Journal of the American Planning Association, 2024
Problem, research strategy, and findings: We explored the contributions of local public libraries... more Problem, research strategy, and findings: We explored the contributions of local public libraries to community resilience in the face of economic hardships, extreme weather events, and the COVID-19 pandemic using a survey of 415 library directors distributed through state library listservs in 13 Midwestern states, community-level census and presidential elections data, and library-specific data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services annual Public Libraries Survey. We found that public libraries provide invaluable resilience-boosting community services. They help patrons find jobs and access social services, often with one-on-one support. They act as daytime shelters during extreme heat and cold events, which is particularly important for unhoused and underhoused individuals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they innovated to provide delocalized services and information access, such as installing WiFi hotspots. The provision of these essential resilience-boosting services is largely independent from library resources and community contexts and appear grounded in librarians' ethos. Our research was limited to Midwestern public libraries and thus results are not generalizable to other regions, private, academic, and specialized libraries. We did not explore the possible relationships between local political majorities that could affect local government funding and priorities and local libraries' funding sources, levels, and services. Takeaways for practice: Beyond collections and information access, public libraries provide many services relevant to community and economic development and to disaster response. In addition, local public libraries act as resilience hubs in the face of economic stressors and extreme weather events, as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are ready, flexible, adaptable, and willing to support patrons in times of need. Planners seeking to enhance community resilience can work with their local public libraries to build disaster preparedness and response capacity.
PurposeThis study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret po... more PurposeThis study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret police files, before and after the fall of Communism in Romania. These DIPs were often weaponized against citizens perceived to be anti-government.Design/methodology/approachBased on Buckland's (2017) concept of a document as an object with physical, mental and social parts, the study used thematic analysis to examine volumes of DIPs from 1945 to 1989 Communist Romania as well as several recorded reactions to the DIPs by the victims who were targeted by the Communist secret police.FindingsFour themes were revealed by the study's findings and discussed within the manuscript: DIPs as unreliable epistemic tools, DIPs as tools to construct the identity of the “People's Enemy,” DIPs as weapons to fight the “People's Enemy” and DIPs as tools that could be used in counterattacks during post-Communism, including in political-economic blackmailing.Research limitations/implicationsTh...
Journal of Education for Library and Information Science
This article argues that the MLIS curriculum should offer information ethics courses that enable ... more This article argues that the MLIS curriculum should offer information ethics courses that enable future information professionals to develop their imaginative powers through close study and discussion of fiction. LIS students reading ethical theory and fiction bring the two into conversation and as a result reach a better understanding of both. Crucially, this process presupposes the exercise of empathetic imagination, a mental capacity that helps us inhabit other perspectives and modes of being in the world. The paper supports this discussion with evidence from an instructional intervention implemented during an information ethics course within an LIS program at a large public research university.
Recent work across disciplines has examined the current post-truth climate and various types of i... more Recent work across disciplines has examined the current post-truth climate and various types of information disorders which have permeated the internet. Scholars have made significant progress in defining and theorizing information literacy and its various aspects, as well as in designing programs to help students acquire the relevant skills for evaluating information. Nevertheless, further exploration is needed, for example to understand the roles of criteria in information evaluation. The present study draws on scholarship in discourse and rhetoric studies to suggest how discursive strategies, a key concept in these convergent areas, can inform approaches to information evaluation. To illustrate this improved approach, this study explores the case of a recent piece of fake news that involves both text and image and has circulated widely as a digital flyer on social media.
Purpose Learning how to identify and avoid inaccurate information, especially disinformation, is ... more Purpose Learning how to identify and avoid inaccurate information, especially disinformation, is essential for any informational consumer. Many information literacy tools specify criteria that can help users evaluate information more efficiently and effectively. However, the authors of these tools do not always agree on which criteria should be emphasized, what they mean or why they should be included in the tool. This study aims to clarify two such criteria (source credibility and soundness of content), which evolutionary cognitive psychology research emphasize. This paper uses them as a basis for building a question-based evaluation tool and draws implications for information literacy programs. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on cross-disciplinary scholarship (in library and information science, evolutionary cognitive psychology and rhetoric studies) to explore 15 approaches to information evaluation which conceptualizes source credibility and content soundness, two m...
