Information Practices and Behaviors

Discovering and explicating how people seek, use, avoid, and share information to advance knowledge, aid in decision making, solve problems, and engage in everyday life activities

Researchers Working in this Area

Related Research Projects

Augmenting Health Self-Regulation across the Cancer Survivorship Continuum by Digital Phenotyping

Time frame
2022-Present
Investigator
Jessie Chin
Total funding to date
$30,000.00
Funding agency
Campus Research Board

Breast cancer (BC) is a chronic illness. BC survivors often deal with the lifelong needs of self-management, such as controlling the symptoms, taking diet or nutrition plans, or adopting a physical activity program across their cancer survivorship continuum. Our team is eager to develop a novel technique to predict the intentions of lifestyle behavior by tracking ones' information behavior and…

head with questions

Development of a Chatbot for Delivering Long-Term Motivational Interviewing for Improving Exercise Adherence in Hemodialysis Patients

Time frame
2022-Present
Investigator
Jessie Chin
Total funding to date
$75,000.00
Funding agency
Jump ARCHES

There are approximately 600,000 individuals in the U.S. with kidney failure undergoing maintenance hemodialysis (HD) therapy. HD patients have several co-morbidities, including muscle wasting, cardiovascular disease, and bone disorders, with very high medical costs, averaging ~ $93,000/patient/year. Lifestyle interventions such as exercise and nutritional modification are often prescribed to…

medical chatbot

Exploring Algorithmic Fairness and Potential Bias in K-12 Mathematics Adaptive Learning

Time frame
2020-2025
Investigator
Nigel Bosch
Total funding to date
$987,015.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Students in middle school and high school often use adaptive learning software as part of their math education experience. Adaptive learning software works by automatically measuring how much students have learned about the topic, as well as their learning process and experiences, and then adjusting the instruction accordingly. This project will investigate potential ways in which adaptive…

books stacked on table with ipad on top

Identifying False HPV-Vaccine Information and Modeling Its Impact on Risk Perceptions

Time frame
2020-Present
Investigator
Jessie Chin
Total funding to date
$389,810.00
Funding agency
National Institutes of Health

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S., with over 34,000 new HPV-related cancers diagnosed annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An HPV vaccine, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006, is recommended as part of routine vaccinations for school-aged children. However, the vaccine's…

network

Rapid Prototyping of Semantic Enhancements to Biodiversity Informatics Platforms

Time frame
2014-2018
Investigator
Michael Twidale
Total funding to date
$421,200.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Taxonomists are scientists who describe the world’s biodiversity. These descriptions of millions of species allow scientists to do many different kinds of research, including basic biology, environmental science, climate research, agriculture, and medicine. The problem is that describing any one species is not easy. The language used by taxonomists to describe their data is complex, and…

Repository Services for Accessible Course Content

Time frame
2015-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$7,173.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Across the country, colleges and universities are struggling to meet demand for accessible forms of course materials for students with an array of disabilities. At present, each institution is addressing this problem individually, at great expense, and often without full campus coordination, much less consortial collaboration. Locating digital files is difficult and entails numerous sources.…

Strengthening Public Libraries’ Information Literacy Services Through an Understanding of Knowledge Brokers’ Assessment of Technical and Scientific Information

Time frame
2021-2025
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$416,760.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Scientific and technical information is often translated for the public, by knowledge brokers such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists, and public librarians. This project will research how knowledge brokers assess the quality of scientific and technical information and the implications for public access, information literacy, and understanding of science. The project will use case…

Golden Gate bridge

Temporal Factors

Time frame
2012-2016
Total funding to date
$408,908.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Time affects information retrieval in many ways. Collections of documents change as new items are indexed. The content of documents themselves may change. Users submit queries at particular moments in time. And perhaps most importantly, people’s assessment of a document’s relevance to a query is often time-dependent. For example, searchers of news archives might seek information on a past…

Text Mining the Novel: Establishing the Foundations of a New Discipline

Time frame
2014-2020
Investigators
Ted Underwood, J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$142,000.00
Funding agency
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

This HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) project seeks to produce the first large-scale cross-cultural study of the novel according to quantitative methods. Ever since its putative rise in the eighteenth century, the novel has emerged as a central means of expressing what it means to be modern. And yet despite this cultural significance, we still lack a comprehensive study of the novel’s place…

The Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network

Time frame
2021-2025
Investigator
Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo
Total funding to date
$16,818.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Knowledge commons refer to the institutionalized community governance of sharing, creating, and curating a wide range of intellectual and cultural resources. This project will establish a Research Coordination Network (RCN) designed to build a research community that will advance these scientific principles. In doing so it will aid in the development of empirical and theoretical insights into…

black & white photo of book stack

Understanding Search Literacy and Search Skills Adoption: How People Solve Technical Problems via Search

Time frame
2015-2016
Investigator
Michael Twidale
Total funding to date
$65,000.00
Funding agency
Google

Despite the ubiquity of search in many people’s daily lives, a lack of search literacy can make it difficult to find solutions to technical problems, such as completing software-based tasks like troubleshooting program installations. iSchool Professor Michael Twidale and Assistant Professor Max Wilson of the University of Nottingham have received funding from Google for a project that aims to…

News Stories