OCLC Programs and Research and the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) announce research grant awards to Kathryn La Barre and Carol Tilley of the University of Illinois, Michael Khoo of Drexel University, and Bill Kules of The Catholic University of America. The awards were presented in January at the ALISE 2009 Annual Conference Awards Reception in Denver, Colorado.
* Kathryn La Barre, Ph.D., and Carol Tilley, Ph.D., of the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois will conduct a research project, "Folktales and Facets," designed to enhance access to folktales in print and non-print formats through the development of user- and task-focused models of information representation. The goal of the project is to develop a next-generation catalog prototype with enhanced records for access to folktales that give special consideration to the shared and unique information-seeking tasks of scholars, practitioners and laypeople.
* Michael Khoo, Ph.D., of the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University, will develop and evaluate a tool to support non-specialists who engage in metadata work, specifically the quality control of Dublin Core records, in his project, "Addressing the metadata bottleneck by developing and evaluating an online tool to support non-specialists to evaluate Dublin Core metadata records." The proposal assumes that metadata work requires specialist expertise, and that this expertise needs to be represented carefully in the tool if non-specialists are to use it successfully. The required specialist expertise will be identified in a requirements-gathering process that includes brainstorming with metadata experts, before being incorporated into the metadata tool via a series of interactive design prototyping usability exercises.
* Bill Kules, Ph.D., of the School of Library and Information Science at The Catholic University of America will examine how searchers interact with a Web-based, faceted library catalog when conducting exploratory searches. The project, "Investigating Gaze Behavior in Faceted Search Interfaces for Library Catalogs," will apply multiple methods to investigate important aspects of faceted search-interface use, including searcher gaze behavior, how gaze behavior changes as searchers become familiar with the interface, how gaze behavior varies by the stage of the search, whether gaze behavior correlates with click behavior and how searchers describe their searches, tactics and actions. It will yield empirical data that will be useful for both practitioners and researchers, refine the procedures proposed for creating and validating exploratory search tasks—two important steps in controlled or semi-controlled evaluations—and thereby contribute to efforts to improve the validity of evaluations and make tasks more comparable across studies.
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