Browsing by Author "Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Crossing disciplinary, institutional and role boundaries in an interdisciplinary consortium
    (Routledge, 2018) Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; Gardner, Alexander C.; Amey, Marilyn J.; Farrell-Cole, Patricia L.; Michigan State University; Van Andel Institute; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    To illuminate barriers to collaboration, this study examines who participates in cross-boundary scholarly collaboration most often and which types of boundary crossing (disciplinary, institutional, role) are engaged in most often. The data of this study came from an interdisciplinary consortium with five partner institutions, including one Historically Black College and University (HBCU). The core disciplines involved in the consortium are life sciences, computer science and math and engineering. Through statistical analysis, we determined that members of the consortium engaged more in interdisciplinary research than inter-institutional research. Participation in all boundary crossing collaborations was greater at the HBCU and students and postdocs were less likely than academics to cross-institutional boundaries.
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    Modeling time-to-trigger in library demand-driven acquisitions via survival analysis
    (Elsevier, 2019-07) Jiang, Zhehan; Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; Walker, Kevin W.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Conventional statistical methods (e.g. logistics regression, decision tree, etc.) have been used to analyze library demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) data. However, these methods are not well-suited to predict when acquisitions will be triggered or how long c-books will remain unused. Survival analysis, a statistical method commonly used in clinical research and medical trials, was employed to predict the time-to-trigger for DDA purchases within the context of a large research university library. By predicting which e-books will be triggered (i.e., purchased), as well as the time to trigger occurrence, the method tested in this study provides libraries a deeper understanding of factors influencing their DDA purchasing patterns. This understanding will help libraries optimize their DDA profile management and DDA budgets. This research provides a demonstration of how data science techniques can be of value for the library environment.
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    Promoting Institutional Repositories via Visualizations: A Changepoint Study
    (2019-03-11) Jiang, Zhehan; Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    This article examines whether implementing visualizations on an institutional repository webpage increases traffic on the site. Two methods for creating visualizations to attract faculty and student interest were employed. The first is a map displaying usage of institutional repository content from around the world. This map uses Tableau software to display Google Analytics data. The second method is a text mining tool allowing users to generate word clouds from dissertation and thesis abstracts according to discipline and year of publication. The word cloud uses R programing language, the Shiny software package, and a text mining package called tm. Change in the number of institutional repository website sessions was analyzed through change-point analysis.
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    The Role of Affect in the Information Seeking of Productive Scholars
    Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Carol Kuhlthau's (2004) work shows that affect is a vital part of information seeking for high school students and undergraduates. This article explores the influence of affect on research university faculty. Like beginning information users, advanced information users are influenced by their confidence, ambition, and interest in their work. This study employed phenomenological interviews to explore how scholars' willingness to tackle new areas of research, submit manuscripts to prestigious publications, approach colleagues for collaboration, and conduct literature searches with tenacity is impacted by their emotions and dispositions.
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    Serving a Fragmented Field: Information Seeking in Higher Education
    Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    This study examines the information seeking habits and needs of scholars of Higher Education. Because Higher Education is a field which draws on many disciplinary traditions rather than a pure discipline in itself, the information needs of these scholars require diverse information seeking strategies. Phenomenological interviews with productive scholars of higher education were conducted and analyzed for this study. Ellis’ (1989) Common Information Seeking Behaviors of Social Scientists are used as a framework to examine the behaviors of these applied social scientists in the modern information seeking environment.