CIRI Faculty Grant Projects

Conceptions of Expertise Among Librarians through a Gender Lens

Co-PI: Dr. Deborah Hicks
Funding Agency: University of Buffalo Gender Institute
Funding Amount: $3,150
Funding Period: 2022 

Summary: This project explores librarians’ conceptions of professional expertise through interviews of librarians representing multiple intersectionalities, including gender, race, type of role (public-facing and non-public-facing roles), and managerial level. Librarianship has long wrestled with issues of professional identity and power relations. Past research has found that librarians who identify as women downplay their professional expertise when discussing public service activities . However, subsequent research did not find a similar tendency among librarians of color. The discrepancies in these studies’ findings suggests that an intersectional approach to examining how librarians understand and enact their professional expertise will expand our current understanding of librarians’ expertise, with a goal to promote currently marginalized forms of expertise among information workers. This study will lay a foundation for future research into conceptions of professional expertise among librarians and will demonstrate the value of an intersectional lens for that scholarship.

Seeking Immortality: The Northern Cheyenne Preservation Project

Partner: Dr. Anthony Chow and Dr. Darra Hofman
Funding Agency: Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Funding Amount: $148,662
Funding Period: 2022-2024 

Summary: The Northern Cheyenne Tribe will partner with San Jose State University to develop a model and toolkit to showcase the use of virtual reality (VR) technology to preserve and share the tribe’s cultural heritage. The VR platform will host recordings of Native language speakers and digitized artifacts. The project team will conduct user interviews, focus groups, and surveys with community members. They will disseminate a toolkit with procedures and practices for designing VR archives focused on preserving language and cultural heritage traditions. This project will benefit more than 12,000 tribal citizens, in addition to serving as a model for other communities and the library field. As a subrecipient, San Jose State University will lead the implementation of the research design, data collection, analysis, and scholarly dissemination; oversee the archival process; and lead the digitization and VR development process.

BIPOC Become Librarians (BBL)

Partner: Dr. Michele A. L. Villagran
Funding Agency: Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Funding Amount: $150,000
Funding Period: 2022-2024 

Summary: San Jose State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library and School of Information, in partnership with San Jose Public Library, will establish a pilot mentorship and internship program to introduce undergraduate students who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) to careers in Library and Information Science. Project activities will include recruiting BIPOC undergraduates, conducting focus groups, identifying and recruiting mentors, mentees, and trainers, and identifying internship partners; evaluating the project throughout each phase; and finalizing the curriculum and shareable resources and disseminating project results. Project outcomes will include an internship and mentorship program ready to introduce BIPOC undergraduate students to careers in librarianship and a toolkit shared with faculty in other library and information science programs featuring shareable resources from lessons learned and best practices gained during the pilot project. 

You want the truth?: The evidentiary character of digital objects

PI: Dr. Darra Hofman
Funding Agency: SJSU RSCA Seed Grant
Funding Amount: $5,000
Funding Period: 2022-2023 

Summary: This project aims to identify and map the major evidentiary paradigms applied by and to digital records and data, to support the ongoing availability and accessibility of trustworthy digital evidence. This project will support initial,e exploratory research in a much larger body of work exploring the evidentiary nature of digital data and records and the requirements for preserving and curating heterogenous, interactive data types in such a way that they can serve as trustworthy evidence for a variety of purposes and in a number of different contexts. The broader project, which extends beyond the scope of the Seed Grant, will combine doctrinal legal research, critical interpretive synthesis, survey research, case studies, and expert interviews. The Seed Grant will utilize critical interpretive synthesis and doctrinal legal research to map (through taxonomies and eventually, ontologies) the longstanding disciplinary paradigms (archives, law, and science) that determine how user communities evaluate the trustworthiness of digital objects as evidence. 

Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship

Partner: Alyce Scott
Funding Agency: Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Funding Amount:  $249,725
Funding Period: 2022-2023

Summary: WGBH Educational Foundation (WGBH) will host a Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship for 10 students enrolled in library and information science (LIS) graduate programs to pursue digital preservation projects at public broadcasting organizations around the country, gaining hands-on experience in audiovisual preservation. WGBH will work with five partner universities: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Missouri, University of Oklahoma, San Jose State University, and Clayton State University. Each university will be paired with a local public media station to serve as a fellowship host. Fellowship placements will address the need for digitization of at-risk public media materials and increase audiovisual preservation education capacity in LIS graduate programs across the country.

Archives 4.0: Artificial Intelligence for Trust in Records and Archives

Partner: Dr. Pat Franks and Dr. Darra Hofman
Funding Agency: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada
Funding Amount: $2,489,577 (CAD)
Funding Period: 2021-2026

Summary: InterPARES Trust AI (2021-2026) is a multi-national interdisciplinary project aiming to design, develop, and leverage Artificial Intelligence to support the ongoing availability and accessibility of trustworthy public records by forming a sustainable, ongoing partnership producing original research, training students and other highly qualified personnel (HQP), and generating a virtuous circle between academia, archival institutions, government records professionals, and industry, a feedback loop reinforcing the knowledge and capabilities of each party.

