Global Impact Study survey data now available

Monday, July 16, 2012

Survey data from the iSchool's Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) Global Impact Study is now available to the public. Over 5,000 public access ICT users were surveyed in libraries, telecenters, and cybercafes in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines. The data collected through these surveys is now publicly available in both SPSS/SAV and CSV formats. Accompanying the data at this time are two documents: a "readme" file that provides information on the complexities of the data, including survey skip patterns, and a document that explains new variables that have been

David Levy interviewed by USA Today

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Research by iSchool Professors David Levy and Jacob Wobbrock showing the positive effects of meditation training in the workplace has captured the attention of journalists and bloggers across the country. The most recent example, a July 8 article in USA Today, features an interview with Levy that explores the inspiration for the research as well as his own meditation practice. Levy discusses reading Darlene Cohen's book, "The One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting to Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way," and wondering about meditation's effect on helping people concentrate and reduce workplace stre

Joshua Blumenstock joins the iSchool

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The iSchool is strengthening expertise in the areas of big data and information and communication technologies for development with the addition of Joshua Blumenstock as Assistant Professor. "I chose the UW iSchool because it has a vibrant and dynamic group of faculty who strongly support my two passions: global development and "big data" analytics," says Blumenstock. "I'm looking forward to working closely with students and faculty to make the iSchool one of the world's preeminent institutions for research in both of these areas." Blumenstock's recent work has shown how terabyte-scale d

Michael G. Moore wins 2012 Borgeson Award

Monday, July 9, 2012

MLIS Law student Michael Moore's paper, "Green with Envy, Not the 'Gold Standard in Legal Citation': Why the ALWD Citation Manual Should be Finally Relegated to a Footnote," received the 2012 Earl C. Borgeson Research in Law Librarianship Award. Moore's article will be published in the journal Legal Reference Services Quarterly. The honor carries a $1,000 prize. The Borgeson award was established in 2000 to encourage scholarly research in the field of law librarianship. Each year students in Professor Penny Hazelton's Current Issues in Law Librarianship (CILL) class each write a major paper

Amy Ko receives Google Research Award

Thursday, July 5, 2012

The Google Research Award will enable Professor Amy Ko to fund Ph.D. candidate Parmit Chilana's LemonAid project and give them the opportunity to work directly with Google research scientists and engineers. Ko's proposal, entitled "Selection-Based Contextual Help in the Wild," was one of 815 submitted to Google Research. The award was given in the category of Human-computer Interaction, one of 21 different areas of focus evaluated by Google and one of 104 awards granted. Chilana's project, LemonAid, is a way to crowdsource help information for users on the web. Useful online help is ofte

Ph.D. candidate Marisa Duarte awarded Andrew W. Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship

Thursday, July 5, 2012

The award, open to UW doctoral students who have completed all the requirement of their degree except for the dissertation (ABD students) in the humanities or the social sciences, recognizes Marisa Duarte's "academic accomplishments, organizational energy, and scholarly promise." The Fellowship is given by the organizers of the John Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures at the University of Washington. As a Fellow, Durarte will be involved in the scholarly activities of the Sawyer Seminar, "B/Ordering Violence: Boundaries, Indigeneity, and Gender in the Americas." According to the websi

Russell Shank, MLIS '49 and library leader, dies at 86

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Russell Shank's leadership in field of library science was profound. As noted in his American Libraries Magazine obituary, he was the first director of libraries at the Smithsonian Institution and the first vice chancellor for library and information services planning at UCLA Libraries. His career encompassed many other leadership roles, including president of the American Library Association (ALA) from 1978-79. president of ALA's Association of College and Research Libraries and president of the Information Science and Automation Division (now the Library and Information Technology Associa

