Category: 2016Page 1 of 3

Artists’ Books Holdings

Students: Megan DeArmond and Abigail Purcell Title: Artists’ Books Holdings Abstract: Our project, Artists’ Books Holdings, is an attempt to analyze and visualize data about artists’ books holdings on an…

Visual Literacy in Pre-K Curricula

InfoShow – Visual Literacy in Pre-K Visual literacy is a critical skill that enables individuals to navigate the world of visual media. While the research shows multiple benefits of introducing…

Welcome Home to the Wild: Orienting Bronx Zoo Visitors to Provide Greater Satisfaction and Comfort

Informed by targeted qualitative research as well as six years of on-the-ground personal observations, this strategic story guides viewers through the current experience of the Bronx Zoo visitor. After identifying pain points and areas for potential, a design solution is proposed in the form of a mobile app. The solution is intended not only to improve the visitor experience, but also to create a feedback channel which will allow further design improvements to be made.

Women Behind the Page and On the Page in Comics: No Longer in Refrigerators?

By using web-scraping tools, I obtained data from fan-curated wikia pages concerning several comic book publishers. By assessing this data at several different points from 1995-2015, I sought to see if the proportion of women writers and artists in the comic book industry was increasing, if women artists and writers tend to more often work on female-fronted titles, and if that changes based on if the title is creator-owned or work-for-hire.

Jay Z’s Brooklyn

This project uses historical materials from the Brooklyn Collection archive on the creation of the Marcy Houses projects to explore themes of community and local history with secondary school students in the Brooklyn Connections program. By exploring current issues around housing through the lens of historical events, this group created a unit of study that engages students in culturally relevant instruction.

A Walking Tour of Brownsville: Teaching with Technology and Primary Sources

This project uses resources from the Brooklyn Collection archive on Brownsville, Brooklyn to create a unit of study for Brooklyn Connections students. The unit emphasizes the ways that classroom technologies can be integrated into the research process to increase student engagement.

LibGuide for Film and Media Preservation

The “LibGuide for Film and Media Preservation” is a centralized location tool to serve the needs of beginning professionals working with and managing moving image media, analog and digital, in information environments such as archives, museum and special collections and libraries. In addition, the resource guide is designed as a supplement to graduate students taking relevant course work in library and informational science coursework, such as film and media collections. The LibGuide includes information resources including encyclopedias, dictionaries, and indexes, selected for their coverage across disciplines including varied topics as preservation, conservation and restoration, film history, and librarianship.

How-To Video: Perler Bead Necklace

This instructional video teaches a craft skill using principles of instructional design and simple technology.

How to Fold a Plastic Bag

This instructional video uses stop animation and principals of good instructional design to teach how to fold a plastic shopping bag into a neat, small triangle.

DIY Linked Data For Cultural Heritage: Structuring useful data using pre-existing tools

This project reports the results of the first nine months of developing linked open data with a small selection of the Whitney’s collection, focusing on the artist and works added to the collection during the founding years (1931-1948) under its first director Juliana Force. It serves as a case study for other institutions interested in developing linked open data projects. This project also demonstrates several practical examples of how linked open data can be used for research and public outreach.

Professional Identity of Librarians

This presentation explores the sociological academic literature on professions to determine if librarianship meets the requirements to be a profession, if library literature supports librarianship as a profession, and why professional self-identification matters.

Community Building & Engagement

This panel explores research and recommendations in community building and engagement at three organizations: the Finkelstein Memorial Library; Pax Gaming Community; and the United States Military, Academic Library, West Point. Special emphasis is placed on social media.

Alchohol dependency/ Women’s reproductive rights: LibGuides

Students demonstrate best practices for creating LibGuides on different topics for a public library (Alchohol dependency) and an academic library (Women’s reproductive rights). Presentation includes original video content by students.

Born-Digital Archiving at the Guggenheim

This project was completed during a year long fellowship at the Guggenheim Library & Archives, where I processed a backlog of born-digital, institutional records. My poster will review the workflow we tested and activated, as well as suggestions for the next steps in processing.

On Forming Identities: Archival Representation and Self-Making in Palestine

This paper will address the extremely influential role of archives in identity formation processes, and will explore how this asymmetry is magnified when considering marginalized, and specifically stateless, communities. This complex relationship will be further explored as it relates to depictions of Palestinians in two unique digital archives.

Transformative Labor: The Invisible Work of Library Digitization

Libraries around the world have been concerned with the digitization of theirmaterials for the past two decades. A digitally available global library is growing, thanks to immense projects like Google Books, and large academic libraries that have been ceaselessly digitizing their materials as new scanning and data storage technologies continue to revolutionize the field. This presents a question of a huge amount of labor—who will do it?

First, I want this paper to shine a light on the actual labor performed by book
scanners for Google, and for other, smaller, library digitization projects. Manual labor continues to drive technological advancement, whether it’s in Apple’s Chinese factories where women construct iPhones for menial pay, or in Silicon Valley where Google’s scanning team works overnight to digitize the world’s libraries.

Second, I want to reveal the ways in which this labor goes undiscussed, both as
(likely) company policy at Google, and in smaller libraries, public and private, around world. Why does this labor remain hidden? The underground sensation that surrounds the Google’s scanning labor, and the way that the transformative labor of digitization goes unremarked, gets us close to the very old class conflict that is at the center of the new tech economy.

The first section of this paper will look at artist Andrew Norman Wilson’s
findings in his art pieces dealing with Google’s book scanning operations, and what we can know about labor conditions there. I then want to connect those findings to labor in smaller digitization undertakings at academic, public, and private libraries around the country. This leads to a discussion of automated robotic book scanners, and the future of library material digitization in the burgeoning convenience economy.

‘Data-Driven Transparency’: Creation and Consequence of the Data-Public

“‘Data-Drive Transparency’: Creation and Consequence of the Data-Public” analyzes the impact open government data programs have on society. The paper discusses how open government data, despite being marketed as democratic transparency initiative, results in the formation of a ‘data-public’ and the ascendance of neoliberal politics.

Day of DH: A Textual Analysis

This project examines definitions of digital humanities that were collected at the Day of DH conferences between 2009-2014, in order to identify themes and trends in the way the field has been defined over these years.

Social Justice and Diversity in LIS: An Overview

My paper deals with social justice, diversity, and demographics in the LIS profession and its practice.

Usability Outside the Classroom: Insights from Usability Consulting Projects

Students from this semester’s “Usability Theory & Practice” course present highlights from three client-facing usability projects – for Columbia Libraries, Pratt SAVI, and the NYC Open Data Portal – and reflect on lessons learned from their experience, from communicating with the client about the project’s scope to presenting their final analysis and recommendations directly to the client via a face-to-face presentation.