YUL research and professional contributions
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Research conducted by York University Library Faculty members can be found in this collection, along with professional contributions such as presentation slides and instructional videos.
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Item Open Access ABCDEF - The 6 key features behind scalable, multi-tenant web archive processing with ARCH: Archive, Big Data, Concurrent, Distributed, Efficient, Flexible(ACM, 2022-06-20) Holzmann, Helge; Ruest, Nick; Bailey, Jefferson; Dempsey, Alex; Fritz, Samantha; Lee, Peggy; Milligan, IanOver the past quarter-century, web archive collection has emerged as a user-friendly process thanks to cloud-hosted solutions such as the Internet Archive’s Archive-It subscription service. Despite advancements in collecting web archive content, no equivalent has been found by way of a user-friendly cloud-hosted analysis system. Web archive processing and research require significant hardware resources and cumbersome tools that interdisciplinary researchers find difficult to work with. In this paper, we identify six principles - the ABCDEFs (Archive, Big data, Concurrent, Distributed, Efficient, and Flexible) - used to guide the development and design of a system. These make the transformation of, and working with, web archive data as enjoyable as the collection process. We make these objectives – largely common sense – explicit and transparent in this paper. They can be employed by every computing platform in the area of digital libraries and archives and adapted by teams seeking to implement similar infrastructures. Furthermore, we present ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub), the first cloud-based system designed from scratch to meet all of these six key principles. ARCH is an interactive interface, closely connected with Archive-It, engineered to provide analytical actions, specifically generating datasets and in-browser visualizations. It efficiently streamlines research workflows while eliminating the burden of computing requirements. Building off past work by both the Internet Archive (Archive-It Research Services) and the Archives Unleashed Project (the Archives Unleashed Cloud), this merged platform achieves a scalable processing pipeline for web archive research. It will be made open-source shortly and can be considered a reference implementation of the ABCDEF, which we have evaluated and discussed in terms of feasibility and compliance as a benchmark for similar platforms.Item Open Access Academic Blogging: Promoting your Research on the Web(2009-03-25) Dupuis, JohnIn a world of information overload, lightning fast news cycles, proliferating journals, declining traditional media outlets and short attention spans, how do we make sure our research has all the impact we want? How do we advance our agenda and create opportunities? How do we explain our research to the general public and get our peers' attention? We blog, of course! Come to this session and see how others have used blogs to engage the public in their research agenda, explore new ideas and join a worldwide community of scholars in every field. At the end of the session, those that are interested will have the chance to set up their own blogs.Item Open Access Academic Success Challenges Faced by International Graduate Students: Final Report(2013-07-10) Olshen, ToniThis is the report and recommendations resulting from a research project exploring the academic success challenges faced by non-English speaking international graduate students as they pursue their graduate studies at York. It includes research findings and offers recommendations for changes for a more proactive approach to removing the academic challenges for York international students which have been identified. This report includes examples of best that may serve as models for improvements in this arena.Item Open Access Active Digital Preservation and Data/Metadata Migration(2017-04-04) Estlund, Karen; Ruest, NickDigital preservation activities increasingly focus on the movement of data and metadata between systems. This panel will present case studies in moving content through preservation activities with APTrust, the Digital Preservation Network, MetaArchive, and local applications. The presentations will highlight common methodologies and elicit group discussion on strategic and sustainable planning for active digital preservation. As the pace of evolution of repository systems continues to increase and new opportunities for digital preservation systems continue to emerge, the nature of active movement of repository objects and metadata has become a growing concern. The focus of content stewardship is shifting from being application-centric to data-centric, with the understanding that content must move through time. In order to provide effective mechanisms to move repository data during repository migrations and to these preservation systems, significant efforts are needed for various import, export, and verification services. The Fedora and MetaArchive communities have begun collaborative efforts to create tools that using the BagIt standard will enable preservation and system profiles that allow for ease of digital object transfer. Essential to these discussions is the role of metadata, file integrity, and size of transfers to actively manage digital objects.Item Open Access Addressing Student Needs By Offering Customized RSS Feeds: TRY 2007(2007-05) Nariani, RajivUsing RSS feeds from STM databases to keep on top of current research. These new tools can saves time valuable research time.Item Open Access Advancing and Promoting your Research on the Web(2010-03-17T20:34:36Z) Dupuis, JohnItem Open Access Advancing Research Data Management: A Social Capital Perspective on Functional Librarianship(Facet Publishing, 2022-12-22) Kosavic, Andrea; Wang, MingluThis chapter investigates librarianship in the area of Research Data Management (RDM) through the lens of social capital theory. If social capital theories and concepts have the potential to bring to light the invisible or non-quantifiable value of academic library services (Bracke 2016; Corrall 2015), we postulate that they will lend a generative lens to explore the symbolic, network, and normative effects of engagement within the academic library. Using librarian and archivist-authored