Research

Students will be able to perform effectively in the library and information science professions by demonstrating competency in research activities. By the conclusion of the master's degree program, students should be able to:

• identify and explain a research question

• locate, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize research findings

• identify appropriate research methods, collect, and analyze data to address issues faced by libraries or other information agencies

• employ evidence-based practices to solve information problems

• design, conduct, and report research that contributes to the body of professional knowledge and/or theoretical constructs

Description - Analysis - Reflection

The road I did end up taking was largely informed by ISCI 705 Research in Spring 2025 with Professor Ehsan Nik. Honestly, I felt like I bit off more than I could chew at many points in this class – again, I come from a liberal arts education background and occasionally (somewhat painfully) remember I signed up for a Masters in Library Sciences. Regardless, I knew I was interested in query formulation and wanted to examine metadata schemas more closely. The natural choice for the latter was Getty AAT because I work in the art field and had some baseline familiarity with these terms, plus I wanted to better understand how such authorities are formed and maintained. I started out with a very vague problem of semantic drift, i.e. shifting meanings in search terms and/or vocabularies, and slowly (after much back and forth with professors) carved out a more exacting research design to compare data from these two fields.

I can certainly look back on this class and identify areas I would like to refine, particularly in the theory application. (I made it work as best I could but there may have been a better/less pedantic choice than Foucault by way of Gilliland, who identifies metadata as discourse.) I would also drill down further on how to harvest user search terms from various academic sources. But overall, I am proud of the progress I made in applying scientific theory to research in the library science field. And perhaps more importantly, I better understand the trajectory I would like to take in my career, focused on creating and refining metadata in digital collections of cultural heritage material. This is partially based on my discovered interests, as well as the current moment wherein AI is well utilized for more tedious tasks but requires human oversight to contextualize descriptive information. We may be in the collective process of applying user language to controlled terms and mapping structured vocabularies to the semantic web. But in the meantime, GenAI is still hallucinating terms and amplifying our worst biases…