Research

My research interests focus on Web information systems, digital libraries and electronic publishing. This is part of the field of information science. A particular interest is the interplay between the technical, economic and social aspects of this field.

Current research

• The Web Laboratory. The Web Laboratory is a joint project of Cornell University and the Internet Archive to provide data and computing facilities for research about the Web and the information on the Web. The data is provided from the Web collections of the Internet Archive. The computing facilities are based at the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing .

  The laboratory supports researchers in computer science, the social sciences and humanities, whose interests lie in the information on the Web, and computer scientists, who carry out research on the Web as an information structure.

  The lab operates the Web Lab Hadoop Cluster. Recently, the work of the Web Lab has extended into studying the use of digitized books in research libraries.

Recent research

National Science Digital Library (NSDL).  This is a major NSF funded project to develop a National Digital Library for education in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.

The NSDL poses a number of major research questions. The first is interoperability. How can highly diverse components be combined into a single coherent set of services? Our work builds on the concept of a spectrum of interoperability. A second problem is automated digital libraries. How can we automate information management tasks that have been traditionally carried out by skilled professionals? A third is sustainability. What are the technical and economic strategies that can maintain digital libraries over the long term?

See the Archive for information about previous digital libraries research at Cornell.