Celebrating Research

Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research, iSchool

Traditionally a university celebrates the good research of its faculty, staff, and students through promotions, granting tenure, or bestowing degrees. That road to celebration can include: publishing excellent papers in top journals; receiving grants from prestigious funding organizations; giving talks at important conferences and events; even having the national media highlight your research activities and outcomes.

But is that the only time to celebrate? Definitely not--over the past four years the University of Maryland has found ways to celebrate milestones along the way. For example, the Vice President for Research’s Office hosts a yearly university-wide celebration of research for all forms of merit. This year I’m happy to share with you those that will be highlighted from the iSchool:

Paul Jaeger, Cassandra Jones, Mega Subramaniam and John Bertot: Received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for research on access and diversity that supports the Information and Diverse Populations concentration in the Master of Library Science Program. Paul Jaeger and Cassandra Jones serve as concentration coordinators.

Derek Hansen: Co-Authored the highly recognized book on social network analysis: Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World, by Derek Hansen, Ben Shneiderman, and Marc Smith.

Doug Oard was PI with Co-PIs David Kirsch, David Doermann received a grant from NSF for the "Development and Evaluation of Search Technology for Discovery of Evidence in Civil Litigation"

Ping Wang: Was given Best Published Paper Award (1st place) at 2010 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in the OCIS (Organizational Communications and Information Systems) Division for the paper he co-authored with Neil Ramiller entitled, "Community learning in information technology innovation" published in MIS Quarterly

Bo Xie: Was given a Best Paper Award at the 2011 iConference for the paper: Xie, B., Wang, M., & Feldman, R. (2011) “Preferences for health information and decision-making: development of the Health Information Wants (HIW) questionnaire.”

Jenny Preece: Was made a Fellow of the ACM’s Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Academy

Ann Weeks, Allison Druin, & Ben Bederson: Received the 2010 American Library Association President's Award for International Library Innovation for the “International Children's Digital Library” (ICDL)

But is that the only time we can celebrate research in the iSchool? The answer is no—for years, we have been recognizing the ongoing achievements of our community in many large and small ways. My predecessor as Associate Dean for Research, Doug Oard used to give at our college assemblies to each of our faculty a “gold star” made from spray-painted cardboard. Each of us that got grants, published papers, or had a research achievement now have these stars hanging in our offices. Our college has had “Research Review Days,” and this year we honored our doctoral students with a poster award competition. The winning posters included: Jes Koepfler’s work on the homeless, Beth Bonsignore’s work on mobile technologies for children, and Dana Rotman’s work on social computing.

In addition, our labs and centers regularly host research events for the public that highlight the good work of our iSchool community. Coming up soon will be the Human-Computer Interaction Lab’s Annual Symposium on May 25-26.

A more recent way we have begun to celebrate the research at the iSchool has been through tweeting! I thoroughly enjoyed when we discovered our Dean was going to be getting an award—there was a flood of tweets highlighting in 140 characters this wonderful achievement! Look for the #iUMD hashtag and you’ll see many of our iSchool students and faculty tweeting away!

Finally, the newest way we will be celebrating the good work of our community will be through this blog. Each week, I will be sharing news, ideas, activities, and energy of the college! Until next week…