The exponential growth of digital libraries and the proliferation of scholarly content in electronic formats have made data mining and information retrieval essential tools for effectively managing, organizing, and disseminating knowledge. This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of the advancements and challenges in these fields, with a…

Typical critical patterns for studying children's literature, defined in this study as a written text intended for a reader up to the age of 14, make it difficult to chart generic change across a large corpus of texts. Traditionally, criticism of children's literature focuses on cherry picked archetypes, exemplars, and the standout extraordinary.…

This dissertation analyzes how North Carolina State University's (NCSU) James B. Hunt Jr. Library extends the ways in which the information architectures of academic research libraries can function as a technology, as discourse, and as rhetoric. The starting point for the analysis is the libraries of antiquity, which functioned technologically as…

PubMed® is an on-line literature database hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Containing over 21 million citations for biomedical literature--both abstracts and full text--in the areas of the life sciences, behavioral studies, chemistry, and bioengineering, PubMed® represents an important tool for researchers. PubMed® searches return…

This dissertation was situated in the crossroads of educational data mining (EDM), educational digital libraries (such as the National Science Digital Library; http://nsdl.org), and examination of teacher behaviors while creating online learning resources in an end-user authoring system, the Instructional Architect (IA; http://ia.usu.edu). The…

The worked-example effect, an application of cognitive load theory, is a well-supported method of instruction for well-structured problems (Chandler and Sweller, 1991; Cooper and Sweller, 1987; Sweller and Cooper, 1985; Tuovinen & Sweller, 1999; Ward and Sweller, 1990). One limitation is expertise-reversal effect, where advanced students…

The category of Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) accounts for almost 50% of the students identified for special education services in America (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education, 2010). The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the participating school system's (PSS) Special Education Procedural Guide…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

Millennial students make up a large portion of undergraduate students attending colleges and universities, and they have a variety of online resources available to them to complete academically related information searches, primarily Web based and library-based online information retrieval systems. The content, ease of use, and required search…