Research & Teaching

Description of Research Interests

Anne’s research falls in the general area of information science and, more specifically, in information retrieval, digital libraries, information organization, education, and natural language processing. A library, a website, or any other information store, is of absolutely no use if the materials therein cannot be easily retrieved by the people who need them. This is an age-old problem that is beyond the capabilities of simple systems to solve because of the complexities of written language. Levy and Marshall  (1995) identified that the work librarians do to make resources accessible is one of the most important components of a digital library.

The majority of my current research is associated with digital libraries and making their collection items accessible either by assigning metadata or finding other novel ways to display information. Anne is also busy evaluating how user interfaces allow educators to search digital libraries and how this impacts their use and adoption into the curriculum. Finally she is embarking on a project that is trying to measure the impact of digital libraries on learning.

(Levy, David M., Marshall, Catherine, C. (1995) Going digital: a look at assumptions underlying digital libraries. Communications of the ACM. 38(4), 77-84.)

Research Keywords

digital libraries, information retrieval, human information behavior, information science, automatic metadata assignment, cross-language information retrieval, natural language processing

Background and Experience

Anne worked as a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Natural Language Processing / School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

 

Ph.D. 2003 Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Information Transfer Dissertation: Translation Events in Cross-Language Information
Retrieval: Lexical Ambiguity, Lexical Holes, Vocabulary Mismatch, and Correct Translations.

Selected Publications and Presentations

Recent Publications (2006-2009)

 

Diekema, A.R. (in press) Implications and challenges of Educational Standards Metadata.” Journal of Library Metadata.

 

Diekema, A.R., Bailey, Jennifer A. and Bennett, Blythe A., Devaul, Holly. (2008). Unleashing the Usefulness of Educational Resources through Mining of Educational Metadata. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Open Education Conference. Logan, UT, September 24-26, 2008.

Diekema, A. R., Yilmazel, O., Bailey, J., Harwell, S. C. and Liddy E. D. (2007). Standards Alignment for Metadata Assignment. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of Digital Libraries (JCDL 2007). Vancouver, British Columbia, June 18-23, 2007.

Yilmazel, O., Balasubramanian, N., Harwell, S. C., Bailey, J., Diekema, A. R., & Liddy, E. D. (2007). Text Categorization for Aligning Educational Standards. In: Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, Hawaii, January 3-6, 2007.

McCracken, N. J., Diekema, A. R., Ingersoll G., Harwell, S. C., Allen, E. E., Yilmazel, O.,  Liddy E. D. (2006) Modeling Reference Interviews as a Basis for Improving Automatic QA Systems. In: HLT-NAACL 2006 Workshop on Interactive Question Answering. New York, New York, June 8-9, 2006, p. 17-24.

 

Recent Presentations (2006 - 2009)

 

Teaching Information Literacy with Authentic Problems: Creating and Using an Online Module (04/24/09) Heather Leary, Wendy Holliday, Anne Diekema. Utah Library Association Annual Meeting, Sandy, UT.

 

Using Digital Primary Sources to Enhance Teaching and Learning (03/05/09) Sheri Haderlie, Cheryl Walters, Heather Leary, and Anne Diekema. Utah Educational Library Media Association Annual Meeting, Ogden, UT.

 

Educational Standards to Enhance Digital Library Accessibility: Research and Development (10/11/08) Invited talk for the School of Library and Information Sciences - University of North Texas Introduction to Digital Libraries meeting in Salt Lake City, UT.

 

Solutions for Correlating Collections to K-12 Content Standards for Interoperability (10/01/08) Stuart Sutton, Diny Golder, Anne Diekema. National Science Digital Library Annual Meeting. Washington, D.C.

 

Unleashing the Usefulness of Educational Resources through Mining of Educational Metadata (09/25/08) Anne Diekema, Jennifer Bailey, Blythe Bennett, Holly Devaul. Open Education 2008. Logan, UT.

 

Evaluating Search in Digital Libraries (11/08/07) National Science Digital Library Annual Meeting, Arlington, VA.

 

Educational Standard Correlation Services for Digital Libraries (11/07/2007) Jennifer A. Bailey, Holly Devaul, Anne R. Diekema, Jonathan Ostwald, John Weatherly. National Science Digital Library Annual Meeting, Arlington, VA.

