Bio
I am an associate professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies and served for six years as its chair. I conduct research on the organization of information and knowledge, the social construction of classifications, how people seek and use information, and models of knowledge production. I am also interested in the role of libraries in a civil society, in public discourse and education, and addressing the public school library crisis in California. I have directed, educated and written critically on global efforts to catalog, organize and provide access to written knowledge. I conduct research using bibliometric methods--quantitive methods used to measure and assess various features about books and other forms of knowledge, especially citation-based metrics. I have worked previously as a librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, and I am a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering from the National Science Foundation.