The field of digital librarianship has reached the point of requiring specifically educated professionals for its continued growth. Consequently, it is necessary to create the academic programs that will develop the future leaders and educators of the field. The Cultivating Digital Librarianship Faculty program (CDLF) is preparing four leaders in digital librarianship through innovative coursework, in-depth research, praxis-based teaching experiences, and active engagement with the wider scholarly community. These carefully coordinated efforts center on four areas critical to the next phase of digital library development: multimedia collections, digital library services, bridging physical and digital libraries, and digital library evaluation. The CDLF program will is being implemented cooperatively over four years, beginning in the fall 2009 term, with the generous support of a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
The primary goal of the program is to educate and train four full-time doctoral students to become innovative leaders in the area of digital librarianship. Each student in the program works closely with one of the faculty team (Francisco-Revilla, Geisler, and Westbrook) as primary advisor and personal mentor. The students are supported by IMLS-funded tuition assistance and computing tools. As part of developing their practical skills, students will be working with the data, structure, and interface of the IPL, the first public library of, and for, the Internet community.
It is expected that the CDLF graduates will have both the theoretical understanding and practical skills necessary for leading the field into maturity through their own research and teaching. The next generation of digital librarians will be influenced by the curricular innovations and rigorous research of these new faculty.
The CDLF program and its students will be evaluated in terms of domain knowledge (e.g., satisfactory progress in coursework and successful annual doctoral student reviews), research growth (e.g., achievement of research internship goals and research presentation goals), and instructional growth (e.g., achievement of teaching internship goals and curricular innovation contributions to the program web site). In addition, the program graduates will be tracked annually for the five post-graduate years to determine their impact on the field in terms of their professional positions, research output, curricular developments, and influence on digital librarianship. The program’s research and instruction materials will be shared fully with the wider IS community.
Personnel, School of Information, University of Texas
Lynn Westbrook, Associate Professor, PI
Dr. Lynn Westbrook centers her research on digital reference, e-government social services, and the information interaction behavior of people in crisis, including substantive work in crisis shelters and aid agencies in both community and online contexts. Her work has been published in JASIST, IPM, and C&RL, presented at ACRL, ASIST, and ALA, and funded by IMLS.
Luis Francisco-Revilla, Assistant Professor, Co-PI
Dr. Luis Francisco-Revilla centers his research on physical/digital connections among visual media in a wide variety of settings, including extensive work at the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University on projects funded by NSF and NSDL. His work has been published International Journal on Digital Libraries, ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), and Hypertext and presented at JCDL and ASIST
Gary Geisler, Assistant Professor, Co-PI
Dr. Gary Geisler centers his research on digital library development and design in organizational and professional contexts, including significant work as a nationally known consultant with projects funded by IMLS, NLM, NSF, and the Library of Congress. His work has been published in ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and presented at JCDL and ASIST.
CDLF Fellows
Jeff Crow
Jeff is interested in non-traditional methods of human-computer interaction for creating user interfaces for populations that are underserved by the current desktop computing paradigm, including visually impaired users and users with autism and other cognitive disabilities. Another research interest is developing ways to understand real-world events through multiple types of social media collections.
Jeanine Finn
Jeanine is interested in issues of public policy and information, particularly in respect to the use and creation of digital resources. A speicific area of interest is how social networking tools can be used to construct (or deconstruct) knowledge and contribute to cooperative democratic spaces in digital environments.
Eryn Whitworth
I see digital collections as a bridge for people to interact with media across physical and digital repositories. My goal as a master's student was to develop a technical skill set necessary to conduct research on building digital collections of fine art images, particularly abstract works, that would offer a richer sensory experience. As a new PhD student I would like to work on projects that combine some of the following topics:
- multi-media digital libraries
- non-desktop multi-touch computing
- user interface design
- information design
- interaction design
- user-defined semantic association
- design of tools for experts
Brandon Wiley
Brandon Wiley is interested in the intersection of people, technology, and culture. His research centers around the boundary areas where information is difficult to find, communicate, or preserve. His past work focused on Internet censorship and New Media technologies. His current research projects explore topics such as the application of information theory to information studies topics, the use of cloud computing for digital video libraries, semantic compression, building user models for evaluating information retrieval systems, and providing global access to social networks despite pervasive Internet filtering.
 |
 |