Kathy Enger, assistant professor in the School of Education, had two articles published.
“Minorities and the Online University” was published in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Distance Learning. The article argues that minorities find the online learning environment to be somewhat free of racial biases and stereotypes, due to the horizontal nature of online communication. “In a traditional white college environment, minorities may not apply for admittance, or if they are admitted, may not stay to complete a degree,” Enger said. “The online environment offers an individual experience, without the pressure of typical peer norms.”
“Using Citation Analysis to Develop Core Book Collections in Academic Libraries” will appear in the next issue of Library and Information Science Research. According to Enger, the article suggests that citation analysis rests in role-set theory, a theory established by Robert K. Merton, a sociologist of knowledge. “Merton was criticized for his ethos of science, but accepted for role-set theory. The next step for citation analysis is to become a “citation” theory, and it can find a home in the sociology of knowledge set forth by Merton,” she said.
“For this article, I examined books purchased for the NDSU library using citation analysis and compared them to books purchased on traditional standards, such as book reviews and the university’s curriculum,” Enger said. “It was found that in specific subject areas, books chosen by the citation analysis method circulated as much as those chosen by the traditional method. Citation analysis quantifies the number of times an author is cited in the scholarly literature. If authors publishing in the scientific literature also publish books, and they are the authors cited most frequently, it would be logical that their books might circulate more.”
Enger has worked at NDSU for nearly 12 years and was social sciences librarian until 2007, when she began teaching and advising in the education doctoral program. She is currently working on an article that employs Husserl’s phenomenology to journals students wrote in an online diversity course she taught to NDSU doctoral students last spring.
She also is conducting a meta-analysis, meta-synthesis and content analysis of literature in nursing, social work, librarianship and education to determine what women in feminized professions might need from female leadership.