YUL research and professional contributions
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Research conducted by York University Library Faculty members can be found in this collection, along with professional contributions such as presentation slides and instructional videos.
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Item Open Access Advancing Research Data Management: A Social Capital Perspective on Functional Librarianship(Facet Publishing, 2022-12-22) Kosavic, Andrea; Wang, MingluThis chapter investigates librarianship in the area of Research Data Management (RDM) through the lens of social capital theory. If social capital theories and concepts have the potential to bring to light the invisible or non-quantifiable value of academic library services (Bracke 2016; Corrall 2015), we postulate that they will lend a generative lens to explore the symbolic, network, and normative effects of engagement within the academic library. Using librarian and archivist-authored RDM literature as a case study, we will explore the dynamic relationships between network structures and the effects of functional librarianship on the social capital of academic libraries. User studies of scientists and case studies of library RDM programs (Perrier et al. 2017) are common in the literature, but their underlying theoretical frameworks are limited to “individual behaviourism” (Fecher, Friesike, and Hebing 2015), normative and historical institutionalism (Akers et al. 2014; Zenk-Möltgen et al. 2018), “wicked problem” theory (Cox, Pinfield, and Smith 2014) and organizational subculture theory (Cox and Verbaan 2016). Insights about the unique positionality of libraries within the academic community (Gold 2007) and potential leadership opportunities (Flores et al. 2015) have been mentioned but have yet to be clearly theorized to the level of a useful framework for deeper analysis or practical application of RDM research. A social capital perspective will offer a theoretical framework which contextualizes the potential benefits borne of functional engagement, including access to information attributed to network positionality and bridging connections, mutual supports found in communities with dense ties and group cohesion, and agency for enhancing reputation (Lin et al. 2001). As the presence of social capital can be used as a predictor of healthier institutional, disciplinary and departmental climates, this examination will highlight opportunities for strengthening social capital in libraries. We will also suggest modalities for libraries and related organizations to more consciously transform themselves using identified relationship building strategies. We provide a review of current RDM literature which summarizes the existing theoretical assumptions applied in the research to describe the development of RDM services and solutions in light of existing challenges. This is followed by an introduction of classic symbolic, normative, and network views of social capital theory, which are synthesized and applied to our sample during our coding exercise. Several essential themes surface in our axial coding exercise and they are summarized in our results and findings.Item Open Access Supporting Computational Research on Large Digital Collections(2022-12-12) Ruest, Nick; Bailey, JeffersonEvery year more and more scholars conduct research on terabytes and even petabytes of digital library and archive collections using computational methods such as data mining, natural language processing, and machine learning (ML), which poses many challenges for supporting research libraries. In 2020, Internet Archive Research Services and Archives Unleashed received funding to combine their tools enabling computational analysis of web and digital archives to support joint technology development, community building, and selected research projects by sponsored cohort teams. The session will feature programs that are building technologies, resources, and communities to support data-driven research, and it will review the beta platform, Archives Research Compute Hub, and discuss working with digital humanities, social and computer science researchers, and industry partners in support of large-scale digital research methods.Item Open Access Digital Preservation at York University Libraries(2022-11-16) Ruest, NickYork University Libraries are ten years into a digital preservation program. How did it start, how it did it evolve, what does our policy and documentation look like, and what are the lessons learned? Library organizations are unique, but there is generally a fair bit of overlap where our path, policies and documentation can be of use to other organizations.Item Open Access Arch-It!(2022-06-24) Holzmann, Helge; Ruest, Nick; Bailey, Jefferson; Dempsey, Alex; Fritz, Samantha; Milligan, Ian; Willis, KodyOver the past quarter-century, web archive collection has emerged as a user-friendly process thanks to cloud-hosted solutions such as the Internet Archive’s Archive-It subscription service. Despite advancements in collecting web archive content, no equivalent has been found by way of a user-friendly cloud-hosted analysis system. Web archive processing and research require significant hardware resources and cumbersome tools that interdisciplinary researchers find difficult to work with. In this paper, we present ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub)1, an interactive interface, closely connected with Archive-It, engineered to provide analytical actions, specifically generating datasets and in-browser visualizations. It efficiently