Chao, Lenstra, Weber awarded Garfield Dissertation Fellowships

GSLIS doctoral candidates Tiffany Chao, Noah Lenstra, and Nic Weber have been honored with 2015 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships from Beta Phi Mu, the International Library and Information Studies Honor Society. Up to six recipients are selected each year for this prestigious award, a national competition among doctoral students who are working on their dissertations. The amount awarded for each fellowship is $3,000.

Chao's dissertation is titled, "Methods Metadata: Curating Scientific Research Data for Reuse."

Metadata generation is an essential activity in the curation and management of scientific research data for multidisciplinary sharing and reuse. The description of research methods implemented by scientists is especially critical for data reuse yet the provision of this metadata is not always a common practice. Using a case study approach, I address what methods metadata, or the type of information needed for basic comprehension of how data were produced and analyzed in the scientific research context, can be derived from journal articles produced by scientists in three different research areas of the earth sciences. The results indicate similarities in the kinds of description used for methods and variations in the availability of methods description from journals articles. By leveraging journal articles as a methods metadata resource, techniques for generating rich metadata can be further enhanced to support the curation of research data for future reuse and innovation.  

Lenstra's dissertation is titled, "The Community Informatics of an Aging Society: A Comparative Case Study of Public Libraries and Senior Centers."

As the global population ages, and as digital technologies become ever more densely woven into the fabric of everyday life, the localized social support older adults rely on to maintain digital literacy will increase in importance. The problems older adults face learning and staying current with digital technologies are often framed as arising in their minds or in their bodies. Less well understood are the community-based social supports older adults rely on to maintain digital literacy. The hypothesis undergirding this study is that maintaining and growing digital literacy in older adulthood requires ongoing social and institutional support at the level of the local community. As such, this dissertation studies older adult digital literacy from the perspective of community-based information infrastructure, or the information systems in communities.  

Weber defended his dissertation, "A Framework for Analyzing the Sustainability of Peer Produced Science Commons," on May 12. He will begin a postdoctoral appointment at University of Washington iSchool this fall.

This dissertation explores the commons as a governance model for sustaining shared resources in cooperative scientific research settings. It asks how governance models used in cooperative research settings change over time and how, in practice, those models differ between domains of knowledge production. The relationship between sustainability, cooperation, and governance is explored through two sets of studies. In conducting these studies, an empirical framework is developed for analyzing dierent characteristics of a governance model. A number of concepts from sociotechnical systems development are also addressed, including the peering of provision and production activities in contemporary research settings, polycentric models of governance, and the emergence of new types of commons models, including the knowledge commons.

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