Dr. Steven MacCall
Associate Professor
http://twitter.com/stevenmaccall
Dr. MacCall is an associate professor in SLIS. He is a nationally recognized teacher who coordinates the Organization of Information area courses for SLIS. In addition to teaching the introductory LS 500 Organization of Information course, Dr. MacCall also developed an advanced organization course on the topic of Metadata. Additional teaching areas include health librarianship, health informatics, and a doctoral seminar in social media and mobile computing.
Dr. MacCall’s primary research interests fall into the general area of cooperative organizing theory, history, and practice, including systems design and development, the latter of which resulted in a patent issuance, membership in the Alabama Chapter of the National Academy of Inventors, and a submission to the 2008 Alabama Launchpad Business Plan Competition that reached the final round of judging:
Online video of final-round presentation of the dlservices.net business plan (parts one & two) and Q&A session that followed presentation (parts one & two).
Write up in University of Alabama Research Magazine (2008): A Launching Pad for Entrepreneurs.
In addition, Dr. MacCall just completed a five-year term as the SLIS Distance Education (DE) Coordinator, a compensated administrative position responsible for assisting the SLIS Director in all aspects of managing the School’s online activities ranging from recruiting to curriculum and faculty development to orientation planning and duties as assigned. The SLIS online program is a fully synchronous Wimba-based cohort approach to the MLIS degree attracting top students from over 40 states and 4 countries that has maintained over a 90% retention rate during Dr. MacCall’s tenure as DE Coordinator.
Education
PhD, Interdisciplinary Program in Information Science, University of North Texas, 1999.
M.S.I.S., University of North Texas, School of Library and Information Sciences, 1992.
B.A., Managerial Studies, Rice University, 1983.
Certificate, Special Collections Librarianship, Rare Book School (University of Virginia), 2010
Research
The present focus of Dr. MacCall’s research is the theory, history, design, development, and deployment of methods for the cooperative organizing of online texts, textual artifacts and digital special collections materials that:
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leverage the existing networks of librarians and libraries;
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suggest an “online book” model that enables and accounts for textual production, transmission, multiplication, reception, and use across a distributed online library network;
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suggest changes to methods of publishing based on online book organizing across a distributed online library network;
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suggest a new model for cooperative online textual artifact organizing across a distributed online library network.
This work is a unification of prior organization of knowledge research streams including a general study of the "library phenomenon" that suggested a classical digital library model. Early theoretical and historical questions driving this research included "Why do people visit (and revisit) physical libraries?" and "What aspects of cooperative knowledge organization contributed to the continued presence of physical libraries in communities over time and can an analysis of this success provide practice models for the professional management of branch digital libraries?"
Other past knowledge organization research that informs present day activities include the creation of a working digital libraries model for clinical medicine as co-director of the Clinical Digital Libraries Project, an inter-institutional research project with the University of North Texas, and navigation and information architecture research as coordinator of the Digital Libraries Navigation Lab. The Lab also provided web hosting services and served as a software design lab for the Clinical Digital Libraries Project, which resulted in the issuance of a patent. Both of these research project teams are currently on hiatus.
Dissertation research was on measurement models for Internet information retrieval evaluation, which examined alternatives to the traditional precision measure that account for the retrieval environment of dynamic networked documents.