streamlines research workflows while eliminating the burden of computing requirements. Building off past work by both the Internet Archive (Archive-It Research Services) and the Archives Unleashed Project (the Archives Unleashed Cloud), this merged platform achieves a scalable processing pipeline for web archive research.Item Open Access ABCDEF - The 6 key features behind scalable, multi-tenant web archive processing with ARCH: Archive, Big Data, Concurrent, Distributed, Efficient, Flexible(ACM, 2022-06-20) Holzmann, Helge; Ruest, Nick; Bailey, Jefferson; Dempsey, Alex; Fritz, Samantha; Lee, Peggy; Milligan, IanOver the past quarter-century, web archive collection has emerged as a user-friendly process thanks to cloud-hosted solutions such as the Internet Archive’s Archive-It subscription service. Despite advancements in collecting web archive content, no equivalent has been found by way of a user-friendly cloud-hosted analysis system. Web archive processing and research require significant hardware resources and cumbersome tools that interdisciplinary researchers find difficult to work with. In this paper, we identify six principles - the ABCDEFs (Archive, Big data, Concurrent, Distributed, Efficient, and Flexible) - used to guide the development and design of a system. These make the transformation of, and working with, web archive data as enjoyable as the collection process. We make these objectives – largely common sense – explicit and transparent in this paper. They can be employed by every computing platform in the area of digital libraries and archives and adapted by teams seeking to implement similar infrastructures. Furthermore, we present ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub), the first cloud-based system designed from scratch to meet all of these six key principles. ARCH is an interactive interface, closely connected with Archive-It, engineered to provide analytical actions, specifically generating datasets and in-browser visualizations. It efficiently streamlines research workflows while eliminating the burden of computing requirements. Building off past work by both the Internet Archive (Archive-It Research Services) and the Archives Unleashed Project (the Archives Unleashed Cloud), this merged platform achieves a scalable processing pipeline for web archive research. It will be made open-source shortly and can be considered a reference implementation of the ABCDEF, which we have evaluated and discussed in terms of feasibility and compliance as a benchmark for similar platforms.Item Open Access Home Made Visible: Partnering with a Film Festival to Preserve IBPOC Home Movies(2020-10) Cohen-Palacios, KatrinaFrom 2017 to 2019, the Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible project, in partnership with Charles Street Video and York University Libraries, highlighted the personal histories of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour (IBPOC) communities in the collective, public memory through an engagement with archival research, artistic creation, and public programming. The project’s goal consisted of celebrating the joy captured in home movies, preserving these histories, and exploring how archives have the power to shape who we become and how we relate to one another. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program, HMV commissioned seven films made by IBPOC artists and organized a tour of 51 exhibitions, workshops, screenings, and installations across Canada. The project also coordinated the donation of nearly 300 home movie clips from 36 families to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections for preservation in perpetuity. This collection spans six decades documenting the everyday life of 25 IBPOC communities. It features weddings, picnics, holiday celebrations, cultural traditions, religious ceremonies, birthday parties, school performances, snowstorms, and trips around the world in a multitude of languages. This presentation will discuss the project’s challenges and successes, including lessons learned from developing new partnerships and collaborative approaches to acquisition and description.Item Open Access Teambuilding in the time of COVID-19: A Zoom Play(2021-05-06) Hill, June; Prince, Tanya; Clink, David; Grewal, Kalina; Pinnock, Veronica; Jon, Genny; Stevenson, Alexandra; Neilson, David; Daniels, Trevor; Ngo, Dat Quoc;Abstract This play brings to life the story of a group of professional and para-professional staff at York University Libraries as they build a new team and provide new services during a year-long COVID-19 lockdown. Creative use of technologies help them develop a sense of community and a renewed sense of purpose. Summary In a strange and scary time, exiled from their place of work, a group of (relative) strangers turn a wellbeing exercise into so much more. Picture this: a threat invisible to the naked eye empties out an entire 60, 000-person campus; the library locks its door with an hour’s notice; and the people who like to help are sent home indefinitely. How are they, the library people, going to survive, thrive and help the faculty and students now dispersed to the four corners of the world? This short play will tell you how. The pandemic shut down the old ways of communicating, BUT library services still had to be available. The professional and para-professional staff in the library overcame personal, technical and other challenges to build a new team that would serve its public. BUT team building requires communication and trust. How was trust in the new team built in an online environment known for