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For Immediate Release
October 25, 2011

Champaign, IL—GSLIS Assistant Professor and CIRSS faculty affiliate Miles Efron along with doctoral students Peter Organisciak and Katrina Fenlon, have won this year's best paper award at the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) annual meeting held in New Orleans, October 9-12, 2011. They won for their joint paper "Building Topic Models in a Federated Digital Library through Selective Document Exclusion."

The research was conducted as part of a partnership in which the Institute of Museum and Library Services supports work by CIRSS and the Library at Illinois in building and enhancing the IMLS Digital Collections and Content registry, a site that aggregates digital cultural heritage materials from libraries, museums, and archives across the nation. Efron’s team is focusing on improving subject access to diverse content brought together from these cultural institutions.

“The paper offers a technique that is intended to help digital library administrators supplement human-generated metadata with automatically created information about topical relationships among items in their collections,” said Efron. “The high-level goal is to improve the searchability and browseability of digital libraries via statistical text analysis.”

The paper builds on earlier work from the machine learning literature on topic modeling—a statistical approach to analyzing large bodies of text.

“Our main contribution is a way to improve the semantic coherence of topic models by capitalizing on regularities in library metadata to identify topically weak records. In doing so, we are able to build topic models from cleaner, semantically rich data,” said Organisciak.

GSLIS CAS student Elin Bammerlin also received recognition at the conference. She and her team won the student design competition in which they addressed the issue of personalized customization of search results known as the “filter bubble.” Members of her team included Justin Brinegar PhD student, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Melissa Hunt Glickman, MS student, San Jose State University; and Tanja Mercun, PhD student, University of Ljubjana, Sloven.

GSLIS and CIRSS were very well represented on this year's ASIS&T program, with five papers, three panels, two posters, and a keynote workshop address:

PAPERS:

Disciplinary Reach: Investigating the Impact of Dataset Reuse in the Earth Sciences
Tiffany Chao

Building Topic Models in a Federated Digital Library through Selective Document Exclusion (Best Paper Winner)
Miles Efron, Peter Organisciak and Katrina Fenlon

The Analytic Potential of Scientific Data: Understanding Re-use Value
Carole L. Palmer, Nicholas M. Weber and Melissa H. Cragin

A Framework for Applying the Concept of Significant Properties to Datasets
Simone Sacchi, Karen M. Wickett, Allen H. Renear and David S. Dubin

Are Collections Sets?
Karen M. Wickett, Allen H. Renear and Jonathan Furner

PANELS:

Shaking it Up: Embracing New Methods for Publishing, Finding, Discussing, and Measuring Our Research Output
Alex Garnett, Kim Holmberg, Christina Pikas, Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem and Nicholas Weber

Sharing Data: Practices, Barriers, and Incentives
Carol Tenopir, Jeffrey van der Hoeven, Carole L. Palmer, Jim Malone and Priyanki Sinha

The Janus Panels: Looking Back in Order to Look Forward
Robert Williams and Kathryn La Barre

WORKSHOP KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

Interdisciplinary information work: Concepts and practices
Palmer, Carole
Keynote address for workshop Where Your World Meets Mine: Information Used Across Domains (SIG USE)

POSTERS:

Semi-automated Collection Evaluation for Large-scale Aggregations
Katrina Fenlon, Peter Organisciak, Jacob Jett and Miles Efron

Shaken and Stirred: ASIS&T 2011 Attendee Reactions to Shaking It Up: Embracing New Methods for Publishing, Finding, Discussing and Measuring Our Research Output
Alex Garnett, University of Victoria; Kim Holmberg, Abo Akademi University; Christina Pikas, University of Maryland; Heather Piwowar, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center; Jason Priem, University of North Carolina; and Nicholas Weber, University of Illinois

Kim Schmidt

Director of Publications and Media Relations

Graduate School of Library and Information Science

501 East Daniel Street

Champaign, IL 61820