School of Library and Information Science alumnus Sammy Davidson, M.L.I.S. ’13, of Akron, Ohio, received the best poster proposal award from the Special Interest Group for Digital Libraries of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).
He accepted the cash prize award of $500 at the November 2014 ASIS&T conference in Seattle, where he presented his poster at the session on “Digital Liaisons: Building Communities and Empowering Culture through Digital Libraries.”
Davidson received his Master of Library and Information Science from Kent State University’s School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) in 2013. Currently, he is pursuing a Master of Science in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management in SLIS, with a concentration in knowledge management. He also is a graduate assistant for SLIS Assistant Professor Denise Bedford, Ph.D., Goodyear Professor in Knowledge Management.
Davidson said the course work he completed during summer 2014 with Bedford inspired his poster idea, which centered on knowledge sharing in a community.
“A community of practice is a group of people coming together to learn in a shared domain or interest with the goal of developing their interest together while they meet regularly,” Davidson explained. “I modeled my research off of Etienne Wenger-Trayner’s framework for communities of practices that focuses on the group’s practice, domain and community. In addition, we included insights into the culture and lifecycle of the group.”
In his research, Davidson said, “I applied different methodologies in semantic and social network analyses to evaluate Ontolog, a virtual community dedicated to the development of ontologies and semantic technologies. I extracted the relationships and content from their forum message archives and applied different measures using different technologies according to the group’s one: practice; two: domain; three: community; four: lifecycle; and five: culture.”
Davidson described his experience at the ASIS&T conference in Seattle as “inspirational.”
“Although my poster was not part of the main poster session, I was able to draw a lot of interesting ideas,” he said. “It was great to be surrounded by people with the same interest and passion for information and technologies.”According to ASIS&T’s website, the meeting is “the premier international conference dedicated to the study of the information, people and technology in contemporary society.”
Davidson expects to graduate at the end of the summer in 2015 and is currently keeping his career options open.
“I feel confident about how the school has prepared me for my career,” he said. “I look forward to the rewards and challenges ahead of me.”