I enjoy sharing my knowledge with others, and have put the full text of many of my writings online. I am currently on the faculty of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where I work in Library Science. Each of us wants to leave a mark in this world that we were here. Many do this through having children; my desire is to do this through sharing knowledge. This section is a collection of resources and works I have created to share my knowledge with the world.

Games, Gaming, and Libraries

My current research area is exploring the intersection of gaming and libraries. Many libraries support gaming in some way. My research is working to understand how this is happening, to create a Library Game Lab where we can recreate gaming programs for libraries, to train librarians about the best ways to use games, and to do research about the most effective type of games for different goals. I'm doing this work through the Library Game Lab of Syraucse.

Bibliomining: Data Mining for Libraries

Another research area of mine is the assessment and evaluation of library services through data mining and bibliometrics through the Bibliomining process. This work has focused on helping libraries to use the data collected about their patrons for better decision-making without infringing upon their privacy.

Web Searching

Back when I was working on my Masters in Library and Information Science, I did some research on the methods different search tools use to index Web pages, and came upon the realization that success in using a search tool was dependent upon choosing the appropriate search tool. I wrote a scholarly article on the topic, Indexing and Abstracting on the Web: An Examination of Six Web Databases, which was published in Information Technology and Libraries.

However, not everyone reads such works. Therefore, I created a tool based upon that article which uses a question and answer interface, and called it AskScott. I ran it for a few years with a group of Syracuse University students, but haven't updated it in a few years.

I was also on CNN Headline News talking about using the Web search tools to detect plagairism.

Dissertation Information

In December 1999, I defended my dissertation, Creating an Information Agent through Data Mining: Automatic Indexing of Academic Research on the World Wide Web. In this project, I created a tool that could look at a Web page and predict if that page contained academic research. It was accurate about 96% of the time in testing. The entire dissertation is online in .doc format, and the abstract is also available.