Margaret Heller and Franny Gaede

“ The Justice of Search Engine Traffic Universities with a social justice or responsibility mission need to ensure their research is part of the public conversation, and assessing how effectively users access the repository content through search engines can be a demonstration of whether that is happening. Search engines form an integral layer through which information is accessed, in particular by novice searchers who are unfamiliar with the non-indexed web and are unlikely to find material not in search engines (Halavais, 2009, p. 41) . ”

“ Making articles and datasets available open access is an important way for privileged institutions to improve research results and enable partnerships without putting their less resourced colleagues in an uncomfortable position. ”

“ The need to demonstrate value in an era of shrinking higher education and library budgets only compounds these issues, giving rise to rhetoric trending towards quantification and validating return on investment. ”

“ Conclusion For institutions with a social justice mission, improving the depth of social justice content collected may improve repository ranking in social justice-related search results. Collection development strategies should focus on departments and/or individuals who are working in social justice-related areas, which defined broadly could encompass much of an institution. For institutions that emphasize social justice, it may be easier to approach faculty who might not otherwise have an interest in open access issues. ”

“ Just as we do not presume all users from a low-income country are underprivileged, we do not assume all social justice-related search topics are part of social justice research projects.
Rather, our data shows that an open access repository was being used in the public sphere of the open web on a social justice topic. ”

“ A social justice term list was developed to permit corpus overlap analysis with each institution’s search keywords, while the World Bank country income lists were used to determine international access by low and low-middle income countries. RESULTS Universities with mission statements explicitly mentioning social justice or Catholic social teaching had greater overlap with the social justice corpus. Low and low-middle income countries as defined by the World Bank were among the most engaged users. All institutions had at least one social justice search term in their top ten ”

“ Researchers often do not go into a search with a particular vision of what they want to find; rather, what they find tends to shape what they are looking for (Halavais, 2009, p. 87) . Therefore, a repository needs to do well in search results to contribute to public discourse.
Methods To create a “social justice impact” metric requires quantifying these various types of justice. First, how well-accessed by search engines is the social justice-related content that exemplifies the social justice mission of the university? ”

“ DISCUSSION The results of this exploratory study indicate that it is possible to use repository data to evaluate the success of an institution’s open access and social justice initiatives. The year-over-year improvement of Loyola’s numbers suggest in addition that it is possible to increase social justice impact through collection development. Performing an analysis of social justice impact can be used as an overall strategy for repository success and outreach on campus, particularly for institutions where social justice is an important part of the campus identity. ”

“ University libraries can contribute to the fulfillment of university mission statements related to Catholic social teaching, education for personal and social responsibility, and community engagement and development by making research products and social justice-related content openly available. Catholic social teaching exhorts the wealthy to aid the less fortunate proactively (Leo XIII, 1891) . ”

“ These quantitative analyses miss some important aspects of open access, however. This article will establish that providing access to people who would otherwise lack it is a crucial role for libraries in sustaining the public sphere. Libraries fail to make the argument for why they are a social good if they ignore the altruistic impacts of repositories. This is an important consideration for institutions funding repositories based on their institutional character or mission of social justice or social responsibility. ”

“ Social justice term analysis The search engine keywords report contains columns for the keywords, number of sessions, percentage of new sessions, numbers of new users, the bounce rate, pages per session, and average session length. Similar to the geographic analysis, the goal was to examine both the highly used keywords and an aggregate of how many of them covered social justice research topics, which required a form of corpus overlap analysis. ”

“ These interests have monopolized public opinion and political thought because they are no longer challenged by an external, autonomous public authority engaged in rational discussion about politics. Habermas suggests that state intervention in the economy in the 19th and early 20th century (linking economic issues with political ones) and the emergence of uncritical consumption from new media disrupted the fragile socioeconomic balance that permitted the public sphere to be formed in the first place. ”

“ METHODS Using web analytics data for search keywords from eight institutions and geographic usage data from nine institutions, the authors were able to determine how well social justice related content is accessed by search engines and how much overall content is accessed internationally, particularly by lower-resourced countries. ”

“ Introduction As systems of scholarly communication have changed radically over the last few decades, librarians have been on the front lines of trying to navigate a more complex and potentially less fair system. ”

“ John Buschman examines the role of libraries in the public sphere in his 2003 book Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy and follow-up article in Library Philosophy and Practice (Buschman, 2005) . He suggests that the continued defunding of libraries and schools can be traced back to the long-term crumbling of the public sphere under neoliberal economics ”

“ I think it is very important that we are not seen from the North as beggars. I’m sorry to say the term. I think we need to show people that they can partner with us because they will gain from our science. ”

“ This paper argues that libraries must move beyond pragmatic justifications for institutional repositories. Repository managers must understand their work in the context of social justice, lest they become complicit in unjust scholarly communication systems. To that end, this paper presents a model for assessing the social justice impact of open access institutional repositories in higher education and some demonstrations of the model. ”

“ Assessments of open access institutional repositories generally have focused on citation advantage, since these are quantifiable and may have a direct institutional benefit in terms of faculty prestige. ”

“ This work examines the structural transformation of society from the rational-critical debate of 18th century salon culture to a manipulated and inauthentic consumer culture constructed primarily by mass media and other private interests. ”