Full Paper

Cultural diversity has been conceptualized and studied in diverse ways. On the one hand, cultural diversity can be conceptualized based on people’s ethnic and national backgrounds. On the other hand, cultural dimensions are defined based on individuals' behaviors and traits. Sociologists further categorize the latter depending on the degree of typicality in cultural artifacts/activities and individuals’ omnivorousness over cultural tastes.

To understand issues about information accessibility within communities, research studies have examined human, social, and technical factors and contexts by taking a socio-technical view. While this view provides a profound understanding of how people seek, use, and access information, this approach tends to overlook the impact of the larger structures of information landscapes that shape people’s access to information.

This paper describes innovative partnerships: university - federal agency (between the University of Maryland and the Office of Innovation at the National Archives and Records Administration - NARA) and university - industry (between the College of Information Studies or “iSchool” at the University of Maryland and Archive Analytics Solutions Ltd.) where we are developing automated scalable workflows that involve digitization, OCR, information extraction, and linking into interactive maps and graph databases, and where digital preservation and archiving are performed using an innovative NoSQ

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.