Soo Young Rieh

Professor and Associate Dean for Education
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin

Soo Young Rieh is Professor and Associate Dean for Education in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining the UT Austin, she spent 17 years as a faculty member in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Her research areas include search as learning, human information behavior, information search behavior, human information interaction, and information literacy. She has initiated two distinct research agendas: credibility assessment in information seeking and search as learning. She has examined how people’s credibility assessments influence their information seeking strategies. Her recent research interests have focused on conceptualizing searching as a learning process. She also has conducted research on assessing learning outcomes in web searching. Her research has been funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the MacArthur Foundation, and Brainly, Inc. She is a Director-at-large in Board of Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) and a member of the Steering Committee for ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR). She is Associate Editor of Information and Learning Sciences, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) and Library and Information Science Research. Rieh is the recipient of 2019 ASIS&T SIG USE Outstanding Contributions to Information Behavior Research Award and has received 10 best paper awards.

News

New IMLS Grant

We received a new IMLS grant for the IDEA (Innovation, Disruption, Enquiry, Access) Institute on Artificial Intelligence. Dania Bilal (University of Tennessee at Knoxville), Clara Chu (The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and I will launch a one-week intensive professional development program on AI for library and information professionals in 2021 and 2022, partnering with the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) and the American Library Association’s division “Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures.” Read a news story here. 

Presentation on “Library as Research Lab”

With Beth Yakel and Laurie Alexander (University of Michigan), I will present a paper entitled Library and Research Lab: New Research Engagement Model for LIS Student and Professionals” at ALISE Conference in October 2020. A research engagement model called Library as Research Lab is designed to foster research on library practice while enabling LIS students to hone research skills and librarians to adopt evidence-based practices. By creating three research labs through collaboration between one iSchool and university library on campus, the Library as Research Lab program provides unique learning opportunities for master’s students, academic librarians, and faculty to engage in research activities over a full academic year.