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Parmit Chilana—Graduate Research
Doctoral Student, Information School at the University of Washington
Master of Science, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- TITLE: Investigating Information-Seeking Activities of Computer Scientists in Bioinformatics
- ABSTRACT: Bioinformatics is an emerging interdisciplinary field bringing together researchers and practitioners from various academic fields. While there have been a few earlier studies that explore the information needs and tasks of molecular biologists working in this area, there is a lack of substantial research on the information-seeking behavior of computer scientists and others involved with software development in the bioinformatics domain. This study is an analysis of data collected from semi structured interviews with participants from four different bioinformatics labs in North America. The research focus within these labs ranges from computational biology problems to applied problems in molecular biology and biochemistry involving use of computational tools. The findings from this study indicate that the information tasks of computer scientists consist of a combination of establishing understanding of the underlying biology and locating relevant technical information. Online information sources play a significant role, but there is need for more centralization, better methods of access and organization of resources, and more consistency among formats. Hence, more research is needed to develop the appropriate tools and techniques that can facilitate the interaction with online resources. More studies in this area are also needed to characterize the general information-seeking behavior of computer scientists.
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Phillip M. Edwards—Dissertation Proposal
Information School at the University of Washington
- TITLE: Mapping scholars' decision processes and factors that influence how they publish and distribute their work
- ABSTRACT: In recent years, mechanisms for distributing scholarly products—e.g., scholarly articles, working papers, datasets from the social and physical sciences, theses and dissertations, course materials, and locally-held library collections with research value--have increased dramatically in variety. Open access publishers (such as BioMed Central), electronic theses and dissertation archives, electronic course reserve and management systems, and institutional repositories have emerged to complement traditional methods of pre-print, monographic, and periodical distribution offered by university presses, professional organizations, and for-profit publishers. Several persistent challenges—the scholarly publishing crisis, efforts inspiring greater participation in open access initiatives, and the uncertain roles of libraries and librarians in this process—reflect our relative ignorance of how and why scholars do or do not incorporate participation in open access initiatives into their work practices. The main question guiding the current study, therefore, asks how scholars traverse the landscape of modern scholarly communication in the context of their professional lives. This study focuses on scholarly publishing activities in their entirety as well as a notable subset of scholarly communication activities that occur on the fringes of scholarly publishing. Drawing upon decision-making and social psychological literature, this study employs a retrospective verbalization method to elicit decisions and explanations for prior publication- and distribution-related behaviors made by scholars. This theory-driven, interview-based method, centered around contextualized practices, has the potential to contribute to our understanding in several ways: (1) by probing multiple decisions related to genres, behaviors, and constraints from an intra-individual perspective, (2) by examining common practices and routines across individuals at higher levels of abstraction, and (3) by modeling a useful method, particularly for academic librarians, scholarly communications staff, and institutional repository managers interested in performing needs assessment or formative evaluations of open access initiatives within the specific contexts of their campuses.
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Oksana Zavalina—Recent Papers
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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