The last several years proved to be very productive for me. I have refocused my research for the long term future, collected new data and published several articles. Fulbright scholar award that I have received for the first 6 months of 2007 provided additional boost to my research agenda. My goal is to become a well known expert on Eastern European information practices, policies, and institutions. I have published multiple journal articles on the subject and have presented at a number of conferences. Enthusiastic reception of my papers indicates that the topic is little explored, but is of great interest to a wider research community.

 1. The main focus of my current and future research is information practices, policies, and institutions in the former Soviet block.

This work was supported with a Fulbright fellowship award held from January to July 2007. During the fellowship I taught and researched at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, one of Ukraine’s leading universities. While there I established personal links with senior personnel in the Parliament Library, the National Scientific Library, Kyiv’s central public library, and key regional institutions in southern and western Ukraine. I traveled to other cities within Ukraine, making numerous presentations in provincial cities and within Kyiv. My work was featured on four different television networks. Although I have now returned to Milwaukee, the collaborative ties established during the visit remain strong.

 My work on Ukraine can be further divided into two main areas:

 1a). The social construction of Ukrainian libraries and library education, and their co-evolution with Ukrainian national identity.

I have presented at the Wisconsin Library Association annual meeting in October 2005: "Information Resource Sharing in Ukraine: From Total Control to File Sharing Freedom" (slides online). Preliminary research on this topic, conducted prior to my arrival in Kyiv, resulted in an article “Escaping Lenin’s Library” (online),  published in The International Library and Information Review, examining the historical role of libraries within Soviet society and its relationship to the current state of library and information science education within independent Ukraine. I presented this material at the Crimea 2007 conference, the leading venue for information science research and practice in the former Soviet Union region. A revised version received a very positive reception at the Social Studies of Science conference in Montreal in October 2007, the main international meeting for researchers in the field of Science and Technology Studies. That was part of a panel I organized on the topic of Institutional Ideologies of Information (slides online).
 

 This was another topic on which I began work prior to my arrival in Kyiv. It evolved out of initial plans for a cross-national quantitative comparison of downloading practices and attitudes toward intellectual property. Pilot data was gathered at UWM, in Kyiv, and in Australia (in collaboration with Christopher Lueg). This data yielded some useful results. I presented initial findings at an ASIS&T SIGUSE workshop and I am currently working on a journal article summarizing its findings. My focus, however, has evolved toward a richer and more culturally grounded approach to the topic.

 ·        My initial approach to this came through a paper called “Downloading Communism: Filesharing as Samizdat in Ukraine” (online) The paper has now been published in Libri and may also be included in a planned book produced from the World Computer Law meeting. This work also was very well received at the Social Informatics workshop at the annual meeting ASIS&T 2007 (abstract online). I presented versions of it at the Wisconsin Library Association meeting, the VI World Computer Law conference in Edinburgh in September 2006, at the Social Studies of Science meeting in Vancouver (4S 2006 Annual Meeting), and in several invited locations in Ukraine.

·        During my time in Kyiv I collected a great deal of data on file-sharing practices, including examination of systems only accessible from IP addresses within Ukraine and interviews with students on their personal practices.

 ·        I am also investigating efforts to create open access institutional repositories in Ukraine, an effort led by Kyiv-Mohyla Scientific Library, an effort on which I am serving as a consultant. There are interesting parallels between efforts of this kind and file-sharing networks.

 ·        In collaboration with Thomas Haigh I am applying my knowledge of present-day free culture movements to his historical work on the early development of software packages to explore the origins of many open source practices in the 1950s.

I’m concluding my work on the following two projects:

 1. I concluded my Software Quality project, an extension from my dissertation thesis.

 My dissertation examined differences between holders of user/developer and manager/non-manager roles in terms of their attitudes toward software quality priorities.  Prior to my arrival at UWM I published three articles on my pilot data. In 2005 the IEEE Requirements Engineering conference accepted one article, a presentation of some of my central results, for a workshop session on Requirements Engineering for Business Need and IT Alignment held at the Sorbonne in Paris.

 My research interests have shifted away from software engineering, so once two more papers are published this research stream will have been successfully concluded.

2. I developed an interest in learning styles in face-to-face and online education.

This led to a research project in which I collected more than one hundred responses from SOIS students on comparison of learning styles between online and face-to-face sections of the same classes. This led to a peer-reviewed quantitative article called "Divided by a Common Degree Program? Profiling Online and Face-to-Face Information Science Students" (online), published in refereed journal “Education for Information” in 2007. To focus my energies I have decided not to pursue further research in this area.