Jane Greenberg, an assistant professor at UNC-CH’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS), has received a $4,000 grant for a research project titled “Scalable, Human-Centered Search: Improving Information Retrieval Using Author-Generated Metadata.” The grant is funded by UNC’s Small Grant Research Program and will be used over the next two years.
The newly funded research is a component of the larger Metadata Generation Research (MGR) project, which is led by Greenberg and conducted in collaboration with the National Institute of Environmental Sciences (http://www.ils.unc.edu/~janeg/mgr). Abe Crystal, a SILS doctoral student who worked on the grant application, will also be working on this newly funded part of the project.
“The funding will allow us to build and test a search tool showing how metadata can assist in the retrieval of Web pages,” said Greenberg. “This is a very important facet of the project, one that we have been wanting to develop and research.
The research will test how author-generated metadata, or data about data, can be optimized to support resource discovery. Other project goals include developing protocols for collaboration between resource authors and metadata professionals during the metadata generation process and studying the integration of collaborative human metadata generation processes and automatic generation processes.