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Information Access

Original
Ronald Yaros

A User’s Digital DIET Overrides Interest in What Gets Read—Can “Smart Story” Structure Bridge Quick Scans and Deep Reading in One Interface?

Have you ever opened something you genuinely wanted to read—only to leave within seconds? This happens even with topics we care about. The problem is not a lack of interest. It is that every user arrives with real-world constraints that shape engagement in the moment. I call this the digital DIET: the mix of available time, environment, individual interests, and device conditions that determines what gets attention, what gets scanned, and what gets ignored.

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Original
Nove Anna

From Uneven Access to Shared Support: Responding to Information Privilege

This is what information privilege looks like in practice: the ability of some people to access information that others cannot, shaped by affiliation and economic context. It also shapes visibility in which work becomes easy to find, cite, and treat as “authoritative.” The ACRL Framework’s “Information Has Value” frame invites us to examine how information is embedded in economic and social systems, and how unequal access influences what counts as legitimate and trustworthy knowledge.

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FeaturedOriginal
Ponego Letswalo

Proactive Privacy: Using AI to Automate PII Discovery and Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs)

The regulatory landscape of GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws has made fulfilling Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) a critical yet operationally complex challenge. Manual processes for locating an individual’s data across fragmented systems are slow, error-prone, and struggle to meet mandated deadlines. This article explores how AI-driven privacy tools are transforming compliance from a reactive burden into a proactive strategy.

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EducationFeatured
Jasmine Wemigwans

Looping the Red Thread of Information: Painting a Path of Indigenous Knowledge

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.

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FeaturedOriginal
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.

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Translation
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. 

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