Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Publication Selecting a specialized education database for literature reviews and evidence synthesis projects(Cambridge University Press, 2025-04-01) Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; Droog, Alissa; Weaver, KariWhile the Institute of Education Science’s ERIC is often recommended for comprehensive literature searching in the field of education, there are several other specialized education databases to discover education literature. This study investigates journal coverage overlaps between four specialized education databases: Education Source (EBSCO), Education Database (ProQuest), ERIC (Institute of Education Sciences), and Educator’s Reference Complete (Gale). Out of a total of 4,695 unique journals analyzed, there are 2,831 journals uniquely covered by only one database, as well as many journals covered by only two or three databases. Findings show that evidence synthesis projects and literature reviews benefit from the careful selection of multiple specialized education databases and that ERIC is insufficient as the primary education database for comprehensive searching in the field.Publication The changing functions of libraries in higher education(Elsevier, 2022-11-01) Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; Eustis, JenniferAcademic libraries, like higher education institutions, have multiple missions. They preserve information, provide that information to members of the institutions they belong to, and help people find and use that information. They serve both the highly specialized research needs of advanced scholars and the large volume of routine learning needs of undergraduate students. They also provide study spaces for students and access to hardware and software for learning and scholarship. While the missions continue, the mechanisms for executing the library’s missions have expanded in the digital age.Publication An APC Trap?: Privilege and the Perception of Reasonableness in Open Access Publishing(Iowa State University Digital Press, 2025) Cantrell, Melissa H.; Mezick, Jennifer; Estill, Matthew; Caldwell, Rachel; Collister, Lauren B.Introduction This article investigates funding sources reported by authors of open access (OA) articles at four R1 universities in the United States along with these authors’ perceptions of Article Processing Charges (APCs). The study suggests a cognitive dissonance among many respondents, where there appears to be a desire and willingness to participate in open access publishing which is at odds with a sense of unreasonableness and an uneven distribution of ability of researchers to participate. Literature Review Much of the literature on APCs centers on rising prices, how commercial publishers profit from this model, and the resulting inequities in OA publishing. Some information exists about resources for funding APCs, including grant funding, library programs, and fee waivers. Methods We surveyed authors who published an OA article in the calendar year 2022. The survey asked whether there was an APC, the funding source for the fee, and the author’s perception of the reasonableness of APC prices and their relative ability to pay compared with their peers. Results From 321 total respondents, grant funding was the largest source of APC funding, and authors reported fees of over US$1500 as unreasonable. Discussion This study confirms the hypothesis that external grants are the primary support for authors paying APCs, and beyond that, authors use a variety of sources to support their publishing fees. Respondents characterized APCs in general as unreasonable for less-well-resourced colleagues. Conclusion Though authors were generally able to find funding or have fees waived, they perceive a threshold of reasonableness for APCs.Publication Library Use and Student Success: Focus on First Generation Students(Taylor & Francis, 2025-02-17) Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; Berube, Suenita; Jiang, Zhehan; Ting, CaiThis study seeks to test for relationships between use of library study rooms, materials, and instruction with student success as measured by retention to the second year, graduation within four years and grades. A cohort of 4,605 first time undergraduate students were considered. Findings show that students who had checked out materials, had library instruction, or using used library study rooms had higher GPAs, retention to the second year, and greater likelihood for graduation in four years. Many of these relationships between library use and student success were particularly strong for first generation college students for whom academic engagement is particularly important.Publication Unseen Labor: An ATG Interview with Ann Kardos and Gretchen Neidhardt(2022-01) Kardos, Ann; Neidhardt, Gretchen; Kubilius, Ramune K.Ann Kardos, creator of the "Unseen Labor" project, sought to tackle the mysteries of metadata work in a visual way. She invited colleagues to visually illustrate the story of metadata labor through stitching. ATG occasional contributor, Ramune Kubilius, asked some questions in order to learn more about this interesting, multi-faceted project.Publication Review of Digital Historical Research on Southeast Europe and the Ottoman Space, edited by Dino Mujadžević (post-print)(2021-01) Seifried, Rebecca MReview of Dino Mujadžević (ed.), Digital Historical Research on Southeast Europe and the Ottoman Space, Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe Volume 35 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021). https://doi.org/10.3726/b17129Publication STEM Librarians and the Future of Scholarly Publishing: Scholarly Communication Concepts that Researchers Need(2022-01) Pacion, Kelee; Radik, Melanie; Duong, Khue; Martinez, Jessica; Bogucka, RoxanneThis narrative reflection describes how five librarians developed a scholarly communication workshop intended for a specific conference with an audience of science researchers, then proceeded to modify it to fulfill different professional development opportunities. We explored themes around open access, the current and future landscape of scholarly publishing, and the decision factors for researchers when choosing a journal to submit papers to. Identifying further venues for the workshop and submitting formal and informal proposals leveraged our knowledge of our own professional associations and what might appeal to those audiences.Publication Yours, Mine, Ours: Some Best Practices for Authors Writing Collaboratively(2021-01) Knapp, Rachel A.; Borrego, Paulina; Atwood, Thea PThe authors of this article focus on the best practices we learned through our