This paper is about a certain type of contested documents (the secret police files known as “info... more This paper is about a certain type of contested documents (the secret police files known as “informative notes”). It employs a neo-documentalist framework and thematic analysis to examine informative notes on four major intellectuals in communist Romania. The paper focuses on three emerging themes: the power effects that the materiality of informative notes has had, after 1989, on Romanian society; the reasons informers interpreted the writing conventions of this textual genre in radically different ways; and the epistemic aspects of this type of document. I emphasize that, despite their nature as historic documents, secret police files have uncanny relevance for understanding the present-day societies of mass surveillance. Cet article porte sur un certain type de documents contestés (les fichiers de la police secrète appelés «notes informatives»). Il utilise un cadre néo-documentaliste et une analyse thématique pour examiner des notes informatives sur quatre intellectuels majeurs d...
The indifference, anxiety, and stress felt by students and the invisibility of marks of quality a... more The indifference, anxiety, and stress felt by students and the invisibility of marks of quality and value in online information environments pose instructional challenges that can get in the way of students’ developing critical thinking skills. We suggest that current and future librarians consider the importance of three interrelated elements when designing information literacy environments: (i) students’ active engagement with one another as a way of forming a community of like-minded people, (ii) the materiality constitutive of the educational place, and (iii) the practices involving students’ embodied presence in the classroom. We describe an example of designing an information literacy instructional session based on these three elements
This paper relies on an innovative theoretical framework, namely the Sociology of Knowledge Appro... more This paper relies on an innovative theoretical framework, namely the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, to explore the narrative structures at work in an ethnographic exhibition designed by indigenous curators at the National Museum of the American Indian. Résumé: The present paper explores one aspect of the ongoing doctoral project of the author, which focuses on discursive constructions of indigenous knowledge among indigenous curators working in major museums in Canada and the United States. The paper is built on two main ideas. First, it suggests that narratives play a special role in the work of these information professionals. On one hand, narratives represent an object of professional interest for indigenous curators, because storytelling constitutes the medium through which knowledge has traditionally been conveyed within indigenous communities (for a brief mention of the narrative dimension of indigenous knowledge, see Castellano, 2000, 31). On the other hand, na...
OF THE DISSERTATION ................................................................................ more OF THE DISSERTATION ........................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ iv DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................. v LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................... x LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ x
Indigenous curatorship has become an increasingly visible presence in the public sphere as part o... more Indigenous curatorship has become an increasingly visible presence in the public sphere as part of the long process of North American Native people’s efforts to regain control over the representations and uses of their cultures in Western societies. Even though scholars consider this profession fundamental to Native American struggles for sovereignty, many do not have a clear understanding of what it involves. In the context of scarce scholarship on Indigenous curatorship, this qualitative study relies on interview and textual data to articulate Indigenous curators’ understandings of their work of preserving and promoting Indigenous knowledge. It emphasizes the uniqueness of Indigenous curatorship by mapping out this profession’s specific roles and responsibilities within the broader arena of museum curatorship. The study identifies two main directions Indigenous curators take in their work, namely activism and engagement of the public. Activism consists in Indigenous curators’ effo...
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI, 2013
This paper discusses the relevance of hermeneutical interpretivism for Library and Information Sc... more This paper discusses the relevance of hermeneutical interpretivism for Library and Information Science research. It surveys the literature that relies on a hermeneutical framework, points to divisions and gaps in this literature, and outlines a systematic and integrative hermeneutical framework that addresses these problems and opens up new venues for future Library and Information Science research.Cet article discute de la pertinence de l’interprétativisme herméneutique pour la recherche en bibliothéconomie et en sciences de l'information. Il passe en revue la littérature qui s'appuie sur un cadre herméneutique, indique des divisions et des lacunes dans cette littérature et définit un cadre herméneutique systématique et intégratif apte à traiter ces problèmes et à ouvrir de nouvelles possibilités pour la recherche future en bibliothéconomie et en sciences de l'information.
Having been invoked as a disturbing factor in recent elections across the globe, fake news has be... more Having been invoked as a disturbing factor in recent elections across the globe, fake news has become a frequent object of inquiry for scholars and practitioners in various fields of study and practice. My article draws intellectual resources from Library and Information Science, Communication Studies, Argumentation Theory, and Discourse Research to examine propagandistic dimensions of fake news and to suggest possible ways in which scientific research can inform practices of epistemic self-defense. Specifically, the article focuses on a cluster of fake news of potentially propagandistic import, employs a framework developed within Argumentation Theory to explore ten ways in which fake news may be used as propaganda, and suggests how Critical Discourse Research, an emerging cluster of theoretical and methodological approaches to discourses, may provide people with useful tools for identifying and debunking fake news stories. My study has potential implications for further research a...
