Authority control provided by Digital Commons is basic. Other than author names, Digital Commons does not provide much in the way of authority control for other fields, such as faculty advisor/mentor names or department names. Standardizing name fields has several benefits, not least of which is the increased precision of reports that institutions can create to highlight the impact of faculty mentorship activities as well as the scholarship output of departmental entities on campus. Institutions that want to ensure the consistency of names across submissions to their Digital Commons repository, especially for self-submitted submissions, must develop their own methods for maintaining authority control. The presenter, a librarian wearing many hats in her position at Eastern Kentucky University Libraries, will talk about strategies she has developed for streamlining authority control work in EKU Libraries’ Digital Commons repository, Encompass Digital Archive.

The purpose of this study is to determine if elementary school libraries in west central Florida provide diverse, inclusive collections of LGBTQAI+ material in a safe space, and, if they do, to ascertain the librarians' understanding of, and satisfaction with, how that material is cataloged and classified. I wanted to know whether the literature was easily located, or, conversely, if the library classification tools and practices either misrepresented non-normative students or failed to represent them at all, given the potential impacts on students' self-acceptance. To answer these questions, I surveyed 41 private, independent, and public librarians, 10 of whom volunteered for in-depth, semi-structured interviews. During the interviews, I explored how the librarians used lists, thesauri, tagging, ratings, and spine labels to supplement their catalog searches. As none of this work happens in a vacuum, I also examined the paradigm in which the librarians do their work. I approached this study as a humanist, through a feminist lens, using Queer Theory and Whiteness studies. I was not seeking a unitary truth but rather a thick description of each librarian's perspectives and decisions concerning their collection management and cataloging procedures, contextualized within their daily demands as school librarians and, in the case of the public school librarians, technology specialists. My research found a group of librarians dedicated to their work, each of whom approached the management of LGBTQAI+ literature from their own positionality, ranging from those who denied that elementary students needed this literature at all, to those who wanted to provide it but were restricted by time, budget, and parental and administration censorship, to those who boldly proclaimed "I'm not afraid."

In order to establish specific procedures for processing, cataloging and classifying the art print collection at the Kentucky Library, Western Kentucky University, data were gathered from three sources. These were: (1) information on current procedures used in the Kentucky Library, obtained through an interview with Riley Handy, the Kentucky Librarian (2) a search of related literature and (3) a questionnaire survey of other institution having art print collections. It was found that historically valuable art prints, which are used primarily as documentary resources, need to be carefully processed and stored so as to preserve and protect them from damaging effects of light, temperature change, humidity and dust. Effective preservation techniques include: (1) controlling the light, temperature and humidity in the building through installation of modern air conditioning units, electronic air filters and artificial light filters; (2) making photographs of the art prints so that the copies rather the original prints can be used by the patrons; (3) placing the prints in all-rag paper or Mylar plastic folders which are then stored flat in dustproof acid free paper boxes or steel map cases; and (4) having damaged prints restored only by professional prints conservationists who use reversible restoration techniques. In regard to cataloging, it was found that historically valuable prints should be individually cataloged and should be organized in either a classified system or in numerical arrangement. Although no central reporting agency exists for disseminating information about art prints, the findings indicate the advisability of each institution publicizing its own art print holdings.

In this thesis, the improvement to relevance in computerized search results is studied. Information search tools return ranked lists of documents ordered by the relevance of the documents to the user supplied search. Using a small number of words and phrases to represent complex ideas and concepts causes user search queries to be information sparse. This sparsity challenges search tools to locate relevant documents for users. A review of the challenges to information searches helps to identify the problems and offer suggestions in improving current information search tools. Using the suggestions put forth by the Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne (SWIRL), a composite scoring approach (Composite Scorer) is developed. The Composite Scorer considers various aspects of information needs to improve the ranked results of search by returning records relevant to the user’s information need. The Florida Fusion Center (FFC), a local law enforcement agency has a need for a more effective information search tool. Daily, the agency processes large amounts of police reports typically written as text documents. Current information search methods require inordinate amounts of time and skill to identify relevant police reports from their large collection of police reports. An experiment conducted by FFC investigators contrasted the composite scoring approach against a common search scoring approach (TF/IDF). In the experiment, police investigators used a custom-built software interface to conduct several use case scenarios for searching for related documents to various criminal investigations. Those expert users then evaluated the results of the top ten ranked documents returned from both search scorers to measure the relevance to the user of the returned documents. The evaluations were collected and measurements used to evaluate the performance of the two scorers. A search with many irrelevant documents has a cost to the users in both time and potentially in unsolved crimes. A cost function contrasted the difference in cost between the two scoring methods for the use cases. Mean Average Precision (MAP) is a common method used to evaluate the performance of ranked list search results. MAP was computed for both scoring methods to provide a numeric value representing the accuracy of each scorer at returning relevant documents in the top-ten documents of a ranked list of search results. The purpose of this study is to determine if a composite scoring approach to ranked lists, that considers multiple aspects of a user’s search, can improve the quality of search, returning greater numbers of relevant documents during an information search. This research contributes to the understanding of composite scoring methods to improve search results. Understanding the value of composite scoring methods allows researchers to evaluate, explore and possibly extend the approach, incorporating other information aspects such as word and document meaning.