Yong-Mi Kim: Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

By receiving the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, I was able to travel to London to participate in the Doctoral Forum at the Second Information Interaction in Context Symposium (IIiX). This allowed me to receive valuable feedback on my dissertation research from leading interactive information retrieval researchers. In addition, the fellowship will help fund subject fees for my dissertation research experiments. My dissertation examines the effect of social tags on the interactive information retrieval process. The topic spans across a number of different research areas: information retrieval, document surrogates and metadata, and search interface design.

I am currently a doctoral candidate at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. My research interests are in the area of user-oriented information retrieval, and how people are making use of the diverse information resources available online to find the information they need. My background is in CS and I worked as a consultant in software engineering and process improvement before completing my MSI i specializing in Library and Information Services and starting the doctoral program at SI. In addition to my dissertation research, I am also participating in a MacArthur Foundation-funded project examining credibility assessment in the Web 2.0 environment, which has my advisor, Dr. Soo Young Rieh, as the PI. I have also collaborated with Dr. Yan Chen, also at SI, on a project examining the relationship between price and answer quality in Google Answers.