This poster presents the main aspects of my dissertation proposal, which focuses on discourses ar... more This poster presents the main aspects of my dissertation proposal, which focuses on discourses around aboriginal cultural heritage produced by aboriginal museum and gallery professionals in North America. This is a particularly important and timely project, given the scarcity in Library and Information Science of studies exploring the notion of cultural heritage, especially aboriginal cultural heritage. Moreover, since aboriginal curators
Journal of Religious & Theological Information, 2015
In this article, we explore three understandings of religious reading to illustrate the diversity... more In this article, we explore three understandings of religious reading to illustrate the diversity of information use in religious contexts. “Informative” refers to information acquisition; “formative” concerns the learning of practical behaviors; while “transformative” points to spiritual growth, rich identity formation, and deep self-understanding. We provide instantiations of these notions among recent converts to various branches of Christianity and Islam and explore similarities between these traditions through analysis of published conversion narratives in Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christianity and of select data gathered through interviews with Muslim converts in the Toronto area. Our discussion builds upon Buckland's notion of theological information and engages with Kari's understanding of informational uses of spiritual information. We assume a hermeneutic concept of reading, according to which religious texts propose models of humanity, which readers are invited to assess and possibly assimilate. Our research contributes to existing Information and Communication Studies scholarship on the normative or prescriptive aspects of religious reading practices, congregational belief formation, and knowledge production and control in the wake of new media.
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2010
We survey core and peripheral journals in library and information studies (LIS) to identify conce... more We survey core and peripheral journals in library and information studies (LIS) to identify conceptualizations and dimensions of heritage research. We identify the knowledge structure of the heritage literature in information science with its adjoining fields including museum studies, archival, and computer science.
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2024
Problem, research strategy, and findings: We explored the contributions of local public libraries... more Problem, research strategy, and findings: We explored the contributions of local public libraries to community resilience in the face of economic hardships, extreme weather events, and the COVID-19 pandemic using a survey of 415 library directors distributed through state library listservs in 13 Midwestern states, community-level census and presidential elections data, and library-specific data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services annual Public Libraries Survey. We found that public libraries provide invaluable resilience-boosting community services. They help patrons find jobs and access social services, often with one-on-one support. They act as daytime shelters during extreme heat and cold events, which is particularly important for unhoused and underhoused individuals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they innovated to provide delocalized services and information access, such as installing WiFi hotspots. The provision of these essential resilience-boosting services is largely independent from library resources and community contexts and appear grounded in librarians' ethos. Our research was limited to Midwestern public libraries and thus results are not generalizable to other regions, private, academic, and specialized libraries. We did not explore the possible relationships between local political majorities that could affect local government funding and priorities and local libraries' funding sources, levels, and services. Takeaways for practice: Beyond collections and information access, public libraries provide many services relevant to community and economic development and to disaster response. In addition, local public libraries act as resilience hubs in the face of economic stressors and extreme weather events, as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are ready, flexible, adaptable, and willing to support patrons in times of need. Planners seeking to enhance community resilience can work with their local public libraries to build disaster preparedness and response capacity.
PurposeThis study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret po... more PurposeThis study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret police files, before and after the fall of Communism in Romania. These DIPs were often weaponized against citizens perceived to be anti-government.Design/methodology/approachBased on Buckland's (2017) concept of a document as an object with physical, mental and social parts, the study used thematic analysis to examine volumes of DIPs from 1945 to 1989 Communist Romania as well as several recorded reactions to the DIPs by the victims who were targeted by the Communist secret police.FindingsFour themes were revealed by the study's findings and discussed within the manuscript: DIPs as unreliable epistemic tools, DIPs as tools to construct the identity of the “People's Enemy,” DIPs as weapons to fight the “People's Enemy” and DIPs as tools that could be used in counterattacks during post-Communism, including in political-economic blackmailing.Research limitations/implicationsTh...
Journal of Education for Library and Information Science
This article argues that the MLIS curriculum should offer information ethics courses that enable ... more This article argues that the MLIS curriculum should offer information ethics courses that enable future information professionals to develop their imaginative powers through close study and discussion of fiction. LIS students reading ethical theory and fiction bring the two into conversation and as a result reach a better understanding of both. Crucially, this process presupposes the exercise of empathetic imagination, a mental capacity that helps us inhabit other perspectives and modes of being in the world. The paper supports this discussion with evidence from an instructional intervention implemented during an information ethics course within an LIS program at a large public research university.
