This week in CIS 720 (Monday, 4:30p-5:30p) Jennifer Beamer will be presenting her dissertation research in advance of her final defense — “Examining Open Access Information Infrastructures: A Socio-Technical Exploration of Institutional Repository Models In Japan And The United States.” Peer feedback encouraged.
Abstract:
This dissertation investigated the relationship of organizations with open access institutional repositories (IRs), the institutional and social contexts in which the IRs and the organizations evolved, and the social contexts in which they have been deployed and used (Kling, Rosenbaum & Sawyer, 2005). In terms of organizations supporting and maintaining IRs on a national level, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in North America and its global affiliate SPARC in Japan are similar, and for this research they were examined and compared as case studies. Thus far, the literature has explored some aspects of the technical infrastructure of IRs, including various social practices and processes that have led to IR growth. Still, fewer studies have been conducted on how organizations shape IR socio-technical contexts in one society compared to another.
For its analytical framework, this research used social informatics (SI) principles, i.e., the premise that technology user practices and research outcomes are mutually constituted by the interactions between technology affordances and broader context (Kling et al., 2003). Moreover, Scott’s (2008) Institutional theory was used as a lens to understand organizational characteristics, including norms, rules, and activities of the organizations, thus providing a framing device for establishing boundaries via pillars and carriers to shed light on how SPARC NA and SPARC Japan have supported IR development.
This study’s methods of data collection and analysis, i.e., Kling et al.’s Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STIN) and Scott’s Institutional theory, provided direction for bounding, collecting, and analyzing of SPARC NA and SPARC Japan. Multiple research field-site visits were made, and qualitative semi-formal and in-depth interviews were performed with selected individuals in these organizations. Additionally, the analysis of data from supporting documents, websites, reports, and participant observations at organization-sanctioned activities contributed to the findings of this research. This study aims to contribute to the expansion of the Socio-Technical framework for understanding organizations and IRs in specific, and to the literature on the technological transformation and communication of research in general.