M.L.I.S - Library and Information Science

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/20323

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SIERA-ex (Single-Island Endemic Representativeness Analysis for ex situ Collections): a Kauaʻi-based plant conservation model
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Houck, Kevin M.; Gazan, Rich; Library and Information Science
Over 260 single-island endemic (SIE) vascular plant taxa are recognized on Kauaʻi. Many face threats inherent to island species with narrow ranges and small populations where there is an increased risk of genetic diversity loss. In order to ensure species resilience, ex situ facilities collaborate to expand metacollection holdings, broadly sampling from multiple genetically diverse individuals. Priorities and relationships of metacollection partners have a major impact on the trajectory of biocultural conservation efforts in Hawaiʻi, as most of the germplasm for habitat restoration is held in these repositories. Curators pool resources, sharing plant material and analyzing datasets to inform strategy and pinpoint conservation gaps. This study introduces SIERA-ex, an empirical framework and accompanying open-source software application for place-based gap analysis that uses geographic and ecological coverage as a proxy for allelic coverage where optimal distance thresholds are poorly known. It can account for known sympatry and admixture, which is beneficial for confounded species delimitation and misidentification. Resolution is buffered across geographic reference area, ecoregion, watershed, moku, ahupuaʻa and wao geospatial layers to the level of 2 km for use over small ranges for Kauaʻi SIE taxa. Metrics are introduced to assign both taxon and subpopulation priority values that incorporate biocultural value, exceptionality, and threat level. A case study of nine Kauaʻi species [Loulu (Pritchardia –7 spp.), Kokiʻo ʻUla (Hibiscus clayi), and Hōlei (Ochrosia kauaiensis)] identified and recommended for conservation priority nearly a dozen underrepresented subpopulations with varying degrees of urgency. Results indicate that curators can best empower reciprocity and maximize resources in the perpetuation of the least conserved SIE species by limiting scope, and prioritizing taxa with high levels of threat assessment, exceptionality, and biocultural value.
Indigenous Voices Informing Academic Information Literacy: Critical Discourses, Relationality, and Indigeneity for the Good of the Whole
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Ford, Jason Taylor; Sutherland, Tonia; Library and Information Science
Instructional librarianship in public post-secondary institutions requires that librarians be responsive to a diversity of paradigms and student needs, including Indigenous contexts. Although constrained by institutional infrastructures, Indigenous research methodologies and epistemologies provide frameworks for Indigenous librarians and students to practice and support inquiry in ways that are responsive to their culturally-specific needs. Currently, research in the field of library and information science about how Indigenous research methodologies and epistemologies can support academic librarianship is limited, especially concerning how Indigenous voices can inform information literacy as a whole. For this study, 4 Indigenous LIS and academic professionals and an Apache-Comanche Elder were interviewed. These semi-structured interviews were then analyzed to better understand how Indigenous voices can inform information literacy in the public academy. Responses were coded using thematic analysis. Results demonstrate that Indigenous voices can inform information literacy in consideration of relevancy, value neutrality, positionality, through being critical of hegemonic infrastructures including technology, prioritizing native voices, braiding knowledge systems, and centering relationality. These results hold implications for strategic planning, curriculum development, and informing social paradigms that support Indigenous people in post-secondary education while addressing issues in modernity for the good of the whole.
Public Libraries and Homelessness: Connecting Vulnerable Patrons to Needed Resources
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019) Vega, Holiday; Irvin, Vanessa; Library and Information Science
This thesis describes ethnographic and exploratory research conducted to learn more about ways in which public librarians work with vulnerable patrons, particularly homeless patrons, for the purpose of connecting library patrons with resources and services in the community. The literature on the intersection between librarians and social services is presented and discussed. The methodologies employed included semi-structured interviews with librarians and social workers, field observations, reflective research journaling, and autoethnographic (self-study) methods. The data analysis explores my interest in gaining an understanding of the information needs of patrons experiencing homelessness and the information needs of librarians to best serve such a vulnerable population. A significant outcome of this work is a pilot program involving one student intern from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Social Work Department conducting their internship with the Hawaiʻi State Public Library System (HSPLS). The efficacy of this internship program is a question for further research. Limitations of this study are discussed, and suggestions for future research are presented.