its comical awkwardness? The limitations of Zoom were turned into a strength: week by week, turn by turn, everyone got to speak and truly listen to their team members. The common launching off point was a carefully selected video on skills building, library services, accessibility and diversity. Video by video, varied insights meant that team members were visible to each other as fellow humans and co-workers! A team was born. Learn what each player in this team did to make it come alive. Come by and watch: Team-building in the Time of COVID: A PlayItem Open Access Repositioning altmetrics: From metrics to indicators of research strengths(2021-04-29) Nariani, RajivAcademic librarians especially those with subject responsibilities use various methods to know about the research being produced within its universities. This might include conducting specific searches in databases, reading research newsletters, talking to faculty and graduate students, and attending faculty council meetings among other activities. A better understanding of academic research could probably translate into targeted collection development activities. In the present situation with limited budgets, libraries in different types of higher education institutions will need to be proactive while building teaching and research collections that emphasize their support for the specific directions taken by their universities. Research metrics will have a big role to play in academic libraries, especially in the current world scenario. Altmetrics can be of immense help to subject librarians trying to understand the emerging research within their areas, while anticipating new programs and expansions. I have been using Altmetric Explorer (free librarian version) and databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar along with Tableau in my analysis. These different tools can help to highlight and visualize the highly discussed and cited papers from our universities. The role of altmetrics needs to be repositioned in today’s academia. It is time that we start learning from these diverse sets of metrics on how they can inform us make important decisions that will eventually help support our researchers while increasing our university’s profile.Item Open Access Standard Review COVID-19 (Coronavirus): ADB Information Centre(The Charleston Company, 2021-04-01) Salmon, MarciaCOVID-19 (Coronavirus): ADB Information Centre is a website that provides Open Access to evidence-based clinical decision supports, online courses, patient information, pamphlets, and procedural videos on Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) for front line healthcare workers in the Asian Development Bank (ADB) regional member countries. Evidence based clinical decision supports and patient information pamphlets are created by BMJ Best Practice. This website has a clean user-friendly interface with information that is easily accessible and is available in three languages English, Russian and Mandarin. The COVID-19 (Coronavirus): ADB Information Centre is a creditable and authoritative source of evidence based medical information on COVID-19.Item Open Access Fostering Community Engagement through Datathon Events: The Archives Unleashed Experience(Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, 2021-03) Fritz, Samantha; Milligan, Ian; Ruest, Nick; Lin, JimmyThis article explores the impact that a series of Archives Unleashed datathon events have had on community engagement both within the web archiving field, and more specifically, on the professional practices of attendees. We present results from surveyed datathon participants, in addition to related evidence from our events, to discuss how our participants saw the datathons as dramatically impacting both their professional practices as well as the broader web archiving community. Drawing on and adapting two leading community engagement models, we combine them to introduce a new understanding of how to build and engage users in an open-source digital humanities project. Our model illustrates both the activities undertaken by our project as well as the related impact they have on the field. The model can be broadly applied to other digital humanities projects seeking to engage their communities.Item Open Access Influenza Pandemic: A Webliography(Taylor and Francis (Routledge), 2020-09-01) Salmon, MarciaCurrently, the world is experiencing an influenza pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) is believed to have originated in Wuhan province of China in the autumn of 2019. During this unique time of self-isolation to halt the community spread of this virus the following webliography aims to provide information regarding influenza pandemics. Influenza pandemic is a global outbreak of an influenza virus. This article outlines the World Health Organization six phase classification system for flu pandemics. It discusses the difference between pandemics and epidemics. The cause and effect of past influenza pandemics is also covered in this article. This webliography is a guide to online resources for instance consumer health websites such as Healthline and WebMD and government websites for example Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Health Canada and the World Health Organization (WHO) websites that provide information on influenza pandemics.Item Open Access Standard Review of ProQuest Coronavirus Research Database(The Charleston Company, 2020-10-01) Salmon, MarciaCoronavirus Research Database is created and maintained by Pro- Quest. It is freely available to existing ProQuest customers