IMLS awards $510,205 to SI for study of institutional repositories

(Sep 2005) The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in Washington, D.C., has awarded the University of Michigan $510,205 to investigate the development of institutional repositories in colleges and universities.

Three School of Information professors will conduct the study of "Institutional Repositories: Ensuring Continued Access to Learning Objects."

Assistant Professor Soo-Young Rieh is the principal investigator for the three-year grant. Working with her are Professor Karen Markey and Associate Professor Elizabeth Yakel. Markey and Yakel as co-principal investigators will identify models and best practices in the administration, technical infrastructure, and access to institutional repositories.

Institutional repositories are digital collections that capture and preserve the intellectual output of teaching and research activities, such as data files from research projects, instrumentation, courseware, E-prints, and learning objects. They are under development on many academic campuses and are becomingly an increasingly important information resource for researchers, faculty, students, and other members of the academic community.

"The main goal of the research project is to investigate what ‘success’ means in terms of institutional repositories, identify specific factors contributing to their success, and determine effective ways of accessing and using these repositories," Rieh says.

Using various research methods including surveys, case studies, interviews, and experimental studies, project investigators will examine the issues of institutional repositories from the perspectives of both repository users and their parent institutions.

Expected project outcomes include the identification of key elements contributing to the models of success; specification of variables that influence success factors; evaluation of institutional repositories based on user studies; and instruments and protocols for re-use by other investigators and repository staff.

For more information about the project, contact the investigators: Rieh, Markey, or Yakel.

ASIS&T honors Rieh with Best Paper Award for 2005

(Nov 2005) Assistant Professor Soo Young Rieh received the 2005 John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST Paper Award at the American Society for Information Science and Technology annual meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Her paper, "On the Web at Home: Information Seeking and Web Searching in the Home Environment," appeared in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (Volume 55, Issue 8, 2004, pp. 743-753). According to the ASIS&T Jury Committee, "The results make fascinating reading, and the study helps illuminate how the Web is becoming integrated into people's daily lives."

Rieh's paper reports on a study exploring the environmental factors that influence users' information seeking at home. The data were collected through at-home interviews based on search activity diaries kept by the subjects. The data were analyzed on four levels: home environment, information seeking goals, information retrieval interaction, and search query.

Findings indicated that the home, indeed, provided a distinct information use environment beyond physical setting alone in which the subjects used the Web for diverse purposes and interests. Based on the findings, the relationships among home environment, Web context, and interaction situation were identified with respect to user goals and information seeking behaviors.

The John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST Paper Award was established in 1969 to recognize the best refereed paper published in the volume year of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Yakel's paper receives award from American Medical Informatics Association

(Oct 2005) Associate Professor Elizabeth Yakel has been cited by the American Medical Informatics Association with the Harriet Werely Award for writing a paper that made the greatest contribution to advance the field of nursing informatics.

The coauthor was Gail Keenan, formerly of the U-M School of Nursing and now of the University of Illinois-Chicago. The paper was on "Promoting Safe Nursing Care by Bringing Visibility to the Disciplinary Aspects of Interdisciplinary Care."