Standards Alignment for Metadata Assignment (6/22/2007) Anne R. Diekema, Ozgur Yilmazel, Jennifer Bailey,Sarah C. Harwell, and Elizabeth D. Liddy. Joint Conference for Digital Libraries, Vancouver, BC.

 

Assigning and Aligning State and National Educational Standards (10/19/2006) Anne R. Diekema, Sarah C. Harwell, Jennifer A. Bailey, Ozgur Yilmazel, and Elizabeth D. Liddy. National Science Digital Library Annual Meeting, Washington, DC.

 

Computer Assisted Standard Assignment and Alignment (03/16/2006) Holly Devaul, Anne R. Diekema. National Science Digital Library Online ToolTime presentation.

 

Natural Language Processing for NSDL....(and all of NSF!) (1/25/2006) Elizabeth D. Liddy and Anne R. Diekema. National Science Foundation, Washington, DC.

 

Grants

Recent Grants (2006 - 2009)

2009: Integrating Primary Resources into K-12 Teaching in Northern Utah. Metropolitan State College of Denver / Auraria Higher Education Center. Co-Principal Investigator.  Grant to introduce primary sources to Utah teachers and school library media specialists through a 3-day workshop, assignments, focus group and conference meetings.

2008-2009: A Demonstration Project to Update 21st Century Librarians. IMLS. Co-Principal Investigator. National Leadership Grant that provides an innovative standards-based approach to improving information literacy teaching and learning through a freely-accessible, K-16 multimedia Web centered teaching support system.

2007-present: State Content Alignment Services. Verizon Foundation. Principal Investigator. Aligning Thinkfinity (www.thinkfinity.org) education materials semi-automatically through natural language processing to educational standards of each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to provide teachers the ability to quickly identify appropriate state aligned lessons for use in their classrooms.

2007-present: Enhancing Access to Digital Collections using Automatic Metadata Assignment and Search Tools. IMLS. Principal Investigator. Integration of three digital library tools and services to create a new system, Metadata Assignment and Search Tool (MAST).  The tool will enable libraries and museums to efficiently describe and disseminate their digital materials using a combination of automatic and human-mediated processes.

2007-2008: Enhanced Access to Digital Humanities Monographs. NEH. Principal Investigator. Creation of a prototype system to search monographs in the humanities through the application of natural language processing techniques to utilize the rich, intellectually-viable information contained in tables of contents and back-of-the-book indexes in combination with the actual text, thus making monographs accessible by capitalizing on the internal structure of the book.

2007-2008: Computer-Assisted Standard Assignment & Alignment - supplement. NSF. Principal Investigator. Supplemental funding to extend the educational standards tools developed in an earlier project by providing additional training for the learn function, carry out user testing, and creating APIs for integration into the National Science Digital Library.

2006-2008: Improving Public Health Grey Literature Access for the Public Health Workforce. NLM. Co-Principal Investigator. Building a web-based system to gather high quality public health grey literature reports that are currently not easily accessible on the web by providing health-specific document summaries and deep natural language processing-based indexing.

2006-2007: Arabic Information Retrieval. DOJ. Co-Principal Investigator, Project lead. Provision of a demonstration system of the Arabic information retrieval capability that includes an automatic crawler and incremental indexing capability to allow users to search a constantly updated Arabic newswire collection using English queries, and retrieve Arabic documents and their English translations in response.

2004-2006: Computer-Assisted Standard Assignment & Alignment. NSF. Principal Investigator. Developing two services for the National Science Digital Library: 1) A computer-assisted standards assignment tool for auto-suggesting educational standards for the educational resources in the Library; and 2) A methodology and technology for automatically aligning state standards to selected national standards in order to dramatically improve the ability of teachers to locate resources in the NSDL that will support their standards-based instruction, no matter what state they are in or where a resource was developed.

Professional Memberships

American Library Association, American Association of School Librarians, American Society for Information Science & Technology, Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval, Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Related content

Course

• INST 5000: SLM Foundations and Information Management
• INST 6060: SLM Foundations and Information Management
• INST 5030: Information Access and Technology
• INST 6030: Information Access and Technology
• INST 4010: Principles and Practices of Technology for Elementary Teachers