July 1996
New Research Grant at Graduate School of Library and Information Studies
Andy Large and his co-researchers have been awarded a three-year research grant of $90,000 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
The inter-disciplinary McGill team - Large and Jamshid Beheshti from the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies and Alain Breuleux and Bob Bracewell from the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology - are investigating "Design Criteria for Multimedia Information Sources in an Educational Context".
The research will adopt a multidisciplinary approach drawing upon both information science and cognitive science to identify how information sequences in different media can optimally be combined to deliver information to primary school students, and how these students access full-text databases, move between information segments and identify, retrieve and display relevant segments.
McGill's first Ph.D. in Library and Information Studies Awarded
The June 1996 McGill Convocation was a landmark for the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies as well as McGill University and the Province of Quebec when Dr. Albert Tabah, B.Sc., M.L.S. (McGill) graduated with a Ph.D. in Library and Information Studies.
His thesis, "Information Epidemics and the Growth of Physics", examined the prevalence of information epidemics in the physics literature to discover whether outliers observed on time series charts are due to information epidemics, whether these epidemics are widespread occurrences in physics, and whether literatures showing such rapid growth arise mainly due to the influence of an important work. His bibliometric study showed that epidemics do exist but are not widespread, and that they are caused by groups of influential works.
Dr. Tabah is currently an Assistant Professor at the Ecole de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information, Université de Montréal.