Abby Goodrum | Wilfrid Laurier University (original) (raw)

Abby Goodrum

UX Professor. Media Informatics Researcher. Blues Singer.

I hold degrees in Radio, TV, and Film and Library and Information Science from the University of Texas, and I received my PhD in Information Science from the University of North Texas.

I have progressively advanced in my career as both an academic and university administrator, and played a significant role in the transformation of Laurier's research culture including leading the development of the University's strategic research plan. Prior to my appointment as VPR at Laurier, I held the Rogers Research Chair in News, Media, and Technology at Ryerson University where I was also Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Communication and Design. I have also held faculty positions at Syracuse and Drexel universities.

A highly cited researcher in media and information studies, my work bridges multiple disciplines and appears in the journal literature of computer science, humanities, communication studies, information management, and media studies. For more than 20 years, my research has focused on the study of how humans seek, use, share, manipulate, store, retrieve, and organize digital multimedia. I was the founding director for Social Science Research in a $23M Centre of Excellence that served as both a research network and commercialization engine in order to to address complex issues in digital media and transform multidisciplinary research into user-centered solutions.

I have served on a variety of research committees, management boards and boards of directors, and have extensive experience in peer review processes at all levels including provincial, national and international including: the Ontario Ministry for Research and Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada , the National Endowment for the Humanities (U.S.), and the National Science Foundation (U.S.). I have also served on the boards of GRAND, the Canadian Digital Media Network, the Accelerator Centre, SHARCNET, the Southern Ontario Water Consortium, and the Ontario Council on University Research.
Supervisors: Mark Rorvig
Phone: 519.756.8228 ext. 5349
Address: Wilfrid Laurier University
73 George Street, Brantford, ON, N3T 2Y3
Office: Odeon Bldg, Rm. 105

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Papers by Abby Goodrum

Proceedings of SPIE, Jan 17, 2005

This paper considers the deceptively simple question: Why can't digital images be managed in ... more This paper considers the deceptively simple question: Why can't digital images be managed in the simple and effective manner in which digital music files are managed? We make the case that the answer is different treatments of metadata in different domains with different goals. A central difference between the two formats stems from the fact that digital music metadata lookup services are collaborative and automate the movement from a digital file to the appropriate metadata, while image metadata services do not. To understand why this difference exists we examine the divergent evolution of metadata standards for digital music and digital images and observed that the processes differ in interesting ways according to their intent. Specifically music metadata was developed primarily for personal file management and community resource sharing, while the focus of image metadata has largely been on information retrieval. We argue that lessons from MP3 metadata can assist individuals facing their growing personal image management challenges. Our focus therefore is not on metadata for cultural heritage institutions or the publishing industry, it is limited to the personal libraries growing on our hard-drives. This bottom-up approach to file management combined with p2p distribution radically altered the music landscape. Might such an approach have a similar impact on image publishing? This paper outlines plans for improving the personal management of digital images-doing image metadata and file management the MP3 way-and considers the likelihood of success.

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Jan 31, 2005

Information Processing and Management, Mar 1, 1998

What elicitations or requests for information do search intermediaries make of users with informa... more What elicitations or requests for information do search intermediaries make of users with information requests during an information retrieval (IR) interaction-including prior to and during an IR interaction-and for what purpose? These issues were investigated during a study of elicitations during 40 mediated IR interactions. A total of 1557 search intermediary elicitations were identified within 15 purpose categories. The elicitation purposes of search intermediaries included requests for information on search terms and strategies, database selection, search procedures, system's outputs and relevance of retrieved items, and users' knowledge and previous information-seeking. These findings are compared with results from a study of end-user questions (Nahl & Tenopir, 1996) and a study of user elicitations of search intermediaries (Wu, 1993). Implications of the findings for the development of a dialogue-based model of IR interaction based on a grammar of IR interaction framework and the design of IR systems are also discussed.

Reference and User Services Quarterly, Sep 22, 2005

Résumé/Abstract In mediating between image collections and image information needs, visual resour... more Résumé/Abstract In mediating between image collections and image information needs, visual resource professionals-stock image and footage experts, slide librarians, video and film archivists, museum librarians and curators, and so forth-have traditionally assisted users in defining and expressing their image needs and helped to match those needs to appropriate images from a variety of sources. These requests are often among the most challenging to satisfy due to the disconnect between the words that users employ in image ...

Abstract This study explores the terms assigned by users to index, manage, and describe images an... more Abstract This study explores the terms assigned by users to index, manage, and describe images and compares them to indexing terms derived automatically by systems for image retrieval. Results of this study indicate that userderived indexing vocabulary largely reflects what users see in the image or what they perceive as the overall topic of an image. This is in contrast to system-derived indexing wherein terms are extracted from existing text surrounding the image. In many cases, the surrounding text does not describe the image, ...

Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 2000

This paper begins with a definition of competitive intelligence (CI) and identification of the co... more This paper begins with a definition of competitive intelligence (CI) and identification of the core skills and abilities required of a CI professional. It provides a brief overview of the current state of CI education as background to a discussion of the process used to ...

