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Exam period can be a stressful time for students, and having examples of past papers to help prepare for the tests can be extremely helpful. It is possible that past exams are already shared on your campus--by professors in their specific courses, via student unions or groups, or between individual students. In this article, we will go over the workflows and infrastructure to support the systematic collection, provision of access to, and repository management of past exam papers. We will discuss platform-agnostic considerations of opt-in versus opt-out submission, access restriction, discovery, retention schedules, and more. Finally, we will share the University of Toronto setup, including a dedicated instance of DSpace, batch metadata creation and ingest scripts, and our submission and retention workflows that take into account the varying needs of stakeholders across our three campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placing Papers: The American Literary Archive Market (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) discussed the post–World War II trade in authors’ papers. One finding of Placing Papers was how well Black writers did on the market as measured by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) rank of their papers’ housing institutions and the frequency with which Black authors were paid for their materials. However, this boon for Black writers only occurred once colleges and universities sought to improve the diversity of their holdings. In this update to Placing Papers, the author expands her data set to include more authors of color to verify her original findings for Black writers and determine the comparative success of Latino authors. The study determined that while Black writers indeed do just as well or better than white authors on the archive market, Latino writers remain understudied and undercollected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional discovery environments now serve as central resource databases for researchers in the academic environment. Over the last several decades, there have been numerous discovery layer research inquiries centering primarily on user satisfaction measures of discovery system effectiveness. This study focuses on the creation of a largely automated method for evaluating discovery layer quality, utilizing the bibliographic sources from student research projects. Building on past research, the current study replaces a semiautomated Excel Fuzzy Lookup Add-In process with a fully scripted R-based approach, which employs the stringdist R package and applies the Jaro-Winkler distance metric as the matching evaluator. The researchers consider the error rate incurred by relying solely on an automated matching metric. They also use Open Refine for normalization processes and package the tools together on an OSF site for other institutions to use. Since the R-based approach does not require special processing or time and can be reproduced with minimal effort, it will allow future studies and users of our method to capture larger sample sizes, boosting validity. While the assessment process has been streamlined and shows promise, there remain issues in establishing solid connections between research paper bibliographies and discovery layer use. Subsequent research will focus on creating alternatives to paper titles as search proxies that better resemble genuine information-seeking behavior and comparing undergraduate and graduate student interactions within discovery environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to positively impact library and archives collections and services--enhancing reference, instruction, metadata creation, recommendations, and more. However, AI also has ethical implications. This paper presents an extensive literature and review analysis that examines AI projects implemented in library and archives settings, asking the following research questions: RQ1: How is artificial intelligence being used in libraries and archives practice? RQ2: What ethical concerns are being identified and addressed during AI implementation in libraries and archives? The results of this literature review show that AI implementation is growing in libraries and archives and that practitioners are using AI for increasingly varied purposes. We found that AI implementation was most common in large, academic libraries. Materials used in AI projects usually involved digitized and born digital text and images, though materials also ranged to include web archives, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and maps. AI was most often used for metadata extraction and reference and research services. Just over half of the papers included in the literature review mentioned ethics or values related issues in their discussions of AI implementation in libraries and archives, and only one-third of all resources discussed ethical issues beyond technical issues of accuracy and human-in-the-loop. Case studies relating to AI in libraries and archives are on the rise, and we expect subsequent discussions of relevant ethics and values to follow suit, particularly growing in the areas of cost considerations, transparency, reliability, policy and guidelines, bias, social justice, user communities, privacy, consent, accessibility, and access. As AI comes into more common usage, it will benefit the library and archives professions to not only consider ethics when implementing local projects, but to publicly discuss these ethical considerations in shared documentation and publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

students’ research topics: a rubric to examine proposed topics in terms of scope, development, and the “researchability” of the topic, as well as textual analysis, using ATLAS.ti, to provide an overview of the types of subjects students select for a persuasive research essay. Results indicated that students struggle with defining an appropriate and feasible focus for their topics and that they often select topics related to education, health, and the environment. These findings were used to implement a new information literacy instruction model that better supports student topic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an anthology of papers from "The Power of New Voices" conference session, which features the work of early-career individuals in the field of rare books, manuscripts, and cultural heritage. The session was developed in response to calls for broader representation and opportunity for emerging voices. The anthology includes essays that were originally lightning talk presentations and were condensed from longer scholarship. One of the essays in the anthology discusses the challenges and importance of having a basic proficiency in the history of the book for special collections librarians who work with rare books. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the history of paper specifications of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) in 1895-1980. It says that the Printing Act of 1895 has provided GPO the power to set and employ quality standards to obtain paper from the marketplace. It mentions that the Paper Specification of GPO specified paper composition as well as the initial acidity from at least 1950s onward. It adds that the specification offer enough data, which can be used to compare the paper selection of GPO.

The article discusses the extent of "American State Papers" (ASP) duplication of Serial Set U.S. government documents and reports, and offers suggestions on how to address the issue of duplication. Topics discussed include the rationale for the initial compilation and printing of ASP volumes one to 27, the amendment introduced by Senator Judah Philip Benjamin to an appropriation bill on March 3, 1857, and the rules on ASP publications and materials to be included in the additional ASP volumes.

This paper presents the findings of a citation analysis of papers written by undergraduate students. The analysis included the types of materials cited, number of citations per paper, publication year, online availability, and refereed status of materials cited. Library ownership of materials was also analyzed. Number of citations in each paper increased over the first three papers, as did the number of refereed journals cited. There was also a positive correlation between the number of citations in the paper and the word count of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the inclusion of public policy papers in three resources--Policy File, Policy Archives, and PAIS International. The databases were analyzed by searching for known policy papers across the three resources, analyzing the subject coverage of the policy papers contained in the databases, and the inclusion of particular policy institutes. PAIS International contained more policy papers based on subject and included more of the selected policy institutes. Policy File contained more of the preselected policy papers., Of the myriad resource types needed by public policy students and researchers, policy papers can be the most difficult to locate because of the various sources in which they can [...]

In fall 2008, students from first-year Composition I and upper-level classes at Florida Gulf Coast University participated in a citation analysis study. The citation pages of their research papers revealed that the students used more books, more types of sources, and more overall sources when a librarian provided instruction. When these results were compared to those produced by students in upper-level classes (all of whom received instruction), it was discovered that, as the class level increased, the number of citations and the percentage of scholarly citations generally increased and there was a high preference for books from all disciplines, especially history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]