Dr. Deborah E. Swain (School of Library and Information Science) will present at a poster session during the 2004 American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) Annual Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, November 13-18. The theme of the conference includes research on Information Technology "from ideas to bits and back." Dr. Swain is co-authoring a study of collaboration with Dr. Marilyn K. McClelland (NCCU School of Business) and Dr. Barbara P. Heath (UNC-Wilimington), entitled "Long-Term Collaboration Across Disciplines: iLumina Digital Library’s Metadata Development Team."

Their research specifically analyzes communication data and interviews from a 4-year Metadata iLumina Digital Library Project. The presentation will include illustrations of communication networks and cognitive phases experienced by participants as well as provide preliminary results of data analysis of knowledge management and "contested collaboration" issues that arose during the project. Working together over 4 years, the project’s subjects established a metadata schema for the web-based iLumina digital library of undergraduate teaching materials in multiple disciplines (http://www.ilumina-dlib.org).

Dr. Swain looks forward to feedback during the conference on a model of long-term collaboration across an interdisciplinary, inter-organizational group. Her research objective is to verify successful approaches to collaboration as identified in this study by a diverse team of individuals who established useful metadata schemas, taxonomies and controlled vocabularies from both Dublin Core (DC) and IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standards.