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2001

Abstract This article is concerned with the problem of representing moving images for information... more Abstract This article is concerned with the problem of representing moving images for information retrieval. Of primary concern is evaluating the representativeness of different types of surrogates for various tasks. The basic factor considered is the ability of a surrogate to enable users to make the same distinctions that they would make given the actual video. To explore this issue, four types of video surrogates were created and compared under two tasks. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to map the dimensional dispersions of ...

Informing Science The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 2000

This paper provides an overview of current research in image information retrieval and provides a... more This paper provides an overview of current research in image information retrieval and provides an outline of areas for future research. The approach is broad and interdisciplinary and focuses on three aspects of image research (IR): text-based retrieval, content-based retrieval, and user interactions with image information retrieval systems. The review concludes with a call for image retrieval evaluation studies similar to TREC.

IGI Global eBooks, Jan 18, 2011

Proceedings Of The Association For Information Science And Technology, Jan 31, 2005

Oxford University Press eBooks, Sep 2, 2009

As a field of study, media literacy emerged along with the study of radio propaganda in the 1930s... more As a field of study, media literacy emerged along with the study of radio propaganda in the 1930s. More recently it became a field of research that has responded to the television saturated consumer cultures of the late-1960s onwards. Unlike literacies of pre-electronic media environments, those that have been studied within electronic environments have been almost solely concerned with analytical ways of reading multimedia texts. In contrast, literacies in the written word have typically involved the production of written texts as integral to curricula. The new media environment provides opportunities and challenges for research in new media literacies, not the least of which is understanding what it means for people to have a widespread potential to write themselves into global, multimediated conversations. This not only involves technical, cultural, discursive, and aesthetic knowledges, it also involves the need to be politically and economically literate in the implications of a dispersed, participatively produced, multimedia environment as distinct from the ‘broadcast’ literacies of past media environments. This article situates new media literacies in an historical framework, emphasizing the close connections among technology, culture, discourse, and related changes in political economic structures.

Abstract The Web has enhanced the integration of textual and multimedia information. We examine c... more Abstract The Web has enhanced the integration of textual and multimedia information. We examine changes in Web users&amp;amp;#x27; multimedia searching on Excite (R), a major Web search service, over two years. Two data sets of 1025910 queries from 1997 and 1999 were analyzed. Key similarities and changes are identified. We identified changes in the multimedia terminology used and the length of multimedia queries. Our results are compared to findings from general Web searching studies. Implications for the design of ...

Computers & society, Jun 1, 2000

UMI eBooks, Aug 1, 1997

10 between the written word, or information that is presented as words, and visual information th... more 10 between the written word, or information that is presented as words, and visual information that is presented as images. Visual Information Retrieval (VIR): "An emerging field which goes beyond text-based descriptors to elicit, store, and retrieve imagery-based information content in visual media." (Gupta & Jain, 1997). Central to the development of VIR systems is the notion that images and videos are dense information bearing containers, and that systems for accessing this information must be capable of supporting image processing for handling queries. Outline of the Report This chapter has provided a brief introduction to the research problem, its scope, significance, and background for the research. The following chapter, Chapter 2, provides a review of the literature which forms the theoretical background for this study. It also discusses the history and theory underlying the statistical tests used to examine the data. Chapter 3 describes the method employed in conducting this research. Chapter 4 provides the data and a summary of the results of the experimental procedure. Chapter 5 discusses the results in greater detail within the theoretical framework of the study. Chapter 6 presents the conclusions drawn from the results, the model resulting from this research, and offers implications for theory, practice, and design of a Visual information retrieval (VIR) system.

Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 1999

Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1999

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Proceedings of the annual conference of CAIS, Oct 23, 2013

D-lib Magazine, Feb 1, 2003

The Information Institute of Syracuse at Syracuse University is engaged in a project designed to ... more The Information Institute of Syracuse at Syracuse University is engaged in a project designed to build collaborative digital museum and digital library reference services. To that end, the project team is currently developing, testing, and evaluating procedures and mechanisms that will enable museums and libraries to work together in providing reference assistance over the Web to support patrons' image information needs. The user-centered project is based upon a successful model for digital reference that has been widely embraced in the digital library community. This approach is expected to yield new insight into users' image seeking behavior that will help museums and libraries provide transparent access to visual resources across collections and institutions. This article presents an overview of the project and discusses the challenges involved in helping users find appropriate images on the web.

Proceedings of the annual conference of CAIS, Nov 2, 2013

What elicitations or requests for information do human search intermediaries make to patrons sear... more What elicitations or requests for information do human search intermediaries make to patrons search with information requests that require an online search? What intermediary elicitations occur before and during an online search? Why do human search intermediaries make elicitations? This study reported in this paper investigated search intermediary elicitations during mediated online searching. A study of 40 online reference interviews involving 1557 search intermediary elicitations, found 15 different types of search intermediary elicitations to patrons. The elicitation purposes included search terms and strategies, database selection, relevance of retrieved items, and patrons' knowledge and previous information-seeking. Analysis of the patterns in the types and sequencing of elicitations showed significant strings of multiple elicitations regarding search terms and strategies, and relevance judgments. This paper discusses the implications of the findings for training search intermediaries and the design of interfaces eliciting information from end-users.