Beth Bartlett's Applied Project

Overall Design Methodology

data mining from Web sites

Although Web sites do not provide a complete picture of all library media specialist activities, information posted on those Web sites can represent what library media specialists want students, school personnel, and the public to know about their programs.
Descriptions of media literacy activities on these Web sites could be interpreted as evidence that library media specialists are incorporating media literacy.
A limitation of this methodology: "absence of evidence" does not equal "evidence of absence"; if no or very little mention of media literacy activities is found on these sites, more study through other methods (such as surveys or direct observation) may be warranted.

Who/What?
school library media program Web sites from Georgia public schools
How many?
30 (10 each from high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools)
How were they selected?
(for more details, see Appendix A: Web Site Sampling Procedure)

identified through school system links from the Georgia Department of Education Web site
randomly selected to ensure a geographic mix of schools
checked to ensure the sites had enough content for further examination

How were they recruited?
Not applicable -- only sites that are publicly accessible were included.

Gathered URLs for Georgia school library media program Web sites
From 75 randomly selected schools (25 from each level), I was able to identify 47 school library media program Web sites. (For more details, see Appendix A: Web Site Sampling Procedure.)
Evaluated the sites against the content criteria to narrow the list to 30 sites (10 from each level) (For more details, see Appendix A: Web Site Sampling Procedure.)
After piloting the data collection procedure and collection spreadsheet, examined each Web site as follows:

Viewed the main page identified as "the" media center home page
Viewed up to 3 pages that were part of the same site (with the same "base" URL) that were one link away from the home page
I picked the 3 second-level pages by looking at the links on the home page and using my judgment as to which were most likely to contain evidence of media literacy activities.
Visually scanned each page for indicators of media literacy activities

Considered text, images, text of links, and descriptions of external or deeper-level pages
For the purposes of this project, did not consider
- content on external sites
- contents of the online catalog

Used a Word macro to search each page's text for terms/descriptors that could possibly represent media literacy activities (from a master list I compiled) and then re-examined these results to make sure I had not missed an example of media literacy

Used a spreadsheet to collect observations as I viewed each Web page (For column headings, see Appendix B: Collection Spreadsheet.)
Due to the changing nature of Web content, I copied and pasted the Web pages' text into individual documents.

Terms that might indicate media literacy were flagged (in red) using the Word macro.
Based on my reading, I highlighted probable media literacy in green, possible or opportunities for media literacy in yellow, and added descriptive comments for all.

I had planned to do basic analysis on the data, such as

percentage of Web sites that showed evidence of media literacy activities
extent of media literacy activities in typical schools (number of activities identified on individual/overall Web sites)
differences between types of media literacy (Was there more focus on entertainment media, news media, or consumer media?)
differences between activities among elementary, middle, and high school levels
a brief description of each site that showed evidence of media literacy activities, including a listing of those activities

However, there were not enough sites with evidence of media literacy, so I analyzed the following instead:

continue reading: IV. Results