Associate Professor Terry Weech and doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa will discuss their research on the economics of information at the International Conference on Business and Information (BAI), which will be held July 4-6 in Hiroshima, Japan. The conference is an annual meeting for scholars in the business and information disciplines.
Weech and Takazawa will present their paper, "iSchools and Business Schools, Potential to Collaborate on Business and Information Research." In their talk, they will examine the potential contributions of collaboration between schools of information and business schools that have an interest in the impact and utilization of information in the business context. They will also present their plan for establishing a basis for collaboration between business schools and schools in the iSchools organization.
Takazawa's doctoral research seeks to understand how information search and seeking activities facilitate spontaneous collaborative work. The topics in her research area lie at the intersection of information behavior, learning, and self-organization. Her dissertation examines the case of a humanitarian aid group that emerged on social media platforms in response to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan.
Weech's research interests include the areas of reference services and sources, government information, library administration, library cooperation and networks, library use instruction, and economics of information. His teaching experience includes appointments at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Emporia State University (Kansas); University of Iowa, Iowa City; and Mississippi University for Women in Columbus. At the iSchool, Weech teaches the Economics of Information course (IS 549). He has been active in the American Library Association (ALA) and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and he has been involved in the administration of the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award reception at the ALA Midwinter meeting for nearly twenty years. Weech received his MS and PhD degrees in library and information science from the iSchool at Illinois.