Donghee Sinn

This study investigates public library innovations during COVID-19. Many public libraries quickly adapted to the pandemic environment, changing and improving their operations and services to meet the new challenges and user demands. We collected 2 datasets to understand public libraries’ innovations: 751 tweets from the 12 largest public libraries in the U.S. and 72 articles from 3 major professional magazines. These datasets were analyzed to identify innovative services provided between 2020 and 2021. The Twitter data illustrated quick adoption of innovative library services, publicized to user communities, and the magazine articles provided detailed accounts of innovations both user services and internal operations within libraries. The findings of content analysis from both datasets highlight that public libraries quickly changed their service delivery modes and implemented diverse innovative services. These efforts included informing users about the disease, combating racism, bridging the digital divide, supporting health and technology literacy, and assisting with unemployment and career development. Libraries served as community centers during difficult times, focusing on outreach efforts during lockdowns and providing crucial support to vulnerable populations.

Journal of Medical Internet Research - International Scientific Journal for Medical Research, Information and Communication on the Internet

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically test whether individuals’ internal factors (prior knowledge, resources, and capability) and environmental factors (stimuli, limitation) have any influence on the development of personal health information management (PHIM) literacy skills and which constructs are statistically associated with general health-related outcomes.Design/methodology/approach: Survey responses were collected from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk), a crowdsourcing internet service, in December 2013. A total of 578 responses were analyzed using partial-least squares structural equation modeling technique.Findings: The model as a whole exhibited 62.8 percent of variance in health-related outcomes. The findings suggest that prior knowledge has a direct effect on health literacy (HL) skills (H3:β=0.212,pβ=0.475,pβ=0.526,p<0.001) through the mediator of stimuli and the knowledge variable.Research limitations/implications: One possible limitation of this study is that the study may include a highly technology literate group, as survey respondents were recruited from the online service mTurk.Practical implications: The study poses implications for further research and practice. This research was an exploratory work for further model development so future studies should investigate deeper into real personal health record (PHR) user groups (e.g. patients and caregivers). For example, studies by White and Horvitz (2009a, b) conducted real-time user studies that the authors could apply to the authors’ future PHR studies. Since the findings cannot be generalizable to these specific groups, similar research may be conducted. Using caregiver groups of PHR users in comparison to patient groups could determine the similarities and differences of their PHIM activities and related outcomes for optimal design of self-care management.Social implications: Further, it is suggested to conduct large scale, real-time-based studies using a PHR transaction log analysis to achieve conclusiveness and generalizability. Additionally, future studies should address not only diverse real-time user groups, but also various PHR data sources and their presentation issues.Originality/value: This study model offers an important perspective on PHIM and its causal pathway for use not only by patient educators and healthcare providers but also information providers, personal health record (PHR) system developers, and PHR users.

BACKGROUND With abundant personal health information at hand, individuals are faced with a critical challenge in evaluating the informational value of health care records to keep useful information and discard that which is determined useless. Young, healthy college students who were previously dependents of adult parents or caregivers are less likely to be concerned with disease management. Personal health information management (PHIM) is a special case of personal information management (PIM) that is associated with multiple interactions among varying stakeholders and systems. However, there has been limited evidence to understand informational or behavioral underpinning of the college students’ PHIM activities, which can influence their health in general throughout their lifetime. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to investigate demographic and academic profiles of college students with relevance to PHIM activities. Next, we sought to construct major PHIM-related activity components and perceptions among college students. Finally, we sought to discover major factors predicting core PHIM activities among college students we sampled. METHODS A Web survey was administered to collect responses about PHIM behaviors and perceptions among college students from the University of Kentucky from January through March 2017. A total of 1408 college students were included in the analysis. PHIM perceptions, demographics, and academic variations were used as independent variables to predict diverse PHIM activities using a principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical regression analyses (SPSS v.24, IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA). RESULTS Majority of the participants were female (956/1408, 67.90%), and the age distribution of this population included an adequate representation of college students of all ages. The most preferred health information resources were family (612/1408, 43.47%), health care professionals (366/1408, 26.00%), friends (27/1408, 1.91%), and the internet (157/1408, 11.15%). Organizational or curatorial activities such as Arranging, Labeling, Categorizing, and Discarding were rated low (average=3.21, average=3.02, average=2.52, and average=2.42, respectively). The PCA results suggested 3 components from perception factors labeled as follows: Assistance (alpha=.85), Awareness (alpha=.716), and Difficulty (alpha=.558). Overall, the Demographics and Academics variables were not significant in predicting dependent variables such as Labeling, Categorizing, Health Education Materials, and Discarding, whereas they were significant for other outcome variables such as Sharing, Collecting, Knowing, Insurance Information, Using, and Owning. CONCLUSIONS College years are a significant time for students to learn decision-making skills for maintaining information, a key aspect of health records, as well as for educators to provide appropriate educational and decision aids in the environment of learning as independent adults. Our study will contribute to better understand knowledge about specific skills and perceptions for college students’ practice of effective PHIM throughout their lives.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the associations of personal archiving behaviors to factors and challenges that have been assumed to affect personal digital archiving strategies.Design/methodology/approach: This study created an online survey to understand general patterns of personal digital archiving practices and related phenomena. The survey was employed to investigate to what extent people show a certain behavior or feel certain factors and challenge when archiving personal digital content.Findings: Some of the findings of this study regarding specific personal digital archiving practices were in accordance with existing studies. However, the associations between digital archiving challenges and archiving practices were not observed statistically significantly as assumed in previous studies. General technology efficacy and the awareness of the importance of personal records appeared to influence personal archiving practices.Research limitations/implications: This study used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. As this is not a commonly used internet service, the workers here could have higher than average levels of internet efficacy. This possibility may have affected the demographics, and the survey responses may be biased in this respect.Practical implications: As the study results suggest that technology efficacy and personal heritage awareness are the influencing factors of personal digital archiving, these are the areas where information professionals can involve in assisting users for future cultural heritage.Originality/value: This is the first study that develops measures for personal digital archiving related practices and perceptions that the previous qualitative studies have identified. With these measures, it examines the general status of individuals’ archiving strategies and the overall associations of digital archiving challenges as well as looking into other technological and personal factors.

This exploratory study examined college students' personal information management behaviors in three contexts from a perspective of information horizon theory. Findings suggest that students show different density and activeness in information behaviors in different context. Academic context was most active for all activities while health was the least.

Archivists for Memory: A Theoretical Study on Archives and Memory Memory;Social Memory;Collective Memory;Records;Archives;Archivists for Memory; In archival discourse, social memory has been discussed for some time. Despite this, however, theoretical studies have not been prolific at all in the Korean archival community. Many Western scholars have argued that archivists should consider memory rather than records for archival preservation because the inclusiveness of the former will fill the gaps in the latter. Social memory that is shared and transmitted across generations in society would include the stories of marginalized groups of people who are often neglected in official documents. Archivists can reconstruct the diverse narratives of a variety of social groups based on social memory, and this would be their social responsibility. In this sense, it is archivists who exercise power regarding how history will be written in the future because they determine what would be preserved in archives: mainstream culture with official records or a broader spectrum of diverse stories of people in society. From this perspective, this paper intends to understand how memory is discussed in archival discourse and to review how archives and history are associated with memory in theories and practices.