Faculty
Research Update
David Eichmann
In addition to assuming the responsiblities of the SLIS Directorship
in July 2002, David Eichmann continues his research in information
extraction and question answering from text and detection of novel
information from document streams. He and D.J. Park (a Computer Science
doctoral student) recently presented their work in digital video shot
boundary detection and story segmentation at the TRECVID Workshop
in Washington, D.C. He also continues to run the Online@Iowa course,
which enrolls 2200+ freshmen each fall.
Jim Elmborg received the Outstanding Publication
of 2002 award from
the Instruction Section of the Association of College and Research
Libraries
for "Teaching at the Desk: Toward a Reference Pedagogy"
(Portal, 2002). He published articles in three journals, Reference
Services Review, Research Strategies, and LOEX Notes, and he presented
a paper at ALISE with Christine Pawley that will be published in JELIS.
It's entitled, "Historical Research as Critical Practice and
Relationship: The Carnegie Libraries in Iowa Project." He also
convened a panel at ALISE on "Theory, Pedagogy and the Academic
Library" and presented at the ACRL conference in Charlotte, NC.,
the Workshop for Instruction in Library Use in Fredericton, NB, LOEX
of the West in Eugene, OR., and at the Writing Program Administrators
conference in Park City, UT.
Marc Light
Much of Marc Light's work this past year has focused on extracting
information automatically from bioscience literature. He gave presentations
on this work at the UI/ISU Joint Bioinformatics Workshop in Iowa City,
at ZymoGenetics, a biotechnology company in Seattle, and at a bioinformatics
conference in Australia. He also continued his work on building systems
that can find answers to specific questions in a document collection
and presented a paper on the topic at a workshop at Stanford. This
summer Light received an Obermann Interdisciplinary grant to work
on data mining and language dysfunction with Dr. Coleman Martin of
the Neurology department. In addition, he received an ATAC Innovations
in Instructional Computing Award to work on building web interfaces
to human language technology.
Christine Pawley
With help from a second Old Gold Fellowship from the University of
Iowa in the summer of 2003, Christine Pawley has been continuing her
research into the history of women's reading in the twentieth century
Midwest, with a particular focus on Iowa and Wisconsin. Her planned
book will contain chapters on reading and the public library, the
rural school, small-town newspapers, homemakers' newsletters, a book
club and the county extension system. Publications that appeared during
2002-03 include articles in Book History and American Studies, and
the introduction to a new issue of Dee Garrison's Apostles of Culture:
The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 . An article
on information literacy will appear in the Fall 2003, issue of The
Library Quarterly.
Rebecca Platzner reports a successful first year.
She chaired a panel on “Food as Metaphor” at the Children’s
Literature Association International Conference, in El Paso Texas.
She is working on an article based on her dissertation research, and
she is developing a class in Services for Children and Young Adults
that will be offered in Spring, 2004. Rebecca reports that she continues
to be impressed by the caliber of SLIS students, and notes that she
enjoyed meeting students at seven sites around the state when she
taught via the Iowa Communications Network (ICN) this past spring.
Padmini Srinivasan spent the Fall 2002 semester
at the Lister Hill
research center of the National Library of Medicine, Maryland as part
of
her UI Faculty Scholar award research activities. She returned to
the
University and enjoyed teaching her courses during the Spring 2003
semester. A proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation
for
research has been funded and the three year, $312,000 project, beginning
August 2003 will explore the design and evaluation of text mining
strategies
in biomedicine. Papers in this area were presented at several conferences
over the summer. She returns to Lister Hill in Fall 2003 for the last
semester of her Faculty Scholar award.
New Faces and Transitions
Jane Bradbury - Program Coordinator
I have just completed my first year as SLIS Program Assistant. As
a recent graduate of the School, I have experienced firsthand the
type of education that our graduates obtain, as well as the collegiality
that the School offers to both its faculty and students. I will work
to continue to improve my services to the faculty, students, and alumni,
so please feel free to contact me if you have a concern.
Becky Thoms - A Friendly New Face in the Front Office
We are happy to announce the appointment of Becky Thoms as the new
departmental secretary at SLIS. Becky’s efficient and cheerful
efforts during a busy year of transition have proven to be a great
help to students and faculty alike.