and is an authoritative source of information on Coronavirus Disease pandemic (Covid-19) and past coronavirus epidemics such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). It has a robust search engine and a clean user interface. Pro- Quest Coronavirus Research Database has become a reputable and reliable research source for coronavirus research and the virus’s impact on public health.Item Open Access From archive to analysis: accessing web archives at scale through a cloud-based interface(Springer Nature, 2021-01-06) Ruest, Nick; Fritz, Samantha; Deschamps, Ryan; Lin, Jimmy; Milligan, IanThis paper introduces the Archives Unleashed Cloud, a web-based interface for working with web archives at scale. Current access paradigms, largely driven by the scope and scale of web archives, generally involve using the command line and writing code. This access gap means that subject-matter experts, as opposed to developers and programmers, have few options to directly work with web archives beyond the page-by-page paradigm of the Wayback Machine. Drawing on first-hand research and analysis of how scholars use web archives, we present the interface design and underpinning architecture of the Archives Unleashed Cloud. We also discuss the sustainability implications of providing a cloud-based service for researchers to analyze their collections at scale.Item Open Access Editorial(Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2020) Sloniowski, Lisa; Nicholson, Karen; Schmidt, JaneItem Open Access Building Community at Distance: A Datathon during COVID-19(Digital Library Perspectives, 2020-08-04) Fritz, Samantha; Milligan, Ian; Ruest, Nick; Lin, JimmyThis paper aims to use the experience of an in-person event that was forced to go virtual in the wake of COVID-19 as an entryway into a discussion on the broader implications around transitioning events online. It gives both practical recommendation to event organizers as well as broader reflections on the role of digital libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.Item Open Access Bodies, Brains, and Machines: An Exploration of the Relationship between the Material and Affective States of Librarians and Information Systems(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020-01) Allison-Cassin, StacyThis paper uses the idea of information networks and the ways librarian bodies are called to serve as a relay within information systems. The founding of librarianship as a profession in the Victorian period during a period of increased bureaucracy and mechanization has had a profound and far-reaching impact on the way women’s bodies and affective states are subsumed into information systems. The history of librarianship is read alongside Kittler’s analysis of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula as a story not about vampires, but about office technology. The connection between women’s bodies and information processing is further traced through an analysis of the film Desk Set. The film is examined for the ways librarian bodies and affective states interact with computer technologies to show that women are encouraged to fully give over brains and bodies to serve as nodes along a library information systems, in effect becoming cyborgs. Finally, contemporary issues around digital systems and affect are examined as a possible means to provide a bulwark against the complete surrender to capitalist information flows.Item Open Access Standard Review of Disaster Lit: Database for Disaster Medicine and Public Health(The Charleston Company, 2020-07-01) Salmon, MarciaDisaster Lit: Database for Disaster Medicine and Public Health is created and maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It is an Open Access database of research literature in disaster medicine and public health. This database provides access to biomedical research, journal research, and grey literature on disaster medicine and public health. It has a well-developed search engine and a good user interface. Disaster Lit is an important database for research in emergency management and disaster preparedness and public health.Item Open Access The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives(ACM/IEEE, 2020-08) Ruest, Nick; Lin, Jimmy; Milligan, Ian; Fritz, SamanthaThe Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building -- all proceeding concurrently in mutually --reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate "derivative products", using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from over two hundred users, totaling around 300 terabytes of web archives.Item Open Access Introduction: Strange Circulations: Affect and the Library.(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) Sloniowski, Lisa; Adler, KateIntroduction to a special issue of Library Trends on the role of affect in library work.Item Open Access Content-Based Exploration of Archival Images Using Neural Networks(ACM/IEEE, 2020-08) Adewoye, Tobi; Han, Xiao; Ruest, Nick; Milligan, Ian; Fritz, Samantha; Lin, JimmyWe present DAIRE (Deep Archival Image Retrieval Engine), an image exploration tool based on latent representations derived from neural networks, which allows scholars to "query" using an image of interest to rapidly find related images within a web archive. This work represents one part of our broader effort to move away from text-centric analyses of web archives and scholarly tools that are direct reflections of methods for accessing the live web. This short piece describes the implementation of our system and a case study on a subset of the GeoCities web archive.