd like to discuss how we do this during such a controversial time, while making all of our patrons feel safe in our libraries.

I'm having a bit of trouble coming to terms with this. Due to the recent election results, how do we provide library resources for "all people" without making our patrons feel unsafe or unaccepted? I feel like this is a very important thing to discuss now that we are entering such a controversial time.

It concerns me that "social justice" is opposite "neutrality" and not "social conservatism" - or that "neutrality" isn't opposite "partisanship" or "advocacy" or some other word that could indicate either side.

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I would have liked to know the geographical breakdown of the respondents to see if there were trends or themes within the different parts of Canada.

I wonder if this is because they consider YouTube videos to still be public domain.

It would be neat if universities set up some sort of online "Ask a Copyright Officer" virtual reference chat to make this less time consuming.

Yes. I've heard time and time again (from current academic librarians) that librarians need to get better that marketing themselves and what we do.

This basically forces them to have some sort of relationship with the librarians. However, this is also a way for administration to avoid making it mandatory that their teaching staff is training in copyright and fair dealing. I don't know if I like this policy.

I wonder if this result is biased based on the fact that they know they're surveyed about copyright?

Yikes. I wonder why they asked colleagues instead of librarians?

Would be interested in hearing how librarians in our LISJC community reach out to faculty and staff regarding copyright issues.

Perhaps this has to do with lack of technology? This was found in a study published in 1999.

I'd be interesting in hearing why these Universities decided to separate from Access Copyright. Im assuming it mostly has to do with money, but maybe also because they didn't see value in AC?

This seems strange to me. You can copy up to 10% of a copyright protected work. Why 30 seconds of a song? What if a song is 15 minutes or 1 minute?

Is this not reason enough to make it mandatory that their teaching staff are appropriately trained on copyright and fair dealing? I think this would also foster a closer relationship between the teaching staff and librarians.

This is an important discussion point: do people really think that copyright "doesn't affect them" such that they shouldn't prepare themselves? Is it always a thing you have learn by screwing up (or by being screwed over)? Don't you waste more time that way? Wouldn't you think academics would know better?

A bit concerned about the use of 20-year-old studies here.

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I wish you had opened with this!

I rankle every time I see "people" and not "students," because I think TCs work a lot better for the traditional (young, freshly-high-school-graduated) university student than they do for learners at other stages in their lives or outside formal spheres. I've seen little discussion on how TCs work in independent or self-guided learning, so I'm not sure that I can get behind this language.

I would be hard-pressed to market this as a good thing.

Intrigued by this, but unfortunately have not had time ahead of the lisjc chat / annotation to work up what these could be from a discovery perspective. As noted above, of those presented here Authority, Research Process, & especially Scholarly Discourse come through clearest in our discovery user experience work.

It seems to me that "struggl[ing] to connect [one's] work to the broader conversations in the discipline" may well be something that affects LIS practitioners just as much as other disciplines.

I would question the extent to which we ourselves buy into the idea that we are a part of an ongoing scholarly conversation ourselves - within our own domain of LIS. Do we engage with scholarly work or other 'existing conversations' to the extent that we are expecting of our users in this concept?

This insight seems absolutely correct from ongoing user experience work at my workplace (a university). We see in more expert users a very well-developed idea that learning and knowledge creation takes places in a scholarly community. This community is understood as supportive, as it can provide recommendations, help and guidance, and has deep expertise in particular specialist areas that are tied to research in known and predictable ways.

I find this threshold concept the least "best fitting" of those identified. I suspect it may speak to a limitation of the Delphi method in this case - perhaps the participants selected, or a 'bandwagon' effect of some sort?

What I'm seeing here (particularly my highlights above) are in 2016 perspectives that do not chime with current novice or expert understandings of library search and discovery systems that I see as a practitioner - let alone a more general, complicated idea of being an information literate person.

... which is something I've always found a bit questionable in this premise.

