This Code of Ethics intends to promote activism on the part of the librarian to advance intellectual freedom and access issues to the community. Libraries are in danger. The danger lies in a few specific areas: in the accessibility of information via the Internet so people do not feel they need to come to a library for information; privacy violations by the government in the name of security; low pay which drives potential librarians to the private sector in search of higher paying jobs; a sense of atrophy in the administration of libraries; rising costs and the corporatization of libraries; and the pressure to compete with retail bookstores in customer service and other quantifiable measures. (Roberto and West, 2003) Librarians must do whatever they can, no matter how small or large the contribution, to fight for their rights and the rights of patrons. Activism is most commonly believed to be picketing, marching, and petitioning; things that are seen on the nightly news. But librarians can be activists on a much more simple level. By becoming a member of every organization in their particular field, reading as much related material as possible, and simply being aware of what is going on in our profession, librarians can become a much more powerful group of professionals.

Cost effective development of collaboration technology requires evaluation methods that consider group practices and can be used early in a systemâ s life-cycle. To address this challenge we developed a survey to evaluate collaboration technology based on innovation dgusion theory. The theory proposes five attributes of innovations that influence technology adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability. Selecting items from existing surveys related to these attributes, we developed a prototype multi-scale survey to help evaluate whether using a system face-to-face or distributively influences study participantsâ attitudes towards system adoption. We have begun refining the survey instrument and report on this process, the proposed survey questions, and the reliability and validity of the survey instrument.

Libraries have been involved in technological transformation for several decades, and are now increasingly associated with discourses surrounding the development of a global information society. The information society, however, remains a contested terrain, with a major focus on connectivity to ICTs, and is often linked with technological determinist and technocratic agendas. The library profession and field do not adequately theorize technology in a way that offers a progressive alternative to this dominant information society vision. In light of this context, this dissertation argues for the relevance of critical theory as a framework for guiding and analyzing library technology actions. This confluence of critical theory and library technology studies is named a “critical theory of library technology.” The framework is both a conceptual tool for re-envisioning the roles of libraries in relation to technology, as well as an analytical tool for exploring library technology decisions at various levels of impact. The open source software movement in libraries serves as test case in the application of this framework as a mode of analysis. Prominent library open source projects are discussed, and an in-depth, qualitative case study of Simon Fraser University Library in Canada, a library developing open source software for electronic resource management and electronic journal publishing, is undertaken. Interviews and documentary research are the main sources of data. Findings indicate that while the software projects are nominally open source, the co-developer communities remain limited. Best practices research will have to address areas related to the on-going community development and sustainability of these projects. However, in relation to the critical framework, the library emerges as a model of high investment in the technological skills of systems staff. The case presents a regional example of cooperation that is benefiting smaller client libraries in the regional consortia. Open source ideology, however, appears as just one of a variety of factors behind the deployment of these projects. In the case of the electronic journal publishing software project, an open source/open access ideological orientation is prominent, and the project presents a potentially new model for academic libraries in the support of electronic publishing services.

