Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship

Eric Chuk received a 2008 Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship and is pursuing his degree at the University of California Los Angeles. He holds an M.A., Linguistics (special option in Pragmatics), from California State University, Long Beach and a B.A., Digital Media (specialization in Writing) and Minor, Linguistics from the University of Central Florida.

Library and information science, in Eric's view, is a bridge spanning the gap between digital media and linguistics, the two fields which have comprised his education thus far. Within LIS, bibliometrics and text mining are emerging as exciting areas of research that fully appreciate the importance of the link between language and technology. 
While Eric feels that, as an information scientist or library technologist, there are intriguing opportunities to work with not only schools and government, but business and industry, which are so often at the forefront of innovation and usability.  Eric hopes to ultimately be employed making his ideas applicable to real-world problems, meaningful in some way to society at large.  He is also becoming increasingly interested in notions of not only authorship, but readership, digital literacy, and electronic literature. Questions of texts and technology will figure prominently as we move forward in this new age of information, and there are many relevant issues for us to address as LIS scholars and practitioners. In particular, he would like to begin examining how narrative and literary theory might be used to better inform the coding behind word processors and search engines.

Mónica received a 2008 Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship and is pursuing her degree at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.  She holds an MS in Information Science from the School of Information Sciences - University of Tennessee, Knoxville; an MBA in Human Resource Management from Inter American University of Puerto Rico, Metropolitan Campus; and a BBA in Human Resource Management from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus.  Her research interests focus on Knowledge Management and how libraries can benefit from these principles in order to improve training and development of personnel at all levels, but more particularly for professional librarians.

Brenda Mitchell-Powell received a 2008 Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship and is pursuing her degree at Simmons College.  She holds a M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a B.A., with distinction, awarded in English from Simmons College.

Her proposed doctoral research will investigate the impact of libraries on the lives of nineteenth-century free people of color. Brenda hopes her research will expand the breadth and depth of interdisciplinary course options in graduate and undergraduate communications and history, as well as in Black studies, and will introduce an innovative approach to historical research on libraries. Such doctoral research will also benefit the profession by providing alternatives to existing pedagogy and historiography.

Asher Jackson received a 2008 Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship and is pursuing his degree at Simmons College.  He holds a Master of Science, Library and Information Science Archives Concentration from Simmons College and a Bachelor of Arts, English and Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley.

His research goals involve exploring "survivability" in relation to the digital preservation of rare materials; examining and evaluating metadata schemes related to information access and retrieval and, as a possible subset: relating organization of information to information literacy goals, and finding new ways to provide clear evaluative criteria for information users and investigating the idea of web information 'certification'—how can information providers offer a basic guarantee of currency, accuracy, and reliability?

Stefani Gomez received a 2008 Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship and is pursuing her degree at Rutgers University.  She holds a Master of Library and Information Science from Rutgers University and a B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University.

Stefani's primary research goal is to understand how internalized cultural beliefs and information seeking behavior interact to construct the experiential texture of daily life. She is particularly interested in identity construction and the psychological and cultural factors that contribute to information avoidance.

Nicole Cooke received a 2008 Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship and is pursuing her degree at Rutgers University.  She holds a Masters in Adult Education / Certificate in Distance Educatio from Pennsylvania State University; Masters of Library Service from Rutgers University; and a B.A. in Communication from Rutgers University. 

Nicole's primary research interests include adult education and lifelong learning, library instruction and training, and staff development. She has also conducted research and published in the areas of distance learning and libraries, the creation of learning environments, and the relationship between library instruction and library anxiety and would like to conduct additional research in these areas. Other research interests include issues surrounding web 2.0 and learning 2.0, the emergence of new media and its impact on information acquisition and distribution, the digital divide, instructional design, and the recruitment and retention of minority librarians.