I find this whole concept / Frame troubling as it simply does not fit very well with developed ('expert') understanding of format (or medium) as my own library users understand and interpret it. I found Lane Wilkinson's discussion of the equivalent draft Framework frame on format very useful and, I think, applicable here:

this frame isn’t about format at all. From the standpoint of information use, the differences between a .jpg image and a .png image, or a print book and an ebook, are an engineering issue, not an information literacy issue. I think the real focus of this frame is media, not format, and a more intuitive way to state the concept might simply be "Medium Matters."

from: https://senseandreference.wordpress.com/2014/07/25/is-format-a-process/

I'm trying to read the article as-is rather than jumping into the finished Frames too much, but this is one case where I think the additional shaping and development of the Framework results in a better concept / Frame than the Delphi study did.

I would agree with this, based on how useful (or not) I have found the concepts / Frames from the study in my work which is systems-focused.

I have been using these in the context of user experience research of a discovery system. This sits in a broader information seeking landscape which is complex, nuanced, and of which library discovery and "the library" generally is only one piece.

Given the technical knowledge and expertise of my team, I've found that some concepts / Frames are simply much more useful in understanding infolit aspects of this process. These were: Authority, Research Process, & especially Scholarly Discourse.

I find it particularly interesting the authors note the need to expend extra effort on including practitioners, having discussed 'routine criteria for expertise' above.

I think in this case there is very definitely a need for an integrative approach: inductively developing theory from practice as well as applying theory to infolit classroom practices.

"Authority is constructed and contextual". ;-) I do not agree that these criteria necessarily allow reliable judgement about infolit expertise so much as reflecting those who are seen as authorities or 'prominent voices'.

I found this a key problem to grapple with further on in the paper where the concepts themselves are listed. Are they bounded by information science as a discipline? Three explicitly are not.

Just to digress: I agree with this argument myself and feel I have a strong bias toward this view of things. I highlight it here as I wonder if it is a somewhat taken-for-granted principle that is often not always followed through in infolit practice? To me that would mitigate against the usefulness of a threshold concepts Framework - you'd want both a "concepts" and a "competencies" document.

Not so sure about this argument. It just seems a little overstated. To me concept of threshold concepts appears relatively acceptable to libraryland - having seen it initially when Land spoke at the LILAC infolit conference with a keynote talk about threshold concepts (this is a very mainstream conference). It would not surprise me to see threshold concepts included in future infolit guidelines / frameworks from for example, SCONUL or CILIP with relatively little fuss.

My overall impression of the method is that it seems a reasonable way of getting some threshold concepts from subject matter experts. I would question if these concepts are necessarily "the" threshold concepts for infolit given the differences between the Delphi study and the Framework that draws on it.

I already find this premise questionable.

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Has anyone seen further uses of this?

Interesting that the spectrum doesn't differentiate very well here.

But is it really that surprising?

This.

My final thoughts: It is rather difficult to call upon professionals to essentially sacrifice their professional wellbeing for open access publishing. I believe that we need to focus our activism on changing the foundation of what is valued in the field. It needs to start being recognized that librarians publishing in open access journals is fundamentally the only appropriate publishing option for the field and should merit tenure not the other way around. Having some sort of an incentive for publishing open access is going to be a game changer for rallying people to this very important cause.

Gosh, I sure wish I had learned about this in Library School..........

This journal selection process is not exactly reproducible. This creates a problem as there is no way to independently verify that proper steps were taken to eliminate a selection bias. Any criteria that was used to select these journals should be clearly defined somewhere.

Were any journals excluded for failing to provide these details?

I could really use a few contextual pieces of information: for one, what's the estimate of total LIS journals that you could potentially have drawn from? Two, might you have controlled in some way for the types and subfields represented here?

So, not really a "method" then.

I'm so interested in knowing precisely what constitutes a (relatively) high circulation, (relatively) low acceptance, (relatively) strong citation rate, etc. in LIS work. Do we have a journal that sets a standard?

An issue I rarely see tackled head-on.

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I have several questions about this method: 1) Is it, in fact, valuable to compare multiple participants' views of their organization's values? (When they are all from 1 organization.) 2) I feel like the variance in participants' values would affect how they saw their organizations, i.e. things Ps feels strongly about would be more noticeable to them if they thought O lacked those interests. High inter-participant correlations in ratings of O-values would be interesting. 3) There would be way less chance of any correlation between Ps of differing Os as to organizational values, except in the general thesis that organizations are generally conservative and/or ROI-focused, which we could debate all day, I guess ... 4) I feel like #1 would only be valuable as compared to #3, where 3 is your control (how all Ps feel about their Os) and 1 is your experimental (how these Ps feel about this one O). Controlling for 2 (how some Ps feel strongly about certain values and misperceive their Os in corresponding ways).

