Major Research Themes

The design, analysis, integration and economics of information and librarysystems to create effective and valuable information exchange between people (as individuals, groups, organizations and cultures), recorded knowledge and technology.

Ongoing Projects

• A study on Future of Librarians funded by IMLS
• A study on Users of Online Information funded by IMLS

Selected Previous Projects

• Return on investment analysis of information systems and libraries, including multiple approaches to cost/benefit assessment, including impacts to communities based on availability, use, wages and gross regional product.
• Influences of the digital revolution on the conduct of research, especially focused on similarities and differences among researchers in different countries, sectors and disciplines, and in the implications for providing resources and support to the research efforts.
• Success criteria and best practices for information technology in higher education collecting and analyzing data from executives in over 1200 U.S. higher education institutions.
• Development of protocols and policies for resource sharing across organizations on local, state and regional levels, including both public and private institutions. Required the development of organizational structures and communication forums to accommodate and facilitate cooperation among organizations with vastly different cultures, organizational structures, perspectives and agendas.
• Analysis of the impact of information and information systems on decision-making for development, especially focused on evaluation and measurement for developing countries, and models to assess the value of investing in information systems for a specific country.
• Design of methodologies and systems to assess the value of information systems, including costing and pricing.
• Review of potential models and systems for the development of a “next generation” national information infrastructure for the physical sciences.
• A digital data exchange system for bioresearch to allow biomedical researchers implement cost-effective data sharing plans, including the design of a scalable, modular architecture to remotely access, index, manage and discover data from observations, experiments and computations.
• Multiple database design and creation projects for medical imaging, sequencing data (e.g, DNA), and clinical study data.
• Design of an international computer system to build adaptive, responsive models of treatment for psychiatric illnesses, based on electronic capture of treatment outcomes and real-time modification of treatment protocols. Included extensive consideration of regional cultures as they affect approaches to diagnosis and treatment, requiring systems that not only provide alternate information capture and delivery options, but also result in recommendations of culturally-accepted and possible treatment regimens.
• Design of metadata and a metadata database system for improving access to 300 numeric and statistical databases to improve the ability of energy analysts to navigate through all recorded knowledge in the field of energy. This included capturing and analyzing data lifecycles, from data processing systems through the publication of findings. Resulted in the first operational metadata system, still in operation today.
• Design of a system, using computer modeling and simulation, for the integration of heterogeneous distributed databases in a multi-level secure environment.

Funding Sources

U.S.A.

• U.S. Department of Defense
• U.S. Department of Education
• U.S. Department of Energy
• U.S. Department of Labor
• National Science Foundation
• National Academy of Sciences
• Institute of Museum and Library Science
• Internal Revenue Service
• National Institutes of Health
• National Institutes of Mental Health
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Agency for International Development
• Office of National Drug Control Policy
• National Commission on Libraries and Information Science
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Center for Information Security,
• Special Libraries Association
• States of California, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts

International

• National Physical Laboratory (England), Radiation Physics Division
• U.K. National Health Service
• Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories
• NATO, AGARD
• UNESCO
• International Development Research Council, Canada
• British Library, Research and Development Division

Corporate

• AT&T Bell Labs
• Johnson & Johnson, Inc.
• Eastman Kodak, Inc.
• Colgate-Palmolive, Inc.
• DuPont, Inc.
• Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.
• Baxter Health Care, Inc.
• Maxwell Online, Ltd.
• National Rural Electrical Association
• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
• IBM, Inc.
• Apple, Inc.
• Ameritech, Inc.