US Midwest Chapter News
US Midwest Chapter Board, September 20
Dr. Brady Lund has been elected to the US Midwest Chapter Board, in the position of Chair-elect. He will serve on the Midwest Chapter Board from November 2022-Nov. 2023, and then will take over as Chapter Chair for 2023-2024.
IMLS National Leadership Grant: Creating accessibility and usability digital library guidelines in the mobile environment, August 4
Professor Iris Xie (PI) and Assistant Professor Wonchan Choi (co-PI) at UW-Milwaukee, School of Information Studies have been awarded a $695,631.00 Applied Research grant from IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries. The project "Universal Accessibility and Usability of Digital Libraries in the Mobile Environment: Developing design guidelines to support blind and visually impaired users” was one of 39 projects selected out of 139 applications. The three-year grant goes from August 1st, 2022 to July 31st, 2025. This project extends the PI’s prior IMLS funded project that focused on creating accessibility and usability digital library (DL) guidelines in the desktop environment to the mobile environment.
This project will generate a new framework including 1) the theoretical approach that takes into account both social and gap disability theories and interactive information retrieval (IR) models which consider all users rather than just sighted users; 2) the types of help-seeking situations encompassing both design and content/format related difficulties that blind and visually impaired (BVI) users encounter in their interactions with DLs using various mobile devices; 3) mobile DL accessibility and usability guidelines (mDLAUG) addressing each type of help-seeking situation; 4) a report on how DLs currently comply with mDLAUG; and 5) methodology that can be applied to develop similar guidelines for DLs and other types of IR systems to address additional groups of underserved users' mobile accessibility and usability issues.
The project team, led by Dr. Iris Xie, represents different DL stakeholders who develop, research, and use DLs. The following organizations and/or their representatives serve as partners and/or advisory board members: organizations developing DLs (DL Federation, Digital Public Library of America, HathiTrust, OCLC, OER Commons, ProQuest, Milwaukee Public Libraries, Milwaukee Public Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, UWM Libraries, and Recollection Wisconsin), organizations serving the BVI community (American Council of the Blind, American Foundation for the Blind, National Federation of the Blind, Envision, and Vision Forward), Trace R&D Center, and ASIST standards committee.
The project will help policymakers, researchers, and practitioners to understand DL design problems in diverse mobile contexts and enable developers to enhance DLs for universal access. Please see the official IMLS Announcement: https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-252289-ols-22
2022 ASIS&T Annual Meeting Award announced, August 3
Evelyn Castro Cox
The U.S. Midwest Chapter is pleased to announce the winner of its 2022 ASIS&T Annual Meeting Award: congratulations to Evelyn Cox.
Evelyn Castro Cox is a doctoral candidate in Information Studies and the Native Nations Center Coordinator at the University of Oklahoma where she obtained her MLIS as well as her Graduate Certificate in Archival Studies in 2018. She obtained her BA in English from UCLA, has worked in education at multiple levels, and is a wife and mother of two. Evelyn is also a 2016-2018 SAA Mosaic Program Fellow, a 2018 AAPB Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellow, and an EASP Scholar. Evelyn's work centers around documenting and preserving history that is inclusive of the many voices and vantage points not formerly represented or acknowledged in the record. Her areas of interest are related to information access and representation, particularly around the use of technology for social and cultural preservation and transference.
Many thanks to Brian Stettner, Chair, and the members of the award committee, as well as to all who applied for the award.