... does that make sense? Maybe I'm misreading but I don't feel like the PQMethod software is described as offering these analyses.

!!!!! I'm SO interested in this. How could you test people on their interest in actions, laid out specifically, and the relation of those actions to their stated values?

It would be really interesting to speculate more on how we might typify cataloging quality - I feel like I could list a half-dozen as a non-cataloguer, but I would be interested to see how others see those things. (Completeness in # of fields + relevance of fields; vocabulary control as % of applicable fields; format + readability of long-form fields; typos + factual errors; relevance of subject headings based on available SHs and # of SHs used; ........)

I find this very interesting. Something to follow up on with a larger study perhaps.

My natural tendency is to question the validity of the sample size, right off the bat. Is one participant per library going to be able to reflect meaningfully on the values of said library?

See, this is where I wonder whether a different format would be better. For a research project where the lit review is part of the methodology, wouldn't you put methodology first and lit review second? Is it just me?

++++++ A thousand times yes

I appreciate the introduction to this methodology and can see where it could very useful for strategic planning or other scenarios where alignment between personal/institutional values is desirable.

I think I am still wrapping my head around Q-Sort. From scanning the appendicies, I think that each of the statements that are identified as "core" to the various factors (i.e. online catalog and/or discovery tool usability) have a one-to-one correspondence to a Q-statement that participants were asked to rank. Is that true? Or are there multiple Q-statements that might be reflected in one short-hand descriptor. If so, are these grouped together before hand or after the software analysis?

The information about the libraries and participants below is useful. Am also curious to know how participants were recruited.

This sounds a bit backwards; how does one "select" participants? How do you pre-select participants with a "broad representation of viewpoints"? Sounds laborious.

Yay for appendices w/survey instruments!

This section clarifies a lot of my questions about the previous Q-Sort section: might be useful to present this information in one place.

This section was enough encourage me to learn more about Q-Sort, but a some of it flew over my head. (Especially the part about factor analysis.) I wonder if narrating a few concrete examples from your study alongside the description of the method would have made it a little easier to process?

I would have found a diagram very helpful here.

Minor question about wording: Because of the placement of this sentence, I am not sure if what follows (i.e. the statement about two different kinds of organizational decision making) come from the Simon article or are the author's assertion. (I'm assuming it's from the Simon article...)

Does that mean that, even when the desired outcome of assessment was "improve services," for example, the results of activities were more often expressed in terms of listed changes such as staff reallocation, rather than in "Yes, we improved services! By [this much]!" ??? That's weird.

I feel like this intro kind of washed over me - without a practical example or two, I wasn't really sure what was being discussed. I would have liked to have a short "intro" to the methodology here, and then have that expanded later in the methodology section (since that's where you describe your approach, not the theory you're working from).

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This was very helpful re: measuring the relative effectiveness of the various chat reference interventions; would love a similar measure for in-person intervention, although I recognize that's much more difficult (impossible?) to capture.

Does anyone have an idea how that could be done?

Would be helpful if discussion explicitly referenced the Figures for additional context.

This is a good indicator that simply "increase reference interactions" is not a meaningful goal in its own right.

Addition of chat reference isn't actually one of the interventions that were part of this study, so it seems inappropriate to refer to it as an outcome. This data is better suited for the previous section, which described the introduction of chat reference to the library.

The fact that they normalized reference transaction data per FTE to account for the changing enrollment at the college (described in the paragraph above) over time is a strength.

I would have liked to see a deeper exploration of the literature supporting this statement, as motivation for this project beyond the observation that reference transactions are declining.

"typical graduates of NYC public schools" is under-defined; could lead reader to make problematic assumptions about the library's users.

Discrete data points don't prove trends.

I wonder if they consulted existing signage and wayfinding research to improve this in line with best practices. (That's a whole other article, isn't it?)

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