Luanne Silvia Sinnamon
Research Classification
Research Interests
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Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters
Biography
I have been a faculty member at the iSchool at the University of British Columbia since 2007. I completed my phd in 2008 at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.
Research Methodology
Recruitment
Design and use of Internet search engines; online information interaction and information design
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Graduate Student Supervision
Doctoral Student Supervision
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Learners participate in complex environments that are comprised of diverse and distributed people, information, and tools. To better understand why this situation presents challenges for learners, and to examine how they seek to overcome these challenges, a two-part study was conducted. This research explores undergraduate engineers’ information interactions through a mixed methods study. Questionnaire responses and interviews with students were analyzed to investigate how undergraduate engineers seek, manage, and interact with discipline-specific information and how they share documents with their peers. This work included questionnaire responses from 103 students enrolled in undergraduate engineering programs at a large university in Canada. Follow-up interviews with 18 of these respondents extended accounts of students' experiences.The findings contribute to understandings of how undergraduate engineers navigate complex information environments. Given that students have access to a substantial amount of information communicated in many ways, their ability to select and apply information was found to be integral to their participation in these environments. Results identified and described the latent relationship between learning tasks and document genres. It was also found that students regularly collaborate through social media and other backchannels to sidestep their instructors’ efforts to monitor and control how and what information they share.Findings suggest implications for understanding how students develop awareness about pairing documents with the learning activities in which they are engaged. While students are coping with complex information environments, they are not necessarily using the expected document genres, suggesting areas for adjustments in curriculum, information literacy instruction, and theoretical synthesis.
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No abstract available.
Information is increasingly available at the touch of a button, and yet limits are still present in the ability and willingness of individuals to access that information. These limits can result in information avoidance, a phenomenon in which individuals prefer not to seek or be exposed to information. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident and more problematic than in health, where information has been linked to better health outcomes, and where the consumer health movement has shifted the responsibility of health information seeking from healthcare professionals to patients. This dissertation examines such health information avoidance, looking in particular at the mechanisms that constitute this phenomenon, and the affective, personality, and information source factors that influence it. Two studies were performed, the first an online survey using the crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk for recruitment, and the second a user study in which participants interacted with health information and were then interviewed. Both studies also employed scales such as the Need for Cognition scale, the Threatening Medical Situations Inventory (examining monitoring and blunting styles), and the Positive and Negative Affect short scale. Results indicate that very few people are willing to report practising complete information avoidance. However, numerous participants reported avoiding some information, often through filtering mechanisms such as self-regulation and delegation. This evidence of partial avoidance suggests that information avoidance can be located on a continuum of information seeking behaviours, rather than existing as a simple negation of information seeking. Significant factors that influence the practice of information avoidance were found to include affect such as fear, disgust, and disinterest, all factors that can indicate a threat to the participant. While the personality and information source factors tested were also influential, this work found that for these participants, affective factors often functioned as a primary influence. This work indicates that health information avoidance is a situation-dependent information behaviour, rather than primarily a personality trait as previously claimed. As such, it should be included in models that depict people’s general behavioural patterns with regard to information, such as Wilson’s (1999) General Model of Information Seeking and Johnson’s (1997) Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking.
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Some homeless men are very frequent public library users, but are rarely asked by librarians for their opinions about libraries. Semi-structured individual interviews of 23 homeless men investigated how they used libraries and explored their understanding of the library as a place in downtown Vancouver, BC. Despite not being eligible for regular library membership privileges, often due to simply not having an address, 14 participants were still very frequent Central Library users. Homelessness is a high risk lifestyle and 4 participants who purposely avoided street danger in the Downtown Eastside found a safer niche within the Central Library, while 15 participants purposely chose to physically distance themselves from the stigma of homelessness and mostly kept to themselves while they were at the Central Library, which was often daily from opening until closing. Public space in libraries is especially valuable to homeless people who have no private space of their own. Amenities such as washrooms, comfortable seating and access to the Internet, which are not as freely available elsewhere as they are at libraries, made the Central Library the preferred library among all participants. Just like many of the other library users at the Central Library, participants enjoyed very ordinary library experiences, such as reading for pleasure, learning, playing online games, searching the Internet and sending and receiving emails, and some of the most frequent users created a new social identity for themselves as library users, which is far more socially acceptable than the stigmatized social identity of homelessness. Being a frequent library user gave some participants a routine and stability and the anonymity of being an ordinary library user at the Central Library gave participants an opportunity to be treated respectfully by other library users. Seventeen participants believed that using public libraries had greatly improved their lives and used libraries as transition spaces to improve their circumstances. Some participants who were frequent library users said they would like to have their own library membership for the Central Library, perhaps as much to give them a sense of belonging in their own community as for borrowing library materials.