experiences in scholarly writing, with a specific focus on the collaborative writing process. For the sake of this paper, we define collaborative writing as a collective process of creating a scholarly work for distribution, either through formal (e.g., peer-review) or informal (e.g., white paper) venues. This article is, in part, in response to our lack of formal training and addresses a situation in which we felt other researchers might find themselves. We hope to provide starting points for others interested in writing collaboratively and help empower those wishing to have a broader conversation about writing. Our scope here is limited to collaborative writing, and as such, we exclude other components of collaborative scholarly work, such as generating an idea, pursuing a grant, or analyzing data. Nevertheless, we do endeavor to provide resources and advice broadly applicable and relevant to all disciplines. After a brief literature review, included to provide a broader context, the authors give some background information on their own experiences with co-authorship prior to this article. However, the authors dedicate most of this article to presenting reflections, advice, and a curated list of open-access resources related to some of the critical aspects and challenges of collaborative writing.Publication Cross-functional policy development for a Data Repository(2021-01) Atwood, Thea P.; Jerome, Erin; Kardos, Ann; McGinty, Stephen; Radik, Melanie; Reznik-Zellen, RebeccaPolicy can articulate the scope of work. For repositories that house data, policy can help users manage expectations, especially for individuals who are new to data sharing, or where expectations for sharing data have changed. We cover some of the current literature around the process for writing policy, specifically focusing on policy for data collections and repositories, factors that encouraged us to create a repository policy, our collaborative process for creating the policy, and lessons learned. We hope that others can use our processes to build their own policy that reflects the needs of their campuses and scholars and further moves the needle toward the “Library as Publisher” model.Publication Reveiew of Can't Pay Won't Pay: the Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition(2021-01) Taylor, JaimeWhile focus on the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic means that parts of this book will, we hope, soon feel dated, Can’t Pay Won’t Pay captures the economic zeitgeist of the early 21st century. A mere five chapters and just over 150 pages, the brevity of the book makes it an accessible introduction to the reasons so many individuals, communities, and even countries have found themselves deeply in debt. While fewer words are spent on remedies to the problem than describing it, the authors recommend the formation of debtors’ unions, modeled on labor unions. Through such unions, they suggest, collective power can force the abolition, or at least renegotiation, of debts. Can’t Pay Won’t Pay will help higher education librarians understand the conditions under which their students are laboring, as well as illuminating both the personal and systemic positions of librarians themselves.Publication New Data on Southern Euboean Landscapes: Results of the Norwegian Archaeological Survey in the Karystia(2021-01) Tankosić, Žarko; Laftsidis, Alexandros; Psoma, Aikaterini; Seifried, Rebecca M; Garyfallopoulos, ApostolosWe present the results of a diachronic survey of the Katsaronio plain in the Karystia, southern Euboea, Greece. The project was organized under the aegis of the Norwegian Institute at Athens with a permit from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture under the official name of the Norwegian Archaeological Survey in the Karystia. Five years of fieldwork (2012–16) covered an area of 20 km2 in a large agricultural plain located about 5 km north-west of the town of Karystos. The survey identified 99 new findspots with a range of dates spanning from the Final Neolithic to Early Modern times. Here we present the collected prehistoric through Roman data, which represent the bulk of the acquired evidence. One of the notable features of the assemblage is the vast quantity of lithics that were recovered, numbering over 9,000 and consisting mainly of obsidian. Certain periods were absent from the evidence, such as post-Early Bronze Age prehistoric and Geometric, while others were represented with varying intensity. We offer initial interpretation of the patterns observable in the evidence in an attempt to reconstruct the past use and habitation of this part of Euboea.Publication The Stone-Built Palaiomaniatika of the Mani Peninsula, Greece(2021-01) Seifried, Rebecca M.There are over 170 stone-built settlements in the Mani Peninsula that scholars believe were inhabited from the Middle Byzantine period (eighth to thirteenth centuries AD) up until the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. These enigmatic sites are known as palaiomaniatika, and roughly half of them are abandoned today, their massive stone walls in various stages of collapse and overgrown by olive trees and unchecked brush. This paper reviews the state of scholarship on the sites, outlining the typical characteristics of the vernacular architecture and discussing variations in settlement size and layout. A case study of the abandoned village of Koulouvades is offered to illustrate how targeted archaeological sampling and archival analysis can be fruitfully combined to illuminate the timeline of village abandonment. The final part of this paper is a call to action to archaeologists of the medieval and post-medieval eastern Mediterranean to adopt the theoretical lens of household archaeology. Through excavations of rural villages, data can be gathered that can answer questions about social process from a “bottom-up” perspective. Despite the body of art historical and architectural studies that have been carried out at the palaiomaniatika over the past 40 years, the lack of archaeological excavations limits the questions we can ask about daily life in these villages, as well as about the factors that contributed to their abandonment. Yet, they are an ideal candidate for household-scale excavations that would contribute to a wider understanding of social process in rural landscapes, not only in the Peloponnese but across the eastern Mediterranean as a whole.Publication Introduction(2021-01) Stewart, Deborah E. Brown; Seifried, Rebecca M.Deserted Villages: Perspectives from the Eastern Mediterranean is a collection of case studies examining the abandonment of rural settlements over the past