Enacting Critical Feminist Librarianship: Examining LIS Book Clubs as a Means of Collaborative Inquiry and Professional Value Formation
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2018-12) Brown, Laila; Irvin, Vanessa; Library and Information Science
This master’s thesis presents an examination of the meaning and significance of dialogic exploration of texts in book club settings among Library and Information Science (LIS) master’s students at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM). I conducted participant observation among the feminist Books by Women Book Club and the progressive and diversity-ethic oriented UHM LIS Book Club and interviewed several members in each group. In this study, I sought to achieve an understanding of the creative, constitutive, and generative processes of these two book clubs. This study illuminates three essential elements of student participation in these value-driven and library and information science-intentioned book clubs. Firstly, these book clubs function as communities of practice that offer emerging LIS professionals networks of interpersonal and professional support. Secondly, these book clubs complement and supplement LIS classroom pedagogy, thereby contributing to member professional learning and knowledge. Thirdly, these book clubs contribute to the development of members’ personal and professional values and philosophy. Through focused exploration of textual content espousing the values upon which these book clubs are predicated—namely feminism and critical librarianship—these book clubs enable student participants to explore, negotiate, and enact such values in the book clubs, and to continue to do so in their future professional practice.
Ruth Horie: An Oral History Biography and Feminist Analysis
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2018-12) Shaindlin, Valerie Brett; Wertheimer, Andrew; Library and Information Science
This thesis is an oral history biography of Ruth Horie (1950- ), a Japanese American librarian in Honolulu, Hawai‘i whose work centered mainly on preserving and providing access to Native Hawaiian materials. Primarily a cataloger, Horie was one of the rare librarians who understood Hawaiian, a critically endangered language. She earned her undergraduate degree in Hawaiian Studies and two master’s degrees, in Library Studies and Linguistics, from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She worked for a decade as a reference librarian at the East-West Center and Bishop Museum, and then spent twenty-two years as a cataloger at Hamilton Library at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. The accompanying intersectional feminist analysis aims to examine the unique positionalities Horie embodied, and extract insights from her experience. Horie’s life and work turn out to be an excellent example for all librarians who wish to take a social justice stance in their careers.
Exploring Personal Connections In A Digital Reading Environment
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2017-05) Trimble, Amy; Library and Information Science
This thesis presents a phenomenological, qualitative study of students and faculty and their experience with reading in both the physical and digital realms of reading. Results are based on the analysis of personal, one-on-one interviews from the context of a university environment, specifically, community members of the University of Hawaii. The phenomenon of connection between readers and their reading sources is explored resulting in six themes, which represent manifestations of connection between the study participants and their reading. Important to note, touch and tangibility continue to play a significant part in the reading process, especially due to aspects of familiarity, accessibility and ownership.
Exploring Personal Connections in a Digital Reading Environment
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2017-05) Trimble, Amy; Library and Information Science
This thesis presents a phenomenological, qualitative study of students and faculty and their experience with reading in both the physical and digital realms of reading. Results are based on the analysis of personal, one-on-one interviews from the context of a university environment, specifically, community members of the University of Hawaii. The phenomenon of connection between readers and their reading sources is explored resulting in six themes, which represent manifestations of connection between the study participants and their reading. Important to note, touch and tangibility continue to play a significant part in the reading process, especially due to aspects of familiarity, accessibility and ownership.
Toward a Hawaiian Knowledge Organization System: A Survey on Access to Hawaiian Knowledge in Libraries and Archives
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2015-08) Matsuda, Shavonn
Libraries and archives in Hawai‘i and around the world contain significant collections of Hawaiian knowledge. This thesis examines the adequacy of Western Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) for Hawaiian knowledge and presents the results of an investigation into the creation of a Hawaiian system of organizing knowledge. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of Hawaiian scholars and a sample of information professionals in Hawai‘i to discover successes and challenges in accessing Hawaiian knowledge in libraries and archives and to explore opportunities for a KOS designed for Hawaiian collections and communities. Select KOSs created and implemented by other indigenous peoples were reviewed along with past and ongoing efforts in Hawai‘i to improve access within Library of Congress classification and subject headings. Key considerations for a Hawaiian KOS are presented: the immensity of Hawaiian knowledge, decisions concerning the language of a KOS, the need for Hawaiian library and information science professionals and the importance of collaboration in the creation and maintenance of a Hawaiian KOS.
