During the Oklahoma Library Association annual conference held in Tulsa, OK on March 6 – 8, 2024, graduate students Natalie Elliot, Melissa Weiss, Lupita Gonzalez, Marem Deal, and recent graduate Beverly Theige presented papers, research, and projects at the Fresh Takes session. This session is designed for students to gain experience as conference presenters and to share their current work in the field of information studies. Andrew Soliven, Director, Library Services, Rose State College attended the session and shared, “I’d like to tell you how awesome of a job your students did at OLA’s Fresh Takes session last month in Tulsa! The uniqueness of each presentation was incredible. Bravo to all of them!”
SLIS Faculty, Dr. Buffy Edwards, works with students to organize the session.
Presentation Summaries
Marem Deal, SLIS Graduate Student, presented, The Trials of Classifying Non-Traditional Media. The presentation focused on the decisions made by a variety of groups in adapting the classification systems they work with primarily to accommodate non-traditional media in their collections and what patterns can be seen.
Natalie Elliot, Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Philosophy, University of Oklahoma, presented, Toxicity in Gaming Culture and the Information Behaviors of Video Game Players. An increasing number of academic libraries are recognizing users’ desire for video games and the equipment needed to access and enjoy them. Though gaming can function as a fun and relaxed method of community building, high rates of toxic behaviors in the gaming community during player interactions while gaming or discussing games can sour enjoyment. Toxicity is also present within gamers’ information sources through the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Yet, the relationship between toxicity in gaming culture and its impact on players’ information seeking behaviors remains underexplored and, therefore, not well-understood. Being a group that has been mostly overlooked or undervalued by the greater LIS profession has contributed to the gaming community’s drive to build strong social bonds and rely on other gamers for information. However, such overreliance paired with the mostly anonymous ties within the gaming community have exacerbated the toxic behaviors that have become both normalized and pervasive in gaming culture. The goal of this research is to understand toxicity in gaming culture and information seeking by addressing the information gap on the relationship between and impact of toxicity on information behaviors and the encounters and responses to mis- and disinformation. The secondary goal is to understand the difference between the single- and multi-player settings’ rates of encounters with toxicity and mis- and disinformation, and how these players identify and addresses mis- and disinformation.
Lupita Gonzales, SLIS Graduate Student, presented, A Family History: on Migration from Calvillo, Aguascaliented. As a final project for a Cultural Heritage Data course at the University of Oklahoma, she created a digital archive of my maternal family history, with the goal of digitally preserving that history for my relatives and for future generations, so that they may know and have access to their personal history. Many of the photographs in this archive are ones that she took while visiting my maternal grandparents' house in Calvillo, Aguascalientes, Mexico. Others are family photographs that were digitized. The oral history was recorded by Lupita with her mother at her home in Norman, Oklahoma. Throughout working on this project, she was conducting research on how immigrant families can document, preserve, and digitize their family histories for posterity using digital collections and oral history methods. I'm particularly interested in how digitally preserving family histories can strengthen cultural identities and ensure a personal understanding of an individual’s cultural heritage.
Beverly Thiege, Children's Department Manager, Norman Public Library Central, Pioneer Library System, presented, The Impact of Enhanced Storytimes on Early Literacy Practices at Home. The hypothesis for the study is that if parents and caregivers know what they can do to promote early literacy in their child and why the activities work, they will be more inclined and motivated to practice these skills with their little ones in their daily lives. “I am quite passionate about the role of public libraries in helping children reach their full potential. While I would love the opportunity to implement this research in Oklahoma, I would be even more excited to be a part of bringing any effective early literacy strategies to public libraries that will ultimately help improve literacy and education in our state.” Beverly Theige
Melissa Weiss, University of Oklahoma, Western History Collections, presented, Apparitional Descriptions: Disability History, Reparative Descriptions, and Ethical Failings in a Special Research Collection. Reparative descriptions, the act of remediating archival finding aids and descriptions that misrepresent and/or silence historically marginalized communities, is a growing trend in archival scholarship. Identifying and better representing the disability community within archives is a part of this trend with scholars such as Sara White and Gracen Brilmyer integrating disability studies into archival practice. However, few archives are publishing their work on remediating disability related items and collections and few archivists are publishing their processes or providing best practices for remediation in a field that struggles with limited staffing and resources. In this thesis, I examine several theoretical models advocated for and utilized by archivists for working with collections and items related to the disability community or other historically marginalized communities. I outline my process for remediating descriptions of several items in the Western History Collections, a special research collection at the University of Oklahoma, and the challenges of crafting new descriptions that reflect the ethical considerations of remediation while better representing the disabled subject. This thesis contemplates the realities of trying to bring historically marginalized persons to the forefront of archival descriptions while highlighting the importance of making the invisible work of remediation in archives visible.
