sifting & winnowing

Research at SLIS

The School of Library and Information Studies is proud of its long-standing progressive and public service-oriented research ethos. While it is hard to summarize the body of research of any faculty, SLIS research aims to fulfill those values articulated in the SLIS Mission and Vision Statement.

Within this broad progressive mission, SLIS faculty work in the following areas:

1. Library, Print Culture, Information and Information Technology History

History of print cultures both analog and digital; history of librarianship; history of information technologies and the information industries.

Faculty: Senchyne, Downey, Eschenfelder, Whitmire, 

2. User Behavior and Social Aspects of Information Seeking

Users online information seeking behaviors; libraries in the life of everyday people; underrepresented populations; health information seeking behaviors; financial literacy; technological literacy; user vocabularies and information behaviors

Faculty:  Arnott-Smith, Kim, Whitmire, Willett

3. Social Informatics, or the social aspects of information and information & communications technologies

Information technology change in the information industries; privacy in the digital era; information technology and changes in genres and values in the arts; new technologies, information sharing and community building in patient communities;

Faculty:  Arnott-Smith, Downey, Eschenfelder, Rubel, Willett

4. Digital Organization of Information

This includes cross-cultural organizational scheme analysis, and organization of digital information by humanists (especially in the arts), and the socio-cultural history of organizational tools

Faculty: Kim

5. Information Policy & Ethics

This includes intellectual and cultural property; privacy concerns in the digital era; digital library, repository & e-publishing policy issues; information disparities -- especially health and financial information.

Faculty: Arnott-Smith, Eschenfelder, Rubel

SLIS faculty work in close conjunction with our full-time instructors who teach, lead the profession, and produce new knowledge in key areas including:

  • Digital repositories, data curation, e-publishing and open access: Salo
  • Cataloging & management of digital materials and organization of information: Shapiro
  • School Library Management & Relationship with School Administration: Kaplan
  • Collection management & archives administration: Pearlmutter

SLIS faculty & instructional staff participate in a number of campus research groups including:

Recent External Research Grants/Awards Won by SLIS Faculty

Catherine Arnott-Smith:  James and Sylvia Thayer Short-Term Research Fellowship, UCLA Libraries and Collections (Los Angeles, CA). $1400; NIH R21 grant (National Institute for Stroke and Neurological Disorders) in collaboration with the University of Utah, Brigham & Women’s Hospital (Boston, MA), and PatientsLikeMe (Cambridge, MA). $296,000; Subcontract, Specialized Information Services Division, National Library of Medicine $60,000;  Electronic Records Fellowship (National Historic Preservation and Records Commission) $15,000; 2010 Co-PI “Public Libraries as Financial Literacy Providers” by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Financial Security (CFS) as part of the 2010-2011 UW-Madison CFS Financial Literacy Research Consortium Cooperative Agreement with the Social Security Administration, $76,091.

Kyung-Sun “Sunny” Kim: Association of College and Research Libraries Samuel Lazerow Fellowship – “Perception and use of information sources by undergraduate students”

Ethelene Whitmire: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Scholarly Fellowship for "The Regina Andrews Project"

Jane Pearlmutter: 2 grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for the Archives Leadership Institute. Funds annual summer institutes from 2008-2012 ($ 197,201 and $260,842)

Kristin Eschenfelder: (2010) Co-PI “Public Libraries as Financial Literacy Providers” by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Financial Security (CFS) as part of the UW-Madison CFS Financial Literacy Research Consortium Cooperative Agreement with the Social Security Administration, $76,091; (2006) Institute for Museum and Library Services Laura Bush 21st Century Research Grant RE-04-06-0029-06 $246,718.