FSU School of Library and Information Studies doctoral candidate Adam Worrall was recently accepted to participate in the Doctoral Consortium at the 2013 ACM / IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), to be held July 22nd in Indianapolis, IN. Adam’s extended abstract of his doctoral research and dissertation, titled “Social Digital Libraries: Their Roles Within and Across Social Worlds, Information Worlds, and Communities,” was reviewed by a panel of experienced professors and practitioners in the field of digital library research. The panel judged Adam’s research to be of high quality and in an interesting and important area of digital library research, selecting his submission as one of about 15 accepted for the Consortium.

JCDL 2013 is a major international conference sponsored by ACM and IEEE-CS focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, organizational, and social issues. The JCDL Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for Ph.D. students and candidates from all over the world in the early phases of dissertation research related to digital libraries. The goal of the Consortium is to help students with their dissertation and research plans by providing feedback and general advice in a constructive, international, multidisciplinary environment. Each student will be given time to present their research, get feedback from the expert panel and other participants, and engage in small group discussion sessions.

Adam’s broad research interests include digital libraries, social informatics, collaborative information behavior, online communities, social media, and social and community theories in information science. In his research agenda, he looks to help fulfill the need for theoretical and practical research into the roles that digital libraries play in collaboration, communities, and other sociotechnical contexts. Adam’s work theorizes digital libraries as boundary objects in the context of the social worlds, information worlds, and communities of their users. His dissertation research consists of two case studies of LibraryThing and Goodreads, digital libraries and Web sites for readers and lovers of books, and uses a mixed method research design incorporating content analysis, a survey, and interviews to examine and interpret the roles of the digital libraries in sociotechnical contexts.

Adam’s doctoral committee chair, Dr. Michelle M. Kazmer, praised Adam’s research as “strong in its theoretical contributions to, and social and institutional implications of and for, digital libraries.” She added that, “with his data collection just underway, Adam is positioned well to benefit from the interactions and feedback he will gain from the Doctoral Consortium. Adam is also a great listener who can think on his feet, and I am sure he will provide honest and thoughtful feedback to other attendees.”

The Doctoral Consortium will provide Adam with funding for attending JCDL 2013 and for his travel, hotel, and meals. He will also have the opportunity to further revise his extended abstract for publication in a special issue of the TCDL Bulletin, a publication of the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. Adam also contributed to a research poster accepted for presentation at JCDL 2013; entitled “Studying the Data Work Of A Scientific Community,” the poster is led by Drs. Besiki Stvilia and Chris Hinnant, with other authors including doctoral candidate Shuheng Wu and doctoral student Dong Joon Lee. For more information on Adam’s research and other activities, check out his website and online portfolio.