Visualizing the article: an exploratory study of undergraduates' educational reactions to images in scholarly articles
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2013-05) Vornholt, Sarah Ilysa
The aim ofthis research is to explore undergraduate underclassmen interactions with scholarly communication and in what manner the inclusion of images impact the student's educational interests. Scholarly journals and articles are a common companion to many university courses. According to Bishop and Neumann (2000), students tend to retrieve digital scholarly journals more than their faculty. Libraries at university campuses subscribe to multiple types ofcostly educational databases to provide faculty, students, and researchers with access to scholarly materials. To provide an example, Harvard University recently performed a complete overhaul of their library subscriptions claiming these subscriptions were "fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive" with 3.75 million dollars of their budget paid in 2011 to database providers for access to scholarly articles (Harvard Faculty Advisory Council, memorandum, April 17, 20'l2). With so much of the universities funds pouring into scholarly communication resources, the student users should feel their academic needs are met. To begin an experimental questionnaire study was conducted at a research university on underclass undergraduate students from an introduction Information Resources and Library Science (IRLS) course. The participants were presented with brief articles on various subjects (history, business, sociology, and art) containing either an image related to the topic or text only. The participants were asked a variety of open-ended, free response questions related to their perceptions of the articles, their opinions on using them in further research, and recall information retained from the articles. The research questions center around the general impact of images in scholarly publications, but specifically (a) how will undergraduate underclassmen respond to articles with images as compared to those without images, (b) what kinds of factors influence this population's educational interests in scholarly journals, (c) how are educational interest and images linked, (d) if unprovoked, will students notice and comment on the addition of images in a scholarly article. Because the study's core is the students' unprovoked responses to images, the participants were not aware of the true nature of the study, and any references to images were spontaneous and not suggested. This thesis is organized as such: Chapter 2 surveys the literature and experimental investigations from various related fields to information sciences. Chapter 3 details the methods and procedures adopted to study participants' relationships with images in scholarly articles, with a focus on measuring educational interests (defined as motivations behind interest in academic materials). Chapters 4-5 review and discuss the results of the experimental survey. In Chapter 6, the conclusion, it will be shown there are many different causes for students to view an article as educationally interesting, but images do appear to be a factor for many students. This indicates that images in scholarly articles can be an important enhancement to scholarly communication for students with diverse learning styles.
Meeting the information needs of students in the Ilokano language and literature program: assessing Hamilton library's Philippine collection at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2013-12) Garces, Nicolita Marie Sagun
This case study uses a critical theory framework to explore the possibilities of how the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa's Hamilton Library can be a transformative space by aligning its services with the Ilokano Language and Literature Program and aid in the decolonization process and empowerment of students. The study identifies students' information needs and assesses the library's Ilokaniana collection. The study encompasses language and cultural preservation in Hawai‛i and the Philippines, the cultivation of ethnic pride and empowerment, and the growing development of Ilokano Studies as an academic discipline. Its multi-method approach includes a syllabus study, analysis of library-generated data and interviews of Ilokano Program students and professors and the Philippine specialist librarian. The research uncovers external and internal issues regarding the publication and availability of Ilokano materials and how students and professors supplement materials. Recommendations on how to improve the Ilokaniana collection, including collaborative and technological efforts, are addressed.
Discriminating tastes: editing Siam's patrimony and the birth of the 'National Library,' 1905-1925
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2012-12) Mika, Joshua Christopher
Concerning the authority which libraries possess in society, Fernando Baez states, "We have to remember that museums and libraries were closely linked to the nation's power structure."18 This research proffers that this statement be taken further in the case of Siam's Royal Library for the Capital: The Library was not only linked to Siam's power structure, it was an active agent within the power structure by defining and promoting what Siam was and what constituted the nation through publications composed by the Library's royal administrators and published as Royal Library for the Capital editions. These publications became standard educational treatises on Siamese history, society, politics, and literature. The Library also acted as a warehouse of "raw material" to facilitate knowledge production within a growing amount of print-scholarship concerning the new notion of Siamese cultural identity.19 During this era (and the present era in Thailand), Siam was replete with non-Thai peoples, such as Khmer, Lao, Burmese, Chinese, and many others who represented potential sources of minority unrest to the ruling ethnic Thai absolutist regime. This research details how the Library's royal administrators consolidated competing sources of information that were deemed to conflict with the emerging royalist-nationalist, Thai-dominated identity of the Kingdom. Far from promoting the egalitarian ideals which we find in Carnegie's philanthropic work in establishing American public libraries, as an obverse, Siam's Royal Library for the Capital was an active agent operating to promote the hegemony of the Chakri regime through its collection policies and the production of knowledge (as argued in the sixth and seventh chapters). Within the sixth and seventh chapters, this research examines the scope of history during first twenty years of the Library's existence, covering the latter years of King Chulalongkorn's reign (1905-1910) and the entirety King Vajiravudh's reign (1910-1925). It investigates the actions of the library's administrators and the publications which the library scholar-officials (including some Westerners who acted as chief librarians) published while amassing Siam's literary heritage within the centralized location of the Royal Library for the Capital. Also, this research examines the Royal Library's role within the dissemination of newly constructed knowledge within the Kingdom. The scholar-librarians who administered the institution enabled and promoted great epistemological changes within the kingdom, and they greatly enlarged the collections and functions of the Royal Library for the Capital. This period of the early years of the Library marks distinct changes in official discourses of knowledge within Siam. Simply put, Siam's Royal Library for the Capital was central to this process. It acted as a sort of foundry wherein knowledge was manipulated and forged. This knowledge promoted a new construct of the Siamese nation, and it promoted the primacy of the newly constructed, unilateral Thai history which buttressed the legitimacy of the ruling Chakri elite; their views, in this process, were the only ones articulated.20 The institution therefore acted as both locus and agent for discriminating knowledge production and its dissemination. The intent through this research is to expand upon the constructs of the Library's history which have been put forth by the Thai government as well as Thai and foreign scholarship over the past century. Its role within the absolutist Siamese regime has not yet been fully articulated in scholarship; its relationship to other processes of Siamese internal-colonization has yet to be realized.
