Rong Tang, PhD
Associate Professor
Director, Simmons GSLIS Usability Lab
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Simmons College
Boston, MA 02115
rong.tang@simmons.edu

Some photos Research Current Activities Awards Publications Refereeing Teaching Beliefs

• Harvard Library UX: Usability testing of Microsoft Surface Table at Harvard Libraries.

II. Awards Research Grants & Awards

• Faculty Fund for Research. "Usability Evaluation of Harvard Catalyst Website." Collaborative research with Harvard Medical School CBMI.
• Pottruck Technology Faculty Fellowship. "Usability Lab for Experiential Learning." (Co-PI: Terry Plum). $15,000
• OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant for 2008. "User Based Question Answering: An Exploratory Study of Community Generated Information Exchange in Yahoo!Answers." (Co-PI: Sheila Denn). $15,000
• Bohdan S. Wynar/ALISE Research Paper Competition 2008 Winner. "Author-Rated Importance of Cited References in Biology and Psychology Publications." (Co-author: Martin A. Safer).
• Simmons College President's Fund for Faculty Excellence. "User Based Question Answering: An Exploratory Study of Community Generated Information Exchange in Yahoo!Answers." (Co-PI: Sheila Denn). $15,000
• APA (American Psychological Association) Research Contract Award. "Needs Assessment of PsycINFO Search." $10,000
• Faculty Fund for Research & Emily Hollowell Fund.  "Image Tagging and Sorting." Collaborative Research With Dr. Daniel Joudrey.
• Faculty Fund for Research. "User Search Behaviors of Federated Searching Systems." Collaborative Research with Pascal V. Calarco, University of Notre Dame.
• Faculty Grant-in-Aid. "User Perceptions of A Federated Searching System." Awardee of Catholic University of America for the year of 2006. Joint Research With Dr. Ingrid Hsieh-Yee and Ms. Shanyun Zhang.
• Faculty Grant-in-Aid. "Assessing Citation Value of Scholarly Publications: An Analysis of Citer Motivations and Social Relations." Awardee of Catholic University of America for the year of 2005.
• Faculty Grant-in-Aid. "Visualizing Knowledge Domain Structure of Information Library Science." Awardee of Catholic University of America for the year of 2004.
• ASIST/ISI Citation Analysis Research Grant. "Citation Data Augmented Document Retrieval." Awardee of international competition of the 2003 research grant sponsored by American Society for Information Science and Technology and Institute for Scientific Information.
• Advanced Question & Answering for Intelligence (AQUINT) R & D Program. "High-Quality Task-Oriented Question Answer" (Phase I: 2001-2003).  Grant received from Advanced Research and Development Activity, Department of Defense. $1.6 Million.
• Faculty Research Award Program. "Web Search Behaviors of Public Library Users." Awardee from the School of Information Science and Policy of State University of New York at Albany for the year 2000 - 2001.
• Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.  Awardee of the year 1999-2000.

• Safer, M. & Tang, R. The psychology of referencing in psychology journal articles. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(1), 51-53.
• Tang, R. & Thelwall, M. (2008). A hyperlink analysis of US public and academic libraries' Web sites. Library Quarterly, 78(4).
• Tang, R. (July 2008). Citation characteristics and intellectual acceptance of scholarly monographs. College & Research Libraries, 69(4), 356-369.
• Tang, R. & Safer, M.A. (2008). Author-Rated Importance of Cited References in Biology and Psychology Publications. Journal of Documentation. 64 (2), 246-272.
• Tang, R., Hsieh-Yee, I. & Zhang, S. (2007). User Perceptions of MetaLib Combined Search: An Investigation of How Users Make Sense of Federated Searching. Internet Reference Service Quarterly, 12(1-2).
• Tang, R. (revising). Cross-language citation patterns I: Domain and disciplinary differences. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
• Tang, R. (revising). Cross-language citation patterns II: Language Distributions and Citation Specifics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
• Tang, R. (2004). Visualizing interdiscplinary citations to and from Information and Library Science publications. Proceedings of Eighth International Conference on Information Visualization, 972-977.
• Tang, R. Evolution of the interdisciplinary characteristics of Information and Library Science. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 41, 54-63.
• Tang, R. (2004). Book review of Applied Informatrics for Information Retrieval Research. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 4(3), 431-432.
• Tang, R., & Thelwall, M. (2004). Patterns of national and international Web inlinks to US academic departments: An analysis of disciplinary variations. Scientometrics, 60(3), 475-485.
• Tang, R. & Thelwall, M. (2003). U.S. Academic Departmental Web-site Interlinking in the United States: Disciplinary Differences. Library and Information Science Research, 25, 437-458.
• Tang, R., Ng, K. B., Strzalkowski, T., & Kantor, P. B. Automatically Predicting Information Quality in News Documents. Late-breaking Paper accepted for presentation/publication at HLT-NAACL (Human Language Technology - North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) 2003.
• Tang, R., Ng, K. B., Strzalkowski, T., & Kantor, P. B. (2003). Toward Machine Understanding of Information Quality. Proceedings of 2003 Annual Meeting of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 40, 213-220.
• Ng, K.B., Kantor, P. B., Tang, R., Rittman, R., Small, S., Song, P., Strzalkowski, T., Sun, Y., & Wacholder, N. Identification of Effective Predictive Variables for Document Qualities. Proceedings of 2003 Annual Meeting of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 40, 221-229.
• Thelwall, M., & Tang, R. (2003). Disciplinary and Linguistic Considerations for Academic Web Linking: An Exploratory Hyperlink Mediated Study with Mainland China and Taiwan. Scientometrics, 58(1), 155-181.
• Tang, R. & Thelwall, M. (2003). Patterns of International and National Web Inlinks to US University Departments: A Webometric Analysis of Disciplinary Specificity. Proceedings of ISSI 2003.
• Thelwall, M., Tang, R. & Price, E. (2003). Linguistic Patterns of Academic Web use in Western Europe, Scientometrics. 56(3), 417-432.
• Tang, R. & Thelwall, M. (2002). Exploring the pattern of links between Chinese University Web sites. Proceedings of the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 417-424.
• Tang, R. (2002). An Integrated Framework for Web Searching Research: Learning, Problem Solving, and Search Tasks. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS4), 49-67.
• Tang, R. (2001). Developing multilingual academic websites: A study of Chinese university web design for the Chinese and the English Versions. Proceedings of the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 458-471.
• Ho, J, & Tang, R. (2001). Towards an optimal resolution to information overload: An infomediary approach. Proceedings of the ACM 2001 International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 91-96.
• Tang, R & Solomon P. (2001). Use of relevance criteria across stages of document evaluation: On the Complementarity of Experimental and Naturalistic Studies. Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, (52) 8, 676-685.
• Tang, R. (2001). University Web Site Design in Mainland China and Taiwan: A Comparative Study on the Chinese Version and the English Version. Paper accepted to be presented at the National Conference on Asian Pacific American Librarians (NCAPAL)
• Tang, R. (1999). Use of Relevance Criteria across the Stages of Document Evaluation: A Micro-Level and Macro-Level Analysis. Doctoral Dissertation, UNC-CH.
  • Dissertation Fulltext (pdf format)