Curriculum Design and Instruction for Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL) Online

Partner: Dr. Lili Luo
Funding Agency: Institute of Museum and Library Services
Funding Amount: $248,299
Funding Period: 2021-2024

Summary: The Loyola Marymount University Library, in collaboration with the San José State University School of Information and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium, will expand the availability of the successful research training and mentoring program for novice librarian-researchers, the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL). Transitioning the proven in-person training experience to a sustainable synchronous online format will provide access to a wider base of participants at a lower cost per participant. To further cultivate the growing community of practice of librarian-researchers, IRDL Online proposes to develop the IRDL Scholars’ Speaker Series and IRDL Online Research Conference as part of the program. Scholars will have free access to IRDL Online and it will provide research training and mentorship to 90 librarians over three years.

Bridging Knowledge: Supporting Indigenous Scholars in the Field of Librarianship

Partner: Sheila Gurtu
Funding Agency: Institute of Museum and Library Services
Funding Amount: $700,000 
Funding Period: 2021-2024

Summary:  The San José State University School of Information, American Indian Library Association, the Alaska State Library are partners on a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant worth over $700,000 awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Alaska Library Network. The grant will fund a three-year project titled Bridging Knowledge: Supporting Indigenous Scholars in the Field of Librarianship. The project will provide financial, professional and peer support to 15 American Indian, Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian students as they pursue their Master of Library and Information Science degree in the iSchool’s exclusively online program. The students will also have the opportunity to concurrently earn an Advanced Certificate in Strategic Management of Digital Assets and Services.

Reading Nation Waterfall

PI: Dr. Anthony Chow
Funding Agency: Institute of Museum and Library Services
Funding Amount: $1.4 million
Funding Period: 2020-2023

Summary: The Reading Nation Waterfall project aims to increase access to literary resources and libraries for Native American children and families. The project partners  include Crow Tribe of Montana (Montana), Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (North Carolina), Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina (North Carolina), Northern Cheyenne (Montana), and Kewa Pueblo, formerly Santo Domingo Pueblo (New Mexico). The project will have national impact in seven ways: 1) It further pilots, scales, and extends activities previously funded and tested in the field through an IMLS planning grant; 2) Expands these activities to new audiences; 3) Is easily replicable and implementable across the field; 4) Addresses all three aspects of the core mission of IMLS – Promote Lifelong Learning, Build Capacity, and Increase Public Access; 5) Focuses on the Lifelong Learning project category by working with cross disciplinary partners working with children from 0-10; 6) Establishes a team with the expertise, experience, and culturally appropriate perspective to implement the project; and 7) Develops and disseminates, in partnership with local and national library associations and community organizations, a Native American literacy and library model. The project team will also develop and disseminate a process to be shared via web-based toolkit and traditional academic presentation and publications for easy replication.

Educating for Equity?: Sexual and Gender Minority Privacy in Library and Information Studies Education

Co-PIs: Dr. Michele A. L. Villagran and Dr. Darra Hofmann
Funding Agency: Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Research Grant Competition
Funding Amount: $5,000
Funding Period: 2021-2022

Summary: This project examines whether students are equipped to handle complex questions of information policy by examining an urgent information problem facing libraries: the privacy of sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals in the face of COVID-19 surveillance. Sexual and gender minorities face significant information risks that differ from those of cis-gender, heterosexual people; improper information disclosure can lead to the loss of employment, housing, access to health care, and social support for SGM due to outing. This study asks, “Are LIS programs preparing their students to meet the needs of LGBTQ+ patrons and stakeholders from a policy perspective in the workplace?” It will answer that question with a mixed-methods study, including a survey of LIS faculty, a content analysis of ALA-approved masters programs’ learning outcomes and syllabi, a document analysis of the privacy policies of a purposive sample of libraries, and interviews with library employers. 

Feels Like Begging: First-Generation Online Graduate Students in Library and Information Science

Co-PIs: Dr. Anthony Bernier and Dr. Michele A. L. Villagran 
Funding Agency:  SJSU Level-Up Grant. 
Funding Amount: $20,140
Funding Period: 2021-2022

Summary: What can the experiences of first-generation students (FGS) in online masters programs teach us about improving student success? Dr. Bernier and Dr. Villagran will use the SJSU Level Up Grant to produce a competitive project prospectus potentially leading to an IMLS invitation to submit a full proposal for its Research in Service to Practice Grant in response to a new question relevant to the experiences of First Generation Students in online LIS programs.