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The traditional subscription-based publishing system of scholarly journals is in crisis, and open access has been suggested as an alternative model. However, participants in the traditional publishing system are engaged in a debate on its feasibility as a replacement for subscription-based journals. As the gatekeepers who determine what is published in scholarly journals, editorial boards play an important role in scholarly communication. However, although there are some studies of their role in scholarly publishing no major study has focused on their role in influencing journal access polices, and in particular, their role in influencing journal policies to make some or all articles free or to allow self-archiving by authors.Through a survey of editors and editorial board members of major scholarly journals, this study explores their role in the open access movement. It examines the positions of the major publishers of scholarly journals (categorized as commercial, scholarly society and university publishers) to open access. In addition, it examines the awareness of journals’ editorial boards of their publisher’s access polices and whether their own attitudes to open access were consistent with those of their publishers. Editorial boards’ behaviour as a force for change in setting open access policies is explored. The study also considers how their level of responsibility at the journal and their own open access publishing behaviour are related to their perception and promotion of open access.The findings of this study show no clear-cut difference between categories of journal publisher in term of offering some or all of their articles free to users, and in allowing authors to self-archive. The respondents in this study demonstrated some awareness about journal access policies, with higher awareness of policies regarding offering free articles than of those on self-archiving. The majority of the respondents are satisfied with subscription-based journals although their opinion on offering free articles and on self-archiving is generally positive. They were not willing to take strong measures to influence journal access policies such as resigning from the editorial board. The level of responsibility at the journal, gender, and publishing behaviour influenced the respondent’s answers to the questionnaire.
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Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
No abstract available.
No abstract available.
No abstract available.
No abstract available.
No abstract available.
No abstract available.
Publications
- Exploring Open Data Initiatives in Higher Education (2020)
- The Information Needs of Canadian Midwives and Their Evidence Informed Practices: A Canada-Wide Survey (2020)
Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, - A Case Study of New England Open Data Portals (2019)
JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 11 (1), 59--80 - Interacting with archival finding aids (2016)
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67 (4), 994-1008 - Investigating the role of user engagement in digital reading environments (2016)
CHIIR 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, , 71-80 - On measuring learning in search: A position paper (2016)
CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 1647 - The effects of textual environment on reading comprehension: Implications for searching as learning (2016)
Journal of Information Science, 42 (1), 79-93 - Contextualizing the information-seeking behavior of software engineers (2015)
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66 (8), 1594-1605 - Supporting the modern polyglot - A comparison of multilingual search interfaces (2015)
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 2015-, 3483-3492 - Documenting and studying the use of assigned search tasks: RepAST (2014)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 51 (1) - Does the perceived usefulness of search facets vary by task type? (2014)
Proceedings of the 5th Information Interaction in Context Symposium, IIiX 2014, , 267-270 - Searching as learning (SAL) workshop 2014 (2014)
Proceedings of the 5th Information Interaction in Context Symposium, IIiX 2014, - Searching as learning: Novel measures for information interaction research (2014)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 51 (1) - Untangling search task complexity and difficulty in the context of interactive information retrieval studies (2014)
Journal of Documentation, 70 (6), 1118-1140 - What motivates the online news browser? News item selection in a social information seeking scenario (2014)
Information Research, 19 (3) - A cross-domain analysis of task and genre effects on perceptions of usefulness (2013)
Information Processing and Management, 49 (5), 1108-1121 - SIGIR 2013 workshop on modeling user behavior for information retrieval evaluation (2013)
SIGIR 2013 - Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, - Assigning search tasks designed to elicit exploratory search behaviors (2012)
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, - Future directions for information programs: Data from students at six Canadian schools (2012)
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, , 636-638 - Introducing FRED: Faceted retrieval of e-government documents (2012)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 49 (1) - Digging into digg: Genres of online news (2011)
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, , 674-675 - E-informing the public: Communicative intents in the production of online government information (2011)
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, , 443-444 - Making functional units functional: The role of rhetorical structure in use of scholarly journal articles (2011)
International Journal of Information Management, 31 (1), 21-29 - Student perceptions of the information professions and their master's program in information studies (2011)
Library and Information Science Research, 33 (2), 120-131 - A taxonomy of functional units for information use of scholarly journal articles (2010)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 47 - Information interaction in 140 characters or less: Genres on Twitter (2010)
IIiX 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 Information Interaction in Context Symposium, , 323-326 - Supporting semantic navigation (2010)
IIiX 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 Information Interaction in Context Symposium, , 359-362 - The goldilocks effect: Task-centred assessments of E-government information (2010)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 47 - Digital media internships: LIS education 2.0 (2009)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 46 - Diverse approaches to "tasks" in information science: Conceptual and methodological insights (2009)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 46 - Multiple facets of personalization (2009)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 46 - Predicting stopping behaviour: A preliminary analysis (2009)
Proceedings - 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2009, , 750-751 - Fishing in query pools for task representations (2008)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 45 - One degree, three streams: Three populations? (2008)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 45 - Tagging for use: An analysis of use-centred resource description (2008)
IIiX'08: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Information Interaction in Context, , 6-12 - Task effects on interactive search: The query factor (2008)
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 4862 , 359-372 - Usability beyond the interface: Designing a portal for text analysis (2007)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 44 - X-Site: A workplace search tool for software engineers (2007)
Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR'07, - Enterprise search behaviour of software engineers (2006)
Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2006, 645-646 - Towards genre classification for IR in the workplace (2006)
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 176, 30-36 - Modeling task-genre relationships for IR in the workplace (2005)
SIGIR 2005 - Proceedings of the 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, , 441-448 - Searching for relevance in the relevance of search (2005)
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3507, 59-78 - WiIRE: The Web interactive information retrieval experimentation system prototype (2004)
Information Processing and Management, 40 (4), 655-675 - Priming the query specification process (2003)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 40, 381-388 - The role of context in search: Examining the effect of subject domain on the search interface (2003)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 40, 543-544 - Understanding the brevity of web queries (2003)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 40, 517-518
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