• Tang, R., Vevea, J. L., & Shaw, W. M., jr., (1999). Towards the Identification of Optimal Number of Relevance Categories, Journal of American Society for Information Science (JASIS), 50(3), 254-264.
• Tang, R.& Solomon, P. (1998). Toward an Understanding of the Dynamics of Relevance Judgment: An Analysis of One Person's Search Behavior, Information Processing & Management, 34, 237-256.

• Question and Probing in Reference Communication

1. Refereeing
• The Journal of Education for Library and Information Science. July 2000 -- May 2003.
• Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. August 2004; April 2008 -- July 2008
• Library & Information Science Research. March 2008.
• Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS): An International Journal. June 2005 - Present
• 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Contributed Papers and Panel Sessions
• 9th International Conference of Information Visualisation, Contributed Paper Session.

 

2. Professional Services
• Sloan Fellow 2008, Faculty Career Flexibility Program
• Director, Simmons GSLIS Usability Lab.
• Consultant, Usability Testing, American Psychological Association. Summer 2005
• Reviewer, ASIST Dissertation Proposal Award 2005
• Reviewer, ASIST PVC student travel award 2005

IV. Courses Taught

1. Simmons College

• LIS 531Y Usability and User Experience Research
  • Fall 2011
• LIS 531R Library Automation Systems
• Spring 2012
• Fall 2008
• LIS 621 Conducting Research: Methods and Design (Doctoral Seminar)
  • Spring 2008
• LIS 403 Evaluation of Information Services
• Spring 2012
• Spring 2011
• Fall 2010
• Spring 2009
• Fall 2008
• Spring 2008
• Fall 2007
• Spring 2007
• Fall 2006
• LIS 454 Digital Information Services & Providers
  • Fall 2007
• LIS 488 Technology for Information Professionals
• Fall 2006

1. Catholic University of America




• LSC745 RESEARCH METHODS IN LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
  • CUA Campus:
    • Spring 2005
  
  
• LSC 555 INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN LIBRARIES AND INFORMATION CENTERS
  • CUA Campus
    • Spring 2004
    • Fall 2004
  • Richmond VCU Campus
    • Spring 2005
    • Spring 2004
  • Library of Congress
  • Fall 2004
  
  
• LSC 727 ONLINE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
  • CUA Campus
    • Fall 2005
    • Spring 2004
    • Fall 2004
  • Richmond VCU Campus
    • Fall 2005


2. State University of New York at Albany
   
   
   
   • RISP 607 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARY AUTOMATION
     • Fall 2002

   • RISP 633/433 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
     • Spring 2003
     • Spring 2002
     • Spring 2001

   • RISP 602 INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION
     • Fall, 2001
     • Spring, 2000
     • Fall, 2000

   • RISP 639 ONLINE DATABASE SEARCHING
     • Spring, 2003
     • Summer, 2002
     • Spring, 2002
     • Fall, 2001
     • Spring, 2000
     • Fall, 2000
   
   
3. University of North Caronlina at Chapel Hill
   
   
   • INLS50 Introduction to Computing
     Summer I, 1998     Spring, 1999     Summer, 1999     Fall, 1999
   • Chinese 001, Chinese 003, Chinese 004

IV. Beliefs

• I believe that I am 100% "Made in China."

• I believe in the American Dream that states
  Each individual should be able to grow to the fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.
• I believe that the meaning of life is in the pursuit of intellectual advancement.
• I believe in making improvements in life and receiving reward from hard work, but not at the expense of destroying others.

 

 

Last updated: April 2012 by Rong Tang.