Rich Gazan

• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Information resources and practices have always been social, but traditional information literacy instruction tends to prioritize a model of an individual searcher evaluating library‐curated resources, while social collaboration tools and user‐generated content sites provide more participative paths and practices for research at all levels. Using d...

Online learning has taken great leaps forward with the emergence of Web 2.0 and has paved the path for learning technologies that can be conveniently accessed by users provided they are connected to the Internet. One of the most profitable learning techniques, “Learning from the crowd,” or augmenting “collective intelligence,” has attracted the att...

NASA astrobiology researchers from diverse fields often have little sense of how their work relates to one another. Using document analysis and participatory design methods, this paper reports on a scientometric analysis project to distill essential elements of astrobiology documents to identify them across diverse domains. Twelve NASA astrobiology...

In this study, we combine bibliometric techniques with a machine learning algorithm, the sequential Information Bottleneck, to assess the interdisciplinarity of research produced by the University of Hawaii NASA Astrobiology Institute (UHNAI). In particular, we cluster abstract data to evaluate Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge subject categories as...

This article presents a review and analysis of the research literature in social Q&A (SQA), a term describing systems where people ask, answer, and rate content while interacting around it. The growth of SQA is contextualized within the broader trend of user-generated content from Usenet to Web 2.0, and alternative definitions of SQA are reviewed....

The worst-case scenario for the redesign of an established online community is a subsequent mass migration of its core members to other sites. Using data from transaction logs, content analysis and participant observation, this paper presents a descriptive analysis of the fragmentation of a social question answering (Q&A) community in the immediate...

Virtual reference (VR) and social Q&A (SQA), both refer to some form of information seeking activity using online Q&A. They are often seen as apples and oranges, but there is a need to understand their similarities and differences in order to derive lessons from each side to help the other. The proposed panel will bring together prominent researche...

Most social Q&A sites are designed to support solo searchers who access the aggregated opinions of other users, and ask and answer questions of their own. The purpose of this paper is to show how users in one social Q&A community defy system constraints to engage in brief, informal episodes of collaborative information seeking called microcollabora...

This paper provides an overview and discussion of successful elements of translation, integration and synergy from past studies of interdisciplinary science practice.

Describes the application of the Textpresso retrieval and concept extraction engine to the Astrobiology Integrative Research Framework (AIRFrame) project.

Astrobiology is an inherently interdisciplinary field concerned with questions of life in the universe. This paper describes the design and ongoing implementation of the Astrobiology Integrative Research Framework (AIRFrame), an open source, ontology-driven information system designed to ingest and analyze heterogeneous inputs of both published and...

Evidence from a long-term participant observation suggests that a critical point in the evolution of an online community occurs when participants begin to focus less on topical content and more on one another. When content restrictions were removed from a question answering community and social technologies were introduced, the proportion of factua...

Social network sites like MySpace are increasingly important environments for expressing and maintaining interpersonal connections, but does online communication exacerbate or ameliorate the known tendency for offline friendships to form between similar ...

This panel brings together researchers who focus on Q A sites, those that focus on digital reference, and those who bridge between the two, into what we believe will be a lively discussion.

Today's digital reference service environment faces many opportunities as well as a number of threats. This panel presents three different approaches, methods of data collection, and approaches to analyze and examine quality issues in virtual reference (VR) as well as other reference platforms. One threat has to do with sustainability of VR quality...

In order to incorporate Web 2.0 functionality effectively, digital libraries must fundamentally recast users not just as content consumers, but as content creators. This article analyzes the integration of social annotations - uncontrolled user-generated content - into digital collection items. The literature review briefly summarizes the value of...

One of the most interesting effects of social computing is that the line between users and designers has become increasingly uncertain. Examples abound-user-generated content, rating and recommendation systems, social networking sites, open source software and easy personalization and sharing have effectively allowed users to become design partners...

An increasing number of students are seeking homework help outside library structures and systems, such as on social reference sites, where questions are answered by online community members who rate one another's answers and provide collaborative filtering in place of traditional expertise. This paper reports the preliminary results of a participa...

The most sustainable online communities are those that allow and encourage their users to have a voice in how the community evolves. The proliferation of online communities with collaborative filtering mechanisms, where user feedback is aggregated to shape future interactions, makes it necessary to understand why participants in online communities...

The results of a study of a collaborative digital library development project suggested that activities positively associated with project success included various forms of connection work, such as integrating diverse people, organizations, and collections of information. The digital library study results are juxtaposed with the results of a survey...

A user-centered, iterative design philosophy requires a common language between users, designers and builders to translate user needs into buildable specifications. This paper details the rationale, evolution and implementation of use scenarios—structured narrative descriptions of envisioned system use—in the development of the Alexandria Digital E...

Understanding how designers of information and communication technologies conceptualize and perform their work can contribute to the larger goals of more effective design environments and more effective information systems. This article discusses the narrative analysis method in the context of a digital library design project related to environment...

We report on the first two years of a five-year project to design and evaluate the Alexandria Digital Earth ProtoType (ADEPT), a digital library of geo-referenced information resources, for use in undergraduate education. To date, we have established design principles, observed classroom activities, gathered baseline data from instructors and stude...

THIS IS A DISCUSSION ON THE RESEARCH DESIGN FOR AN educational evaluation of the Alexandria Digital Earth ProtoType (ADEPT), a digital library of gee-referenced information resources. ADEPT is being studied in undergraduate classrooms at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The article provides...

Administrative and institutional barriers tend to confine evaluation to the funding period when the system is being designed, and when its uses and effects can only be guessed at. In this short paper I will discuss a digital library project in environmental science where some of these evaluation issues arose, the value of eliciting narrative data f...