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Raya Fidel is an Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information Science, University of Washington. She teaches courses in database design, indexing and abstracting, knowledge representation, thesaurus construction, and analysis of searching behavior. Her research focuses on online searching behavior. Ms. Fidel received a B.Sc. degree in Mathematical Sciences from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1970. After completing her studies for the MLS degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she worked at that University’s library system and served as the Librarian of the School of Applied Sciences and Technology for five years. Immediately after graduating from the University of Maryland, where she received a Ph.D. in Library Science, Ms. Fidel joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1982. Starting with her dissertation research, Ms. Fidel has been studying how users search online information systems. Conducting a large-scale study she investigated the ways in which professional searchers improve retrieval, and how they decide when to use descriptors from a controlled vocabulary and when to enter a free-text term. She has just completed a project to study how engineers filter technical reports they receive over the Internet, and another one investigating how high-school students use the Web for homework assignments. Ms. Fidel was among the first researchers in library and information science to employ qualitative methods in which the investigator collects data when they occur in natural settings. In recognition of her work, Ms. Fidel received the Best JASIS Paper Award twice (1985 and 1991), the ASIS Award for Research in Information Science in 1994, and the New Jersey ASIS Distinguished Lectureship in 1995. In 1992 she was invited to be a Visiting Librarian at Perkins Library, Duke University, where she served as a reference librarian for 9 months. Of the various professional organizations to which she belongs, Ms. Fidel is most active in ASIS. In addition to serving on various committees, she has played major roles in a number of programs and publications put together by SIG/CR. As part of her activities in ACM’s SIGIR, she served as the Conference Chair of SIGIR’95. She is currently a member of the editorial boards of Information Processing & Management and Library Quarterly. Publications related to the project “A Visit to the Information Mall: Web Searching Behavior of High School Students. Journal of American Society of Information Science, 50:24-37, 1999. (With others) “Image Retrieval Task: Implications for the Design and Evaluation of Image Databases.” The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 3:181-199, 1997. Content Organization and Retrieval Project: Phase I-A Work-Centered Examination of WebSearching Behavior of Boeing Engineers. Final Report, The Boeing Company, June 1998. (With E. Ethimiadis) A Framework for Work-Centered Evaluation and Design: A Case Study of IR on the Web. Report for MIRA, Grenoble, France, March, 1998. (With A. M. Pejtersen) “Users’ Perception of the Performance of a Filtering System.” In: Belkin, N.J., Eds. Proceedings of the 20th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Philadelphia, July 27-31, 1997. New York: ACM Press, 1997, pp. 198-205. (With Michael Crandall) Other publications Users Choice of Filtering Methods for Electronic Text. Final Report, Special Libraries Association, July 1998. (With M. Crandall) “User-Centered Indexing.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45(8): 572-576, 1994. “Qualitative Methods in Information Retrieval Research.” Library and Information Science Research 15(3):219-247, 1993. “Searchers’ Selection of Search Keys I. The Selection Routine; II. Controlled Vocabulary or Free-Text Searching; III. Searching Styles,” Journal of the American Society for 42(7):490-527, 1991. “What is Missing in Research about Online Searching Behavior?” Canadian Journal of Information Science, 12(3/4):54-61, 1987. Collaborators Betty Bengston, University Libraries, University of Washington; Geri Bunker, University Libraries, University of Washington; Michael Crandall, Technical Library, The Boeing Company; Efthimis Efthimiadis, School of Library and Information Science, University of Washington; Edward Fox, Computer Science, Virginia Tech; Peter Ingwersen, Royal School of Librarianship, Denmark; Annelise Mark Pejtersen, Risoe National Laboratory, Denmark; Alan Smeaton, Computer Science, Dublin City University, Ireland; Greg Zick, Electrical Engineering, University of Washington Advising Elizabeth Burns, Masters thesis, 1998; Linda Furness, Masters thesis, 1997 Advisor Dagobert Soergel, College of Library and Information Services, University of
Maryland, advisor for the Ph.D. dissertation. |
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