<p> The purpose of this study was to present a content analysis of seven music therapy journals in the English language in order to provide an objective documentation of the longitudinal growth of the field. The current study examined seven English language music therapy journals including the <i> Journal of Music Therapy, Music Therapy: Journal of the American Association for Music Therapy, Music Therapy Perspectives, The Australian Journal of Music Therapy, The Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, The British Journal of Music Therapy,</i> and <i>The New Zealand Society for Music Therapy Journal. </i> A total of 1,922 articles were coded according to author information (name, credentials, institution, geographic location), mode of inquiry, population studied, and subsequent article citation. Results indicated a broad range of research topics with a rapid rise in music and medicine research beginning in the 1980s. Research authors in music therapy comprise a diverse group of authors both from the United States and abroad. This study highlighted transitions in institutional productivity moving from clinical settings to academic settings. Over the course of 50 years, there have been continuous changes in various aspects of the music therapy literature that document the continuing growth of the profession.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study is to propose a means of reconciling the competing ideas of library and information science's identity, thereby strengthening professional autonomy. I make the case that developing a system of virtue ethics for librarianship would be an effective way to promote that reconciliation. The first step in developing virtue ethics is uncovering librarianship's function. Standard approaches to virtue ethics rely on classical Greek ideas about the nature of being to determine function. Since classical ideas of being may no longer be persuasive, I introduce another approach to uncover librarianship's function that still meets all of the criteria needed to establish a foundation for a system of virtue ethics. This approach is hermeneutical phenomenology, the philosophical discipline of interpreting the meaning given to historical events. Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic circle technique and Paul Ricoeur's theory of narrative intelligence are used to engage in a dialogue with three crises in the history of American librarianship. These pivotal events are the fiction question, librarian nationalism during World War I, and the dispute between supporters of the "Library Bill of Rights" and social responsibility. From these crises, three recurring themes become apparent: the tendency to reconcile idealism and pragmatism, the intent to do good for individuals and society, and the role of professional insecurity in precipitating the conflicts. Through emplotment of these themes, an identity narrative for librarianship emerges. My finding is that librarianship's function is the promotion of stability-happiness. This is the dual-process of supporting dominant socio-cultural institutions as a means of protecting librarianship's ability to offer the knowledge, cultural records, and avenues for information literacy that can improve lives and facilitate individuals' pursuit of happiness. In the conclusion, the ethical implications of having stability-happiness as the profession's function are considered. It includes a discussion of how librarianship's narrative identity could be applied to develop an ethical character for the profession and how such a character, combined with knowledge of function, might address persistent problems of race and gender disparity in library and information science.</p>

The shape and function of the contemporary library is approaching a structural crisis, as the rate of publication continually increases and the media of publication diversifies and digitizes. In this thesis, I propose a number of alternatives to these looming problems. The proposals result from investigations into basic structural properties of information, especially as expressed in academic research and publication, where meaning is largely the result of linking ("this idea furthers this related idea") and context (as a field of study, a body of work, and institution or research group, etc.). The proposed library system, called a "datastructure" in a melange of cultural practice, public policy, structural system and technological infrastructure. Additional research notes (beyond those contained in this document) are kept in a project wiki that can evolve and adapt as the work requires in the future. You can access this wiki at http://think.rice.edu.

A method for ranking efficient decision making units in Data Envelopment Analysis is suggested. The method uses parametric programming and calculates "rigidity" of efficient units relative to perturbations of input and output data. / Theoretical results are applied to 108 North American university libraries. The efficiency of the libraries is determined by the Charnes-Cooper-Rhodes tests. The radius of rigidity approach is applied to efficient libraries. In particular, we focus on the McGill University library and compare its efficiency to other libraries using different data sets.

<p> This dissertation proposes, exemplifies, and validates the usage of course-subject co-occurrence (CSCO) data to generate topic maps of an academic discipline. CSCO is defined as course-subjects taught in the same academic year by the same teacher. This work is premised on the assumption that in the aggregate and for reasons of efficiency, faculty members teach course-subjects that are topically similar to one another. To exemplify and validate CSCO, more than 112,000 CSCO events were extracted from the annual directories of the American Association of Law Schools covering nearly eighty years of law school teaching in the United States. The CSCO events are used to extract and visualize the structure and evolution of law for the years 1931-32, 1972-73, and 2010-11&mdash;roughly, forty year intervals. Different normalization, ordination (layout), and clustering algorithms are compared and the best algorithm of each type is used to generate the final map. Validation studies demonstrate that CSCO produces topic maps that are consistent with expert opinion and four other indicators of the topical similarity of law school course-subjects. Resulting maps of the educational domain of law are useful as a reference system for additional thematic overlay of information about law school education in the United States. This research is the first to use CSCO to produce visualizations of a domain. It is the first to use an expanded, multi-part gold-standard to evaluate the validity of domain maps and the intermediate steps in their creation. Last but not least, this research contributes a metric analysis and visualizations of the evolution of law school course-subjects over nearly eighty years.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Drexel University, 2008. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 351-370).

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Charles N. Morris. Dissertation Committee: Jean Pierre Jordaan. Includes bibliographical references.