About

Archival and information science theories and methods hold abiding value for exploring knowledge-intensive aspects of society, such as cultural heritage (libraries, archives, and museums), academic scholarship, government, health, and education. Our interdisciplinary research group investigates complex socio-technical problems related to information and data curation, access, use, and discovery employing a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Our members work in a variety of research areas:

• Archival studies
• Culturally and context-sensitive advancement of information literacy and education
• Data literacy, curation, sharing, and reuse
• Digitization of cultural heritage resources
• Digital preservation and curation
• Human rights and social justice
• Information accessibility
• Information quality
• Information seeking behavior
• Knowledge infrastructure
• Museum informatics
• The maker movement
• Recordkeeping practices

Recent research:

Smith, C. L. and Rieh, S. Y. (2019). Knowledge-Context in search systems: Toward information-literate actions. Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval (CHIIR ’19), 55-62. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/148270

Frank, R. D. (2019). The Social Construction of Risk in Digital Preservation. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24247 Available via: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/149147

Guberek, T., Muralles, V., & Alpert-Abrams, H. (2019). Scaling Access to State Records of Repression: The Role of Digitalization in Guatemala’s Historic Archive of the National Pice, . International Journal of Transitional Justice, 13(1), 50-70. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijy035

Frank, R. D., Tyler, A. R. B., Gault, A., Suzuka, K., & Yakel, E. (2018). Issues of Privacy in Qualitative Data Reuse. International Journal of Digital Curation, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v13i1.492. Available via: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/148322

Conway, P. & Askew, K. (2018). “From International Shortwave to Digital Rebroadcast: Transforming Music Time in Africa for a New Worldwide Audience.” IASA Journal Issue 48.

Thomer, A. K., Yoder, M. J., & Twidale, M. B. (2018). Transforming Taxonomic Interfaces: "Arm's Length" Cooperative Work and the Maintenance of a Long-lived Classification System. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2 (CSCW), 173. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274442

Faniel, I., Kansa, S., Austin, A., Boytner, R., France, P, Jacobs, J.E., Kansa, E. and Yakel, E. (2018). Beyond the Archive: Bridging Data Creation and Reuse in Archaeology, Advances in Archaeological Practice 6/2.

Thomer, A. K., Wickett, K. M., Baker, K. S., Fouke, B. W., & Palmer, C. L. (2018). Documenting provenance in noncomputational workflows: Research process models based on geobiology fieldwork in Yellowstone National Park. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24039

York, J., Gutmann, M., & Berman, F. (2018). What Do We Know about the Stewardship Gap. Data Science Journal, 17, 19. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2018-019

Frank, R. D., Chen, Z., Crawford, E., Suzuka, K., & Yakel, E. (2017). Trust in Qualitative Data Repositories. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 54(1), 102–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401012.

Guberek, T., Hedstrom, M. (2017). On or Off the Record?: Detecting Patterns of Silence about Death in Guatemala's National Police Archive. Archival Science 17, 27-54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10502-017-9274-3