The manuscripts of Timbuktu: armed conflict and the preservation of memory
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2014-05) Rasmussen, Valancy
This paper explores the events surrounding the rescue of manuscripts from Timbuktu in 2012/2013. It also explores the significance of these materials, which include works from a variety of disciplines including law, theology, history, science and mathematics and that date from the 12th to the 20th century. Timbuktu was once a prominent center of scholarship and its manuscripts represent a confluence of peoples and cultures, with works from throughout the Islamic world including those produced by the city's own scholars. They are part of the extraordinary, yet little known, history of Africa's documentary heritage.
Censorship glossarchive project phase one: developing metadata schema for cryptic circumlocutions in Chinese social media
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2014-05) DaSilva, Matthew Charles
Chinese censors constantly evaluate and sanitize the electronic speech of her citizens in the name of service to the greater good. Yet while the hidden Internet enforcement agencies with specialized tools seek to enforce vaguely defined and sometimes shifting standards of expression, China's people continue to offer their own resistance ranging from thoughtful critiques to wisecracks, through both overt speech and cryptic circumlocutions. Little is known about what China's users know about the censors or what the censors know about their fellow cyber citizens. This study seeks to provide a basis by which we may begin to expand our knowledge of Internet censorship as practiced in the Peoples's Republic of China and, by extension, the rest of the world through a cyberethnographic examination of the politically sensitive posts on China's version of Twitter, Weibo with an emphasis on the deliberately deceptive practice of cryptic circumlocutions. An analysis of the known cryptic circumlocutions shows that while they may be arranged into a taxonomy, the metadata schema does not require strict adherence to the taxonomy in order to adequately catalog each discrete instance of Internet communication. The metadata schema proposed here is for the cataloging of various types of discrete Internet communication ranging from entire sites, articles on news sites, to blog comments or social media postings with an eye towards indexing the nature of sensitive expression as well as the type of cryptic expression.
The Role of School Librarians in Establishing and Facilitating Professional Learning Communities
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2012) Ogawa, Michael-Brian Chosaku
Professional development for educators in K-12 schools has traditionally been one-shot workshops that were not built into their work (Darling-Hammond, 1996). Therefore, many educators have minimal sustained opportunities to augment their knowledge and skills during their careers. Schmoker (2004) recommends professional learning communities (PLC) as a method of professional development that gives teachers the opportunity collaborate in context to improve teaching and learning. Pennel (2008) believes that librarians can be critical members of PLCs, as they have much experience collaborating and nurturing relationships with teachers. Since librarians can be valuable members of PLCs, the purpose of this qualitative case-study was to determine how librarian-teacher PLCs develop, identify the role of the librarian in a PLC, and determine behaviors or practices that contribute to an effective PLC in a specific high school setting. The researcher identified the librarians as the initiators of the PLC. Their roles included leader, supporter, collaborator, and learner. Lastly, their specific behaviors and practices were based on a theoretical framework that was rooted in Hord (1997, 2003) and DuFour’s (2004) models. The researcher contributed to PLC research with this case study about the development and evolution of a librarian-teacher PLC in a Hawaii high school.
A discourse on shadows: archive ideals and ideal archives: How access and preservation shape the performance of archival discourse
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2007-05) Yim, Matthew
Archival science and library science are both aspects of information science. The genealogy of each discipline is different They have come from very different origins, but due to the stories of individual libraries and archives they often have shared beginnings. Especially in Hawaii, the history of local repositories is often found in the library. I don't mean to trace the histories of individual archives in Hawaii. Rather, I want to analyze how and why archivists negotiate the many forces that impact their repositories. I believe a part of this negotiation involves the interpretation, or in some cases reinterpretation, of perfect forms to create systems that help the archive to function properly. These perfect forms I mention are Platonic in essence. I arrived at this analysis by following a methodology unique to Hawaii. Hawaii is a unique place on many levels. One of these aspects is described by the 'olelo no'eau, or words of wisdom, nana i ke kumu-look to the source. There are many practices in archives that come down through tradition. It isn't important just to continue performing these tasks, we should identify why we perform them and why certain interpretations have been made by various regimes over time. Since, this thesis explores interpretations of different repositories in Hawaii, I proceeded with my exploration, using this 'olelo no'eau as a guide. My na'au interprets these words in many different ways, including a way to analyze and explain present practice by looking to their origins. This would indicate that all practices can be traced to an origin. It is these original practices that I am interpreting as Platonic perfect forms.

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