RDM literature as a case study, we will explore the dynamic relationships between network structures and the effects of functional librarianship on the social capital of academic libraries. User studies of scientists and case studies of library RDM programs (Perrier et al. 2017) are common in the literature, but their underlying theoretical frameworks are limited to “individual behaviourism” (Fecher, Friesike, and Hebing 2015), normative and historical institutionalism (Akers et al. 2014; Zenk-Möltgen et al. 2018), “wicked problem” theory (Cox, Pinfield, and Smith 2014) and organizational subculture theory (Cox and Verbaan 2016). Insights about the unique positionality of libraries within the academic community (Gold 2007) and potential leadership opportunities (Flores et al. 2015) have been mentioned but have yet to be clearly theorized to the level of a useful framework for deeper analysis or practical application of RDM research. A social capital perspective will offer a theoretical framework which contextualizes the potential benefits borne of functional engagement, including access to information attributed to network positionality and bridging connections, mutual supports found in communities with dense ties and group cohesion, and agency for enhancing reputation (Lin et al. 2001). As the presence of social capital can be used as a predictor of healthier institutional, disciplinary and departmental climates, this examination will highlight opportunities for strengthening social capital in libraries. We will also suggest modalities for libraries and related organizations to more consciously transform themselves using identified relationship building strategies. We provide a review of current RDM literature which summarizes the existing theoretical assumptions applied in the research to describe the development of RDM services and solutions in light of existing challenges. This is followed by an introduction of classic symbolic, normative, and network views of social capital theory, which are synthesized and applied to our sample during our coding exercise. Several essential themes surface in our axial coding exercise and they are summarized in our results and findings.Item Open Access Affective Labor, Resistance, and the Academic Librarian(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) Sloniowski, LisaThe affective turn in the humanities and social sciences seeks to theorize the social through examining spheres of experience, particularly bodily experience and the emotions, not typically explored in dominant theoretical paradigms of the twentieth century. Affective or immaterial labor is work that is intended to produce or alter emotional experiences in people. Although it has a long history, affective labor has been of increasing importance to modern economies since the nineteenth century. This paper will explore the gendered dimensions of affective labor and offer a feminist reading of the production of academic subjectivities through affective labor by specifically examining the pink-collar immaterial labor of academic reference and liaison librarians. It will end by exploring how the work of the academic librarian may also productively subvert the neoliberal goals of the corporate university.Item Open Access After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?(2010-10-15T05:20:31Z) Denton, William; Taves, AdamReference librarians are whiny and demanding. Systems librarians are arrogant and rude. Users are clueless and uninformed. A new discovery layer means that they need to collaborate to build it and then — the next step — integrate it into teaching and learning. How should we (reference librarians, systems people, and users) work together to better exploit the possibilities of open source systems so we can focus on discovery and understanding instead of the mechanics of searching?Item Open Access Already Enough Ghosts:The Invisibility of Emotional Labour in Archives(2016-06-12) St.Onge, AnnaPresented as part of a roundtable intended to provide a glimpse into the emotional and affective labour required to do archival work. Though many traditional archival theorists have suggested that professional archivists should remain objective and at an emotional "arms length" from the records and people with and for whom they work, failing to acknowledge the at times intensely emotional impact of archival work can negatively impact the mental and psychic wellness of the archivist - thereby affecting the archivist's professional output and professional relationships.Item Open Access An Annotated Chronology of the History of AIDS in Toronto(Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la médecine, 2005) Robertson, MarkThe purpose of this annotated chronology is to help provide a framework for research into the history of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic in Canada but especially as it unfolded in Toronto, Canada. The chronological entries can be used to identify the order and relationship of particular themes, while the sources listed in the chronology can be used as points of reference for further investigations. This chronology is primarily derived from reports in key newspapers based in the Toronto region. Each chronological entry lists the sources which reported on the particular event.Item Open Access Anti-British in Every Sense of the Word? Methodist Preachers, School Libraries, and the Problem of American Books in Upper Canada, 1820-1860(Canadian Society of Church History, 2013) McLaren, ScottItem Open Access Applications and Implications of AI in East Asian Libraries(2024-03-12) Leong, Jack Hang-tatArtificial intelligence (AI) has entered library areas such as search and information discovery, collection management, academic publishing, information literacy, and references services. With the rise of generative AI such as ChatGPT, AI becomes a hot topic in academia. A deeper understanding of this technology and how it affects academic libraries becomes more important than ever. The objective of this presentation is to investigate and reflect critically the application of AI in East Asian libraries. To address the issues of privacy, data security, academic integrity, and threats to job, it is critical to involve information professionals in the development and stewardship of this technology.Item Open Access Arch-It!