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Prof. Diane Kelly awarded OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant
Jan. 17, 2008—Diane Kelly, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science (SILS), has been awarded an OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant.
The grant, totaling nearly $15,000, is sponsored by OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., and OCLC Programs and Research in collaboration with the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). According to OCLC's Web site, the grant program is intended to "promote independent research that helps librarians integrate new technologies into areas of traditional competence and contributes to a better understanding of the library environment."
Kelly was awarded the grant to pursue her research proposal "Developing and Evaluating a Query Recommendation Feature to Assist Users with Online Information Seeking and Retrieval." The research will focus on evaluating the effectiveness of combining two information retrieval techniques, term relevance feedback and query recommendation, to help users better translate their information needs into queries that search systems can understand.
"This is an exciting opportunity for me and a student to work together to combine two information retrieval techniques, relevance feedback and query recommendation," Kelly said. "When exploring new areas, people often have a hard time formulating one query, much less multiple queries which are typically required to find an appropriate amount of relevant documents. This research has the potential to help people issue multiple queries and to think about their topics from different perspectives."
As part of receiving the grant, Kelly will present her research at the 2009 ALISE Annual Conference.