Michael Zarro

I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the Drexel University College of Information Science and Technology. Expected completion date: Fall 2013.

mike zarro My dissertation research is intended to develop theory and systems that support information seeking and learning for people with long-term information needs by investigating episodic and exploratory search sessions. This work builds on information seeking theories from the information sciences and dual-process theory from social psychology. Currently, I am conducting a mixed methods study to investigate exploratory searching on the Web by diabetes patients. Preliminary results show emerging expertise of patients and reliance on social media to complement authoritative information resources.

My work is informed by 10+ years industry experience as an Information Architect and Web Developer. I have an MSLIS from Drexel University, and my Ph.D. research has been supported by an IMLS research fellowship.

Publications, etc.

Wedding Dresses and Wanted Criminals: Pinterest.com as an Infrastructure for Repository Building. Zarro, M., Hall, C., & Forte, A. (in press). Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2013).

Exploring Social Curation. Zarro, M., & Hall, C. (2012) D-Lib Magazine 18(11/12). November/December 2012.

Social Curation on the Website Pinterest.com. Hall, C. & Zarro, M. (2012). Proceedings of ASIS&T 75th Annual Meeting (ASIST 2012).

Developing A Dual-Process Information Seeking Model for Exploratory Search. Zarro, M. (2012). The Sixth Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, HCIR2012, Cambridge MA.

Using Social Tags and Controlled Vocabularies As Filters for Searching and Browsing: A Health Science Experiment. Zarro, M. & Lin, X. (2011). The Fifth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, HCIR2011, Mountain View CA.

Projects

A Conceptual Model for Information Use of Chronic Disease Patients.

My dissertation research investigating online health search behaviors, changes in cognitive processing, and learning over time while managing a chronic condition.

Health and Crowdsourced Information

I am working with with graduate students at the University of Minnesota to investigate linking behaviors and the concept of information scent on crowdsourced webpages, like Wikipedia,to support consumer health search and learning.

Social Curating

My collaborators and I are exploring users' social collecting and sharing activites, what we call "social curating," on social media sites like Pinterest.

Teaching

Information Architecture (INFO658)- Winter 2013