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Tessa Sullivan |
| Ph.D. student in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina | |
| tsullivan [AT] unc [DOT] edu |
Metadata Research Fellow for the Metadata Research Center (MRC)
Metadata Application Review and Survey (MARS) -- The Metadata Applications Research and Survey (MARS) project seeks to first evaluate existing software applications that information professionals use to create, extract, or manipulate metadata. During a later phase the MARS project will also seek to specify the desired behavior for one or more new metadata applications, by analyzing business process flows (role-based tasks performed by information professionals) and the extent to which a software solution might meet a need in one or more of the following areas: metadata creation, metadata extraction (harvesting), or metadata translation/management.
I am interested in information organization -- discovering the ways to organize material online so that people can find what they need, when they need it. This has led to an interest in classification structures (especially faceted ones) and metadata usage. I am interested in designing for browsing over known-item searching because it seems the more interesting problem. How do you structure information so that people who may have little knowledge about a topic can find what they need?
Graduated from the University of Houston in May 1997 with a BA in History and a minor in Math. While at UH, I worked part time as a sysadmin for the Math Dept.
Worked for a software company for one year in tech support and then (thankfully) moved into software testing, which I did for 5 years. I enjoyed the work but the company was always understaffed so much of the product design was haphazard and some of the interface design was done by programmers and me. None of us were trained in interface design nor did any of us have experience in the industries which used the software. So, over time, I became more and more unhappy with the quality of the interface as well as the work flow of the different tasks we supported. I became more and more interested in actually doing this and looked longingly at going back to school. And so here I am, in my 3rd year at SILS.