Recent work across disciplines has examined the current post-truth climate and various types of i... more Recent work across disciplines has examined the current post-truth climate and various types of information disorders which have permeated the internet. Scholars have made significant progress in defining and theorizing information literacy and its various aspects, as well as in designing programs to help students acquire the relevant skills for evaluating information. Nevertheless, further exploration is needed, for example to understand the roles of criteria in information evaluation. The present study draws on scholarship in discourse and rhetoric studies to suggest how discursive strategies, a key concept in these convergent areas, can inform approaches to information evaluation. To illustrate this improved approach, this study explores the case of a recent piece of fake news that involves both text and image and has circulated widely as a digital flyer on social media.
Purpose Learning how to identify and avoid inaccurate information, especially disinformation, is ... more Purpose Learning how to identify and avoid inaccurate information, especially disinformation, is essential for any informational consumer. Many information literacy tools specify criteria that can help users evaluate information more efficiently and effectively. However, the authors of these tools do not always agree on which criteria should be emphasized, what they mean or why they should be included in the tool. This study aims to clarify two such criteria (source credibility and soundness of content), which evolutionary cognitive psychology research emphasize. This paper uses them as a basis for building a question-based evaluation tool and draws implications for information literacy programs. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on cross-disciplinary scholarship (in library and information science, evolutionary cognitive psychology and rhetoric studies) to explore 15 approaches to information evaluation which conceptualizes source credibility and content soundness, two m...
This paper is about a certain type of contested documents (the secret police files known as “info... more This paper is about a certain type of contested documents (the secret police files known as “informative notes”). It employs a neo-documentalist framework and thematic analysis to examine informative notes on four major intellectuals in communist Romania. The paper focuses on three emerging themes: the power effects that the materiality of informative notes has had, after 1989, on Romanian society; the reasons informers interpreted the writing conventions of this textual genre in radically different ways; and the epistemic aspects of this type of document. I emphasize that, despite their nature as historic documents, secret police files have uncanny relevance for understanding the present-day societies of mass surveillance. Cet article porte sur un certain type de documents contestés (les fichiers de la police secrète appelés «notes informatives»). Il utilise un cadre néo-documentaliste et une analyse thématique pour examiner des notes informatives sur quatre intellectuels majeurs d...
The indifference, anxiety, and stress felt by students and the invisibility of marks of quality a... more The indifference, anxiety, and stress felt by students and the invisibility of marks of quality and value in online information environments pose instructional challenges that can get in the way of students’ developing critical thinking skills. We suggest that current and future librarians consider the importance of three interrelated elements when designing information literacy environments: (i) students’ active engagement with one another as a way of forming a community of like-minded people, (ii) the materiality constitutive of the educational place, and (iii) the practices involving students’ embodied presence in the classroom. We describe an example of designing an information literacy instructional session based on these three elements
This paper relies on an innovative theoretical framework, namely the Sociology of Knowledge Appro... more This paper relies on an innovative theoretical framework, namely the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, to explore the narrative structures at work in an ethnographic exhibition designed by indigenous curators at the National Museum of the American Indian. Résumé: The present paper explores one aspect of the ongoing doctoral project of the author, which focuses on discursive constructions of indigenous knowledge among indigenous curators working in major museums in Canada and the United States. The paper is built on two main ideas. First, it suggests that narratives play a special role in the work of these information professionals. On one hand, narratives represent an object of professional interest for indigenous curators, because storytelling constitutes the medium through which knowledge has traditionally been conveyed within indigenous communities (for a brief mention of the narrative dimension of indigenous knowledge, see Castellano, 2000, 31). On the other hand, na...
OF THE DISSERTATION ................................................................................ more OF THE DISSERTATION ........................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ iv DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................. v LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................... x LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ x
Indigenous curatorship has become an increasingly visible presence in the public sphere as part o... more Indigenous curatorship has become an increasingly visible presence in the public sphere as part of the long process of North American Native people’s efforts to regain control over the representations and uses of their cultures in Western societies. Even though scholars consider this profession fundamental to Native American struggles for sovereignty, many do not have a clear understanding of what it involves. In the context of scarce scholarship on Indigenous curatorship, this qualitative study relies on interview and textual data to articulate Indigenous curators’ understandings of their work of preserving and promoting Indigenous knowledge. It emphasizes the uniqueness of Indigenous curatorship by mapping out this profession’s specific roles and responsibilities within the broader arena of museum curatorship. The study identifies two main directions Indigenous curators take in their work, namely activism and engagement of the public. Activism consists in Indigenous curators’ effo...
