Carol Tenopir

For someone so steeped in the digital age, it’s ironic that School of Information Sciences Professor Carol Tenopir, a member of the inaugural class of Chancellor’s Professors, has a house full of books.

“Old-fashioned books with pages,” she says. “My husband used to sell used books. Even though I’ve always worked in automation science, I like to read widely, especially Victorian literature.”

Workdays, however, Tenopir is an internationally recognized scholar on the digital age and the evolving ways people find and process information. A highly productive teacher and researcher, she publishes and teaches about the impact of new technologies on reference librarians and scientists. She is recognized as one of the nation’s top leaders in the online information industry. Since 1983, she has published a monthly column on digital information in Library Journal. Online magazine named her one of the top nine “leaders of the online industry.” A study done by researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia and published in the Autumn 2006 edition of Library and Information Science Research named Tenopir as the most research productive library and information science faculty member in the U.S.

“I look at the outcomes of all of this information,” she explains.

“The pace of acceleration has been much greater since 1995 and the Web, especially in medicine, engineering, sciences, social sciences.”

She expects that improvements in hand-held digital devices will increase this trend. Today’s enormous flood of information, however, has to be well-organized, vetted and filtered before it becomes useful.

“Ultimately, it’s all about human needs,” she says. “Information has to be understood to become knowledge. Then it can lead to wisdom.”

Change, flexibility, freshness are obvious hallmarks of digital publishing.

“My career is always interesting, and it continues to get more interesting. It’s a moving target,” she says. “There are new things all the time, and the ways people use information never stops changing.”

As a teacher, she often takes note of generational differences in the way electronic information is used. She says that because they’ve grown up integrated into the digital world, today’s students are increasingly savvy with technology-based information.

“We do see a change. They’re more confident about digital information,” she says. “But they don’t always understand what’s going on ‘under the hood,’ i.e. how search engines work.”

In addition to library and information science, she studies the natural sciences, literature and history—all fields of study that she has put to good use in improving online scholarly journals.

“Lots of folks want to design better scholarly communications vehicles,” she says. “The challenge is to find out the ways scientists and other scholars actually use the information,” she says. “Then we can figure out how to improve the design of journals and delivery of services.”

Digital publishing, she says, has changed the scholarly world.

“The number of journal articles in most fields has expanded greatly in the past 10n or 11 years,” she says. “But interestingly, the amount of time spent reading has gone down. In other words, people read more, but faster.”

“To make an online journal valuable, you have to consider the retrieval system, the peer review system used, accurate abstracting.”

Tenopir says that in studying the digital age, it’s also interesting to study what hasn’t changed.

“Scholars still rely get about one-third of the reading from print journals,” she says. “So paper hasn’t gone away. It’s still often more convenient.”

“Lots of reading habits haven’t changed much,” she says. “Generally, there’s more interdisciplinary reading, wider sources, more searches, but there’s still a lot of general browsing going on.”

Carol and her husband, Gerald Lundeen, emeritus professor of the University of Hawaii, have a son, Andrew, 23, who recently graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.