Qualitative Study

Urban renewal was a project of the American government that aimed to reconstruct poor urban neighborhoods. Because community-level data that shows the underlying mechanisms of urban renewal has not been curated in a systematic way, due to the complexity and volume of the relevant archival collections, we aim to digitally curate property acquisition documents from the urban renewal projects that affected the Southside neighborhood of the city of Asheville, North Carolina, in the form of a map-based, interactive web application. This paper reports early findings from interviews.

Independent business owners often prefer informal information sources to formal ones such as library collections. Part of these preferences is rational because contextual and application-oriented information is usually available from informal sources, which are theoretically the best matches for this kind of information. This suggests that, in addition to outreach strategies, efforts to integrate informal sources of business-relevant information can improve public libraries' ability to support independent business owners' information needs.

Social media has provided a huge amount of user-generated data in capturing urban dynamics. Among them, place-level human behavior has been largely detected through people’s check-in records at certain places. Conventionally, places are characterized by a set of pre-defined features, often specified by the owner of the places. In this paper, we argue that capturing socially-meaningful features and dynamics of an urban place may also be done by analyzing human activity traces.

This paper presents the findings from a project about how international students seek and acquire information during their settlement in an unknown geo-spatial environment. Through semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and cognitive mapping with twenty international students, this study examines their information needs, information sources, and settlement experiences in the host country.