Information Access - Information Matters

As a mixed Ojibwe woman from Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, I carry both pride and a sense of responsibility in how I represent my identity through academic and artistic spaces. I recently graduated from the Master of Information in Library Science Program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. My goal is to become a full-time librarian who integrates Indigenous knowledge into library and information systems. I am excited to share my painting with the Information Matters community as one way to contribute an Indigenous perspective in our shared field. This acrylic self-portrait, funded by an Ontario Arts Council bursary, reflects the concept of the “Red Thread of Information” (Bates,1999) and visually embeds my Anishnaabe worldview. The piece invites viewers to reflect on how identity and information phenomenon can be fused together into creative expressions.

Featured Translation

July 9, 2024 Siyao Cheng

Generative AI and Copyright Laws: Bridging the Divide

One of the concerns is that Generative AI’s output in response to user prompts often draws from copyrighted works, eliciting a question nowadays: Can the content created by Generative AI qualify for copyright protection itself? Here, we strive to extend our insights into the question.

Featured Original

May 17, 2024 Quinn Remington

Resource “Accessibility” Is More Than Just “Posting It Online”

Not everyone has the time and money to book a flight across the world to look at an artifact in person, so how do researchers with limited funding access one-of-a-kind resources? The Internet is a godsend for collaboration, letting us share photos of ancient pottery fragments, 3D scans of mummified tissue, and create virtual tours of ancient Egyptian tombs. However, sharing becomes a little more complicated when that artifact contains thousands of individual pages in 61 diaries, handwritten by a steamship clerk living in nineteenth-century Iraq. The Svoboda Diaries Project (SDP) focuses on exactly that. For nearly two decades, this project has used new and exciting digital preservation methods and extensive collaboration to make these diaries accessible to everyone.

Translation

May 17, 2023 Siyuan Cheng

Survey of Smartphone Applications for the Subjective Hearing Disorder of Tinnitus

Tinnitus can affect concentration, sleep, communication and result in heightened stress, anxiety, and depression, but an effective treatment remains elusive. A promising treatment option, one that has the support of experts from various domains, is that of smartphone applications for mitigating tinnitus-related symptoms. To work around the shortcomings of the existing tinnitus apps, we propose implementing improvements from an information science perspective to enhance user experience.

Translation

April 20, 2023 Karen Wickett

Critical Data Modeling: Tools to Trace Oppression in Information Systems

Critical data modeling uses tools from data modeling and systems analysis to analyze information systems, connecting social critiques to the structure of digital information systems and data objects.

Education Featured

March 30, 2023 Dr. Shalini R. Lihitkar

The Open Access Movement: Opportunities and Hurdles

The Open Access movement is the movement to make available or publish scholarly literature on the internet to readers free of charge and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions.

InfoFire Multimedia

March 7, 2022 Shalini Urs

Changing Contours of the iField: A Fireside Chat with Mike Eisenberg

Listen to this episode of the fireside chat series, InfoFire by Information Matters, with Professor Mike Eisenberg, dean emeritus, University of Washington Information School.

Editorial

January 28, 2022 Chirag Shah

In AI We Trust, But Should We?

We are giving up more and more agency and control to AI systems as we build more trust in them. But there are dangers to doing so—both for the users and the systems. We need a better understanding of this trust and the inner workings of the systems to create a sustainable future.