This paper is a reflection on the process of engaging with Twitter from the perspective of a researcher and a user. It includes the author’s experiences as a content producer on Twitter during wildfires in Colorado, followed by the experience of researching tweets produced during Hurricane Sandy. The goal is to outline the author’s subjective understanding of both experiences, and how those experiences play off each other to inform future social media use and future research.
Sexual assault is a prevalent, yet underreported and stigmatizing crime that disproportionately affects college-age students. The literature of Library & Information Studies does not currently address the ways in which survivors may seek information after an assault. Blending findings from Psychology and LIS, this study proposes the Information Seeking of Sexual Assault Survivors (ISSAS) model, which examines the seeking process through various stages of healing. The article concludes with directions for future research as well as insights on serving survivors within the academic library while being mindful of one's appropriate professional role. exual assault is a crime that impacts people from all walks of life. The National Crime Victim Survey reported 0.5 sexual assault per 1,000 U.S. women in 2009, 1 with an average of 207,754 individuals being assaulted each year. 2 In the United States, data from a variety of studies demonstrate that sexual assault on college campuses is a very real problem. 3 However, it is difficult to know the full extent of the problem on college campuses, as sexual assault is a widely underreported crime because of the stigma survivors face. 4 This stigma may also affect our ability to fully understand the extent of the problem and has implications for library service in terms of how, when, and if survivors of sexual assault will seek information related to recovery. The prevalence of sexual assault on college and university campuses suggests that improving services to survivors should be a part of LIS research and practice. However, reluctance on the part of survivors of sexual assault to self-identify, and the potential for researchers to do harm inadvertently to this population in the context of research, makes them a difficult population to study and to serve. This article proposes a model for conceptualizing the information-seeking process of survivors of sexual assault through the lens of survivors' healing process. The objective of the Information Seeking of Survivors of Sexual Assault (ISSAS) model is to be informative about how survivors of sexual assault seek information as an aid to providing library services to this population, particularly in academic libraries. The ISSAS model, however, may be applied to sexual assault survivors in other contexts
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