Ana Ndumu entered the iSchool’s Ph.D. in Information program in 2014. This February, she came in third place in the Jean Tague Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition at the 2018 Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) conference in Denver, Colorado.

“The iSchool has invested so much in me. It’s an honor to pay it forward and represent our school,” Ana said.

Her research explores how information–or lack thereof–effects one’s quality of life. “My research goals are linked to my desire to understand how people actively and passively seek, use, or ignore information,” said Ana. She explores topics like domestic and international library use, the digital divide and information literacy, and normative information experiences of marginalized communities.

Her poster that won at the ALISE conference is called “Foreign-Born Blacks, Information Access & Information Overload: a Three-Paper Dissertation.” The dissertation entails analysis of U.S. Census data, results from a survey study that includes a literature-derived information overload scale, as well as focus group narratives. Her findings indicate that 1) the majority of Black immigrant households have access to the Internet, based on Census data; 2) black immigrants utilize a variety of information resources regularly but are often overwhelmed by formal/authoritative and temporal or spatially-bound resources; 3) black immigrants value oral information and turned to family/friends (both in person and virtual) but were overwhelmed by the decentralized, highly complex and politicized U.S. information landscape.

Ana is also the recipient of the 2018 College of Communication & Information Academic Leadership Graduate Student Award, to be presented April 6, 2018.