Research Centers, Institutes and Profiles

Abramovich’s research includes finding and understanding the learning opportunities presented by the intersection of the learning sciences and emerging technology, especially assessment for learning. This includes research on micro-credentials and digital badges, online rating systems, makerspaces and open education resources—all to help guide education improvement and reform. He is the director of the Open Education Research Lab, whose mission is to create a better understanding and improvement of open education in all its forms.

Albertson studies and writes about interactive information retrieval (IIR), with specific interests intersecting areas of interface design, human-centered computing and information management. A considerable amount of his work focuses specifically on visual and video information retrieval, including the users, information needs and tasks, and designs of retrieval systems. Albertson also engages rural and other disadvantaged communities in order to help find solutions for digital information sharing, access and learning.

Dodson specializes in human-computer interaction and information retrieval to study how individuals learn and collaborate in online information environments. In his work so far, he has enjoyed investigating a range of issues in these areas, from the ethics of search engines to the information practices of engineers. His research focuses on the implications of how people make sense of information, as well as the design of systems that support learners’ needs and potential.

Hand’s research centers on higher education and information access. Her current research agenda examines public libraries as an information resource to college-bound patrons based on experiences working in both higher education (admissions and academic advising) and public libraries. Her work also explores the experiences of first-generation students—as users of academic libraries and students and professionals in the LIS field.

Julien’s research focuses on information behavior and digital/information literacy. She has also conducted research on acceptance of altmetrics in the discipline of information science, and multiple analyses of methodological practices in information behavior research. Her work in digital literacy has focused on examining students’ experiences of information literacy, librarians’ experiences of the instructional role, and information literacy instruction practices in academic and public libraries in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Her work in information behavior focuses on daily life contexts and on people’s affective experiences.

Soergel makes scholarly contributions in many areas within and outside of information science, emphasizing connection in a wide field of ideas, including knowledge organization, relevance, sensemaking, learning, problem solving and IT support for new ways of learning and assessment. For the coming years, he will focus on contributions of knowledge organization supported by information technology, to the transformation of learning and education.

Sun’s research spans several related fields, including information seeking, information retrieval and data mining. Her work in information seeking and information retrieval focuses on developing information systems to support task-specific and data-intensive information applications, such as legal e-discovery, intelligence analysis and medical information retrieval. Her work in data mining has focused on scientific information presentation in public media, automatic scoring system for STEM education and academic information on the web. She has also conducted research on systematic evaluation of interactive information systems.

VanScoy studies the professional thinking of information professionals and how professionals’ use of formal and informal theory affects practice. She is interested in how practice is affected by professionals’ beliefs, values and attitudes and by their conceptualizations of their work. Using primarily qualitative methods, Dr. VanScoy investigates professional thinking in both national and international contexts. Her interest in diversity and inclusion inspired her to explore the topic within the context of racial and ethnic identity, as well, leading to a research paper award and a research grant sponsored by divisions of the American Library Association. VanScoy is interested in improving research and its application to practice. In addition to methodological papers and presentations, she investigates how various research methods are used to study practice.

Wang's research focuses on information retrieval in a multilingual and multimodal environment. He is particularly interested in developing retrieval models and techniques and evaluating them to support users’ access to digital information. He has done extensive research in several areas, including cross-language information retrieval, spoken document retrieval and e-discovery. Recently, he has extended his work to the study of short text conversation in open social media domains.