Join us for the inaugural INSPIRE@SILS Research Symposium on Wednesday, October 1, from 3:30–5:00 p.m. in Manning 01. The symposium will feature 10-minute research talks from SILS faculty, highlighting a range of exciting topics. This event is open to all. Come be inspired by the innovative work happening at SILS!
Speaker: Jaime ArguelloTitle: Integrating Search and GenAI to Support Users with Learning-oriented Search TasksAbstract: Generative AI (GenAI) technologies such as ChatGPT are changing the ways people interact with information. To illustrate, popular search engines (e.g., Google) have started integrating responses from GenAI tools with the traditional search results. In this talk, I will briefly discuss results from a study that investigated how people learn with systems that integrate GenAI output with traditional search results.
Speaker: Rob CapraTitle: Understanding Trust, Verification, and System Choice in Search and Chat InteractionsAbstract: This paper presents a user study where participants used an interface combining Web Search and a Generative AI-Chat feature to solve health-related information tasks. We study how people behaved with the interface, why they behaved in certain ways, and what the outcomes of these behaviors were. A think-aloud protocol captured their thought processes during searches. Our findings suggest that GenAI is neither a search panacea nor a major regression compared to standard Web Search interfaces. Qualitative and quantitative analyses identified 78 search tactics across five categories and provided insight into how and why different interface features were used. We find evidence that pre-task confidence and trust both influenced which interface feature was used. Particularly when using the chat feature, trust was often misplaced in favor of ease-of-use and seemingly perfect answers, leading to increased confidence post-search despite having incorrect results.
Speaker: Alexandra ChassanoffTitle: Building Capacity and Resilience for Born-Digital Stewardship Communities of PracticeAbstract: In 2022, the higher ed research and consulting group Ithaka S&R made the stark declaration that “there appear to be thousands of heritage organizations undertaking little to no digital preservation activity” (Rieger et al., 2022). In this talk, I will introduce and discuss the DigiStew Project, an IMLS-funded early career research grant to investigate field-wide challenges and potential opportunities for sustaining born-digital stewardship in U.S. libraries and archives. Though the grant was terminated in its first year, I will introduce the research and share preliminary findings from two sites of data collection:a) an environmental scan of educational, training, and professionalization pathways for born-digital stewards; andb) a practitioner survey assessing current born-digital stewardship practices at North American collecting institutions.
Speaker: Cal LeeTitle: Dualities of Digital CurationAbstract: Digital collections rest on binary foundations. All digital objects and associated metadata are composed entirely of binary values (bits). Technologies to manage and use digital objects can only perform actions that are reducible to binary values. But archival work involves continuous grappling with dualities. According to Lave & Wenger, a duality is “a single conceptual unit that is formed by two inseparable and mutually constitutive elements whose inherent tensions and complementarity give the concept richness and dynamism.” Resources are limited, and digital curation professionals cannot pursue all objectives equally. However, rather than simply picking one side of a duality, digital curation professionals must often pursue them simultaneously to varying degrees while ensuring a certain threshold level of commitment to each, finding what Paul Evans and Yves Doz call the “zone of complementarity.” The proper balance depends on a variety of contextual factors that evolve over time. The dualities of digital curation provide a powerful way to strategize complex, often messy human activities that must be enacted through entirely binary representations.
Speaker: Brian SturmTitle: 1001 Arabian Nights: It’s a Killer StoryAbstract: The frame story of 1001 Arabian Nights is about a king who marries a woman each day and kills her the next morning for three years, until the vizier’s daughter offers to wed him and tells him an unfinished story each night, keeping the story—and herself—alive. How do modern Egyptian women feel about this femicidal story?
Speaker: Joseph WinberryTitle: Older Adult Perspectives on Public Librarian Education in an Aging Society: Early FindingsAbstract: Despite the reality of an aging society, public library engagement of older adults is a patchwork system across the US, which does not always pursue the perspectives of older adults in what should be offered. Since formal library education is a major input into library practice, this presentation presents early findings of a multi-year study into how public librarian education can be shaped for better cooperation and systematic engagement with older adults. Grounded in the Integrative Critical Gerontology Information Framework, this exploratory study creates a schema of the skills, services, and values that 11 interviewed older adults in one Southeastern US community want from public librarians. The resulting schema—a product of ongoing constructivist grounded theory analysis—will be further empirically and theoretically developed with interviews of older adults in five additional communities across the United States, and perhaps through a national survey if replacement funding for this once IMLS-funded project materializes.
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Additional Information can be found at: https://heellife.unc.edu/event/11721363