Make it Matter @ #NCLA15

I've been very involved in the North Carolina Library Association 61st Biennial Conference, and I've been able to collaborate with my colleagues and students at UNC's School of Media & Journalism as part of that involvement.

I served as chair of the publicity committee, which involved all aspects of promotion for the conference. To start with, I asked two MEJO design students to create the conference logo, which was used on all of our material and on our conference bags:

Thanks, Katie King & Camille Romac-Gullo!

Katie King also designed our program and pre-conference brochure, and both look terrific.

I've also worked to promote the conference on social media and other methods -- and filled in content for the pre-conference brochure. Fortunately, my awesome colleague April Everett from the Rowan County Public Library filled in all the content for the final program. Follow the conference tweets at #ncla15.

At the conference, I collaborated with two colleagues from the Durham County Library to present a three-hour pre-conference session discussing the use of social media in libraries.  We primarily talked about using Twitter and Facebook (DurhamCountyLib is awesome on Twitter), and we covered issues such as content, social media clients, and control & coordination of the accounts. We also talked about social media policies, visibility, and analytics -- and we ended with a brief discussion of the other social media tools we use.

We created a guide with notes and links from the session: Social Media Hacks: Tips & Conversation for Enhancing Social Media Use in Libraries - and we had a great time talking to academic and public library colleagues across the state about using social media.

Finally, I had a poster session presenting results of my research with MEJO professor Jim Hefner: Does Forcing Students to Ask for Help Work? Assessing the Effect of REQUIRING Term Paper Consults The short answer is: YES, forcing students to ask for library help does work. See my earlier post Requiring Students to Meet with a Librarian for more details of that research.

Stephanie discusses the results with Brigitte Blanton, director of Greensboro Public Library.

It's been a great conference, and I'm thrilled to incorporate so much of my daily work into the association and the conference.

Text Visualization / Content Analysis with @VoyantTools

Many of my research colleagues do content analysis on newspapers, and there's a new tool which may provide useful to them. Let's explore Voyant Tools, a "web-based reading and analysis environment" which provides lots of high-level insight into text.

 I did a quick LexisNexis search on articles written in college newspapers about sexual assault and pasted a few of them into Voyant-Tools.org. You can see the word cloud above as well as the text on the right.

If you click on any of the words in the cloud or in the text itself you'll also see where in the document the term appears, and you can see a list of Keywords in Context.

Click on the plus-sign next to the phrase, and you see more of the context.

I was able to export a URL for this Keywords in Context chart, so you can see it in all its glory.

There are myriad other export features in the tool, including a list of words by count, comma- and tab-separated options, and more.

It seems like a good option for exploring text on a very broad level. And it's a quick way to provide graphics for publications or presentations on your text analysis.

There is a stop-word list so you can exclude common words; you can edit this list as well (I excluded lots of common LexisNexis terminology like "u-wire" and "document;" should I have excluded "said" as well?). It is possible to upload multiple documents, so that you can compare coverage of a topic in one newspaper against coverage in another paper.

Some of the limitations for newspaper research include:

• It's not possible to analyze pdfs, for relatively obvious reasons; but this eliminates the ability to search many historic newspapers which are available online only as pdfs.
• If you export multiple stories from LexisNexis or America's News, they are exported as one document, which makes it impossible to compare documents against each other in Voyant-Tools. To do this kind of analysis, you'd need to export the documents one at a time, which would quickly get tiresome.

Here's a screen shot of an analysis I did of eight individually downloaded articles from LexisNexis -- that process was a bit cumbersome, but the data is interesting:

The chart at right shows the number of times the word "women" appears in each of the eight artcles. You can see a quick analysis of all the words in the eight articles under the Word cloud (or here).

This has great potential in the newspaper content analysis toolbox.

Infographic: Research on Students' Research Habits

The good folks at the University of Washington's Project Information Literacy created a great infographic of their findings about 11,000 college students' research habits:

For the text-based learners among you:

• 70% use Wikipedia 
• 92% use search engines

Other resources students use for course research:

• 88% library databases
• 83% instructors
• 30% librarians (emphasis mine)

What's most difficult about doing research?

• 84% getting started

and check out the 12 adjectives students use to describe how they feel about research assignments!

For more, check out the Project Info. Literacy website, where you can read an article from College & Research Libraries about Alison Head's research, watch a video, and more!