Soo Young Rieh

Interim Dean and Brooke E. Sheldon Professor of Management and Leadership
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin

Soo Young Rieh is Interim Dean and Brooke E. Sheldon Professor of Management and Leadership in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research areas include credibility assessment of online information, search as learning, supporting creativity in search, information literacy, and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in library settings. Her prior research has focused on conceptualizing searching as a learning process and evaluating human learning during web searching. Currently, her research revolves around fostering critical thinking and creativity within the search process, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of information search strategies and idea generation.

Her research contributions have garnered recognition, earning her over 10 research awards, including the ASIS&T Outstanding Contributions to Information Behavior Research Award (2019), ACM CHIIR Best Paper Award (2023), ACM CHIIR Honorable Mention (2019), and Best JASIST Paper Award (2005, 2011).

Rieh has been actively engaged in various scholarly communities. She was the general co-chair of the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. She served as a Director-at-Large on the Board of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) and a member of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) Steering Committee. Currently, Rieh holds the position of Associate Editor for Information and Learning Sciences and serve as a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) and Library and Information Science Research. In 2022, her dedicated professional leadership and service in the field of information science was honored with ASIS&T Watson Davis Award for Service.

Before joining the University of Texas at Austin, she served on the faculty of the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Additionally, she worked as a Human Factors Research Engineer at the Excite@Home Search and Directory Group. She received her Ph.D. in Communication, Information, and Library Studies from Rutgers University, USA.

News

IMLS-funded LADDER Project

With Professors Kenneth R. Fleischmann and R. David Lankes, I received a new IMLS grant (IMLS grant number RE-252381-OLS-22) to educate and mentor the next generation of Library and Information Science faculty specializing in artificial intelligence and data science. The LADDER project (Training Future Faculty in Library, AI, and Data Driven Education and Research) trains nine doctoral students in the University of Texas School of Information as LADDER Fellows, equipping them with the expertise to implement AI and data science applications in library settings. These fellows engage in collaborative research projects with iSchool faculty and librarians across public, school, and academic library environments. They receive mentorship and gain valuable teaching experience, focusing on how to develop, apply, and utilize AI in libraries in ways that are equitable, ethical, and effective.

Recent Publications

Chavula, C. Choi, Y. & Rieh, S. Y. (2024). Searching for creativity: How people search to generate new ideas. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 75, 438-453. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/asi.24857

Chavula, C., Choi, Y., & Rieh, S. Y. (2023). SearchIdea: An Idea Generation Tool to Support Creativity in Academic Search. In ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 161-171. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3576840.3578294.

Rieh, S. Y., Bradley, D. R., Genova, G., Le Roy, R., Maxwell, J., Oehrli, J.A., Sartorius, E. (2022). Assessing college students information literacy competencies using a librarian role-playing method. Library and Information Science Research, 44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2022.101143

Chavula, C., Choi, Y., & Rieh, S. Y. (2022). Understanding Creative Thinking Processes in Searching for New Ideas. In ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 321326. https://doi.org/10.1145/3498366.3505783

May 2024 Update: I am pleased to announce that a paper co-authored with my doctoral advisee, Siqi Yi, titled “Children’s Conversational Voice Search as Learning: A Literature Review,” has been accepted for publication in Information and Learning Sciences.

In March 2023, Catherine Chavula, Yuijin Choi, and I were honored to receive the Best Paper Award for our paper titled “SearchIdea: An Idea Generation Tool to Support Creativity in Academic Search” at ACM SIGIR CHIIR.