Emerald award winners: rich variety: Ukachi, Huvila, Seeber, Halpern, Helberger, Yu, Duff, and more

Commercial publisher Emerald has "best paper awards every year ("winner" and "highly commended"). The whole list is at http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/authors/literati/awards.htm?year=2016 (note that most papers on Emerald are subscription-only; I have sought out open access versions for some of those listed below, but I didn't have time to look for them all). This year, ones of possible interest to information literacy include (in fairly random order):

- Ukachi, N. (2015). Exploration of information literacy skills status and impacts on the quality of life of artisans in Lagos, Nigeria. New Library World, 116 (9/10), 578 - 587. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/NLW-01-2015-0006. Ukachi's Reserarchgate site is here with preprints

- Huvila, I. (2015). Situational appropriation of information. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 67(5), 492 - 504. "In contrast to the interest of describing and managing the social processes of knowing, information science and information and knowledge management research have put less emphasis on discussing how particular information becomes usable and how it is used in different contexts and situations. The purpose of this paper is to address this major gap, and introduce and discuss the applicability of the notion of situational appropriation of information for shedding light on this particular process in the context of daily information work practices of professionals. The study is based on the analysis of 25 qualitative interviews of archives, library and museum professionals conducted in two Nordic countries." To quote Isto's blog "The paper is freely available to download for one year on the Emerald Insight website. Preprint of the text is available on this site."

- Seeber , K. (2015). Teaching “format as a process” in an era of Web-scale discovery. Reference Services Review,   43(1), 19 - 30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/RSR-07-2014-0023 a preprint is here. "This paper aims to present academic librarians with a framework for teaching and assessing information literacy in response to advancements in online discovery. Advancements in online discovery require academic librarians to develop new means of teaching and assessing information literacy, with an emphasis on having students use critical thinking to evaluate sources. "

- Halpern , R and Tucker , C. (2015). Leveraging adult learning theory with online tutorials. Reference Services Review, 43 (1), 112 - 124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/RSR-10-2014-0042

- Helberger , N., Kleinen-von Königslöw , K. and van der Noll , R. (2015). Regulating the new information intermediaries as gatekeepers of information diversity. info,  17 (6), 50 - 71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/info-05-2015-0034 "The purposes of this paper are to deal with the questions: because search engines, social networks and app-stores are often referred to as gatekeepers to diverse information access, what is the evidence to substantiate these gatekeeper concerns, and to what extent are existing regulatory solutions to control gatekeeper control suitable at all to address new diversity concerns? It will also map the different gatekeeper concerns about media diversity as evidenced in existing research before the background of network gatekeeping theory critically analyses some of the currently discussed regulatory approaches and develops the contours of a more user-centric approach towards approaching gatekeeper control and media diversity."

- Yu , L. (2015). Back to the fundamentals again: A redefinition of information and associated LIS concepts following a deductive approach.  Journal of Documentation,  71(4), 795 - 816. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JD-12-2014-0171

- Duff , A. (2015). Cyber-Green: idealism in the information age.  Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 13 (2), 146 - 164. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JICES-10-2014-0049

- Canuel , R. and Crichton , C. (2015). Leveraging apps for research and learning: a survey of Canadian academic libraries. Library Hi Tech, 33(1), 2-14.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/LHT-12-2014-0115  "The purpose of this paper is to assess the response of Canadian academic libraries to the rapid proliferation of mobile application (apps), many of which are useful for research, teaching, and learning. "A survey was conducted to identify existing initiatives that address the use of mobile apps to facilitate research, teaching, and learning at the libraries of the 97 member institutions of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). Based on this survey, this paper describes how apps are promoted, curated, organized, and described by today’s academic libraries. A review of the literature places this survey in its broader context."

-  Renaud , J. et al  (2015). Mining library and university data to understand library use patterns. The Electronic Library, 33 (3), 355 - 372. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EL-07-2013-0136. "Library data are often hard to analyze because these data come from unconnected sources, and the data sets can be very large. Furthermore, the desire to protect user privacy has prevented the retention of data that could be used to correlate library data to non-library data. The research team used data mining to determine library use patterns and to determine whether library use correlated to students’ grade point average."

This is another (non-IL) I thought looked interesting: Sun , Q and Kang , H. (2015). Infusing work-based learning with Confucian principles: a comparative perspective. Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, 5 (4), 323 - 338. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/HESWBL-04-2015-0019
Photo by Sheila Webber: My cherry blossom, April 2016