Paper by Dania Bilal Is the Most Requested - Again

An article coauthored by School of Information Sciences Professor Dania Bilal on children’s information seeking is the single most requested article from the leading information science journal, Information Processing & Management (IPM) -- for the second time.

Out of tens of thousands of downloaded articles from IPM's website in 2007, Bilal’s article, co-authored by former UT SIS master’s student Joe Kirby, was the most requested article, according to IPM’s parent company Elsevier. Bilal and Kirby’s paper was cited with the same distinction in 2004.

Bilal’s paper, “Differences and similarities in information seeking: children and adults as Web users,” analyzes patterns of information seeking behaviors of seventh-grade science students compared to information science graduate students using Yahooligans! Web search engine and directory. The article is relevant, says Bilal, because it is one of only a few scholarly articles that compare children’s and adult’s Web searching behaviors. Using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, she concludes that children need targeted instruction to help them develop search strategies and reflective skills to self evaluate their Web searching successes. System design improvements are also needed, she argues.

In a follow-up study, Bilal collected substantive survey data from children that include their participation in the design of search engine interfaces that make sense to them. No commercial search engines for children have incorporated children’s design concepts to date, however.

“Dr. Bilal's article shows her genius for great scholarship. Hers is an important and popular research area, her results are intriguing, and she asks probing, questions that have real-world implications,” says Dr. Ed Cortez, Professor and Director of the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences. “I am very proud to have Dania on our faculty.”

Citation
“Differences and similarities in information seeking: children and adults as Web users.” Information Processing & Management,
Volume 38, Issue 5, September 2002, Pages 649-670 by Dania Bilal and Joe Kirby.

The University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences is one of four schools within the College of Communication and Information.