Research

I'm a Ph.D. Student and IMLS Fellow at The College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University. My research is focused on human-centered information retrieval (HCIR), digital libraries, social media, and health informatics. Recent projects include investigating the use of social and controlled vocabularies in an interactive health search interface and the role of heuristic and systematic processing in information retrieval.

 

{Publications}

Using Social Tags and Controlled Vocabularies As Filters for Searching and Browsing: A Health Science Experiment. Zarro, M. & Lin, X. (2011). The Fifth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, HCIR2011, Mountain View CA.

What Do You Call it? A Comparison of Library-Created and User-Created Tags. Hall, C. & Zarro, M. (2011). Proceedings of the 11th Annual ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2011 (pp. 53-56).

A Study of User Queries Leading to a Health Information Website – AfterTheInjury.org. Yang, C., Winston, F., Zarro, M., & Kassam-Adams, N. (2011). Proceedings of the iConference 2011, Seattle WA.

User-Contributed Descriptive Metadata for Libraries and Cultural Institutions. Zarro, M. & Allen, R. (2010). In M. Lalmas, J. Jose, A. Rauber, F. Sebastiani, & I. Frommholz (Eds.), Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 6273, pp. 46-54). Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

 

{Doctoral Consortia}

2012 ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI 2012)
Topic: Interactive Health Information Search Using Social Tags and Controlled Vocabularies

 

{Posters}

Healthcare Information Behavior: Implicit Collaboration with Social Tagging Systems. Zarro, M. (2011). Poster presented at The 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2011).

Extending Library Collections Using Web 2.0 and Flickr.com
Zarro, M. (2010). Poster presented at the Library Research Seminar-V 2010, University of Maryland

User-Contributed Annotations for Libraries and Cultural Institutions
Zarro, M. & Allen, R. (2010) Poster presented at Drexel Research Day.
(Awarded Dean's honorable mention)

Drexel Research Day 2010

 

Education

Ph.D. in Information Studies, 2009 - present
Drexel University

MS, Library and Information Science, 2007
Drexel University (with honors)

BA, 1996 George Washington University

 

Awards

IMLS Research Fellowship, Drexel University

Dean's Honorable Mention, 2010 Drexel Research Day

Beta Phi Mu, The Library and Information Science Honor Society