Inaugural iAffiliates Day generates new collaborations

Thursday, June 28, 2012

The inaugural iSchool iAffiliates Day - a 'lightly planned unconference' to explore areas of collaboration between the iSchool and key external stakeholders, or iAffiliates - was held on April 20. The event was attended by over 100 people representing over 40 companies and organizations, as well as many iSchool faculty and Ph.D. students. Participating companies and organizations included Avanade, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, BlackRock, Boeing, Cisco, Costco, Deloitte, Expeditors, King County Library System, Microsoft, Seattle Public Library, Serials Solutions and VX Technologie

Making it mobile: Smartphone apps abound at iSchool

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Would a nap or a jog just now ruin your sleep tonight? How about some coffee? A new smartphone application called ShutEye developed at the UW Information School guides users toward making choices that improve the quality of their sleep. It's one of several smartphone apps created by iSchool talents this school year. Others, from health to shopping and even updates to the popular OneBusAway, were created by iSchool students as capstone projects -- final projects before graduation. ShutEye, an app for Android-based phones, was developed by UW doctoral student Jared Bauer with Sunny Consolv

Students and faculty present at ALA Anaheim

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The annual American Library Association (ALA) conference is an opportunity for the UW iSchool faculty and staff to present papers, lead workshops, and network with colleagues. Scheduled for June 21-26, 2012 in Anaheim, CA, the annual conference is the world's largest event for the library community. Bringing together more than 25,000 librarians, educators, authors, publishers, literacy experts, illustrators and the leading suppliers to the market, the conference gives participants a once-a-year opportunity learn how to improve libraries. At this year's conference, the iSchool will host a

Katie Davis, digital youth expert, to join iSchool faculty

Friday, June 15, 2012

The iSchool is expanding its emphasis on digital youth with the hiring of Katie Davis. She will join the faculty this fall. Davis is currently a project manager at Harvard's Project Zero, where she investigates the role of digital media technologies in the academic, social and moral lives of adolescents. She also serves as an advisory board member for MTV's digital abuse campaign, A Thin Line. "I'm excited to be joining a faculty that has such an interdisciplinary focus, strong sense of community, and interest in understanding young people's experiences with digital media," commented Dav

MLIS Capstone project results in grant for UW Libraries

Friday, June 15, 2012

Elizabeth Russell's project is helping Special Collections make historic photos available to the public. The University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, has been awarded a $34,926 Digitizing Historical Records grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. These grants allow institutions to promote the preservation and use of America's documentary heritage. The award to the UW Libraries is to digitize and make available the more than 24,000 historic photographs in the J. Willis Sayre Photograph Collection (Sayre pictured above), a collection that docume

Levy and Wobbrock's research shows meditation helps workers multitask

Monday, June 11, 2012

In an increasingly high-stress, multitasking world, people are looking for ways to manage workplace demands, remain effective at their jobs, and maintain their overall health. New research by University of Washington Information School Professors David Levy and Jacob Wobbrock suggests that meditation training helps people stay on tasks longer, improves memory, and reduces feelings of stress. "To our knowledge," Levy observed, "this is the first study to explore how meditation might affect multitasking in a realistic work setting." Levy, a computer scientist, and Wobbrock, a researcher in

Three incoming MLIS students receive 2012-13 Spectrum Scholarships

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Andrea Barkley, Brandon Cal and Connie Thompson are the latest iSchool students to be selected as American Library Association Spectrum Scholars The Spectrum Scholarship Program provides scholarships to American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander students pursuing graduate degrees in library and information studies. Its mission is to improve service at the local level through the development of a representative workforce that reflects the communities served by all libraries. Andrea Barkley received her BA in Lin

Informatics student Curtis Howell wins 2012 Business Plan Award

Friday, May 25, 2012

The Herbert B. Jones Finalist Prize was awarded to Howell (pictured second from left) and three team members for their Biking Billboards concept, a new kind of mobile advertising combining billboards pulled on bicycle trailers with savvy and engaging brand ambassadors promoting clients' messages. Howell was complementary about the support the team received during the competition. "The advice, feedback and encouragement we have received throughout the Business Plan Competition has been invaluable. Our team is now much more prepared to scale our operations here in Seattle and expand to additi