The increasing prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa over the past twenty-five years continues to erode the continent's health care and overall welfare. There have been various responses to the pandemic, led by Uganda, which has had the greatest success in combating the disease. Part of Uganda's success has been attributed to a formalized information, education, and communication (IEC) strategy, lowering estimated HIV/AIDS infection rates from 18.5% in 1995 to 4.1% in 2003. We formulate a model to investigate the effects of information and education campaigns on the HIV epidemic in Uganda. These campaigns affect people's behavior and can divide the susceptibles class into subclasses with different infectivity rates. Our model is a system of ordinary differential equations and we use data about the epidemics and the number of organizations involved in the campaigns to estimate the model parameters. We compare our model with three types of susceptibles to a standard SIR model.

This paper proposes a practical framework for social justice research in the information professions by sharing examples from three qualitative studies, each of which represents an information service and/or application of social justice ideals for meeting the needs of a particular underserved population. In order to develop the framework and to encourage consideration of the social justice angle within mainstream LIS discourse and practice, the three studies are examined in light of social justice elements and principles. What is common to these studies is an underlying need to bring about a change in existing power dynamics between who we as information professionals consider central and who we consider peripheral in our teaching, research, and service missions.

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How does information lead to changes in human behavior? Why have current information theories been inadequate to shed light on this and related questions? Library and Information Science (LIS) has arrived at a crucial juncture in its relatively brief theoretical history. In addition to the cognitive and physical perspectives in our study of information, a new paradigm has been suggested; the affective paradigm. This new perspective offers keys to unlocking questions about the nature of the interaction of human and information. In recent years we have developed deeper knowledge and deeper specializations, drawing together and combining knowledge from multiple fields in order to advance our own knowledge. The relationship between information needs and information seeking has been well studied. The ways in which people use information is not as well understood because of the complex nature of human behavior. Drawing from other fields that study human behavior, however, muddies the traditional boundaries of LIS, creating some possible discomfort as we trespass into lesser known intellectual territory. Pushing our boundaries also forces questions of our self-identity as a discipline. What constitutes Library and Information Science, either in whole or in part, becomes more difficult to define and can lead to greater fragmentation. Alternatively, the incorporation of multiple perspectives may be the defining core of what constitutes LIS. The focus of this talk is to look at LIS from the outside in, from a multidisciplinary perspective, in order to shed light on questions of how information can lead to changes in human behavior. Drawing from other fields of study, the impact of information on human behavior will be explored in light of what other fields may have to offer.

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