Interaction via computer media and how it supports and affects work, learning, and social interaction; how information is exchanged, knowledge is co-constructed, collaboration happens, and community forms in and in conjunction with online contexts.
The heart of my work is stories, what they tell us and how they are told. Stories are central to library and information science, because stories literally store us, serving as storage for an infinite variety of formal and informal knowledge.
History of children's literature; history of youth services librarianship as women's history; historical and contemporary censorship and intellectual freedom; young adult literature; representations of minority-status groups in children's and young adult literature; reading engagement; reader-response research; reader-text interaction.
Interrogating historical and contemporary naming practices and power dynamics in cultural heritage collections of films, comics and zines. Methods: Community-based participatory research and oral history.
Paul Otlet’s ideas in relation to the Internet, the World Wide Web, and information science; utopian schemes of knowledge organization including H.G. Wells’s idea of a world brain; the implications of digitization and networking for libraries and museums.
Education for library and information science, with particular attention to online pedagogy; history of information science; impact of new technologies on reference and information services.
Community informatics; technology use in local communities and by ordinary people; public libraries past, present, and future; social capital as a crucial resource in the information revolution.