millennium and a half, focusing on modern-day Greece with contributions from Turkey and the United States. Unlike other parts of the world, where deserted villages have benefited from decades of meticulous archaeological research, in the eastern Mediterranean better-known ancient sites have often overshadowed the nearby remains of more recently abandoned settlements. Yet as the papers in this volume show, the tide is finally turning toward a more engaged, multidisciplinary, and anthropologically informed archaeology of medieval and post-medieval rural landscapes. The inspiration for this volume was a two-part colloquium organized for the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Francisco. The sessions were sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology Interest Group, a rag-tag team of archaeologists who set out in 2005 with the dual goals of promoting the study of later material and cultural heritage and opening publication venues to the fruits of this research. The introduction to the volume reviews the state of the field and contextualizes the archaeological understanding of abandonment and post-abandonment as ongoing processes. The nine, peer reviewed chapters, which have been substantially revised and expanded since the colloquium, offer unparalleled glimpses into how this process has played out in different places. In the first half, the studies focus on long-abandoned sites that have now entered the archaeological record. In the second half, the studies incorporate archival analysis and ethnographic interviews—alongside the archaeologists’ hyper-attention to material culture—to examine the processes of abandonment and post-abandonment in real time.Publication The Legacy of Byzantine Christianity in the Southern Mani Peninsula, Greece, after Imperial Collapse(2021-01) Seifried, Rebecca MReligion is one of the many potential mediums for emphasizing ethnic difference and highlighting group membership. Particularly in mountainous landscapes, which are difficult for imperial or state powers to control, religion may be a key means of asserting peripherality. The residents of the Mani Peninsula, Greece, converted to Orthodox Christianity during the reign of the Byzantine Empire and maintained this religious affiliation even after Byzantine collapse in 1463 CE, when the region came under Ottoman and, later, Venetian rule. This study reviews the research on Mani’s Byzantine churches to date – much of which is published in Greek – and presents new interpretations of the religious practices of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine communities of Mani. This case study sheds light on the role of religion in rural communities and the potential reasons for religious continuity in peripheral landscapes during periods of social transformation. In particular, the firm adherence of Mani’s residents to Orthodox Christianity emphasized their ethnic difference from the ruling authorities and simultaneously undermined these authorities’ ability to assert hegemonic power in the region.Publication Library Space Redesign (Virtual)(2009-06-21) Billings, Marilyn SThis session will present a series of "think pieces" for both librarians and other campus constituencies to explore as we create new ways of working together to meet the needs of students, faculty and researchers of the 21st century. Topics will include new scholarly communication techniques, digital repositories, new partnerships and ways of marketing our scholarly outreach activities, and examine the implications for our current and future workforce.Publication ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst: FY20 Annual Report(2020-01) Jerome, ErinPublication Toward a Conceptual Framework for Scholarly Information Seeking(2020-01) Fitzgerald, Sarah RoseThis article reviews literature on information seeking theories and discusses the relevance of those theories to the information seeking habits of faculty with research expectations. A new model is constructed to depict the factors influencing scholarly information needs. The model incorporates career advancement factors, the influence of discovery tools, and the influence of interpersonal networks. Theoretical frameworks from T.D. Wilson and James Krikelas play important roles in building the model to describe scholarly information needs. This model can be of use to librarians, discovery tool designers, and university administrators supporting the information seeking, research, and teaching of faculty.Publication Seascapes and Fresh Water Management in Rural Greece: The Case of the Mani Peninsula, 1261–1821 CE(2019-01) Seifried, Rebecca MThe Mani peninsula is a semi-arid landscape with few natural sources of fresh water, yet it supported a dense population during the Late Byzantine and Ottoman periods. This paper reviews the archaeological and historical evidence for water-management practices in Mani, concentrating on its domestic-scale hydraulic infrastructure (cisterns and saltpans) and the ports and harbours along its coasts. The data point to a critical shift in household-level social organization at the turn of the 18th century, underscoring the fact that people living in supposedly ‘peripheral’ regions like Mani nevertheless engaged in far-reaching networks of contact and exchange.Publication Scholarly Publishing at a Crossroads: Scholarly perspectives on Open Access(2020-01) Fitzgerald, Sarah Rose; Jiang, ZhehanThe cost of access to scholarly research creates inequity for readers with varying resources. Open access publishing is an avenue to address this inequity. This research employed a survey of scholars to discover what they know and think about open access. The survey elicited both faculty and doctoral student perspectives. Data were analyzed according to rank and discipline. Although the majority of scholars across disciplines agreed that their work should be freely available to all readers, there were significant differences between disciplines regarding whether scholars had distributed their publications through open access. The survey instrument was examined through Exploratory Factor Analysis.Publication University of Massachusetts Amherst Response to Draft Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting From Federally Funded Research(2020-01) Atwood, Thea PResponse to the Office of Science and Technology Policy's Draft Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting from Federally Funded Research. Original call for public response is available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/17/2020-00689/request-for-public-comment-on-draft-desirable-characteristics-of-repositories-for-managing-and