(2022-06-24) Holzmann, Helge; Ruest, Nick; Bailey, Jefferson; Dempsey, Alex; Fritz, Samantha; Milligan, Ian; Willis, KodyOver the past quarter-century, web archive collection has emerged as a user-friendly process thanks to cloud-hosted solutions such as the Internet Archive’s Archive-It subscription service. Despite advancements in collecting web archive content, no equivalent has been found by way of a user-friendly cloud-hosted analysis system. Web archive processing and research require significant hardware resources and cumbersome tools that interdisciplinary researchers find difficult to work with. In this paper, we present ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub)1, an interactive interface, closely connected with Archive-It, engineered to provide analytical actions, specifically generating datasets and in-browser visualizations. It efficiently streamlines research workflows while eliminating the burden of computing requirements. Building off past work by both the Internet Archive (Archive-It Research Services) and the Archives Unleashed Project (the Archives Unleashed Cloud), this merged platform achieves a scalable processing pipeline for web archive research.Item Open Access Archival echoes: too weak to survive or too far to travel?(2016-04-04) St.Onge, AnnaThe extensive archives of Lady Victoria Welby (1837-1912), the English self-educated philosopher and prolific letter-writer, have been held by York University in Toronto, Canada for over forty-five years. Yet, in that time, relatively little research has been conducted regarding her rich correspondence with over four hundred individuals (with notable exceptions). This presentation will address the history of the records themselves: their fragmentation due to the publishing efforts of Welby’s daughter, Nina Cust; the intervention of descendants to produce an attractive lot for sale to a North American institution; and the extraction of discrete correspondence by individual researchers in pursuit of their own scholarly goals. A speculative piece, I will attempt to identify historical and serendipitous factors that may have led to her exclusion from scholarly histories. With the adoption of new tools and approaches to contextual information, as well as selective digitization of the archives, hitherto unexamined patterns and connections have surfaced in the remnants of Welby’s relationship with her vigorously cultivated network of correspondents. This presentation is part of a larger effort to boost awareness and visibility of the Welby archives in the scholarly community in order to actively insinuate her voice back into the scholarly discourse of late Victorian and Edwardian cultural studies. Overlaying this project is a question of the true impact of Welby: is her absence from the current canon of historical source material an accurate reflection of her contributions, or is it an unintended obscuration caused by the complex afterlife of her archives?Item Open Access The Archives Unleashed Notebook: Madlibs for Jumpstarting Scholarly Exploration(2019) Deschamps, Ryan; Ruest, Nick; Lin, Jimmy; Fritz, Samantha; Milligan, IanThis paper introduces the Archives Unleashed Notebook, which is designed to work with derivative datasets from the Archives Unleashed Cloud, a platform for analyzing web archives. These datasets contain common starting points for scholarly inquiry, including full text content and the domain-level webgraph. Our notebooks interactively walk a scholar through the process of interrogating a collection using a fill-in-the-blanks 'madlibs' approach to promote engagement. Scholars start with a notebook populated with common analyses, in which they can make minor changes to variables to alter the subject of study in systematic ways.Item Open Access The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives(ACM/IEEE, 2020-08) Ruest, Nick; Lin, Jimmy; Milligan, Ian; Fritz, SamanthaThe Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building -- all proceeding concurrently in mutually --reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate "derivative products", using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from over two hundred users, totaling around 300 terabytes of web archives.Item Open Access Astronomy Education and Outreach in a Large Urban University(Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2010-02-17) Fernandez, LeilaCitizen science and public participation in astronomy has received an impetus in the Internet age. Education and community outreach can play an important role in providing the stimulus for this participation. The International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009) has focused on creating networks between astronomers and the public by exploiting a full range of new communication technologies such as blogs, podcasts and Twitter to reach a global audience. Using these tools, Canadian participation in IYA 2009 has enabled outreach to bilingual and First Nations (aboriginal) communities in Canada. Universities also promote science education to local communities as part of their educational mission and astronomy themes have been prominent during IYA 2009. This presentation will outline initiatives in astronomy education undertaken within a large urban university in Canada and discuss the role of science librarians in promoting awareness of educational resources in astronomy. A local campus-based observatory program with an interactive chat facility that provides live online viewing of telescope images of the night sky will be described, along with a discussion of its role in public outreach. As the learning commons concept is developed in the library it will create more opportunities for partnering with science faculty and the campus observatory to support educational initiatives in astronomyItem Open Access At Their Fingertips: Customized Library Resources in Course Management Systems and Student Portals(2009-06-06T19:10:09Z) Coysh, Sarah J.; Denton, WilliamPortals and Course Management Systems such as Moodle bring together resources students need. Why not also include library resources to increase library-student communication? York University librarians have capitalized on these environments, providing students with customized library resources at their point of need.Item Open Access Authorities Training Presentation(2007-05-24T15:42:17Z) Salmon, MarciaA cataloguing training presentation on authorities