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI, 2013
This paper discusses the relevance of hermeneutical interpretivism for Library and Information Sc... more This paper discusses the relevance of hermeneutical interpretivism for Library and Information Science research. It surveys the literature that relies on a hermeneutical framework, points to divisions and gaps in this literature, and outlines a systematic and integrative hermeneutical framework that addresses these problems and opens up new venues for future Library and Information Science research.Cet article discute de la pertinence de l’interprétativisme herméneutique pour la recherche en bibliothéconomie et en sciences de l'information. Il passe en revue la littérature qui s'appuie sur un cadre herméneutique, indique des divisions et des lacunes dans cette littérature et définit un cadre herméneutique systématique et intégratif apte à traiter ces problèmes et à ouvrir de nouvelles possibilités pour la recherche future en bibliothéconomie et en sciences de l'information.
Having been invoked as a disturbing factor in recent elections across the globe, fake news has be... more Having been invoked as a disturbing factor in recent elections across the globe, fake news has become a frequent object of inquiry for scholars and practitioners in various fields of study and practice. My article draws intellectual resources from Library and Information Science, Communication Studies, Argumentation Theory, and Discourse Research to examine propagandistic dimensions of fake news and to suggest possible ways in which scientific research can inform practices of epistemic self-defense. Specifically, the article focuses on a cluster of fake news of potentially propagandistic import, employs a framework developed within Argumentation Theory to explore ten ways in which fake news may be used as propaganda, and suggests how Critical Discourse Research, an emerging cluster of theoretical and methodological approaches to discourses, may provide people with useful tools for identifying and debunking fake news stories. My study has potential implications for further research a...
This poster presents the main aspects of my dissertation proposal, which focuses on discourses ar... more This poster presents the main aspects of my dissertation proposal, which focuses on discourses around aboriginal cultural heritage produced by aboriginal museum and gallery professionals in North America. This is a particularly important and timely project, given the scarcity in Library and Information Science of studies exploring the notion of cultural heritage, especially aboriginal cultural heritage. Moreover, since aboriginal curators
Journal of Religious & Theological Information, 2015
In this article, we explore three understandings of religious reading to illustrate the diversity... more In this article, we explore three understandings of religious reading to illustrate the diversity of information use in religious contexts. “Informative” refers to information acquisition; “formative” concerns the learning of practical behaviors; while “transformative” points to spiritual growth, rich identity formation, and deep self-understanding. We provide instantiations of these notions among recent converts to various branches of Christianity and Islam and explore similarities between these traditions through analysis of published conversion narratives in Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christianity and of select data gathered through interviews with Muslim converts in the Toronto area. Our discussion builds upon Buckland's notion of theological information and engages with Kari's understanding of informational uses of spiritual information. We assume a hermeneutic concept of reading, according to which religious texts propose models of humanity, which readers are invited to assess and possibly assimilate. Our research contributes to existing Information and Communication Studies scholarship on the normative or prescriptive aspects of religious reading practices, congregational belief formation, and knowledge production and control in the wake of new media.
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2010
We survey core and peripheral journals in library and information studies (LIS) to identify conce... more We survey core and peripheral journals in library and information studies (LIS) to identify conceptualizations and dimensions of heritage research. We identify the knowledge structure of the heritage literature in information science with its adjoining fields including museum studies, archival, and computer science.
At the conference Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) 9, held in June 2016 in ... more At the conference Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) 9, held in June 2016 in Uppsala, Sweden, we facilitated a panel session entitled "Phenomenology in library and information science: studying information experiences." In this article, we discuss the unfolding of that panel. We begin by situating discussions of phenomenology in the historical thrust of information research. We then describe the content and summarize the key discussion points of the panel. Of note is the role phenomenological inquiry can play in one issue of critical practical concern in librarianship—namely, the reference interview. Along the way, references are provided so that interested readers can follow the red thread of phenomenological thought in LIS and engage with it in their own endeavors.
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Papers by Iulian Vamanu